The First Hymn remains stable. The offering has not rejected the vessel. The Mother’s ward must remain unbroken until ascension. The Keeper will count the names. The Choir will send the answer.

I read the lines once, then again. The room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with dust or paper. The heavy kind. The kind that settled in whenever everyone in the room realized something had just stopped being a theory.

The Keeper will count the names. Marcellus. The Mother’s ward. The Empress. The Choir will send the answer. Saint Orison’s. The children. The bells. The first hymn.

My fingers tightened around the page. "Explain."

Marcellus had gone pale, not dramatically, he was too disciplined for that, but the color had withdrawn from his lips, and the veins at his temples showed faintly beneath his skin.

"It’s not a complete record," he said.

"That wasn’t my question."

"The language is symbolic."

"No. Symbolic language still means something."

"Your Excellency, these rites were conducted under imperial authority."

"So was the founding oath. That doesn’t make every line attached to it honorable."

His gaze sharpened. "Be careful."

I smiled at that. "Lord Keeper, I’ve entered an orphanage that treated children like inventory. I’ve entered a chapel that stored bones beneath its floor. I’ve met a priest whose mouth was sealed by an oath he didn’t dare break. And now I’ve found your archive clearance written across supply routes carrying preservation salt and ritual grade material."

I stepped closer. "You don’t have the right to tell me to be careful."

The lamps flickered again, and this time every light in the chamber dimmed at once. Bernard froze. Abi didn’t. His eyes had darkened into a deeper violet, and the air around him went strangely smooth. The flickering stopped.

Marcellus looked at him, not with confusion, but recognition, brief and sharp, then gone again just as quickly.

"You recognize my brother," I said.

His composure returned with admirable speed. "I recognize power when I see it."

"Most people do."

"Some fail to recognize it until it’s too late."

"That sounds like experience."

"It’s history."

I laughed softly. "Those two things tend to overlap."

The chamber door opened without warning. No footsteps had announced anyone’s arrival, no voice had called ahead, yet the Empress stepped in with two guards behind her, dressed in a silver-blue gown that seemed too elegant for a dust-filled archive and too composed for the tension already sitting in it.

Her gaze went first to Marcellus, then to the open ledger in my hands, then to me.

"Your Excellency," she said. "I see you’ve been productive."

"Your Majesty," I replied with a bow. "I’ve been attempting to be."

Her eyes settled on the exposed record, and something small shifted across her face. Not surprise. Pain, well hidden, but there all the same. So she knew. Not everything, perhaps, but enough to recognize the First Hymn the moment she saw it.

Marcellus stepped forward. "Your Majesty, this record is incomplete and shouldn’t be interpreted without the full ceremonial context."

She looked at him. "Then provide the context."

His silence went on far too long. Bernard’s quill scratched across paper, Abi’s smile widened, and I said nothing at all while the Empress’s expression cooled by several degrees.

"Lord Keeper," she said, "you’ve spent years telling this family that the old rite was necessary for my son’s survival. You’ve told us the lower vault relics were contained. You’ve told me the temple records surrounding his illness were sealed because revealing them would cause panic."

Her voice stayed soft, which somehow made it worse.

"Do you have something useful to say now?"

Marcellus lowered his head. "Your Majesty, I acted under the authority granted to me."

"By whom?"

He didn’t answer, and the archive chamber seemed to shrink around that silence, not physically, but the air tightened all the same. By whom? The Emperor? A temple authority? A dead official? Something older still?

The Empress looked back at the open ledger, then at me. "You wished to understand the ward around the Crown Prince’s residence."

"I did."

"I placed it."

"I know."

"It wasn’t meant to imprison him."

"Then what was it meant to contain?"

Her gaze didn’t leave mine. "For years, I believed it was protecting him." There was no tremor in her voice, no tears, no plea for sympathy, only exhaustion, the kind that had been carried far too long to hide anymore. "I no longer know whether I was protecting my son, or protecting whatever was placed inside the life he should have had."

Nobody moved. Bernard’s quill hovered above the page without touching it. Even the lamps seemed to hold their flame a little too still, as though the archive itself were waiting to see what I would do with that.

The words settled heavily over the ledger between us, and my grip on it loosened slightly. Not because I trusted her. Trust was expensive, and I didn’t spend it easily. But because she’d just said something no political player says unless they’ve run out of cleaner lies to offer.

I looked back at Marcellus. He’d gone still, too still, the way Caldus had gone still when his self-silencing seal reacted.

Abi noticed it at the same moment I did. "Brother," he said quietly.

The old ledger began to smoke, starting at the bottom of the page, a thin black line spreading beneath the ink. Self-consuming script. How rude.

"Bernard," I said.

He moved immediately, but the smoke reached the page before he could copy more than half the remaining words. Abi lifted one hand, and violet power threaded through the air and pressed down over the book. The smoke stopped, though not fully. The edges of the page curled and blackened, and the last line disappeared beneath a spreading burn before anyone could stop it. The rest survived.

The First Hymn remains stable. The offering has not rejected the vessel. The Mother’s ward must remain unbroken until ascension. The Keeper will count the names. The Choir will send the answer.

The final line was gone completely.

Marcellus hadn’t moved through any of it. The Empress stared at the damaged page, and I watched him instead.

"Interesting," I said.

He slowly raised his eyes to meet mine.

"You’re responsible for that script," I continued. "It activated the moment the record was exposed."

"No."

"Then you know who is."

His expression gave nothing away, but his silence said everything I needed.

I closed the ledger carefully. "Lord Keeper Marcellus, you will not leave the Capital."

The guards behind the Empress shifted at that. Marcellus looked to her, clearly expecting her to intervene, perhaps assuming after years of habit that she’d protect him the way she always had.

She didn’t answer right away, and that, more than anything, told me exactly where things stood between them.

"Your Majesty," he began.

Her gaze stayed fixed on the blackened page. "Don’t ask me for protection," she said quietly. "Not today."

Something changed in his face, only for a moment, a crack, fear or betrayal or both. Good. People often forgot that the walls they built around others could just as easily become cages once the doors finally locked from the outside.

For a moment, no one in the chamber moved to fill the silence Marcellus had been left standing in. The Empress kept her eyes on the burned page. Bernard capped his ink without being told. Even Abi, for once, said nothing clever.

A shadow slipped through the archive doorway and bowed. "Your Excellency."

"Report."

"An urgent message from Safehouse Three." He held out a paper with William’s seal hanging from it.

My mood darkened before I’d even read a word of it. I took the message and unfolded it.

Perrin has regained consciousness. He heard a voice in the night. He says it came from beneath the aqueduct. He says it told him the first hymn has been disturbed. Then it gave an instruction.

I read the final line twice. Begin the second.

For a moment the archive hall went completely silent. Then I folded the paper and tucked it inside my coat.

Marcellus watched me. The Empress watched me. Abi’s smile had disappeared entirely.

I looked at the blackened ledger, at the trapped Lord Keeper, at the old words still visible beneath the ash. The Choir will send the answer.

How troublesome. It seemed the music had already started moving without waiting for my permission, and I disliked being excluded from my own disasters.

"Bernard," I said.

"Yes, Your Excellency."

"Send word to William. Increase security at every safehouse. No one answers unfamiliar voices. No one follows music. No child is left alone."

"Yes, Your Excellency."

"Captain Arthur is to secure the aqueduct district. Quietly."

"Yes."

"And Lord Keeper Marcellus?"

I looked at the man standing so carefully inside the very archive he’d spent years ruling, a keeper of old names, a guardian of closed doors, someone who’d mistaken silence for safety for far too long.

My smile returned, polite and measured and not the least bit kind.

"Bring him somewhere comfortable," I said. "I believe he and Father Caldus have a great deal to discuss."