The Duke of Pharelle had taken to reading his overnight dispatches before the household woke. It was, he had concluded, the only hour nobody wanted anything from him.
He was therefore somewhat surprised to find the breakfast room already occupied: Laila and Isabella on opposite sides of the table, Lambert at the near end with both hands around a cup, a silent witness to something he had clearly decided not to interrupt.
The breakfast things sat untouched between them. The conversation did not.
“I think perhaps,” Laila said, “you had better tell me exactly what happened last night.”
And so Isabella told them.
She had followed Phaedra to a house on the Rue des Seigneurs: the d’Aubigne residence. At that, Laila’s eyes moved; she brought her face back to stillness, but not before Max had seen it.
What followed was, by any measure, a grotesque. A heist first: the unlatched window, the guard rotation, the voices through a sitting-room wall. Then the study. Then the servants’ wing. Two deaths, described in the same register as the entry points and the floor plan, delivered without pause or apology.
Max watched Isabella rather than listened to her. The detail of the deeds was one thing.
Lambert and Laila kept their faces where they had put them.
“You killed the Countess d’Aubigne,” Laila said. “In her own home.”
“She funded the extraction.” Isabella’s voice was even. “The Keep. The bribe, the placement, the guards who looked the other way—that was her money. We know that now. Phaedra confirmed it.” A beat. “They were planning a counter-offensive. Whatever they had been building, it was moving.”
“I’m sure it was.”
Max looked up.
“You have,” Laila said, “certainly simplified one set of problems.” She picked up her cup and set it down without drinking. “And created another entirely.”
“Vivienne d’Aubigne was—”
“Isabella.” Laila’s voice did not rise. It arrived. “The man who stood at our gate yesterday morning is going to wake up today without a wife.”
The fire settled. Outside, the chanting shifted register.
Isabella said nothing.
“You went there for Phaedra,” Laila said. “What you overheard was incidental.”
It was not a question. Max watched Isabella not answer it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Isabella said. “They were an enemy, and I took them out. The protections are gone—Esteban stripped them.”
“Your point would stand,” Lambert said, “if Esteban’s authority were not contested.”
“As much as Valère has his hold over the Church here in Pharelle,” Max said, “the majority of those outside in wider Gallia do not recognise it. Using it as cover doesn’t protect us.”
The table looked at him.
“You saw him yesterday at our gate. That is a man buoyed by the King’s confidence, with an army behind him.” He looked around the table. “Who do you expect him to point that army at when he finds out?”
The door opened. Wylan came in, dropped into the remaining chair, and reached for the coffee. He had the eyes of a man two coffees short of functional.
Lambert told him in one sentence.
Wylan poured the coffee and set the pot down. “She killed—sorry? Countess d’Aubigne?”
“Last night,” Isabella said.
He nodded slowly and picked up his coffee. “Good work, Isabella,” he said, with an absent expression.
“No,” Laila said. “Not good work.” She looked at him. “This city is fomenting for a fight, and Isabella has just handed it to them.”
Wylan considered this. “Right, yes. That’s bad.” He turned his cup in his hands. “Why don’t we just fight them? Can’t be that hard. We’ve fought a kraken.”
A knock, and Cedric entered without waiting. He was carrying the morning bundle from the gate: pamphlets, broadsheets, the overnight accumulation of a city talking to itself. He sorted through it at the side table and separated one broadsheet from the rest.
He set it on the table without comment.
Max took it. He read for a moment, then read aloud.
“‘It is with regret that we report the deaths of Countess Vivienne d’Aubigne, discovered at her residence on the Rue des Seigneurs, and of a member of her household. Separately, Madame Mirembe Ankhara was found deceased at her apartments on the Rue des Nobles in the early hours of this morning. Investigations are ongoing. The city watch has offered no statement at this time.’”
He set the paper down.
“You realise what this says,” Max said.
“Two less problems,” Isabella said.
“It says either the city is coming apart—in which case I have failed to hold it. Or someone did this deliberately, and both victims happen to be our most prominent enemies.”
Across the table, Wylan had gone still.
“What it means,” Wylan said, “is that Mirembe’s custody claim is also dead.”
Max looked at him. “As much as I know that you’re correct, I don’t think that means we’re clear. They find her dead—her family will make a claim. They’ll allege we had her murdered.”
“That one wasn’t me,” Isabella said.
“Do you think they’ll care if they can pin it on us?” Max said. “This looks very bad for us.”
Wylan’s eyes had sharpened; he looked at the paper.
“How are the deaths reported?”
“You know as well as I do,” Max said, “they wouldn’t publish such details in the gazettes.”
A pause.
“If it’s all right with you,” Wylan said, “I’m going to go and investigate a few things.” He set down his cup. “We should know exactly what we’re dealing with.”
? Wylan’s notebook had a section labelled ‘Things That Will Prove Relevant.’ It was the longest section.
The Chatelet de Pharelle rose ahead of him: stone, iron, and several centuries of arresting people. Gargoyles leered from the eaves, their faces piled with snow like unfortunate hats, icicles depending from their noses.
Wylan straightened his coat and went in.
The halls had been processing unpleasant events since before anyone currently employed there had been born and moved accordingly. Clerks carried files; officials exchanged clipped sentences; quills scratched. Somewhere deeper in the building, a door closed with the finality of a verdict.
He gave his name at the greffier’s post. The clerk considered him. He had heard every variation of every story and found none of them convincing.
“I need to speak with whoever is handling the deaths from last night,” Wylan said. “Countess d’Aubigne. Madame Ankhara.”
A pause. “And your interest in the matter?”
Wylan set the letter on the desk.
The clerk looked at the ducal seal, then at Wylan, then told him to wait.
He waited; the Chatelet administered it without comment. Shortly, he was shown into a back room.
Dr. étienne Marlot was middle-aged, ink-stained, and tired: he had been in the company of unpleasant facts since morning. He looked up from his desk as Wylan entered.
“Master Wylan.” His smile arrived without warmth. “My time, as you might imagine, is rather preoccupied this morning.”
“I won’t take much of it,” Wylan said, and sat down. “Three deaths. Two locations. I’d like to understand what you have.”
Marlot’s fingers settled on his desk. “You’ll appreciate that findings of this nature are politically sensitive. The families involved—”
“The families involved,” Wylan said, “include mine. By implication, if not by evidence.” He set the letter on Marlot’s desk. “If your findings aren’t disclosed through proper channels, the void will fill itself. I’d rather the city had facts than rumours.”
Marlot looked at the ducal seal, then at Wylan, then opened a dossier.
In Marlot’s notes, the d’Aubigne deaths were clean: two victims, same household, different rooms, different methods. One edged, one ligature.
“Professionally executed,” Marlot said, and left the word professionally where it landed.
Mirembe Ankhara was different: found at her apartments on the Rue des Nobles, separate from the d’Aubigne household entirely. The wounds suggested a vampire attack: puncture marks made by fangs, blood loss of a volume that required some consideration.
“The two locations are significant,” Marlot said. “The d’Aubigne deaths and Madame Ankhara’s are unconnected, forensically. Different methods, different sites, no evidence of the same hand.”
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Wylan looked at the papers and turned a page. He kept his face where he had put it.
“Three deaths in one night,” he said. “The gazettes are already connecting them.”
“The gazettes are not médecins légistes.” Marlot’s tone was dry. “What they share is a date and a political context. What they do not share is a cause.”
“The political context is the problem,” Wylan said.
“Indeed.” Marlot steepled his fingers. “My findings are what they are, Master Wylan. What the city does with them is a different matter entirely.”
They worked through Marlot’s notes for another hour. Marlot answered precisely; he had learned that imprecision, in his profession, tended to cause trials.
Marlot asked, as they finished: “Do you truly believe vampires are responsible? Or are you here to prove otherwise?”
“I’m here for the truth,” Wylan said. “Whatever it may be.”
Marlot regarded him for a moment. “The families involved will each prefer a different truth, Master Wylan. The d’Aubignes will want a killer. Madame Ankhara’s family will want someone to blame. And the vampire court—” he closed the folder “—has friends in this building.”
He let that sit. “Tread carefully.”
? The Chatelet had been keeping secrets for four centuries. It was very good at it. Several of those secrets were currently employed there.
The carriage moved through the Vieux Quartier at the pace the streets allowed.
Wylan had Marlot’s account in his head, and it did not take long to reach the part that mattered.
Mirembe was different.
He went back to the courtyard: the specific words. Something will need to be done about her. Sooner rather than later. We have tomorrow night. He had said it, and Augustine had been standing there, and Augustine and Callion had looked at each other, and now Mirembe was dead.
He had not said kill. He had not said tonight. He had said something would need to be done, given a window, and left the rest unspoken.
The gap is not as wide as you’d like it to be.
He turned the page in his memory. The courtyard, the snow, the trail of blood Isabella had followed back inside. Augustine’s smile when he said I have a very good one in mind. The warmth Wylan had read into that smile at the time, Augustine’s attention that he had spent three chapters of a penny romance trying to understand. He had thought he was beginning to.
He read you. He understood what you left unsaid and he acted on it.
Which meant one of two things. Either Augustine had done this for him, had looked at the problem Wylan laid out in the cold and solved it the way Wylan solved problems. Or Augustine had done it for Callion, or for Lampetia, or for reasons Wylan had not been told about and would not be told about, and the I have a very good one in mind had never been about Wylan at all.
The carriage moved. Outside, the city continued its morning.
You fed him your blood. You let him in through the window. You thought you knew what kind of creature you were dealing with.
The carriage slowed.
The noise outside changed before he understood why, the street sound thickening, becoming directional. He looked out: the de Vaillant crest on the door had been noticed.
The crowd pressed close. Faces at the window: a woman with a child on her hip, mouth moving; a man in a baker’s apron, his expression past anger and into something hollower. “Bread. Bread.” Behind them, others who had not come for bread at all: younger, harder-eyed, a pamphlet in one fist. “Down with the nobles.” “Justice.” “Reason.” And somewhere in the press, a voice that surprised him: “Laila! Laila de Vaillant!” Not hostile. Desperate.
The carriage stopped moving entirely.
Hands at the door panel, then at the handle. The coach rocked as bodies pressed against it from three sides. Wylan could hear the driver above, shouting something that wasn’t working. A fist connected with the door, once, twice, and then the window glass flexed inward under a palm and held, barely.
Wylan reached into his satchel, his hands moving without looking, reagents sorted by weight and reaction time. He noted what he had and what the carriage walls would and would not stop.
How many is too many. Count them.
More than he could disperse without injuring someone. More than he could outrun if the door went. The coach rocked again, harder, and something struck the roof with a sound that was not a fist.
He uncorked a vial, held it, and waited.
If the door opens, you have one throw. Make it count.
The shouting grew.
Then the roar came down from above, and the shouting stopped.
Wylan had the carriage door open before the echo died. The crowd that had been pressing against it a moment ago had shed three-quarters of its number in under ten seconds, people running in four directions, the pamphlets abandoned in the snow, the baker’s apron vanishing around a corner. The woman with the child was gone. The hard-eyed younger ones were gone. What remained was the sudden specific silence of a street that had just remembered it had somewhere else to be.
He stepped out. She was coming from the north, the wan winter light behind her: a useful angle. By the time you had identified the silhouette, you had already lost the time to run.
Aeloria descended in a long unhurried arc and landed on the spire of Notre Reine. Her talons closed around the stone. A claim, not a perch. For a moment she was still, her gaze moving across the city below, not deciding whether to act but where to begin.
Then the fires started.
Not wildly. That was the thing Wylan noted, standing in an emptied street with a vial still uncorked in his hand: the strikes were methodical. A warehouse district to the east, a cluster of buildings near Notre Reine. It had a logic, if you could see the whole city at once. From street level, it was simply fire.
The smoke rose in three columns, then four. Around him, the street had not emptied entirely; there were those who had stopped running and turned to watch, the way people do when the thing happening is too large to look away from. Someone was praying. Someone else was doing arithmetic, Wylan could tell by their expression.
He stood in the cold and watched the dragon work and thought about what it meant for the coming two days.
? The civic protocol for a dragon attack in an inhabited city was: evacuate, extinguish, invoice. The invoice was always the most disputed part.
Maximilian heard the alarm from the southern watch and was at the balcony before he had finished identifying it. The winter sky over the Vieux Quartier had changed colour.
Laila arrived beside him a moment later, looked at the smoke, then at the sky, then at the smoke again. Her expression did not change.
“Where’s Wylan?” she said.
Max had no answer.
Aeloria moved over the city without hurry. From this distance she was both enormous and abstract, a silhouette against smoke and pale winter sky. The fires below her were small and precise: they knew where they were going.
Max had read about the water cannons in the city’s defensive records but had not seen them deployed. They rose from the Bassin-de-Marne’s edge in sequence, their arcs catching the winter light before they found their range. Aeloria wheeled and banked; the cannons tracked her. She made one more pass, low and deliberate, and then she was climbing, the fires still burning below her, until the sky emptied.
The household stood at their windows and said nothing. Cedric had appeared in the courtyard below and not left.
Twenty minutes. Thirty. Reports came through the gate, each one slightly different from the last, none of them telling him anything he hadn’t already seen from the balcony.
The gate opened and Wylan came through it at a pace that was not quite running.
Max was down the stairs and in the courtyard before he had thought about it. Wylan was intact: that was the first thing he registered.
“The Chatelet first,” Wylan said, already moving. “Marlot has the bodies from both locations. The d’Aubigne deaths are clean, no complications, but Mirembe’s are—”
“You’re not hurt.”
Wylan paused. Looked at him. “No.”
“Good.” Max fell into step beside him. “Go on.”
Wylan went on. The riot, the carriage, the crowd pressing against the door, the dragon scattering them before he had needed to use anything. The fires from street level, the logic he couldn’t quite read from below. Max listened, and then he stopped listening.
Over Wylan’s shoulder, at the far end of the street, a horse was visible, then two, then a column.
Count Renaud d’Aubigne rode at the head of it, in armour that had not been polished for ceremony. Behind him came the retinue: house colours Max recognised and some he had to think about. House Ankhara’s crest among them. And at the rear, in the white and gold that had nothing to do with any noble house, the Primates.
The crowd behind them filled the street.
The Count dismounted without ceremony, handed his reins to the man beside him, and walked to the gate; the retinue arrayed itself behind him, the Primates to the side in silence.
Max came down to meet him.
For a moment they stood on either side of the gate, the Count in armour and Max in his house colours.
“Open it,” Max said to the nervous guard unlucky enough to be standing watch.
The man gave him a reproachful look but complied all the same.
The gate opened.
“Your Grace.” The Count’s voice carried without effort. “I am here on behalf of the noble houses of this city, whose confidence in this house has been exhausted. Three deaths in one night—two of them women of this city, one of them my wife. A dragon burning the streets you are sworn to protect. Unrest that has been building since your family returned from whatever war you dragged us into, and a gate that has been a flashpoint for every catastrophe since.” He paused. “The noble houses are not alone in this assessment. The Church is here to witness it.”
“Your wife paid for the men who held my sister in a cell at the bottom of the ocean,” Max said. “Phaedra was hers throughout.” A pause. “She was not a bystander, my lord.”
Something moved through the Count’s face. Not surprise: he had prepared for this. The preparation had not been enough.
“Vivienne is dead,” he said.
“Yes.”
“In her own home. Her throat cut.” The level voice carrying more weight now. “And you tell me she deserved it.”
“I tell you what she did.”
The Count looked at him. The witnesses were very still.
“I have the authority to make this a war. The army moves, and this becomes a matter between your city and the King.” His hand found his sword hilt. “If you set your title aside, I will set aside mine, and we settle this as men.”
Max looked at the armour, at the hand already on the hilt, at a face that had been trained not to show what was behind it.
“Clear the yard,” Max said.
The household assembled at the edges without being told: Cedric by the door, the kitchen staff at the upper windows, Greta with Aurora on her hip turned away from the glass. Percival came forward; Elarianna moved in front of him without looking at him, one hand at his chest. Outside the gate the retinue held. The Primates watched, and House Ankhara watched.
Max rolled his sleeves. The cold hit his forearms immediately. The courtyard stones were glazed with ice that the morning had not touched, and his breath came in short clouds that the wind took east.
The Count drew his sword and came forward.
Max opened with fire: a controlled burst, low and directional, enough to force a step back and establish range. The Count took the step, assessed, and came forward again. Max hit him harder. The Count raised his sword arm against the heat and kept moving. Max pushed harder still. The Count kept moving.
Why isn’t it working?
He drove more heat into the next burst, enough to blister stone, and the Count came through it with the same patience, circling, keeping his distance, letting Max spend.
The first cut came from nowhere.
Max hadn’t seen him close the distance. The blade opened a line across his forearm, shallow, and the Count was already back at range before Max had processed it. Max threw fire. The Count stepped aside. Another cut, this one across the shoulder, and again the Count was gone before Max could respond.
He did not seem to be going for heavy blows. Is he toying with me?
Max drove forward with a sustained burst, enough heat to strip paint from stone. The Count moved laterally, let the fire pass, and cut again on the way out, catching his ribs, harder this time. Max felt it. He threw a wide burst on instinct and the Count walked through the edge of it without flinching.
Max changed angle, tried to find the collar, the gap at the throat. The Count read it and tucked his chin, and the next cut found Max’s cheek, close to the eye. He’s bleeding me out!
He could feel all four cuts now, each one distinct.
He drove forward again, fire leading, trying to use his size, trying to create enough pressure that technique became irrelevant. The Count gave ground, one step and then another, and as Max closed the distance, he saw it: the armour surface had a sheen that had nothing to do with polish. He had come ready for this. Someone had told him.
Max felt the first real flicker of belief that he could push him back to the wall.
The Count let him come.
Instead of solid ground, his boot found stone slicked from melted water.
The Count simply moved to the side as Max slid past and hooked his arm around Max’s own.
A swift movement, a loud crack, and pain shot up his arm as he was flung to the frozen ground.
Percival made a sound. Elarianna’s hand was already there.
Max stayed down. The cold came up through the stone. He could hear the crowd outside the gate and the silence inside it.
Max looked at the ground: the mud and the blood and his right hand, which still worked, and the Count’s boots planted beside him, waiting for him to look up.
Max reached across with his right hand and forced his broken arm’s fingers into a lock against his hand. The pain was extraordinary.
The gesture must have seemed like a surrender. The Count looked puzzled, then pleased.
But the Count took one step and no more. The ground beneath his feet had softened, rippling in response to his hands, and in moments the Count had sunk to his knees before the earth turned solid once more.
Through gritted teeth, Max stood up, and before the Count could say or do anything, curled his free hand into a brandish: a burst of fire flung from his hand and caught him in the face.
The man screamed, hands coming up to shield his face from the flames.
When he lowered his hands, the beard was gone, and it was clear that Renaud was blind.
The Count stood where the ground held him. His sword was in the mud.
Max picked it up. He found a slot in the armour and drove it home to the hilt.
As his body slumped, his mouth moved.
“You stupid boy.” His voice had gone quiet. “None of this would have happened.” A breath. “If you had simply invited Aeloria to your daughter’s Emberlight.”
He did not say anything after that.