Lyanna found me before I found her.
That was usually how it went.
I had made it as far as the eastern corridor before I heard the rapid patter of small feet on stone and turned to find her rounding the corner at a speed that suggested she had been running since at least the previous hallway. Her ribbon was already half-undone. Her morning lessons had clearly not started yet, or had been abandoned with the particular confidence of someone too young to fully register consequences.
She stopped in front of me and held up a piece of paper.
"I drew a rift," she announced.
I looked at the drawing.
It was a jagged oval shape filled with what appeared to be either lightning or an aggressive type of grass. Inside the oval, a small figure with a sword stood facing a large circle with eyes. Beneath it, in Lyanna's careful, oversized script, were the words THE MONSTER LOOSES.
"He loses," I said gently.
She examined the word, untroubled. "I'll fix it later." She pushed the drawing toward me. "Do you want it?"
I took it.
She beamed.
This was the part of the morning I had not expected to matter and now could not imagine skipping. Lyanna operated on a logic entirely her own, untouched by the careful political weather of the estate, immune to the quiet recalibrations happening in Father's study and Darius' courtyard and behind Lucian's perfectly measured expressions. She simply existed, loudly and with conviction, and the effect of that on everything around her was the closest thing to clean air I had found since returning.
"Walk with me," I said.
She fell into step beside me immediately, hands clasped behind her back in the posture she adopted when she was feeling official.
"Where are we going?"
"I don't know yet."
"I know a good place," she said. "The window room."
"Which window room?"
"The one with the seat. On the second floor. Elara goes there when she's thinking about things she doesn't want to say yet."
I glanced down at her.
She was looking straight ahead, serene.
I had underestimated Lyanna for most of my previous life. That was one of the cleaner mistakes to acknowledge because it had no sharp edges, no betrayal attached to it, just the quiet embarrassment of someone who had been watching the wrong people for years while the right one was standing at his elbow asking if he wanted the last bread roll.
"Does Elara go there often?" I asked.
"More lately." Lyanna swung her arms. "Since Lucian started having a lot of private meetings."
I kept my voice easy. "What kind of meetings?"
She shrugged, a full-body movement that displaced her ribbon further. "I don't know. I'm not allowed near that wing after dark." She paused. "I went once anyway."
"And?"
"There were two men I didn't know. One of them had a bad smell."
A bad smell.
Shadow affinity registered corruption differently for different people. For me it was a pressure, a displacement in the air. For someone untrained, someone whose perception operated on pure instinct rather than cultivation—
For a child.
I looked down at Lyanna carefully.
"What kind of smell?" I asked.
She wrinkled her nose. "Like when meat goes wrong but someone put flowers on top of it."
The line in my chest went very still.
A corrupted spirit.
She had walked past a corrupted spirit and described it with the sensory vocabulary of a seven-year-old who had raided the kitchen enough times to know the difference between fresh and rotten.
I folded the drawing she had given me and tucked it into my sleeve, beside the letter.
"Lyanna," I said, keeping my voice calm and unhurried. "When did you go to that wing?"
She thought. "Four days ago. Maybe five."
Before I had returned to the estate, or the night of. The margin was close enough that my arrival could not have prompted it.
Which meant the corrupted spirit had been here before I came home.
"Did Lucian see you?" I asked.
"No. I was very quiet." She glanced up at me. "I'm good at quiet when I want to be."
"You are," I agreed. "Did you tell anyone else?"
"I told Nurse Helda I smelled something strange in the corridor and she said it was the new cleaning oil they ordered." She paused. "I don't think it was the cleaning oil."
"I don't think so either."
She seemed pleased to have her suspicion confirmed.
We reached the second floor landing and she led me without hesitation to the window room, a small alcove built into the outer wall that no one had bothered to name officially but which had clearly accumulated a second life as a quiet retreat. A long seat ran beneath the window, padded with a cushion worn soft at one end. The glass was older than the rest of the estate windows, slightly wavered, which gave the view outside a subtle distortion, as if the grounds beyond were being seen through still water.
Lyanna climbed onto the seat and arranged herself with her back against the wall, legs stretched out.
I sat at the other end and looked through the glass.
The eastern gardens were visible from here, and beyond them, the outer wall, and beyond that, the edge of the forest that marked the beginning of the estate's less-managed territory. The trees stood bare this time of year, grey and stripped, but their density was enough that the forest interior was dark even in morning light.
The rift mark on Father's map had been west.
But the northern forests were old.
And old forests were where the barrier ran thin.
"Kael," Lyanna said.
I looked at her.
She was watching me with the particular intensity she used when she had been building up to something and had finally decided to say it. Both hands were in her lap. The ribbon had been absently wound around one finger.
"Are you going to leave again?"
The question sat in the room without apology.
I had expected it eventually. What I had not expected was the way it arrived, not with fear or accusation, just the plain pragmatic curiosity of someone who had already processed the possibility and wanted a straight answer.
"No," I said.
"Promise?"
I did not make promises easily. The word had weight, and I was old enough to know how much could change between the moment a promise was given and the moment it was tested.
But I looked at her, and the ribbon wound around her finger, and the drawing she had pressed into my hands forty years before she should have learned to feel responsible for the people around her, and I said, "I promise."
She exhaled through her nose. "Okay."
Then, as if the matter was entirely resolved, she leaned her head back against the wall. "Lucian said you might leave again. He said you seemed unsettled."
My jaw tightened.
I let it loosen before responding. "When did he say that?"
"At dinner, two nights ago. He said it quietly, but I have good ears." She turned her head to look at me. "He says nice things in his loud voice and different things in his quiet voice."
Seven years old.
"Yes," I said carefully. "He does."
She nodded as if this were simply a fact about the world, like winter coming or bread going hard after two days. "I told him I didn't think you were unsettled. I said you seemed like you were thinking."
"What did he say?"
"He said sometimes those look the same."
I was quiet for a moment.
That was a sharper answer than I would have given Lucian credit for.
"He's not wrong," I said.
Lyanna considered this with great seriousness. "I can tell the difference though."
"How?"
She unwound the ribbon from her finger. "When people are unsettled they make small movements. Their hands, or their eyes. Like they're trying to find something to hold onto." She glanced at me. "You don't do that. You go very still."
I looked at her for a long moment.
In my previous life, I had thought of Lyanna as someone to protect, which was true, and nothing else, which was not.
I had missed a great deal.
"Don't tell Lucian that," I said.
"I know," she said, with the tone of someone who had already decided this several conversations ago. "He asks me questions about you sometimes. I give him boring answers."
"What kind of boring answers?"
"That you sleep a lot. That you don't eat much. That you asked about the stables." She tilted her head. "Is any of that useful to you?"
Something in me shifted.
Not warmth, exactly. Something more solid than that.
"Yes," I said. "That's very useful."
She smiled, pleased, and turned back to the window.
We sat in silence for a while.
Outside, a servant crossed the garden path below, carrying a basket toward the kitchen wing. A bird landed on the outer wall and sat there briefly before deciding against it. The wavered glass made everything look like a memory.
Lyanna said, without looking at me, "Mother's garden gets a visitor sometimes."
I went still.
"What kind of visitor?"
"A person. Early morning. Before anyone else is up." She pulled at a loose thread on the cushion edge. "I see them from here. This window looks the right direction." She paused. "I think it's a man. He doesn't go to the stone. He stands at the garden gate and looks in. Then he leaves."
"What does he look like?"
"I can't see well enough. But he's tall." She glanced at me. "He was there again yesterday."
Yesterday.
After I had found the compartments.
My hands rested in my lap, perfectly still.
Tall. Not a servant. Not one of the family—if it were Lucian she would have recognized him, and she had already told me Lucian's visit had been to bring flowers, not to stand at the gate and observe. A different person entirely. Someone watching the memorial with enough consistency that Lyanna had noted the pattern.
Someone checking whether the things my mother had hidden were still hidden.
"Lyanna," I said. "The next time you see him—don't go near the garden."
She looked at me with clear eyes. "I know."
She said it the same way she had said she knew not to tell Lucian about going still instead of unsettled. Not a promise, not quite. More like a statement of existing intent.
I nodded.
"Kael." She picked up the loose thread and frowned at it. "The smell. From the corridor. Does it mean something bad is happening?"
I looked out the wavered glass at the bare winter trees.
In another life, I would have told her no. I would have found some gentle formulation that preserved the comfortable shape of things and sent her back to her lessons and her ribbons and her drawings of monsters who loosed battles.
This time I said, "It means I need to look into some things."
She absorbed that. "Can I help?"
"You already are."
She accepted this without requiring elaboration, which was one of the things I valued most about her. She did not push for more than was offered. She simply made a place for what she'd been given and moved on.
We sat for another few minutes while the morning hardened into its full, cold self outside the wavered glass.
Then Lyanna climbed down from the window seat, straightened her ribbon by feel alone, and looked at me with the expression she wore when she had completed a task to her own satisfaction.
"I have lessons now," she said.
"Go."
She went, then stopped at the doorway. "I'll tell you if I see him again."
"Thank you."
"And I'll make you another drawing." She considered. "One where he wins this time."
She was gone before I could answer.
I remained at the window and looked at my mother's garden from the second floor.
The gate was closed.
The memorial was not visible from this angle, just the high hedges and the pale tops of the flowers bowing in the morning wind.
But I knew the compartments were there, and I knew the booklet was in my coat, and I knew a tall man had been standing at that gate yesterday morning while I lay in my bed turning over the pieces of a puzzle that was older than I had first believed.
My mother had been investigating something. Lucian was connected to it, or at least to whatever had followed it. The corrupted spirit had been inside the estate before I returned. The facility my mother had crossed out and nearly torn through the page to erase—I had been held in a place with those same carved walls, and I had been seven years old.
The picture was not clear yet.
But it was developing.
I pressed two fingers to the glass, the same way I had pressed them to the memorial stone, and felt the cold run up into my palm.
The window's distortion made the garden look like it existed slightly sideways from the rest of the world.
Maybe it did.
I stayed until the sun moved enough to change the angle, and then I stood, tucked Lyanna's drawing more securely into my sleeve alongside my mother's letter, and left the window room to begin the slow, careful work of finding out who had been standing at that gate.
She had said the smell was like meat gone wrong with flowers on top.
Seven years old, and she had already learned to notice the things adults had been trained to overlook.
I was going to have to be very careful about who I allowed near her.