Chapter 151 Things that cannot be untrue
Chapter 151 Things that cannot be untrue
I was on my feet before the echo of the stopped bell had finished dying, every hair on my arms risen, the Crown’s heat spiking sharp against my skull in the particular way it had started to mean danger rather than simply attention.
“That bell doesn’t stop mid-toll,” Aurelian said, his hand already on his sword hilt, all the careful openness of the previous moment gone behind his armor again as fast as breath. “The palace bell rings full or it doesn’t ring at all. Something stopped it.”
“The Faithful,” Bryn said from across the cavern, already moving toward me through the scattered remains of the circle. “The ones who ran they went up, not out. Garrick told them to scatter if things went wrong, but scatter doesn’t mean surrender, Elara, that’s not how cults work….”
“It’s not the Faithful,” said Selyne’s voice from the tunnel mouth, and she entered the cavern with the controlled, tight-legged stride of a woman carrying very bad news at a walking pace because running with it would make it arrive before she was ready to say it. “I’ve been in contact with my own guard above ground. There’s been a development in the last hour. A rather significant one.”
“How significant,” Aurelian said.
Selyne stopped a few feet from us, her sharp grey eyes moving once, quickly, to the cracked seal glowing red at my feet, then back up to his face. Whatever she’d been about to say, she adjusted the order of it for a moment, visibly deciding what came first.
“There is a delegation at the palace gate,” she said.
“Forty riders, full military escort, carrying the banners of House Morrath.”
I watched Aurelian go absolutely still.
“House Morrath,” he said, in the flat tone of a man repeating something he hopes he misheard. “House Morrath has been gone for eighty years, Selyne. They were exiled. The exile was permanent.”
“The exile was permanent under your grandfather’s decree,” Selyne said, precisely, carefully, in the manner of someone drawing a distinction that is also a blade. “Your grandfather decreed a great many things, as we have all been discovering lately.
House Morrath apparently feels that the circumstances of their exile deserve revisiting, given that the circumstances included a great deal of information your grandfather falsified.” She paused. “They’ve brought documentation. Quite a lot of it. They’re claiming the Luna-elect’s selection confirms a lineage argument they’ve been making from exile for eighty years.”
“What lineage argument,” I said.
Selyne looked at me, and behind her careful composure I saw the first faint trace of something I hadn’t expected from her not hostility, not cold calculation, but something closer to reluctant, bone-deep fatigue.
“House Morrath’s lineage claim,” she said, “is that the true heir of the murdered Prince Caelum’s bloodline did not die with him a hundred years ago. They claim Caelum had a sister. Younger. Hidden before the assassination, smuggled out of the palace the same night the blade went in, raised under a false name in the outer provinces.” Her eyes held mine, steady and uncomfortable and entirely honest. “And they claim that every servant girl born without a traceable family name in the lower city of Virelion for the last hundred years can be traced back to that hidden line — which is why the order watched all of them, Elara, not because they didn’t know which one the moon would choose, but because they couldn’t narrow it down more precisely than the bloodline itself.”
The cavern was very quiet.
“I had a sister,” I said, and it wasn’t a question, because the moment she said it the Crown flooded me with confirmation so clear it felt less like new information and more like remembering where I’d left something I’d been looking for my whole life.
“Caelum had a sister. I had a sister, and I didn’t know — the memory never showed me…”
“Because she survived,” Aurelian said, very quietly, his winter eyes going somewhere distant as his mind worked through the architecture of it. “Your memories from the Crown are only of events you witnessed. You didn’t witness her escape. You were already dying.”
“House Morrath claims to represent her descendants,” Selyne said. “Which means, my lady, that whatever you are the heir of whichever claim the Crown validated when it chose you last week you are apparently not the last of it. There are others. Related others. And they are at the gate right now, tonight, with documentation and forty armed riders, making the extremely reasonable argument that if the Crown chose by blood after all, then any claim you hold to the throne of this kingdom is one they share.”
Below my feet, the seal pulsed, patient and red, its ancient inhabitant listening with the thoughtful quiet of something that had observed a great many political catastrophes from the underside of various floors across a very long existence.
“This is new,” it said, almost companionably, through the crack. “We don’t remember a sister. We rather like the development.”
“Nobody asked you,” Aurelian said, tightly.
“No,” it agreed. “Nobody ever does.”
Outside the cavern, through stone and distance, a second bell began not the palace bell this time, but the deeper, heavier toll of the watch tower, the one that rang only when the gate had been opened under duress or command, and a party had been permitted inside the outer wall.
Someone had let House Morrath in.