~LYRA'S POV~
When I opened my door at dawn, it was there.
A folded piece of paper on the stone floor, just inside the threshold. No seal pressed into wax. No name on the outside. Just a plain paper, slightly creased, like it had been folded quickly.
I picked it up and opened it.
Five words, written sharp, in slanted ink that pressed hard into the page like the person holding the pen had been angry while doing it.
Enjoy your borrowed crown, slave.
I stood there for a moment. The corridor was empty and quiet and the morning was just starting to grey at the edges of the window at the far end.
My first instinct was to go straight to Ryland. Walk down the hall, knock on the study door, hand it over. Let him deal with it the way he dealt with most threats, methodically, with that controlled fury he kept buttoned down behind careful eyes.
My second instinct came a half second later and it was louder.
I didn't want to walk into this pack, into a position that half the people here already thought I had no business holding, and on the first sign of trouble go running to the Alpha with a piece of paper in my hand. I could hear exactly how that would play. I could see Lord Harlan's face.
I folded the letter again, carried it to the small fireplace in the corner of my room, and held it to the flame until there was nothing left but a curl of black at the edge of the ash pile.
Then I got dressed and went to training.
—
When I arrived, kael was already there.
Standing in the centre of the field with his arms at his sides and his expression set to that particular blank patience that, on him, looked almost identical to irritation.
The morning was cold. My breath fogged in front of me as I crossed the grass.
"You're two minutes late," he said.
"I know."
I'd been burning a letter. I didn't say that.
He looked at me for a second, then turned and gestured at the open space in front of him.
"Basic stance first. Let me see where you're starting from."
I settled into the stance Ryland had shown me for movement drills. Kael walked around me slowly, looking at my feet, my hips, the angle of my shoulders. He stopped behind me and reached forward to adjust my right arm.
I stepped away from the touch before I'd fully decided to.
He pulled his hand back. Neither of us said anything about it. But the air between us shifted into something tighter.
"Your weight is too far back," he said from where he'd stopped. "You're braced to receive impact instead of move through it. Shift forward."
I adjusted.
"More."
"This feels unstable."
"It should. You're not trying to take a hit, you're trying to deliver one. Different geometry." He moved to stand in front of me.
"Try the forward strike. Whatever Ryland showed you."
I ran through it. He watched. Then he stepped in and corrected my grip, two fingers repositioning my hand around the practice stick before I had time to process he was close enough to do it.
I threw his hand off. Sharp and deliberate.
His jaw set. "I need to correct the grip or the wrist takes the force wrong and you'll injure yourself in a week."
"Then tell me how to correct it and I'll do it myself."
"That would take twice as long."
"Then it takes twice as long."
He looked at me for a moment. Something moved in his expression that I couldn't fully name. Not anger exactly, or not only anger.
"You're wasting energy on emotion," he said.
I laughed, short and humourless. "You'd know about wasting things, wouldn't you?"
The words landed. I saw them land. His whole frame went very still, the specific stillness of someone who's just absorbed something and is deciding how to carry it.
The silence stretched.
"Again," he said finally. "From the top."
We went through the sequence four more times. Then five. He corrected my form with words instead of hands and I followed the instructions and didn't say anything and neither did he, and slowly, slowly, the session started functioning like an actual training session instead of two people actively trying not to be in the same space.
He pushed the pace at the forty-minute mark. Faster combinations, less time to reset between them. My arms started burning. My footwork got sloppy on the left side and he pointed it out twice, bluntly, without softening it, and I fixed it without arguing because he wasn't wrong.
Fifty-five minutes in, I caught him off rhythm.
He'd been running the same pattern of corrections and I'd been tracking it without fully realising I was doing it. When his right side opened for half a second, I moved. The strike connected with his shoulder. Not hard, I didn't have the power yet, but clean...
Accurate.
He stepped back.
I waited for him to say something. A criticism, a note about form, something that would immediately qualify the moment and put it back in its box.
He said nothing. He just looked at me for a moment, then gave one short nod. The kind that didn't perform anything. Just acknowledged what happened.
I don't know why that landed harder than a compliment would have. Maybe because compliments could be given away to anyone. That nod meant he'd seen something real and was admitting it without wanting to.
I turned away before my face could do something I'd regret.
"Same time tomorrow," he said behind me.
"I know the schedule."
—
The market was busy by mid-morning. I went through it with Theo, who had made it something of a routine to appear at my elbow at market hours under the pretence of needing to pick up items for himself. I hadn't told him I noticed. I just let him walk beside me and found it quietly useful.
We were at the spice stalls when I felt the folded paper.
I'd been reaching into my coat pocket for the small coin purse I kept there, and my fingers touched paper that hadn't been there when I left the packhouse. I kept my face completely still. Pulled out the coin purse. Paid for the dried herbs the vendor was waiting on.
"You alright?" Theo asked.
"Fine," I said. "Hungry. Can we stop at the bread stall on the way back?"
He accepted that without question, because Theo was easy company, and we moved through the rest of the market at a normal pace while my mind ran through every moment since I'd left the packhouse that morning, every brush of a crowd, every shoulder that had passed mine in the narrow stall corridors.
Someone had put their hand in my pocket. Which meant someone had been close enough, comfortable enough, and skilled enough to do it without me feeling it.
Back in my room, door closed, I opened the paper.
The handwriting was the same sharp, slanted ink from this morning. Different words this time, but the same hand. The same pressure into the page.
You don't belong there. Everyone knows it. Soon you will too.
No threat exactly. Just a promise of erosion. Patient and deliberate, the way someone works on stone, not with one large blow but with small, consistent pressure until something gives.
I folded the paper and sat with it for a moment.
There was someone inside Silverclaw's walls who doesn't want me here. Someone who knew my routine, knew which coat I was wearing, and had the access and the nerve to use it.
I didn't go to Ryland. Not yet.
I needed to think before I said anything, and I needed to be careful about what I said and to whom, because if someone was already inside the pack, the worst thing I could do was show my hand before I understood the shape of the game.
I tucked the letter into the small hidden seam at the back of my book chest and made a note of the details in my memory. Time found.
Location. What I'd been doing.
If a third letter came, I'd have a pattern.
And patterns were something I knew how to read.