The door never finished opening. By the time the torches reached the alcove, only the smell of iron and crushed rosemary lingered. The spiral had vanished from Corven’s hand, no light, no proof, only the echo of its pulse beating beneath her skin.

By dawn, rumor had replaced memory. Servants swore they had seen her with the Ward of Shadows, whispering spells that made air burn blue. Someone claimed a sigil glowed across her throat. Another swore it was the mark of the Silent Veil.

They did not call it arrest. They called it summons.

When the guards came, they carried no chains, only a folded parchment bearing Eryndor Veyl’s wax seal. Its impression was a spiral, perfect and unbroken. The message named the charge in delicate ink: practice of spiral craft against the Crown.

She had read enough ledgers to know what that meant.

Now, in the cold beneath the archives, the rumor had turned to ritual. Candles guttered. Dust tasted of chalk and secrets. Every sound above, the scrape of chairs, the hush of gowns, felt like the court holding its breath to see whether she would survive the next one.

Eryndor’s tribunal met in a room that was never meant for judgment. Stone shelves lined with blank tomes rose behind him like witnesses too weary to speak. Wax dripped from a hundred candles, their smoke curling into shapes almost human. At the center stood a single chair. Hers.

Myrren sat without being asked. The guards flanked the door, unmoving. She could smell their fear, old leather, sweat, a trace of wine to steady nerves. On the table before her lay a stack of parchment bound by red thread. Her journal, or something pretending to be it.

Eryndor adjusted his spectacles, his voice mild as dust. “Mistress Vale, you are accused of employing scentcraft and sigilwork in concert, of merging alchemy with forbidden geometry. Spiral craft, as the statute names it.”

He did not look at her when he said forbidden. He looked at the pages, as though they might rise up and defend themselves.

“I wrote notes,” she said quietly. “Not prophecies.”

A rustle from the shadows. Lady Aurelia leaned forward, silver bangles chiming. “And yet, the ink matches your hand. Your sigils repeat across twenty pages, spiral forms identical to the cult’s mark.”

The air stank of frostmint, her own masking agent. Someone had copied even that. Her throat tightened. “Those are not mine.”

“Forgery?” Kael’s smooth voice slipped between them like honey over venom. “Or a memory you prefer to forget?”

He spread one sheet toward her. The handwriting was perfect. Even the mistakes, her uneven r’s, the faint tilt of l’s. But she had never written these words: One shall bind. One shall break.

Her pulse stumbled.

Eryndor cleared his throat. “We are not theologians. We are merely to determine whether you acted in service to foreign or cult powers.”

“Then where is my accuser?” she asked.

No one answered. Only candlelight flickered, and in its glow she saw faint outlines of chalk spirals drawn beneath the tribunal table, half erased, as if this was not the first time the court had practiced judgment over shadows.

Seliora sat in the back row, silent, unmoving. Her rings caught the light, turning once, twice, then still.

Outside, the bells began to toll.

The bell’s echo had not faded before the first whisper rose.

“Summon the witness.”

A servant slipped through a side door, arms trembling under the weight of a velvet-bound box. Inside, Myrren already knew, would be the next lie.

Eryndor’s hand hovered above the seal before he broke it. The scent burst into the air like betrayal given form, frostmint and ash, her own signature compound. She tasted copper on her tongue.

“Recovered from your laboratory,” he said. “Contained within, a fragment of black wax impressed with the spiral. Do you deny it?”

Myrren’s voice rasped. “If you took it from my workroom, then the thief placed it there first.”

Aurelia’s smile was thin. “Always the alchemist’s defense, blame unseen hands.”

“Unseen because they prefer it that way.”

Laughter rippled through the nobles gathered behind the rail. Their perfumes tangled, rose and civet and wine, and beneath it she smelled something colder: incense. The kind burned during prophecy trials. Someone wanted this to feel holy.

Kael spread another parchment before the court. The script shimmered faintly, written in ink that refused to dry. “You see,” he murmured to Eryndor, “the geometry aligns with the Seer’s stanzas. It is not chemistry, it is invocation.”

He read aloud, the words like poison dripped into the air.
“In the spiral of light and shadow..”

Her heart lurched. The room wavered. That line did not belong in any scientific ledger. It belonged to the whisper that had followed her since the first banquet.

“Enough,” she cut in, too sharply. “That verse predates me by centuries.”

“And yet,” Aurelia said, “you have written it in your own hand.”

“I did not.”

“Then who did?” Kael’s tone is gentle, coaxing. “Perhaps you do not remember. Some forms of spiral craft induce forgetting. You could have spelled yourself.”

Eryndor steepled his fingers. “Is this your claim, that memory itself betrays you?”

Seliora’s voice finally entered the chamber, soft and precise. “The girl’s memory is of her genius, my lords. She remembers every scent she has ever distilled. If she swore she did not write those words, she did not.”

Gasps fluttered. Defending her was dangerous. Myrren met Seliora’s gaze, but the woman’s expression stayed unreadable. Only her thumb turned her ring once, the same habit she used when lying.

Aurelia’s fan snapped shut. “And what is your interest here, Lady Seliora? Pity? Or precedent? You defended Cordelia once, did you not? She also claimed innocence before the gallows.”

Seliora’s composure did not crack, but the silence around her did. A name like a ghost reborn, Cordelia, the girl erased from the ledgers, the one whose formulas matched Myrren’s. The court shifted, hungry for repetition.

Eryndor tapped the box. “Mistress Vale, the evidence names you practitioner of spiral craft. Yet the crown has sanctioned similar sigils for state alchemy. Do you claim allegiance to the Queen’s doctrine or to another power?”

There it was, the Queen’s invisible hand. Sanction what served her, damn what did not.

Myrren straightened. “My allegiance is to antidotes, not crowns.”

Kael smiled. “And yet your remedies never seem to cure what they touch.”

The laughter that followed felt rehearsed, a ritual older than justice. Candles hissed. Smoke curled upward, forming shapes that almost spelled words before fading.

Through it all, she smelled frostmint still burning from the open box, her scent twisted into accusation. Each breath tasted of theft.

The tribunal’s murmurs blurred, blending into a single low hum that vibrated in her bones. Every heartbeat sounded like a footstep toward the noose.

Her gaze drifted to the parchment Kael had left half folded. The ink shimmered faintly in candlelight, lines of silver threaded through black. It was still wet, still alive. She leaned closer and caught it: frostmint again, but laced with something deeper. Not poison. Shadow.

Her breath caught. Corven’s magic smelled like that, ink and absence.

For a heartbeat, she felt the tether pull. Not violently, but insistently, like fingers brushing the edge of her mind. She saw the alcove again, his mouth against hers, the spiral burning between them. Then his voice, only in her head, a whisper swallowed by distance.

You are not meant to stand alone.

The words rippled through her. The candle nearest her flared blue. Several nobles gasped; Aurelia crossed herself.

Eryndor rose sharply. “Contain the wards.”

Guards moved, but Myrren’s focus stayed on the floor. In the wax pools at her feet, spirals had begun to form, tiny, perfect, melting as quickly as they appeared. Like the court itself was breathing her confession for her.

She swallowed hard. “I did not summon that.”

Kael’s tone slid soft as oil. “Then something inside you did.”

The tether eased, leaving her dizzy. She forced her eyes upward to Seliora. The older woman’s rings were turning again, faster now. Her face was a mask of composure, but beneath it: fear, or memory.

Seliora’s lips parted just enough to shape two silent words. Not here.

It was not a warning, it was a promise. Myrren felt it like a thread pulled taut between them.

Eryndor slammed his palm against the table. The wax spirals shattered under the blow, splattering light. “Enough of these displays. Until we understand the nature of your affliction, you are to remain under observation. The Queen will determine further proceedings.”

The word observation sounded gentle, but every guard’s hand fell to a blade.

Myrren rose on unsteady legs. The chamber swam, the scent of smoke and mint twisting together. She met Seliora’s gaze one last time. The woman inclined her head once, ring catching candlelight, then looked away as though Myrren had already become a ghost.

Outside the tribunal doors, the bells began again, slow and deliberate, counting down to something she could not yet name.

They did not free her when the tribunal ended.

They escorted her through corridors that smelled of ink and old incense, down stairwells where the air thickened with mold and memory. The guards said nothing. Silence was the sentence before the sentence.

At the top of the final stair waited Captain Holt. His expression was granite, but his eyes, those steady soldier’s eyes, flickered once in pity. He did not speak as he handed over the parchment.
The Queen’s crest. A single line beneath it.

Verdict deferred. Observation continued.

Deferred. Not spared. Suspended like breath between two blades.

They left her in the narrow chamber overlooking the square. No chains, only a shuttered window and a single candle that guttered in the draft. The flame smelled faintly of frostmint, Eryndor’s ink still clinging to her sleeve.

She crossed to the window. Through the slats, the evening light had thinned to copper. Below, carpenters worked in the square, raising a platform, hammering beams, and hanging a rope.

Her stomach twisted. It was not for her yet, but it would be. The court liked its warnings visible.

Each strike of the hammer echoed up the stone like a heartbeat. She tried not to flinch, but her reflection in the glass did, a ghost pale and shaking, with the spiral’s shadow faint across her throat where Corven’s light had branded her hours ago.

Somewhere beyond the walls, bells tolled again, slower now, the count of endings.

She pressed her fingers to the window until her nails left half-moons on the glass. “You told me I would die in all but one,” she whispered. “But you never said which one this was.”

No answer came. Only the final echo of the hammer.

When she turned back, a scrap of parchment waited on her cot, unsealed, unaddressed. The ink was still damp. Three words only, written in a hand she knew too well.

Do not dream.

The candle flickered out, leaving her with the scent of ash and mint and the sound of the rope swaying in the wind.