˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
They put Kostas in the storage room at the back of the community hall.
It had a cot, a blanket, and a door that locked from the outside. Dilwyn had told him, with the even precision of someone making themselves very clear, that he was a guest in the loosest possible sense of the word and should not attempt to leave before morning.
Kostas had said: of course.
He had meant it, which surprised him slightly.
He lay on the cot and looked at the ceiling and thought about the things he had heard in the palace in the weeks before he left. Corridor conversations, half-caught through doors, the kind of thing that people in power said when they believed no one important was listening. Nothing specific enough to act on. Just enough to make the official version of things feel slightly less solid than it had before.
Three weeks under an olive tree had not made it feel more solid.
He closed his eyes.
He did not sleep for a long time.
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
Dilwyn came for him at the seventh bell with Evren and Arashi and a young man whose hazel eyes had gone bright amber the moment Kostas walked into the room.
Kostas sat down. He did not wait to be told.
The document was on the table, unfolded, refolded more than once by the look of it. Someone had read it carefully. More than one someone.
"The document is genuine," Dilwyn said.
"Yes."
"The Queen sent you to assess our capabilities and identify our vulnerabilities."
"That was the assignment."
"And you have not reported back."
"Not once," Kostas said.
Dilwyn looked at him steadily. "Last night you said something is very wrong in Nephoria. That we might be the only people who can help fix it." A pause. "Explain."
Kostas looked at the document. Then at the room. At Evren's sharp blue eyes and Arashi at the door and the young man against the wall watching everything.
"The Queen's war," he said, "is built on a version of history that I am beginning to believe is not the true one."
Dilwyn did not move. "What version?"
"The one where your forefather was a traitor. Where the exile was just." Kostas folded his hands on the table. "I have been here for three weeks. I have read everything I could find about the founding era before I left Nephoria. The story does not hold together."
"That," Dilwyn said, "is not new information to us."
"I know. But it may be new information that someone in Nephoria is starting to question it." He looked at Dilwyn directly. "I am not the only one. There are people inside the palace who know something is wrong. I do not know how far they have gotten. But they exist and they are looking." He paused. "Which means that for the first time in four hundred years, the truth might actually have somewhere to go."
Silence.
Evren was watching him with an expression he could not entirely read.
"You said the story does not hold together," she said. "What part specifically?"
"The invasion four centuries ago," Kostas said. "The history says your people attacked Nephoria out of vengeance and were repelled. But the timeline does not make sense. The forces that came were too small for a genuine invasion. They looked more like—"
"Like people trying to come home," Evren cut in quietly.
The words sat in the room like something that had been waiting to be said for a very long time.
Kostas looked at her. "Yes," he said. "Like that."
Nobody spoke.
Then Dilwyn said: "What do you want from us."
"Right now, nothing. I want you to know that there are people in Nephoria questioning the history. I want you to know that the war is not inevitable." He paused. "And I want you to know that if contact comes from inside the palace, it will be genuine. Not another trap."
"How would we know the difference?" Dilwyn said.
Kostas reached into his coat and set a small object on the table.
A coin. Old, the face worn almost smooth. On one side, barely visible: a lightning bolt. On the other: a storm cloud.
"Four hundred years old," Kostas said. "Minted in the first year of Nephoria's founding, before the exile, when both symbols were still part of the official seal. Anyone who comes to you with one of those, or a description of one, will have gotten it from me."
Dilwyn looked at the coin without touching it.
"You have been planning this for a while," he said.
"The olive tree provided a great deal of thinking time," Kostas said.
Evren made a sound that was almost a laugh and then clearly decided it was not the moment.
Dilwyn picked up the coin. Turned it over once. Set it down.
"You will stay," he said. "You will not go beyond the settlement boundary without an escort. You will not send any communication to Nephoria without my knowledge." His eyes did not leave Kostas. "And you will tell me everything you left out last night."
A pause.
"That is fair," Kostas said.
"It is not an offer," Dilwyn said. "It is the terms."
Kostas looked at him. At the steady authority in the way he sat, the chain at his belt, the controlled precision of every word he used.
"Understood," Kostas said.
Arashi looked at Dilwyn from the door and gave the small nod that Kostas had spent three weeks trying to interpret. Whatever it communicated, Dilwyn received it and something in his expression settled.
"Coem," Dilwyn said. "East quarters."
The amber-eyed young man pushed off the wall. "Come on then," he said to Kostas.
Kostas stood. He looked at the coin on the table.
"Keep it," he said to Dilwyn. "You will need it more than I will."
He followed Coem out into the morning.
Behind him the door closed and Dilwyn sat alone at the table with the Queen's document and a four-hundred-year-old coin and the particular silence of a man who had just made a decision that could not be unmade.
Outside, the Thessaloniki sky was still overcast.
Still building.
Still waiting to break.
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚