Vol. 6 The Saint With No Eyes

Riyah Valour had sharpened three pencils before breakfast.

This was, she told herself, a reasonable number. One pencil might snap. Two pencils might vanish, as pencils in the palace had a habit of doing whenever one looked away from them with insufficient suspicion. Three pencils suggested discipline, foresight, and a proper respect for the habits of old paper.

Four would have been excessive.

She had stopped at three.

Now they lay in a neat row across the corner of Master Halvard’s worktable, their points clean and narrow, beside a stack of blank folio sheets, a ruler of dark polished wood, and Riyah’s small leather-bound notebook. She had dated the top of the first page twice, once in the formal court hand Halvard preferred and once in her own smaller script beneath it, then scratched out the second because it looked childish.

She had been at court long enough to understand that looking prepared and being prepared were not always the same thing.

She desperately wanted to be both.

The morning light came thinly through the tall windows of Halvard’s study, strained by old glass and the pale gold curtains he never bothered to draw properly. Dust moved through the sunbeams in slow, thoughtful drifts. The room smelled of vellum, lamp oil, dried rosemary, and the bitter tea Halvard drank as though it had personally offended him and required punishment.

Outside, the palace had begun its daily performance.

Footsteps moved in the corridor beyond the door. Courtiers’ voices rose and faded like birdsong trained to flatter. Somewhere below, a bell chimed the hour in the queen’s wing, a softer answer following from the royal chapel. The sound should have been beautiful. Most things in the palace were designed to be beautiful before they were allowed to be anything else.

Riyah dipped her pen into ink and copied the heading Halvard had given her.

Comparative inventory of chapel storage ledgers, witness ceremonial objects, and related devotional indexes.

It looked dull enough to be harmless.

That, she suspected, was why Halvard had watched her so carefully when he gave it to her.

He stood at the far side of the study, one hand braced on the edge of a locked cabinet, the other holding a ring of small iron keys. He had not yet opened the cabinet. He had been looking at it for several breaths, which meant either the lock had insulted him or he was choosing his words too precisely.

With Master Halvard, the difference was often difficult to tell.

“These ledgers are not exciting,” he said at last.

Riyah lifted her head. “I did not say they were.”

“You looked hopeful.”

“I looked attentive.”

“You looked hopeful in an attentive manner.”

“That seems difficult to prove.”

“Most things worth proving are.” Halvard selected a key. It clicked into the cabinet lock with a small, dry sound. “The old south chapel has been poorly catalogued for decades. Possibly centuries. Brother Aurel has, after much groaning and an impressive attempt at devotional martyrdom, agreed to release three ledgers for comparison.”

“Only three?”

“Begin with three. If you survive Brother Aurel’s handwriting, we may negotiate for more.”

Riyah sat a little straighter. “Is his handwriting very bad?”

“His handwriting is elegant. That is worse. Poor handwriting admits it is trying to kill you. Elegant handwriting convinces itself the murder is art.”

Riyah smiled despite herself.

Halvard glanced over his shoulder.

She arranged her face into something appropriately scholarly.

It did not fool him. Very little did. But he allowed the pretense, which was one of the ways he showed kindness when ordinary kindness might have made them both uncomfortable.

He removed three long, narrow ledgers from the cabinet. Their leather covers had darkened with age, the corners worn soft from hands long dead. Each had a faded chapel seal stamped into the cover: a sunburst, a tower, and a kneeling figure Riyah did not recognize.

Halvard set them on the table with unusual care.

“These are storage inventories,” he said. “Chapel linen, processional pieces, minor reliquary objects, outdated ceremonial instruments. Dull material, mostly.”

“Mostly?”

He did not answer at once.

Riyah noticed. She had begun noticing the pauses in people more than their words. It was not only her Watcher gift that did it, though the gift sharpened everything when she let it. It was court. It was Soren. It was Queen Seraphine smiling at rooms until everyone inside them forgot they had been wounded. It was Lady Elowen lowering her eyes at exactly the right moment. It was Eryndor saying too little because he felt too much. It was Halvard, who could turn silence into a locked door.

“Old institutions make myths of themselves,” Halvard said. “Chapels more than most. Do not mistake incense for evidence.”

Riyah wrote that down before she could decide whether he intended her to.

Halvard’s eyebrows shifted.

She paused. “Should I not?”

“You may write down whatever you like. I reserve the right to be irritated by it.”

“That seems fair.”

“It is generous.”

She glanced at the ledgers again. “Are we looking for myths?”

“We are looking for inconsistencies.”

“And if the inconsistencies are mythic?”

“Then we will be very tired by supper.”

Riyah smiled again, but the unease remained. Halvard’s tone had been dry. His face had not.

She turned the first ledger toward herself. The leather rasped softly against the wood.

“Should I prepare a full comparison chart by evening?”

“No.”

“I could.”

“No.”

“It would be useful.”

Halvard closed the cabinet and locked it. “Notes are enough.”

“If I keep the columns simple—”

“Riyah.”

She stopped.

His voice had not sharpened. It had softened, which was worse in some ways. Sharpness she could answer. Softness found the places under her ribs.

Halvard came back to the table and looked down at the careful row of pencils. One corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile.

“You are my apprentice,” he said. “Not an offering to the archive gods.”

Her cheeks warmed. “I did not say I was.”

“You did not have to. The pencils said it for you.”

“There are only three.”

“A conservative sacrifice.”

She looked down at them and, despite herself, felt foolish. “I only wanted to be prepared.”

“I know.”

That gentleness again.

Riyah hated how quickly it made something tighten in her throat. Hated it because there was nothing cruel in it, nothing she could resist without appearing ridiculous. She had grown used to working hard enough that no one needed to ask whether she belonged in a room. Master Halvard did not often praise. He did something more dangerous: he noticed.

He tapped one finger lightly against the ledger. “You will review the first entries here, then take the second ledger to Brother Aurel in the old south chapel. He will provide the corresponding devotional index. You will copy references to witness ceremonies, if any appear, and note object continuity across years.”

“Object continuity,” Riyah repeated.

“Which things remain, which vanish, which change names.”

“That sounds more interesting than dull.”

“Many dull things become interesting if one stares at them long enough. This does not mean one should forget meals.”

“I do not forget meals.”

Halvard looked at her.

She looked at the ledgers.

“I rarely forget meals.”

“Mm.”

“I sometimes delay them.”

“A distinction beloved by corpses.”

“Master Halvard.”

“Proceed carefully,” he said, and this time the words felt less like irritation than warning.

Riyah rested her fingers on the cover of the first ledger. “Carefully with the paper?”

“With the paper,” he said. “With the language. With the temptation to make old words confess more than they know.”

“And if they know something?”

His gaze held hers.

For a moment the study seemed to grow quieter around them. Outside, another bell chimed. Somewhere, far away, a door opened and closed.

“Then,” Halvard said, “we will ask why they waited so long to say it.”

He turned away before she could answer.

Riyah opened the ledger.

The old south chapel sat in a part of the palace that court maps rendered vaguely and guests never entered by accident.

Riyah found it after passing through the west archive corridor, down a narrow stair that smelled of cold stone and extinguished candles, and along a passage where the walls had not been polished smooth. The palace changed as she walked. Gold leaf gave way to faded plaster. Carved garlands thinned into old devotional symbols. The floor lost its shine. The air cooled.

It was like walking backward through the palace’s memory.

The public rooms above gleamed because people were meant to look at them. The banquet halls, the audience chambers, the mirrored galleries, the great royal chapel with its marble saints and silver lamps—all of them knew how to hold the court’s gaze. They presented order. They presented beauty. They presented power pretending it had never needed to explain itself.

Here, the palace seemed less certain.

Old banners hung between narrow windows, their embroidery dimmed by age. A saint with chipped hands stared from a wall niche, her painted eyes faded almost white. The scent of beeswax lingered beneath dust and damp. Colored glass broke the morning sun into pieces across the floor: red, blue, amber, a thin green that lay over Riyah’s wrist as she passed beneath it and made her skin look briefly enchanted.

The old south chapel was smaller than she expected.

Not small exactly, but compressed. Its vaulted ceiling rose into shadow, ribs of stone meeting above like folded fingers. The altar was plain, nearly severe, covered with a linen cloth yellowed at the edges. Several chairs had been stacked against one wall. A row of tarnished candle stands stood crooked beside a locked cabinet. At the far end, a curtain of dark brown velvet hung from an iron rod, so old that it had faded almost black where hands had touched it.

It did not feel evil.

That was what unsettled Riyah.

If the room had felt sinister, she might have known what to do with it. She might have steeled herself, watched for danger, named the unease and tucked it into a sensible place.

Instead, the chapel felt neglected.

Embarrassed, almost.

As if the palace had not destroyed whatever this place remembered, but had shut the door and hoped dust would be sufficient.

“Lady Riyah Valour?”

The voice came from the left.

Riyah turned.

Brother Aurel stood beside a narrow door partly hidden behind a stone column. He was thinner than she had expected, with a scholar’s stoop and long hands stained faintly with ink at the fingertips. His brown robe was clean but worn at the cuffs, and his hair, once dark, had gone mostly silver at the temples. His face had the careful stillness of a man who had learned not to look surprised unless absolutely necessary.

He looked surprised now.

Only a little.

“Brother Aurel.” Riyah inclined her head. “Master Halvard sent me.”

“So I was warned.”

That did not sound promising.

“I am grateful for your assistance.”

“That,” Aurel said, “is kind of you.”

He did not sound grateful for her gratitude either.

Riyah held her folio a little tighter. “Master Halvard said you would have the devotional index?”

Brother Aurel’s gaze flicked to the ledger in her arms, then back to her face. He did not look at her eyes for long. Most people did not, at first. Some did because they were curious. Some avoided them because they had heard things about Watchers and did not want to be caught wondering whether the gold in her irises could see through their skin.

Aurel seemed to avoid them because he knew too much about being watched.

“This way,” he said.

He led her through the narrow door into a record room that looked as if it had been made for a smaller century. Shelves crowded the walls from floor to low ceiling, each packed with ledgers, scroll cases, folded inventories, and boxes labeled in several different hands. A single window, high and narrow, admitted a blade of pale light. Dust lay over everything except one cleared table where three ledgers waited beneath a linen cloth.

Brother Aurel removed the cloth with the air of a man uncovering a body.

“Most of this,” he said, “is devotional repetition. Saint-days, linen counts, symbolic inventories, obsolete titles. Nothing likely to interest a practical Watcher.”

“Then it should not take me long,” Riyah said politely.

Aurel looked at her.

She looked back, just as politely.

His mouth tightened in a way that might have been annoyance or reluctant amusement. “Master Halvard did not mention you were ambitious.”

“Did he not?”

“He used another word.”

“Was it complimentary?”

“Not in the common sense.”

That sounded like Halvard.

Riyah set her folio on the table and arranged her pencils at the top edge of the paper. Brother Aurel noticed the three pencils. His expression suggested he had formed an opinion but decided to keep it in holy custody.

“The first ledger corresponds to chapel storage,” he said. “The second is a devotional index. The third is a later copy, less reliable.”

“Less reliable how?”

“It is later.”

“That only tells me when it was written.”

Aurel sighed faintly. “You are Halvard’s apprentice.”

“I am trying to be.”

“That was not praise.”

“I know.”

This time, the smallest possible smile moved across his face and vanished almost at once. “Compare dates first. Then object references. Do not be seduced by titles.”

“I will try to remain morally firm.”

He did not smile again, but his eyes narrowed with something like appraisal.

Then he stepped back, folded his hands into his sleeves, and stationed himself near the shelf beside the door as if he meant to supervise without appearing to supervise.

Riyah began.

For the first hour, the ledgers were exactly as dull as promised.

Altar cloths. Three, white linen. One repaired.

Votive lamps. Six brass, two silvered, one cracked.

Processional bells. Four, small. One missing clapper.

Reliquary box. Empty. Hinges damaged.

Ceremonial ink. Two bottles, black. One bottle, red, sealed.

Riyah copied entries, marked dates, and noted repetition. The work soothed her at first. There was comfort in columns. Comfort in small facts that did not care who smiled at court or who whispered over wine. A lamp was present or it was missing. Linen was mended or torn. A bell had a clapper or did not.

Then the words began to change.

Not dramatically.

That was the trouble.

They shifted by inches.

In the oldest ledger, a stool was listed as awitness stool.

Thirty years later, it became anoath stool.

In the later copy, it was simplysmall carved seat, unused.

Riyah copied the sequence and frowned.

A few entries below, another phrase caught her.

Blindfold cloths, three, washed and sealed.

She paused.

“Brother Aurel?”

He did not move, but his gaze lifted from the scroll he had been pretending to read.

“Yes?”

“Why would a chapel inventory keep blindfold cloths with oath objects?”

“Devotional practice.”

“What sort?”

“Obsolete.”

“That does not answer the question.”

“No,” he agreed. “It answers why the answer is unlikely to matter.”

Riyah looked back down at the ledger.

She wrote: blindfold cloths — devotional? witness? oath?

Brother Aurel’s eyes followed her pencil.

She continued.

The next phrase appeared in a column so narrow it almost hid itself.

Horn stand, ironwood, repaired.

Riyah’s pencil stopped.

Horn stand.

Not bell stand. Not music stand. Not bracket.

Horn stand.

She copied the words carefully.

From across the room, Brother Aurel cleared his throat.

“It was likely a music stand,” he said.

Riyah looked at him. “For a horn?”

“For ceremonial musicians.”

“Would that not be listed with musical instruments?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Were there ceremonial musicians in the old south chapel?”

“Occasionally.”

“What ceremonies?”

“Old ones.”

She held his gaze for a moment.

Brother Aurel’s face remained perfectly composed, but he had begun pressing his thumb against the side of his forefinger. A small motion. Almost invisible.

Riyah looked back at her page.

Horn stand — likely ceremonial/music? Aurel uncertain.

Then she scratched outuncertain.

That was not accurate.

Aurel was not uncertain.

He was unwilling.

She turned to the corresponding devotional index. The writing there was thinner, prettier, more difficult to read. Elegant handwriting attempting murder, she thought, and nearly smiled.

Then she found the horn again.

On the day of royal oath and witness sounding, the west cloths were hung and the horn set before the threshold.

Riyah sat very still.

Witness sounding.

The words did not belong with linen counts and repaired hinges. They did not belong with cracked lamps and missing clappers.

Or perhaps they did, and she had been wrong about what all those things were.

She copied the line exactly.

Brother Aurel had stopped pretending to read.

Riyah did not look at him.

She moved forward through the later copy.

The same date appeared, but the phrase had changed.

On the day of royal oath, the devotional horn was set in the chapel.

No witness sounding.

No threshold.

A page later, in a different hand, an object list referred todecorative chapel horn, unused.

In the last ledger, nothing.

No horn. No stand. No sounding.

Nothing at all.

Riyah’s pulse beat once, hard, at the base of her throat.

She turned back to the oldest ledger and began comparing dates in the margins.

Witness sounding.Devotional horn.Decorative chapel horn.Nothing.

She could hear Halvard in her head.

Do not mistake incense for evidence.

She could also hear something else, quieter and less welcome.

Evidence can be buried under incense too.

“Lady Riyah,” Brother Aurel said.

She looked up.

His face had gone closed. Not blank. Closed. Like a door with someone leaning against the other side.

“You may find the later copy easier to work from,” he said.

“I am finding the earlier one useful.”

His mouth pinched. “It is incomplete.”

“All the more reason to compare it carefully.”

“It is also misleading.”

“Misleading how?”

“Old terminology often suggests relationships that no longer exist.”

“Then I would like to know what relationships it once suggested.”

His fingers tightened inside his sleeves.

Riyah realized, with a small shiver of surprise, that she was not afraid of him.

She had been nervous when she arrived. Polite. Slightly intimidated by the chapel, the records, the priestly displeasure. But now the nervousness had thinned beneath something stronger.

Curiosity, yes.

But not only that.

A sense of standing at the edge of a curtain and seeing light beneath it.

Brother Aurel said, “Master Halvard asked for inventory continuity.”

“I am comparing continuity.”

“Not theology.”

“I have not written down a single theological conclusion.”

“No.” His gaze dropped to her notes. “Only questions.”

“Are questions theological?”

“In old chapels, very often.”

A draft moved through the record room.

Not from the window. The window was shut and too high to reach. The draft came from somewhere beyond the narrow door, from the chapel itself. It slipped under the threshold and stirred the corner of the linen cloth Brother Aurel had folded away.

Riyah looked toward the door.

Something in the main chapel shifted.

A faint sound. Not a footstep. Not a voice.

Fabric, perhaps.

Old fabric moving where there should have been no hand.

“Is there another chamber?” she asked.

Brother Aurel’s answer came too quickly. “No.”

Riyah turned back to him.

His eyes closed briefly.

Then he said, “Not a chamber. A storage alcove. Nothing useful.”

The word touched something sore in her before she understood why.

Useful.

She thought of Halvard telling her she was not an offering. She thought of the pencils. The columns. The carefulness that made her feel as if she might belong.

Nothing useful.

“May I see it?” she asked.

“There is nothing to see.”

“Then it should not take me long.”

Brother Aurel did not like having his own logic returned to him. That much was clear. He moved between her and the door without quite blocking her.

“Lady Riyah, the old chapel contains many remnants. Saints no longer venerated, devotional objects no longer used, inscriptions no longer legible. If every forgotten carving becomes a mystery, you will never complete the inventory.”

“I am only looking.”

He looked at her eyes then.

Fully.

It lasted only a second, but Riyah felt the shift of it. The moment people remembered what she was training to become. The moment they wondered what looking meant to her.

At last, he stepped aside.

“You may look,” he said. “Do not touch anything unstable.”

Riyah gathered one pencil and a fresh sheet of paper.

Brother Aurel looked as though he wished to protest this too, but could not find an argument against paper.

The main chapel felt colder when she returned to it.

The draft moved again.

Riyah followed it toward the far end of the room, past the stacked chairs and tarnished candle stands, toward the long curtain of dark velvet. Up close, she could see that the curtain had once been embroidered. Not beautifully, perhaps. Not with the lavish delicacy of the queen’s ceremonial gowns or the grand chapel’s altar cloths. But with a pattern that had nearly vanished into age.

Tiny circles.

Raised hands.

A shape like an eye.

No.

Not quite an eye.

An eye crossed by a narrow curve.

A horn?

Riyah’s breath slowed.

Behind her, Brother Aurel said, “It is only storage.”

She reached for the curtain.

Dust clung to her fingertips before she even touched the fabric. The velvet was heavier than expected, reluctant to move, as if the years had thickened it. She drew it aside with both hands.

The alcove beyond was narrow, half-shadowed, and full of stale air.

For a moment she saw only shapes: a broken chair, a cracked basin, a folded screen, a tall column of pale stone darkened by dust.

Then her eyes adjusted.

The stone was not a column.

It was a woman.

Riyah forgot to breathe.

The statue stood against the back wall of the alcove, taller than Riyah by half a head. Age had softened the edges of her robes, but not enough to blur the shape of her body. She was carved standing, not kneeling. Her shoulders were straight. Her head was lifted. Both hands were raised before her, palms outward—not pleading, not blessing, not quite praying.

Above her hands, carved into the stone of the alcove itself, hung the shape of a horn.

Not an animal horn. Not a hunting horn. Not a battle trumpet.

It curved with solemn precision, its mouth flared slightly, its body marked by bands that might have been metalwork. It looked ceremonial. Legal. Sacred in the way a seal was sacred, or an oath spoken before witnesses.

Something meant to be sounded where no one could pretend they had not heard.

Riyah’s gaze dropped to the saint’s face.

Her eyes were gone.

Not broken away. Not scraped out by vandals. The face had been carved that way.

Smooth lids. Hollowed calm. No pupils, no painted irises, no empty sockets of violence. A serene blindness made deliberate by the hand that shaped her.

The sight struck Riyah so sharply that she took a step back and nearly dropped her pencil.

Brother Aurel moved behind her.

“Careful,” he said.

But his voice sounded far away.

Riyah could not look away from the saint.

The statue should have been grotesque. It was not. That made it worse. The saint’s mouth was soft, almost sad, but not afraid. Her eyeless face was turned forward with an awful steadiness, as though she had no need of sight to know what stood before her.

Riyah felt something prickle behind her own eyes.

Her Watcher gift did not flare. There was no burst of gold, no vision, no sudden unveiling of secret history. Nothing so simple. Nothing so useful.

Only a feeling like standing too near a bell just before it rang.

“What is her name?” Riyah asked.

Brother Aurel said nothing.

She stepped closer.

At the base of the statue, beneath a layer of dust, symbols had been carved into the stone. Some were chapel marks—old devotional signs she did not know. But others resembled Watcher marks.

Not the clean royal marks Halvard had taught her. Not the formal eye-and-crown seal used in current records. These were rougher. Older. An open eye with a line beneath it. A hand. A horn crossed with something that might have been a crown, though the crown’s upper points had been scratched nearly away.

Riyah crouched.

Her skirts pooled around her knees on the dusty floor.

“Lady Riyah,” Aurel said, sharper now.

She paused with her fingers hovering near the base.

Do not touch anything unstable.

The stone looked stable.

Her hand did not feel stable at all.

Still, she touched the carved eye.

The stone was cold.

The cold seemed to pass through her fingertip and up her arm, settling somewhere beneath her ribs.

She pulled back quickly, embarrassed by the reaction though no one had seen anything but a girl touching stone and stopping.

“Who is she?” Riyah asked again.

Brother Aurel stood at the edge of the alcove, his face pale in the thin chapel light.

“An old saint.”

“Which saint?”

His mouth opened.

Closed.

Then, reluctantly, “Saint Ilyra.”

The name entered the alcove like another draft.

“Saint Ilyra,” Riyah repeated.

“Or that is one name for her.”

“One name?”

“The old devotional lists are inconsistent.”

“Why?”

“Because old devotional lists often are.”

Riyah rose slowly. Dust clung to the hem of her gown. “Why does she have no eyes?”

Brother Aurel’s gaze moved to the statue’s blank face.

For a moment, he looked not like a scholar, not like a brother of the chapel, not like a man irritated by an apprentice’s questions.

He looked afraid.

“They took her eyes,” he said, “but not her witness.”

The words fell between them.

Riyah went very still.

Brother Aurel seemed to hear himself a moment too late.

He drew in a breath and stepped back. “A devotional phrase. Not literal in all accounts.”

“In some accounts, then?”

“I did not say that.”

“You said not literal in all accounts.”

“Lady Riyah.”

“Who took her eyes?”

“I do not know.”

“Why was her witness important?”

His expression shuttered. “You are making leaps.”

“I am asking questions.”

“Some questions are leaps with better manners.”

That sounded so much like something Halvard might have said that Riyah almost smiled.

Almost.

But the saint with no eyes stood behind him, and the horn hung above her raised hands, and the words would not leave the air.

They took her eyes, but not her witness.

Riyah looked back at the horn. “What does the horn mean?”

“Symbolism.”

“Of what?”

“Judgment. Oath. Devotion. The usual clutter of dead ceremony.”

“That sounds like Master Halvard.”

“Master Halvard is often correct.”

“Is he correct about this?”

Brother Aurel did not answer.

Riyah’s pulse quickened.

She looked at the base again. At the rougher marks. At the scratched crown. At the saint’s raised hands.

“Was she connected to Watchers?”

Aurel’s eyes sharpened. “The old chapel had many overlapping traditions.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only safe one.”

Safe.

The word was quiet, but it landed.

Riyah turned fully toward him. “Did Watchers once serve the chapel?”

“No.”

The answer came swiftly, cleanly.

Too cleanly.

Then his jaw tightened.

“Not exactly.”

Riyah held herself still.

Not exactly.

Two words, small as a crack. Wide enough to see darkness through.

Before she could ask another question, Brother Aurel moved past her and took the curtain in both hands.

“I have indulged this long enough,” he said.

“Indulged?”

“The ledgers are your assignment. Not saint legends. Not chapel gossip. Not old devotional quarrels dressed up as revelation.”

He pulled the curtain halfway across the alcove.

The saint’s eyeless face vanished into shadow.

Riyah felt an irrational urge to stop him.

She did not. That restraint cost more than she expected.

“Master Halvard,” Aurel continued, “will decide what is relevant to your apprenticeship.”

There it was.

Halvard’s name like a key turned in a lock.

Riyah folded her paper slowly. Her hands wanted to tremble. She did not allow it. “Of course.”

Brother Aurel looked relieved.

That was his mistake.

Riyah tucked the paper into her folio.

“Thank you for your assistance, Brother.”

He inclined his head. “I will return to the record room.”

“In a moment.”

He paused.

Riyah looked past him to the curtain. Only the edge of the saint’s robe remained visible now, pale stone against old velvet.

“I would like to stand here a little longer.”

Brother Aurel’s face tightened with obvious displeasure.

But she had not asked another question. She had not touched the statue again. She had not disobeyed an instruction he could name.

At last, he inclined his head and left.

Riyah waited until his footsteps faded through the narrow door.

Then she reached out and touched the curtain.

Not pulling it open. Not yet.

Only touching the old velvet where the embroidered marks had nearly disappeared.

“They took your eyes,” she whispered.

The chapel swallowed the words.

The saint did not answer.

Of course she did not.

Riyah let the curtain fall.

Master Halvard was exactly where Riyah had left him, which was to say in his study, surrounded by records, looking as though he had been personally disappointed by civilization.

He did not look up when she entered.

“Brother Aurel remains alive?” he asked.

“For now.”

“Promising.”

“He is very cautious.”

“That is one of the less fatal qualities in a chapel archivist.”

Riyah set her folio on the table. “He gave me the devotional index.”

Halvard turned a page in the ledger before him. “And?”

“There are inconsistencies.”

“There are always inconsistencies.”

“These seem deliberate.”

Now he looked up.

Riyah felt the attention settle over her like a weight. Not unkindly. Not harshly. But completely.

“Deliberate,” he repeated.

She opened her folio and laid out her notes. Her handwriting looked neater than she felt.

“The oldest ledger references a horn stand, then later a royal oath and witness sounding. A later copy calls it a devotional horn. Then decorative. Then nothing.”

Halvard’s gaze moved over the page.

He said nothing.

Riyah continued. “There are also older terms I do not recognize. Witness of the Threshold. Keeper of Account. Uncrowned Witness. Voice Before the Throne.”

“Old ceremonial language.”

“Was it Watcher language?”

“Some ceremonial language overlaps with Watcher language.”

“That is not quite what I asked.”

“No,” Halvard said. “It is what I answered.”

Riyah sat back.

The study felt suddenly warmer than before. The air too close. She could still feel the cold of the saint’s carved mark under her fingertip.

“There is a statue in the old chapel,” she said.

Halvard’s eyes did not change.

That was how she knew he recognized it.

Had his face shifted quickly, she might have missed the truth inside the motion. But he became too still, too precisely himself.

“Many statues,” he said.

“This one was behind a curtain.”

“The old chapel is full of things behind curtains. It is one of its less impressive architectural themes.”

“She has no eyes.”

A beat.

Small.

Enough.

Riyah’s fingers tightened around the edge of her folio.

Halvard looked down at her notes again. “A devotional remnant.”

“Brother Aurel called her Saint Ilyra.”

This time the pause was longer.

Not much.

But long enough for Riyah to hear the scratch of the clock near the window, the faint hiss of the lamp flame, the distant murmur of the palace beyond the door.

“The name is old,” Halvard said at last. “And unreliable.”

“Why unreliable?”

“Because old names often are.”

“Everyone keeps saying old things are unreliable.”

“They generally are.”

“Convenient.”

His gaze lifted.

Riyah’s heart gave a hard, frightened knock.

She had not meant to say that.

Or perhaps she had.

Halvard regarded her for a long moment. His face did not show anger. That was almost worse. Anger would have meant she had crossed a line he knew how to mark. This was assessment.

“What exactly did Brother Aurel tell you?” he asked.

Riyah heard the sentence beneath the sentence.

What has he given you that I did not?

She thought of the alcove. The horn. The eyeless face.

They took her eyes, but not her witness.

“He said the statue was devotional,” she said carefully. “And symbolic.”

“That is likely true.”

“Likely?”

“Riyah.”

There it was again. The warning in her name. Not sharp. Not cruel. But placed with purpose.

She looked down at her page because his face was becoming difficult to read without wanting to please it.

“What does the horn represent?” she asked.

“Ceremony. Oath. The usual clutter of power pretending to be permanent.”

It sounded like Halvard.

It sounded like truth.

It also sounded like a door closing.

“Did Watchers once use horns in oath ceremonies?”

“Do not make leaps from incomplete ledgers.”

“I am trying to understand the pattern.”

“You are trying to find the pattern you have already decided must be there.”

“That is not fair.”

“No,” he said. “It is caution.”

She looked up. “Is caution always fair?”

Something moved in Halvard’s expression then. Not surprise. Not quite pride.

Concern.

He leaned back in his chair and removed his spectacles.

“Legends,” he said, “are where institutions hide embarrassment, not evidence.”

Riyah heard it.

The sentence was meant to turn her away. She knew that. It wore authority like a cloak.

But beneath it sat another thing entirely.

Embarrassment.

Hidden.

“Then should we not look where embarrassment was hidden?” she asked.

Halvard stared at her.

For one breath, he looked older than he usually allowed himself to seem. The severity of him remained, but something tired showed through it. Something that had seen too many clever young people reach for doors they did not yet know how to survive opening.

At last, he put his spectacles back on.

“We will proceed carefully,” he said.

Carefully.

Riyah folded her hands in her lap.

When Halvard said carefully, he usually meant with discipline. With patience. With respect for evidence and context and the danger of making facts carry more weight than they could bear.

Today, carefully sounded like slowly.

Slowly sounded like later.

Later sounded, very faintly, like never.

“What would you like me to do next?” she asked.

Her voice was polite.

Halvard’s gaze lingered on her face, perhaps hearing the politeness for what it was.

“Continue the inventory comparison,” he said. “Object names, dates, omissions. Leave saint legends aside for now.”

“For now.”

“Yes.”

She gathered her notes.

He did not stop her.

At the door, he said, “Riyah.”

She turned.

His face had softened again, but the softness did not comfort her as much as it had that morning.

“Do not confuse being delayed with being dismissed.”

She wanted to believe him.

That was the uncomfortable thing. She did believe him, mostly. Halvard had never treated her like a silly girl who could not think. He had trained her harder than she had expected and trusted her with more than she had once imagined. He had protected her in ways she knew and ways she probably did not.

But he had recognized the eyeless saint.

He had paused at Saint Ilyra’s name.

And he had not told her why.

“I won’t,” she said.

It was not a lie.

Not exactly.

She left before the distinction could trouble her further.

The corridor outside Halvard’s study was brighter than she expected.

Afternoon had settled over the palace, spilling gold across the polished floor and lighting the carved edges of the walls. The shift from the old chapel’s dusty hush to this polished corridor felt almost indecent. Here, everything gleamed. Here, footmen moved with quiet speed, ladies passed in pairs with silk whispering at their ankles, and the windows opened toward a courtyard where orange trees grew in square planters beneath the queen’s preferred arrangement of white stone doves.

Riyah walked with her notes clutched too tightly to her chest.

She should have gone back to her room.

Or to the archive.

Or to luncheon, if the hour had already reached luncheon. She had lost track.

Instead, she turned down the corridor that led toward the west gallery without meaning to. Or perhaps she meant to and simply did not admit it to herself until she saw him.

Soren was leaning against the window embrasure at the far end of the hall, one shoulder against the carved stone, one boot crossed lazily over the other. He was speaking to no one, which meant he was either waiting for someone, avoiding someone, or looking decorative in a place where people might mistakenly assume decoration was the purpose.

He wore dark clothes today, less formal than court preferred, his coat open at the throat and his black hair loose enough that one piece had fallen into his eyes. He looked like trouble that had grown bored of introducing itself.

Riyah stopped.

Soren looked up.

His expression changed at once.

Not dramatically. Soren’s face was too well-trained for that. But the lazy amusement shifted. His eyes sharpened. His mouth softened before he made it smile.

“You look,” he said, “as if a book has insulted your family.”

Riyah’s grip tightened around the folio.

“It was not a book.”

“A scroll, then. Scrolls are notoriously vicious.”

She should have smiled.

She did, a little.

Soren noticed. Of course he noticed. He pushed away from the window and came toward her, not too quickly, not with any obvious urgency. Still, the space between them closed.

“Halvard?” he asked.

“Master Halvard has done nothing.”

“That is often how he does his worst work.”

The smile escaped more fully this time.

It warmed something tired inside her, which was irritating because she had not given it permission.

Soren fell into step beside her when she began walking again. He did not ask where she was going. He simply matched her pace, close enough that the sleeve of his coat nearly brushed hers.

Once, in the first weeks of knowing him, that nearness would have made every nerve in her body leap like startled birds.

Now it still stirred her.

But differently.

Less like shock. More like recognition.

They walked three paces in silence.

Then one of the loose papers slipped from the edge of her folio.

Soren caught it before it hit the floor.

Of course he did. He had the reflexes of a cat and the moral character of one too.

His fingers brushed hers when he handed it back.

The contact was brief.

Warm.

Known.

Still charged enough that Riyah felt it behind her ribs, but not startling enough to make her pull away.

Soren’s gaze flicked to her face, then back to the page.

He did not release it immediately.

“What did you find?” he asked.

Riyah should have said she did not know.

She should have said it was an inventory matter. That Master Halvard had told her to proceed carefully. That Brother Aurel had been strange and the old chapel stranger, but nothing yet was certain enough to share.

Instead, the words came out quietly.

“I found a saint with no eyes.”

Soren’s smile faded.

Not entirely. Soren’s smiles rarely vanished all at once. They retreated by degrees, leaving behind the sharper, quieter shape of him beneath.

His fingers loosened on the paper.

“Where?” he asked.

Riyah looked back toward the corridor that led to Halvard’s study, then toward the older wing where the south chapel waited behind dust and locked doors and a curtain that should not have hidden anything useful.

She heard Brother Aurel’s voice again.

They took her eyes, but not her witness.

She tightened her fingers around her notes.

“Come with me,” she said.