˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
Eurydice Hughes had not slept.
This was not, in itself, unusual. There were nights when the weight of the palace settled on her chest and sleep became a negotiation she lost. She had learned to manage those nights: a lamp left burning, a book opened to somewhere in the middle, her mind given something small and manageable to do until the larger things retreated to a distance she could function at.
Last night had not been one of those nights.
Last night she had sat at her desk with a four-hundred-year-old scroll in her hands and read the same words seventeen times and understood them completely the first time and spent the remaining sixteen trying to find a way they could mean something else.
They did not mean something else.
She was dressed and in the corridor before the seventh bell, which was early enough that the palace had not yet fully woken and the cloudstone halls held the particular hush of a place still deciding what kind of day it was going to be. Her hair was done. Her uniform was straight. Her face was the face it always was: composed, attentive, ready.
Nobody would know.
That was the thing she had decided, somewhere around the fourth hour of not sleeping. Nobody could know, not yet, not until she understood what she was going to do about it. And until that moment she was going to be exactly who she had always been, because the alternative was falling apart in a palace full of people who would notice and report it, and she could not afford that.
She turned the corner toward the breakfast hall and walked directly into Samu.
"Whoa," he said, catching her by both shoulders before she could bounce off him entirely. "Easy. Where's the fire?"
"There is no fire," Eurydice said. "I was walking."
"You were power-walking like someone told you the palace was on a timer." He looked at her. Really looked, the way Samu did when he had decided to actually pay attention. "Did you sleep?"
"Of course."
"Eurydice."
"I slept fine, Samu."
He did not believe her. She could see it in the slight tilt of his head, the way his hazel eyes stayed on her face a beat longer than a polite person would allow. Samu Ó Cuirc had known her since they were children. He was very difficult to lie to and she had always found this quality both reassuring and deeply inconvenient.
"You look like someone handed you bad news," he said.
The scroll. The founding era handwriting. The exile of Prince Astrapi was not just.
"I have a lot on my mind," she said. "The military contingency documents. My mother wants them reviewed by the end of the week."
Samu looked at her for one more moment. Then he fell into step beside her, because that was what Samu did: he did not push, he simply stayed, which was in some ways more difficult to manage than pushing.
"I heard something this morning," he said, as they walked.
"What kind of something?"
"The Queen is moving the timeline up." He said it quietly, eyes forward. "Whatever she was planning regarding the Outcasts. She told the senior guard captains last night that preparations should begin within the fortnight."
Eurydice's step did not falter. She had spent seventeen readings of the scroll learning to hold impossible things without dropping them.
"A fortnight," she said.
"That's what I heard."
A fortnight. Two weeks. The war her mother was building on a foundation that did not exist, accelerated, real, moving toward people who had done nothing wrong except exist in the place they had been sent to four centuries ago by a man who had lied.
"Thank you for telling me," she said.
Samu glanced at her. "Eurydice. If something is wrong—"
"Nothing is wrong," she said. "I appreciate it, Samu. Truly."
He did not look convinced. But he nodded and let it go, because he was Samu, and because sometimes letting things go was its own kind of loyalty.
They parted at the junction of the breakfast hall, and Eurydice walked in and took her seat and accepted the tea that was poured for her and looked at the food on the table and found she had absolutely no appetite at all.
Across the hall, her mother was already seated, already speaking with two senior advisors, already the most alert and purposeful person in any room she occupied. Lexi Hughes looked like a woman who had slept well and woken with clear intentions. She looked like a woman who knew exactly where she was going.
Eurydice looked at her mother and thought about the scroll and thought about Brontes and thought about four hundred years of Outcast exile and thought about a war being planned this very morning in this very palace on the back of a lie so old it had become simply the truth.
She picked up her tea.
She held it.
She did not drink it.
She needed to find Alexis.
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
She found her in the advisor's corridor, coming out of her office with an armful of documents and the expression of someone who had also not slept particularly well.
Alexis took one look at Eurydice's face and said: "Come inside."
She put the documents down. She closed the door. She looked at Eurydice and waited with the patience of someone who had suspected something was coming and had been quietly preparing for it.
"I found it," Eurydice said.
Alexis was still.
"The library," Eurydice said. "The eastern wing. There is a section that nobody visits, and in it there is a scroll, and the scroll—" She stopped. Took a breath. Said it plainly because there was no way to say it that was not plain. "The exile of Astrapi was fabricated. Brontes invented the crime. The entire founding of this kingdom, everything we were taught, everything my mother is using to justify a war, is built on something that did not happen."
Silence.
Alexis sat down, which was unusual. Alexis almost never sat down first.
"How certain are you?" she said.
"The scroll has been verified. Linguistically, materially, historically. It was written by an archivist who was present in the council chamber when the accusation was made. She signed her name to it." Eurydice looked at her. "Her name was Zephyrine Callas."
Something crossed Alexis's face. There and gone.
"You know that name," Eurydice said.
Alexis was quiet for a moment. She touched the pendant at her throat.
"Callas," she said carefully. "It is an old name. Connected to an old archival family." Another pause. "I would need to look into it further."
"Alexis." Eurydice leaned forward. "What do you know?"
Alexis met her eyes. And for the first time in all the years Eurydice had known her, the composed careful advisor looked like exactly what she was underneath everything else: a nineteen year old girl sitting with something too large for one person to hold.
"I know," Alexis said quietly, "that I have never believed the official history entirely. There were always gaps. Things that did not quite connect. I looked into it once, two years ago, and found a reference to a sealed section of the founding era records and then found the reference itself had been removed from the catalogue." She paused. "I did not pursue it. I told myself it was coincidence."
"It was not coincidence."
"No," Alexis said. "I do not think it was."
They sat with that for a moment, the two of them, in the small advisor's office with the door closed and the palace moving around them outside it, enormous and certain and built on nothing.
"My mother is moving the timeline up," Eurydice said. "A fortnight."
Alexis closed her eyes briefly. "Then we do not have long."
"No." Eurydice stood. "Which means I need you to find out everything you can about Zephyrine Callas and the Callas family. And I need to go back to the library."
"The historian," Alexis said. "The one who found it."
Eurydice looked at her. "How did you know there was a historian?"
"Because someone maintained that wing," Alexis said simply. "Kept the lamp burning. Someone has been going there. I assumed it was not you, since you found the scroll yesterday." A pause. "Who is he?"
"His name is Hayden Wolffe," Eurydice said. "He is a Subject. A historian." She picked up her coat from the chair. "And right now he is the most important person in Nephoria, even if nobody knows it yet."
She opened the door.
"Eurydice," Alexis said.
She stopped.
"Be careful," Alexis said. "Not just out there. In here." She meant the palace. She meant the corridors and the breakfast hall and the mother who could hear whispers from three rooms away. "She will notice if something is different about you."
Eurydice thought about the seven bells she had spent sitting with a scroll that had dismantled everything she believed. She thought about the breakfast table and the untouched tea and the perfect composed face she had held all morning.
"She won't notice," she said.
She walked out.
She was not entirely sure she believed that.
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚