Ch2. The place closest to the sky.

Beyond the castle walls, daylight had fully broken.

Jeffery sat back down on the stone ledge. Behind him, his bay horse snorted, tail flicking as it pawed impatiently at the ground. He paid it no mind. His elbows rested on his raised knee, fingers laced, head bowed. Something in the depths of his amber eyes was slowly darkening. The stone he had held all night now lay between his fingers, its rough edges biting into his palm and leaving faint, shallow marks.

He had waited the whole night. No one had appeared on the tower.

He should have stood up and left. On a rational level, he knew that perfectly well.

A wandering knight spending the night at the foot of some stranger’s walls, waiting for a girl with whom he’d exchanged only a handful of words—it was ridiculous, the sort of story that sounded like a joke when told aloud. Yet he did not rise. He remained seated, the crease between his brows deepening and easing in turn, as though some thought were struggling inside his skull, unable to come to a conclusion.

The wind slipped through the gaps in the battlements, brushing past his temples, carrying with it the faint smells of morning smoke and wet grass from within the city.

He closed his eyes.

Behind the darkness of his lids, he recalled the figure leaning out from the high wall last night—the voice, the gaze. That gaze that had regarded him as a person. He did not know where its owner was now, nor how she was. He had not even seen her face clearly.

But his fingers tightened around the stone all the same.

The next morning, Ioanna Riverve Davis had already taken her seat by the window, staring outside with a blank expression. She had scarcely closed her eyes all night. By nightfall, Prince Geelong would formally present his proposal—yet she could do nothing but sit and wait for fate to arrive. She found herself envying the small birds beyond the glass; at least they could still fly where they pleased.

Addie knocked softly on the door. Ioanna did not answer. Perhaps she was pretending not to hear. Perhaps she truly did not.

Morning light slipped in through the crack between the shutters, laying a thin line of gold across the floorboards until it brushed the hem of Ioanna’s skirt and stopped there.

She sat at the window. Because of the lashes on her back, she could not lean fully against the chair and had to hold herself slightly away from it. The posture looked proper, but in truth it was a strained, painful balance. Her hands lay on her knees, not clasped, simply resting there, as if she no longer wished to spend even the strength it took to curl her fingers.

Outside, the sky was a pale, porcelain blue. A few birds skimmed past the eaves and opened their wings, vanishing into a wider sky. Her eyes followed their fleeting shadows until there was nothing left to see, then slowly dropped back down to her own empty palms.

She no longer knew what she was thinking.

Or rather, she had thought everything through to its end, and beyond that point there was nothing left to think.

He’ll propose tonight.

Those three words lay across her chest like a stone slab. Not burning. Not sharp. Just heavy—so heavy that even breathing required deliberate effort.

Addie’s knocking fell lightly on the door, like a leaf drifting onto still water, hardly raising a ripple. Ioanna heard it—of course she did. She hadn’t slept; she could hear every tiny rustle from the trees outside the window. But she did not answer. It was not defiance. She simply parted her lips and realized there was nothing she felt like saying, so she let them close again.

A small voice slipped through the crack beneath the door.

“Miss… it’s Addie.”

Silence stretched. Addie waited a moment longer, then knocked again—softer than before, as if afraid too much sound might shatter something fragile. Ioanna’s gaze did not leave the sky outside, yet her lashes trembled faintly, lowering just enough to veil the deep exhaustion she herself had not noticed collecting in her eyes.

Outside the wall, Jeffery finally moved.

He rose, dusted off his cloak, and reached for the sword resting against the stone, fastening it once more at his hip. His motions were steady, identical to any morning he’d readied himself to ride on. He turned toward the bay, loosened the reins, and laid a long hand on the horse’s neck. The animal snorted, turning its head to nudge his wrist.

He did not mount at once.

He stood there, reins in hand, and tilted his head back to look up at the old locust tree. Its leaves stirred in the morning breeze, dappling light and shadow across his face, casting a shifting shade over the pale scar on his brow. His amber eyes narrowed slightly, as if listening to something, or perhaps speaking to himself. No sound answered. Only the wind. Only the thick, unknowable silence on the other side of the wall.

He turned his head to look one last time at the tower.

Empty.

His throat moved. Slowly, he slipped the stone he had held all night into the inner pocket of his cloak, tucking it close against his heart. He did not consider what that gesture meant—or rather, he did, but refused to admit it.

He swung into the saddle.

Hooves struck the stone of the road—one step, another—and he guided the horse toward the city gate.

Ten paces from the gate, he halted.

From the saddle, Jeffery stared at the slow, steady movement of the opening gate, motionless. The morning breeze lifted one corner of his worn cloak. His brows drew together as if he stood at a fork in the road, his body already leaning forward, his heart still nailed in place. He closed his eyes, drew in a long breath, and let it out.

Hoofbeats sounded again.

But the direction changed.

He turned the horse’s head, led it back to the old locust tree, tied the reins once more, and sat down again on the stone ledge.

He lowered his head and braced his hands on his knees. The corner of his mouth pulled into a small, wry curve, and a soft, almost soundless laugh escaped him. The whole thing struck him as absurd, yet he felt no urge to move. The weight of the stone in his inner pocket was so light as to be barely there—and yet somehow it anchored him in place.

Just a little longer.

He told himself.

Just a little longer.

Ioanna’s lashes flickered, as if to prove she was still alive. Yes, she was alive—but it felt like the word no longer applied.

She stood up so suddenly the chair creaked behind her, crossed the room, and opened a desk drawer. Her fingers closed around a sharp letter opener.

Fine, then. Let it end. A life lived as a pawn on someone else’s board was no different from being dead.

But not here. Not in this room, where she would be found too quickly, dragged back and stitched to some other fate.

She decided: she would go to the tower. Closer to the sky.

The letter opener lay in her palm—narrow, cold. Morning light slid down the blade and flashed as a thin, pale line. Ioanna stared at it. Her hand did not tremble. That, more than anything, was the frightening part—she was too calm, calm like someone who has already settled every account and cannot be bothered to rekindle fear.

She slid the blade up into her sleeve, then turned, letting her gaze travel once around the room she had lived in for so many years.

The bed curtains. The shelves. The fresh wildflowers Addie had placed on the windowsill yesterday. The bronze mirror on the dressing table. In the mirror: a girl’s face, bloodless and shadowed with exhaustion, wrapped in the rumpled dress she had thrown on in haste last night. The wounds on her back were not yet fully scabbed.

She stared at that reflection for a heartbeat, then turned away. She did not look back.

Outside the door, Addie lifted her hand to knock for the third time.

Before her knuckles met the wood, she heard footsteps inside—not coming toward the door, but receding, followed by the faint click of another door opening and closing: the side door that led into the inner corridor.

Addie froze. Her heart dropped heavily, for no clear reason. Only a thread of wrongness pricked at her chest, fine and sharp as a needle. She hesitated for less than a breath, then pushed the door open.

The room was empty.

On the desk, the small stand that usually held the letter opener sat bare.

Addie’s face drained of color in an instant. She spun and bolted from the room, her skirts snatching at the corners of the walls as she turned. She did not care. She ran, mind racing to catch up, to imagine where Ioanna would go—she knew her, knew her temper, knew all that buried stubbornness and the despair she never said aloud.

The tower.

The word flashed through her mind, and she ran faster. Tears spilled first, ahead of her.

Outside the walls, Jeffery lifted his head.

He could not have said what made him do it. There was no sound, no visible sign. Only that aching heaviness in his chest, stretched taut through an entire night, suddenly tightened, like a string pulled too long finally reaching its breaking point.

His gaze climbed the wall—over weathered stone, over withered vines clinging to the cracks—until it reached the tower’s roof.

He shot to his feet.

He did not know what he had seen—perhaps nothing at all—but the feeling propelled his legs before his mind could catch up, like a man who wakes from a dream haunted by a sound he cannot remember, driven by a panic whose source he doesn’t know.

He yanked the reins free and vaulted into the saddle. The horse’s hooves struck the stone in a rapid, jarring rhythm.

He did not know where he was going.

He only knew that something was wrong on the other side of the wall.

He spurred the horse toward the gates, that long-suppressed flame in his amber eyes cracking through the veneer of calm at last—hot, urgent, the same fire that had been smoldering ever since last night.

Faster, he thought.

He did not know who he was urging.

Ioanna, meanwhile, had gone to the tower as she always did. This place, though part of the palace grounds, had been left in disrepair for as long as she could remember. Like her. She was the king’s daughter, yet for reasons never spoken, she had never won his favor. Her mother had died by her own hand because of her. In this palace, apart from Addie, there was no one who truly cared whether she lived or died. Not siblings, not servants. They all followed the king’s lead, treating her with the same careful distance or thinly veiled disdain.

The one thing anyone ever seemed to value in her was her looks—like a doll, they said. Pretty enough to trade. That was all she was worth. Now, by resisting the marriage, she was destroying the last use they had for her.

She stepped onto the rooftop and, as always, leaned her arms over the low parapet. This was the closest she ever came to freedom; the hands extended beyond the stone felt, for a few inches, outside the cage that had trapped her since childhood.

Only this time, the hand she stretched past the wall did not hold a sweet or a little wooden toy. It held a blade.

The wind was stronger up here than below, roaring through the broken crenellations and whipping her loose hair across her face.

She did not brush it aside.

She stood at the same worn stretch of wall she knew as well as the lines in her own palm, resting her forearms on the rough stone, her weight tilted slightly forward, just as she had so many mornings and evenings before. The only difference was the slender knife hidden in her sleeve—and the fact that the thin, stubborn light in her eyes was nearly gone.

She looked down. The ground far below seemed like another world entirely. The wind pushed at her skirts, teasing her toward the edge. Her stomach fluttered with the sense of empty air beneath her, but she did not step back.

This tower was broken.

It had been broken as long as she could remember—grass growing from between the bricks, half-rotted window frames, two loose steps on the stair that groaned underfoot.

Her father had never ordered repairs.

Ioanna glanced down at the hand she’d stretched beyond the wall. It was slender, well-kept—a hand suited for display in a banquet hall, for bearing a betrothal ring, for folding meekly over a skirt before a foreign prince. She slowly drew the letter opener from her sleeve. The blade quivered in the wind, humming faintly.

Her mother, too, had chosen to leave on a morning when she could no longer bear the weight of staying.

Ioanna did not hate her.

The thought brought a sting to her eyes, but the wind dried it before any tears could fall. She pressed her lips together; the scab on the wound she had bitten open the night before twinged faintly. Tilting her head back, she faced the wind and looked up at the sky, pale and glazed with early light.

At least it’s closer to the sky here, she thought, her fingers tightening around the knife.

At the gate, a guard moved to block a bay horse.

“This is the royal precinct. No unauthorized—”

Jeffery did not wait for him to finish. He swung from the saddle, cutting off the man’s words. His amber gaze swept over the guard, voice low and urgent, carrying a tension so taut he hadn’t even realized it was in him.

“The tower,” he said. Only one word. “That tower—there’s someone up there, isn’t there?”

The guard blinked, caught off guard, and hadn’t yet answered when the rapid tread of footsteps echoed from a distant corridor. A maid came into view at the far end—skirt tangled, eyes red, running so hard she could barely breathe. Panic was written plainly across her face.

Jeffery saw her expression, and the tightened string in his chest snapped.

He didn’t wait for anyone to speak. He strode past the guard, heading toward the tower he had only roughly placed in his mind the night before. Striding became a run.

He ran, his cloak snagging against the corners of stone, the scabbard at his hip striking the walls with a dull thud. He did not slow. Each step landed hard, as though he meant to crack the palace floors with his heels. His heart hammered in his chest, too fast, nothing like his usual steady self. His mind held only a single beat, repeating over and over like a muffled drum.

Faster.

Faster.

Faster.

The stairs up the tower were old. He took them three at a time, the two loose steps groaning under his weight. He did not pause. At the turn of the stair, he whipped his head up.

Wind from the rooftop poured down, lifting his hair and brushing the scar on his brow.

He saw her.

Jeffery stopped dead at the threshold of the rooftop. For a moment it was as if something had seized his lungs, dragging all the air out of his chest and leaving nothing in its place.

He saw the slender figure leaning on the low parapet, arms braced against the stone, hair flying in the wind as she faced the open drop. One hand, the one she held beyond the wall, gripped something.

His feet would not move. Something thick and wordless lodged in his throat. His amber eyes widened. All the fear he had pressed down since the night before surged up with nowhere to hide.

He drew a breath.

Then, with the steadiest, most deliberate voice he had ever used, he spoke.

“Hey.”

One word.

“The wind’s strong up there. You must be tired of standing.”

His voice did not shake. He forced it not to, just as he had chosen the most ordinary words he could find last night when she’d leaned out of the darkness to speak to him. He did not know whether any words with weight in them now would break what little she had left to hold onto.

His voice drew Ioanna’s head up slightly. She did not turn fully, as though she needed a moment to gather her thoughts—or what was left of them.

“It’s you…”

She recognized the voice. The stranger from last night—the one who had stood beneath her tower, the one who’d said he’d like to see it repaired someday.

“How did you get in here?” she asked, trying for casual, as if it were any other morning. As if she could drag herself back to that version of herself by asking ordinary questions.

“Climbed the wall,” Jeffery replied, calm, as though commenting on the weather.

He eased a step closer—slow, careful, as if approaching a bird perched on a branch, knowing that any sudden motion might send it flying or tumbling.

“I don’t know this city,” he went on, voice pitched just above the wind. “But last night you told me there was a broken tower. So I got my bearings.”

He paused.

His gaze flicked to the knife at her sleeve, and something clenched again in his chest. He did not let it reach his voice. He stopped three steps away from her, no nearer, simply standing there as he had sat against the wall last night: the least threatening shape he could make of himself.

“I was going to leave,” he said softly. There was a touch of rueful honesty in his tone, like someone confessing to a foolishness they barely understood themselves. “Packed my things, untied my horse. I even rode all the way to the gate—”

He broke off for a moment.

“And then I turned back.”

Wind rushed between them, blowing a few strands of her hair toward him. He watched those stray wisps lift and fall, his brow twitching faintly, but his gaze did not stray from her. His hands hung easily at his sides. He did not touch his sword. He did not reach for her. His palms were open, fingers relaxed, a wordless assurance that he meant no harm.

“I don’t know why,” he said quietly, almost as if speaking to the wind. “I just couldn’t bring myself to go.”

At his words, a stray gust carried with it not just her scent, but the faint, metallic tang of blood.

Jeffery’s eyes narrowed. Almost at the same moment that she shifted, his gaze dropped to her neck, to her shoulders, to the thin fabric of her sleeve where a dark stain bled through. His expression did not change much, but the set of his jaw tightened, then eased again, like a stone dropping into deep water—silent on the surface, heavy below.

“You’re right,” he said after a moment. “With a horse ready, reins in hand, all I have to do is nudge its sides and ride away. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to.”

He did not soften the words. He met the half-turned angle of her face head-on. No evasions. No easy comforts.

He sank into a crouch two steps away from her, bringing his line of sight below hers so that he no longer looked down at her from above. It was the posture of someone speaking to a wounded animal cornered against a wall—making himself smaller, less like a threat.

“I’ve been on the road a long time,” he said, voice even, as if recounting an old story. “I’ve seen a lot of cities. A lot of people. A lot of meetings that didn’t last. The first thing I learned was never to let anything stick. If you let it settle in your heart, you can’t walk fast anymore.”

He paused, and something stirred behind his amber gaze, like a bit of ancient light caught in resin.

“Last night—this tower. That voice. That look.”

He spoke slowly, piece by piece, as though he were hearing the words for the first time himself.

“I told myself you were just a passerby. That I’d leave at dawn. When dawn came, I said I’d leave when the gate opened. The gate opened and—”

He let out a short breath that might have been a laugh. It wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t quite self-mockery either—more a quiet, bewildered surrender.

“I smelled blood.”

He didn’t ask whose.

He didn’t ask what had happened.

He stayed where he was, watching her. There was no pity in his eyes, no superior sympathy—only a steady, human gaze, the way one person looks at another person.

His hand moved, slowly, toward the hand that held the knife. He did not try to take it. His fingers stopped an inch short of hers, suspended in the air as if in a silent, patient request.

“Will you set that down?”

It was not an order. Not a plea. Just a simple question, spoken like anything else two people might say to one another.

“You’re tired of standing. My legs are tired from crouching.” His lips tilted in the faintest hint of a smile. “We could sit and talk.”

Her grip tightened automatically around the knife.

“No.”

The answer came without thought, as if loosening her hand meant loosening her last hold over her own fate.

Jeffery did not move.

His hand stayed where it was, still a finger’s breadth away, neither pressing closer nor drawing back. He watched the curve of her fingers, the whitened knuckles, and felt something sink heavily inside his chest. His face remained steady. He simply watched her, for a long time.

“All right,” he said gently. “Then don’t.”

He withdrew his hand, resting it on his knee again. He did not reach for the knife a second time. The wind tugged at his faded cloak, lifting the hem, and he let it.

After a while, he spoke again.

“I have a question,” he said, in the same mild tone one might use to ask which road to take. “You don’t have to answer. If you don’t want to, let the wind blow it away.”

His gaze dropped briefly to her hand, then rose to her face.

“That blood,” he asked quietly. “Did someone else give it to you… or did you give it to yourself?”

There was no flinching in his eyes as he asked, no pity either. Only that same calm, direct attention, the kind that suggested that whatever the answer was, he wasn’t going anywhere because of it.

Ioanna was silent for a long time. She could feel the warmth of blood seeping through the bandages and cloth on her back, could smell the metallic tang in every breath she took.

“Both,” she said at last, lightly, as if the word weighed nothing at all.

This time she turned fully away from him, leaning forward over the parapet again.

“If I’d simply done as I was told,” she added, “none of this would have happened.”

“Both.”

The word hit Jeffery like a stone dropped into bottomless water. No splash. Just weight, sinking.

His jaw clenched, then relaxed. His eyes flicked once to her back—the thin fabric clinging where dark, irregular marks bled through, as if someone had carved lines into her skin. His teeth ached from the force with which he held them together. He made no sound.

He listened to her say that obedience would have spared her.

Silence stretched long between them.

“Obedience,” he said at last, turning the word over slowly. “Obedient to whom?”

He didn’t wait for her to reply. His voice continued, low and precise.

“And once you obey—what then?”

He straightened to his full height and stepped closer, stopping at the place where, with a slight turn of her head, she could see him without feeling cornered. He leaned his own arms on the parapet, looking down at the distant ground far below.

“My mother was a witch,” he said suddenly, almost idly, as if noting a change in the weather. “Back home, a witch’s child is supposed to read omens, inherit her gifts, grow up exactly the way people expect.”

He paused, turning his face toward her. There was something in his eyes deeper than pity.

“I had no talent at all,” he said softly. “By their logic, from the day I was born I was useless. I should have obeyed and disappeared.”

The wind slid between them.

His gaze drifted back out toward the horizon, a faint, unreadable curve at the corner of his lips.

“But I didn’t,” he went on, his voice dropping until it felt like he was speaking only for her. “I took a sword. I walked out of that town. I walked until I reached this place.”

He paused.

“Not because it didn’t hurt,” he said, turning his eyes back to hers, steady and sure, “but because the people telling me to obey were not worth my life.”

His gaze slipped to the knife in her hand, lingered, then returned to her face.

“The wounds on your back,” he said. “Someone else gave you those. That blade doesn’t have to do the same.”

She flinched—just a little—and the knuckles holding the knife tightened again. Sunlight caught on the tips of her lashes, making them shine.

“Father,” she whispered.

The single word carried everything: who she was meant to obey, who had done this to her.

Father.

Light as a feather. Heavy as a gravestone.

Jeffery did not answer right away. He looked at the way she curled in on herself, at the whiteness of her fingers around the blade, at the tiny glints of light trembling on her lashes. The contrast between those fragile flecks and the weight she bore made something twist inside his chest.

He thought of being fourteen.

Of a forest fire. Of shouting a word—*Mother* or Father—into a night full of flames.

He closed his eyes briefly, pushing something back down inside himself, then opened them again. When he looked at her now, his gaze was calm, but something long-buried glowed faintly beneath, like light trapped in amber.

He did not say I understand.

He knew better than to claim that. Every wound cut in a different place. To say he understood would be an insult.

Instead, he shifted a little, so that he stood squarely at her side, looking out over the same pale, distant sky beyond the wall.

The wind kept blowing.

Only after a long while—long enough that the silence itself had settled into a kind of company—did he speak again.

“I lost my parents when I was fourteen,” he said quietly.

He did not give details; not the fire, nor the night he spent standing alone amid the ashes until morning. He let the simple sentence lie between them, not as comparison, but as a stone set beside another stone—saying only: you are not the only one carrying weight.

“For a long time after that,” he added, his tone as flat and even as a calm river, “I thought the pain was what I deserved.”

He waited so long that the wind changed direction before he spoke again, his voice dropping to a near whisper.

“Later I learned,” he said, “it wasn’t.”

He turned to look at her, at the flyaway strands of hair across her face, at the eyes that held unfallen tears.

“And it isn’t yours either.”

Ioanna’s lashes fluttered, as if holding back something that wanted to fall.

Footsteps sounded on the stair. The guards had arrived. They were here to see if the princess was safe—and more importantly, to make sure she was brought back and watched.

The captain of the guard—Phetlantis’s personal man, the same one who had dragged her before the king the previous night—stopped at the top of the stair.

“Your Highness, you should return to your chambers,” he said. After a brief pause, he added, “May I come up and escort you down?”

He was feeling her out, judging how much force he might need to use.

Ioanna was quiet for a moment.

“I’ll walk myself,” she answered coolly. She had no wish for them to notice Jeffery and carry the news to her father.

She exhaled softly and set the letter opener down on the parapet beside Jeffery’s arm, as if she could hide what had almost happened here by leaving it behind, as if this were nothing more than another bout of temper.

“Once they’ve followed me away,” she murmured, “you need to leave. Quickly. If my father thinks I’m refusing the marriage for some man’s sake, he’ll have your head.”

She turned and walked toward the stairs.

Jeffery looked down at the letter opener lying by his arm, the blade lying quiet in the light like a thing whose work had been taken away. He did not touch it at once. He watched her retreating back for a heartbeat—the rigid line of her spine, the dark stains shifting under the thin fabric as she moved. A secret he should never have seen, and yet now could not unsee.

She had told him not to let her father misunderstand. That he’d die for it.

His mouth tightened into a shape that was hard to name—bitter, perhaps, or something more tangled than that. Slowly, he picked up the knife. The hilt was still faintly warm from her hand.

Her footsteps rang on the stairs—one, then another, then softer as she descended.

Jeffery said nothing. He stood beside the parapet, the blade in his hand, the wind combing his hair across his old scar. He listened to the sound of her steps fade, to the captain’s quiet turn, to the tower once more sinking back into its broken, unattended silence.

For a long time, he did not move.

Then he slid the knife into the inner pocket of his cloak, tucking it beside the stone he had picked up the night before. His hand lingered there, palm pressed briefly against his chest, feeling the twin, light weights resting over his heart.

He glanced down at the tower floor.

Weeds grew between the old bricks. A corner stone had crumbled away. The whole tower was failing, inside and out, and had been for years. No one had come to mend it.

He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath of morning air, laced with wind and the fading trace of blood, then let it go. When he opened his eyes again, he turned toward the stairs and walked down. His boots struck the two loose steps with firm, unhurried weight, drawing a muted crack from each.

He left the tower, crossed the corridor, and made his way back to the gate.

The bay still waited beneath the locust tree, snorting softly when it saw him, swishing its tail.

Jeffery untied the reins and swung into the saddle. He settled there, but did not move right away. Turning his head, he took one last look at the wall, at the tower whose top he could no longer see from here. His gaze was very still, like deep water with something heavy resting far below the surface.

She had told him to go.

She had told him not to let her father misunderstand.

His fingers tightened on the reins, then loosened. Tightened again. Loosened. The stone and the knife weighed against his chest, light yet somehow each unbearably heavy—a stone, a blade, a girl whose face he had only truly seen once, a quiet both, a single word: Father.

He nudged the horse into motion.

Ten steps. Twenty. He reached a bend in the street.

Jeffery drew the reins taut at the corner and bowed his head, silent for a long time. The horse stamped, restless, shaking its head.

He did not move on. He sat where he was, like a man staring into darkness, trying to see a road that refused to show itself.

Slowly, he lifted his head and looked back toward the wall, his gaze hardening like iron heated and held in check. The pale scar on his brow caught the light—a faint, old mark, a reminder that he had lost before and knew exactly what loss felt like.

He did not ride away.

Behind the captain, Ioanna followed down the stairs. Suddenly, she spoke.

“Klopp, take me to my father,” she said, her tone cool, as if asking for an audience with a stranger. “You’ll need to report first, won’t you? To see if he’s willing to receive me.”

Klopp halted at the bottom of the steps.

Years as captain had turned him into stone—quiet, solid, imperturbable. Yet now, looking back at the pale, composed girl behind him, something flickered, brief and human, in his eyes. He hesitated for two seconds, then answered in a level, official voice.

“I will report.”

He did not respond to the barbed edge in her question.

Ioanna stood in the corridor. The guards behind her kept a two-step distance—not too far, not too close—like stones that had learned to walk. She did not look back at them. She remained upright, her back straight. The longer she stood, the more the wounds across her shoulders burned, but she did not shift or even furrow her brows. It was as if she had filed pain and breathing into the same category: things she was used to, and therefore no longer worth remarking.

Light cut across the corridor through the narrow windows, carving thin, bright lines across the floor. Her shadow stretched along the stone, lengthening forward until it disappeared into darkness.

She looked down at that shadow, her gaze smooth and still, like water that no longer rippled.

In her mind, she went over the words she meant to say today. There were no tears in them, no anger—only something colder than rage, the look of someone who had spent too long on a chessboard and was finally learning to speak in the board’s own language.

She thought of Jeffery’s words.

The people telling me to obey aren’t worth my life.

Her fingers curled slightly against her skirt. Her thumb stroked the weave of the fabric, once, twice, as if checking that something unseen was still there.

She no longer had the knife. She had left it behind, entrusted to a wandering knight whose name she did not even know. Somehow, the thought of it in his hands felt safer than in her own.

Klopp’s footsteps sounded again, returning from the far end of the corridor.

He stopped in front of her and bowed his head.

“His Majesty will see you,” he said, voice as neutral as ever.

He hesitated, as if about to add something, then swallowed the words and merely gestured ahead.

Ioanna drew a breath. The air here was cool, smelling faintly of stone and old wax. She pushed that breath down into her chest, pushing down everything she did not intend to carry through the door.

Then she walked forward.

Her footsteps echoed along the corridor—steady, unhurried, neither dragging nor rushing. She walked like someone who had already considered every way out, and decided to move toward the only one left.

At the door to her father’s study, she raised her hand and knocked, her voice even and emotionless.

“This is Ioanna.”

Then she waited, as though there were no blood between them at all.

Silence hung behind the door for a moment.

It was a calculated silence, like a measuring stick laid out between authority and obedience, giving the person outside time to feel themselves shrink.

Ioanna stood straight, hands at her sides, expressionless—not numb, but deliberately, fiercely calm. The wounds on her back burned with every second she remained upright, but she did not shift her weight. She stood like a plant rooted deep in a crack of stone: you could not see the pain, but you knew it was there.

“Enter.”

The voice came through the door—steady, composed, bearing the weight of a seal pressed into paper.

Ioanna pushed the door open.

The study was dimmer than the corridor. Heavy curtains left only a thin gap for light, a narrow beam of morning that died at the edge of the carpet. King Phetlantis sat behind his desk, a few documents spread before him. He lifted his eyes to her, gaze passing from her face to her back and back again, his expression unchanged, like a man tallying figures in a ledger.

Ioanna stopped two steps from the desk. She did not bow deeply—only enough to satisfy formality, the smallest curve that still counted. That slight motion was sharp and precise, cutting along the edge of courtesy like a blade: no more, no less.

She straightened and met his eyes. Father and daughter stared at one another, their gazes meeting like two stones, without spark, only weight.

The study was very quiet.

Ioanna spoke.

Her voice was not loud, but each word fell solidly, like her steps along the corridor.

“I’ve come,” she said, “to discuss terms.”