Chapter 152 The sister’s blood
Chapter 152 The sister’s blood
The woman who met us in the palace’s outer receiving hall was not what I had expected, and I realized, standing in the doorway with Aurelian one step behind me and Bryn half a step behind him, that I hadn’t known what I was expecting until I saw her and felt it be wrong.
She was not old. She was perhaps thirty, fine-boned and dark-haired, wearing a riding coat dusted with three days of road and a pair of eyes the color of storm-grey winter sky that landed on my face and went very, very still.
Behind her, six escort riders and two older advisors in the dusty Morrath colors stood at careful attention, watching the woman the way people watch someone walking a ledge — not certain she’ll fall, but aware of the height.
“You have his eyes,” the woman said, without preamble, without the formal greeting forty years of exile and eighty years of legal documentation apparently couldn’t suppress out of her. “I grew up on portraits. My grandmother made sure I knew his face before anything else. You have Caelum’s eyes.”
“So I’ve been told,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt standing in front of someone who shared my blood across a century and a half without either of us ever being told to look. “You’re a Morrath.”
“Lira Morrath,” she said. “My grandmother was the daughter of Caelum’s sister, Senna. Three generations removed from the original exile, five removed from Senna herself.” She paused, and something careful shifted in her expression, some practiced diplomatic distance making room for something more genuine underneath. “I know how this looks.
Forty riders, gate in the middle of the night, documentation that could overturn eighty years of royal decree. I am aware it looks like a political attack.”
“Is it,” Aurelian said, from behind me.
Lira’s gaze shifted to him, and whatever she saw in his winter-red eyes made her consider her answer with more care than she’d given mine.
“It depends,” she said finally, “on what you intend to do with the Luna-elect. If you intend to honor the Crown’s choice, then no — we’re here to support it, and to offer whatever our line’s claim is worth in legitimizing hers against the houses that are already questioning whether a servant girl’s selection was valid at all.” Her jaw tightened. “If you intend to suppress her claim the way your grandfather suppressed Senna’s exile, then yes. It’s an attack. And we’ve had eighty years to prepare for it.”
“I don’t intend to suppress anything,” Aurelian said.
“I am discovering that suppressing things is the core of every problem currently trying to kill me simultaneously.”
Lira looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone revising an assumption they’d held for the entire ride to the palace, then turned back to me with something that was, carefully and deliberately, not quite yet warmth.
“The documentation my advisors carry proves Senna’s line,” she said. “It also proves something your history books don’t record — that Senna herself was told, the night of Caelum’s murder, by a palace servant woman who helped her escape, that the Crown had already chosen her brother twice.
Once at his original ceremony, and once in a secondary selection the High Council suppressed because the first selection had never been officially rescinded.” She reached into her coat and produced a folded, aged letter, its edges brown with age, sealed with a crest I recognized from Caelum’s memories. “Senna’s account of that night. Her own hand. She believed the Crown would choose again when it was ready, and she left this letter to be opened only when it did.”
She held it out to me. I took it, the paper warm from being carried against her body for three days of road, and unfolded it with hands that wouldn’t quite hold steady, and read a dead woman’s words written to a sibling she’d watched die and never stopped expecting to see again.
When the moon brings you back, Senna had written, in ink gone faint as whispered breath, look for us. We will be the ones who never stopped saying your name.
I folded the letter. Held it pressed against my chest, above the wound, above the mark, above the place where Caelum’s old grief and Elara’s new one had been living side by side in borrowed ribs since the night the Crown chose me.
“There’s something you should know,” I said, because Lira Morrath had ridden three days with documentation and forty riders and her grandmother’s grandmother’s letter, and she deserved to walk into the next hour with accurate information about the state of the floor. “Before we go any further.
There’s an Ancient Force living beneath this palace that we are in the middle of negotiating with, the council member who led the group that murdered Caelum is currently sitting in the cavern below us in a body that isn’t his original one, and the Blood Moon appears to be rising early.” I watched her face move through a sequence of expressions. “Do you still want to be here?”
Lira Morrath looked at me for a long moment.
“My family has been in exile for eighty years waiting to help you,” she said. “We did not ride three days to be deterred by the complicated part.”
From the corridor behind her, one of her advisors cleared his throat.
“My lady Morrath,” the advisor said, his voice carrying the particular strain of a man who has been professionally calm for a very long time and is approaching the limit of it, “the palace guard is reporting that the glow from beneath the outer courtyard is becoming visible from the street.”
I closed my eyes for one full breath.
“Aurelian,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “We have to go back down.”
“I know.” And we have to bring her.” I opened my eyes and looked at Lira Morrath, alive and road-dusty and three generations removed from the sister Caelum never got to know had escaped. “Because if the Heart of the Curse is going to negotiate at all, it should probably do it with every piece of the bloodline that’s still standing.”
Lira adjusted the collar of her riding coat with the brisk, practical motion of someone putting away one plan and preparing for a different one.
“Lead the way,” she said.