Prologue
The shoreline of East Rebilos stretched before Jaskler Hayflare like an old scar—visible, weathered, aching when touched. Once-white sands were now streaked with bruised stains from the dye runoff spilling from the clothing factory upriver. The surf rolled in slow and weary, shouldering the filth before sliding back in shame. She walked barefoot, because she always had, because it was something her father taught her to love. Once, it had been a joy—the warm grit between her toes, the kiss of the wind on her skin. Now the wind scraped and stung, heavy with salt and the tang of chemicals.
She clutched a folded letter in one hand. Not the letter she had received last week from the academy in the North City—she had already read that until the ink might as well have been carved into her mind. This one was older, sealed and unopened, the paper beginning to soften at the edges. It had been kept for her, hidden until now.
She stepped around a slick of blackened foam and nearly tripped over a fish lying in the retreating tide. Once silver-bright, its scales were dulled, the color of tarnished coins. One glassy eye stared up at her, lifeless. She crouched, staring back, and felt… nothing. No pity, no disgust, only recognition—of something that had once been vibrant, reduced to a husk.
The academy’s acceptance meant she would leave tomorrow, on the first ferry to North Rebilos. Six years of study as a scholar in the royal boarding halls, her place paid for by a debt of honor: when her father was alive, he had supported the academy with both funds and influence. Now they would return the favor with lodging, food, and lessons. For Jaskler, it was more than an education—it was an escape from the shore that had become a graveyard.
But it meant leaving her mother behind.
Aila Hayflare was still alive, but time and grief had worn her down. She coughed quietly at night, her voice smaller than it once was. The house they lived in now—her parents’ old estate—was modest compared to the sprawling gardens of her father’s family home, but it still held echoes of better days. And when Jaskler was gone, only Leuo, their loyal butler, would remain to care for her.
Jaskler stopped walking and stared at the horizon, letting the smell of brine pull her backwards into memory.
She had been younger—maybe six or seven—when her father would take her to visit her grandparents’ estate. That world had been all lavender and sunlight, a maze of high green hedges stretching behind the grand fountain, birds darting in the vines outside her second-floor bedroom window. She’d run barefoot in the grass with her cousins, always the quickest in the maze, always the one who remembered the turns. And there was Vyler, the black-and-white spaniel with bright blue eyes and a heart-shaped patch of fur on his nose, padding loyally after her. She’d taught him to sit, to stay, to crawl across the lawn on command, her father clapping proudly when she showed him the trick.
But there were shadows even then. She remembered once running from the maze to find her grandmother seated under a white tent on the porch, sipping tea with a jeweled hand. Beside her, a noblewoman had leaned in to whisper, not lowering her voice enough: “Pretty, for a commoner’s child. But the dog takes her commands better than she will.” Her grandmother had not corrected her.
Years later, when Jaskler was older, she had learned what those words meant. The whispers had been there for as long as her parents’ marriage. Her father, heir to the throne of North Rebilos, had been meant to wed into another royal house, to strengthen alliances. Instead, he had chosen Aila—a scholar’s daughter, beautiful, intelligent, but without a title. Jaskler once overheard him refusing to annul the marriage.
A smaller version of the estate’s cold voice followed her through rooms that winter, and into the following spring and summer. In that spring, she wandered down the corridor and paused—how could she not pause?—at her father’s study, where the door was not latched. Voices rippled from inside. She knew the risk of listening, and she listened.
“…the match is not appropriate,” someone said, not her grandmother this time but her father’s sister, Elfia Hayflare, the younger one who smiled at family breakfasts with barbed teeth. “The council is not pleased.”
“The council,” her father repeated, and the way he said it made the word seem small. “The council does not live my life. It can advise me on matters of tax and tide. It does not decide who I love.”
“Then the council will act without you.”
“They can act as bravely as they like while their hands are clean,” he said. “They will not harry my wife. And they will certainly not unmake my daughter.”
Her aunt’s voice sharpened. “Annul it. We will find you an alliance that strengthens what needs to be strengthened—”
“I said no.”
Silence.
Her father spoke again, softer. “There are lines,” he said, and Jaskler could picture his hands moving to illustrate—his thumb perhaps tracing air. “There are lines I will never cross. You will not ask me to do it again.”
When the door swung open, Jaskler pressed herself flat against the wall, the wood hiding her from sight. Her aunt swept past in a storm of snapping skirts and sharp-heeled steps, each footfall landing like the last word of the argument she had just lost. Jaskler held her breath until the sound faded down the corridor, but she didn’t move.
A cold, crawling certainty had settled in her chest. This had not been a simple quarrel; something had shifted, and the air itself seemed thinner for it. She stayed in the shadow of the open door, heart hammering, fingers twisted in her skirts, knowing—though she could not explain how—that she had just overheard the first crack in a chain of events.
Not long after, he was dead. The official word was an accident—a carriage gone off the cliff road—but the truth was as clear to Jaskler as the sigil she had seen briefly glowing on his skin during the funeral rites before it faded into nothing. His parents had never wanted them. Now, his younger sister wore the title that should have been his.
The day of the funeral was the last time she saw Vyler. A servant led him away on a taut leash as she ran barefoot after them, calling his name until her throat ached. “I’m sorry, Miss,” the servant said without meeting her eyes. Orders were orders.
After that, they moved out of the grandparents’ estate and into her parents’ smaller home by the shore. Life shrank. The ocean grew sick. The factory’s dye seeped deeper into the water each year. Fishermen returned with empty nets. Locals stopped telling the old stories about glowing algae lighting the waves at night—because the glow was gone.
Through it all, her mother gave away what little they had to neighbors who were worse off. Jaskler resented it in silence. Once, she had told her, “Maybe we shouldn’t fix everyone else’s nets.” Aila had only smiled faintly and said, “If no one does, who will?”
Jaskler learned to stop crying. Tears were a language no one in Rebilos cared to hear. Instead, she began quietly collecting clues about her father’s death—snippets of overheard conversations, old documents, books marked with his notes. She kept them hidden in a box under a loose floorboard, away from her mother’s eyes. Aila forbade her from digging deeper. “You thinking about them makes you less in your own skin,” she’d said. But Jaskler had never been good at letting go.
And now she was leaving.
The night before her departure, Leuo came to her room carrying a small wooden box wrapped in crimson cloth. His hair was silver now, his hands trembling. “Your parents’ letters,” he said softly. “Some from before, some after. I promised I’d keep them safe. I’ll be here when you return. The house will be here, waiting.”
She thanked him and waited until she was alone to unwrap it. The box smelled faintly of lavender. Inside were stacks of letters—her mother’s looping script, her father’s precise strokes. She began sorting them, careful not to smudge the ink. Then she saw it: one envelope sealed in deep red wax, stamped with her father’s royal crest.
Her breath caught. She turned it over in her hands, feeling the ridge of the seal. She thought of the sigil at his funeral. Of the whispers in the garden. Of the council that had wanted her gone before she was old enough to understand why.
She broke the seal.
Inside was a single sheet of parchment, the ink still dark and unbroken. At the top, in smaller letters, was her name: Jaskler. She began to read.
If you are reading this, Jas, then I am already dead—and you are in greater danger than you know.
The waves outside hissed against the shore. Somewhere in the house, her mother coughed. Jaskler gripped the page tighter and read on.
