I knew myself to be dreaming the moment I saw the tall trees of the Duskwood.

The city stolen from the depths and brought to the surface like a haphazard pile of loot still stood, I saw, but it was no longer the spirited lakeside capital I’d once glimpsed. The labyrinthine streets that snaked through the finest pieces of half a dozen of the greatest cities of the Empire Ever Dark were no longer filled with busy drow, its rough canals nearly free of the strange stone barges that had sailed them. Serolen was not empty, behind the half-empty streets there was still life and energy, but its vigour had been muted.

“Too many went south,” Andronike murmured in my ear, voice deep and smooth as a sleep from which none woke. “We are bleeding dry.”

I breathed out shallowly, the presence of half my patronesses grounding the loose dream into something altogether more solid. My feet touched the air, which was as solid as if I stood on a pane of glass, and my fingers closed against my yew staff. The length of dead wood followed me everywhere, even in my sleep. Andronike stood at my side, draped in the long shimmering silk robes that had once been the mark of the Twilight Sages. Her hair was long and dark, and at her hip rested a silver mask. We stood side by side, my gaze following those silver-blue eyes in contemplating the city below.

“You still hold the outskirts of the forest,” I said.

“We lose more every day,” Komena scorned from my right, voice ringing of steel on steel. “The Gloom will not hold.”

Where the eldest sister wore the mark of her days as a sage, the youngest had kept into apotheosis the marks of her years of war. She wore the ancient ornate armour of the soldiers of the Empire Ever Dark, and at her hip a long blade of obsidian lay sheathed. Her grip on it was tight, her long fingers almost as claws.

“The demon-traps have not served?” I asked.

After the Arsenal, where the mere presence of a demon of Madness had been enough to send the Night into disarray, Sve Noc had understood the dangers in what they might face. Much sweat and blood had been spent finding an answer to the abominations, many weapons being made but none half as useful as the demon-traps. Simple cubes of obsidian, they had been crafted using the memories of the finest enchantments of the Twilight Sages with the sole purpose of entrapping and containing demons. They would only do this for ninety-nine years, but that was quite enough. We would be victors or dead by then.

“After we caught the fifth demon the Dead King ceased using them directly against the Gloom,” Andronike said. “Yet it does not matter. He has found ways to pierce it, built bridges through. It is a war of attrition now, Catherine Foundling.”

And no one won wars of attrition with Death.

“There are no reinforcements to send from the south,” I admitted. “Things have taken a turn for the worse here. We’re gathering all our strength for a strike against Keter but there’s trouble. The dwarves are turning the screws on us.”

I didn’t bother to spell out exactly how, knowing that the feather-light touches against my mind were the Sisters taking up my invitation to have a look.

“Greed is set in the bones of the nerezim,” Komena darkly said.

“We may be able to free a sigil for the assault on the Crown of the Dead,” Andronike said, “but do not expect much of us. Enemies beset us from without and within.”

I grimaced.

“Kurosiv hasn’t been brought to heel?” I asked.

Komena’s anger was like an open flame, warming the world of the dream around us. It was not her who answered, unsurprisingly.

“The leech learned more of power than we ever knew,” Andronike said. “It cannot be destroyed without bringing about the collapse of a great part of the Night.”

Which would be disastrous, after having lost so much of it in Hainaut already. Frankly it was a miracle that the Firstborn were holding off so well against Keter so far. Mind you, part of that had to be sheer numbers and the fact that the Dead King had to march his armies north. In time he’d mobilize strong enough forces to overwhelm Serolen, none of us were deluded enough to believe otherwise. It was just a question of whether or not we could bring the war to a close before that.

“Kurosiv refuses to fight,” Komena harshly said. “The insipid maggot. It will know agony without end for this.”

“Yet we will not strike first and begin a civil war as we fight for survival,” Andronike said, her anger subtler but no less deep. “Its sigil is as a kingdom, now, and worships it as a god equal to us. It would be costly to end them.”

I nodded. I’d taken the same gamble they now balked at, but that made me understand their reluctant all the more. It had been an… expensive thing, settling the East. I forced aside the thought before my fingers could dig too deep into my palm.

“Is there word you would have me pass to the rulers of the south?” I asked.

I fell, not fearfully but into a warm and welcoming darkness. I felt arms wrap around me, great wings flapping around us, and the whispers were spoken into my ear.

“Hurry,” Sve Noc said. “Else you will face the armies of the north as well as the south.”

I slept deeply, after that, and without dreams. It was the best night of rest I’d had since Ater.

“You know,” I said through a mouthful of pastry, “it’s a little screwed up that the best breakfast I ever had was when I was a prisoner in Wolof.”

Vivienne aristocratically wrinkled her nose at me from across the table.

“It’s a little screwed up that the Queen of Callow never learned not to talk with her mouth full,” she retorted.

In the spirit of love and friendship, I crammed another pastry into my mouth and leaned over so my chewing would spill crumbs all over her plate. She forced me into retreat by swatting away wildly at my head with official correspondence from Duchess Kegan, which I magnanimously allowed since I was busy choking. I swallowed it all down with cough, then drank down a mouthful of water. Alamans loved to have flaky little pastries for breakfast, often with fruits and fresh cream, but I usually found it too sweet a fare. These had been good, though, maybe baked without honey. The palace’s cooks had remembered my tastes.

It was characteristically Proceran to provide fine cuisine even in the face of the end times, I mused.

“Now that you’ve returned to pretending to be civilized,” Vivienne tartly said, “can I brief you on yesterday’s reports?”

“I was waiting for you to,” I smugly smiled.

I saw in her eyes that she considered throwing cutlery at me for a moment before reminding herself that she’d probably be seen doing it. She settled for a glare instead before she began speaking.

“The First Prince is behaving unusually,” Vivienne told me.

I cocked an eyebrow.

“How so?”

“She spent nearly all afternoon yesterday cloistered with every prince and princess in the region,” the dark-haired woman said.

“Which is only to be expected, considering her position,” I pointed out. “She needs their support if she’s to keep her hands on the reins of the Proceran armies.”

If it came to popularity with the rank and file, Hanno would likely win. That wasn’t how it worked, though. While he was popular with soldiers and officers, ultimately these were still very much private armies. Those men and women had sworn oaths to serve a crown or a company, and many would balk at following the Sword of Judgement if it meant breaking faith with their prince or captain. If the remaining royals publicly backed the First Prince, it’d turn the tide of opinion. It wasn’t like Cordelia was unpopular with the soldiers. She just hadn’t won the kind of loyalty you could only get from fighting with them in the thick of it.

“The meeting is nothing surprising,” Vivienne agreed. “The amount of time she spent on it though, is.”

I let out a noise of belated understanding. While I’d seen little of it myself – in all humility, these days when I needed to speak with someone they made the time – all reports from the Jacks agreed that Cordelia Hasenbach was an exceedingly organised woman. She measured the hours of her day and doled them out with as much precision as she could. It was out of the ordinary for her to just throw an entire half day at anything.

“You think she’s having a hard time wrangling them?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Vivienne frowned. “She’s got loyalists in that crowd, but it’s true there are those with little love for her and she has much less leverage to keep them in line now.”

“Otto Reitzenberg and the Kingfisher Prince will back her,” I said. “Our people in their army are sure and I’ve no reason to doubt Senior Mage Kilian.”

Vivienne gave me a look as she decided whether or not to make something of that, then wisely decided not to.

“They’re her only two solid supporters,” Vivienne said. “Beatrice of Hainaut has been fighting side-by-side with the White Knight for two years now and has warm relations with the man. It’s the same with the rest of the lakeside crowns: Cleves and Hainaut see him as the best bet for getting back their lands.”

That and the current Princess of Cleves, Carine Langevin, had a history of enmity with Hasenbach. She’d been the Mirror Knight’s lover, part of the plot to backstab the Firstborn after the war, and that’d been before both her father and older brother were buried by the First Prince. For good reasons, mind you, but that knowledge wouldn’t anything to lighten up the graves.

“They’re also the weakest and least influential,” I bluntly said. “They’ve lost their lands, their troops got mauled and they’re reliant on the supplies Hasenbach gives them to keep eating. They’re not going to strike out on their own to back Hanno, not if the actual players are leaning the other way.”

Partisans of the Sword of Judgement or not, they’d side with whoever had troops to pledge to get them their lands back. If that was Cordelia, like her or not they’d kneel and kiss the ring.

“And I am not convinced they will,” Vivienne said. “Rozala Malanza might have a working relationship with her, but there is no fondness there. Alejandro of Segovia will follow wherever Aequitan goes, and between the two of them they command the loyalty of the army that defended Cleves.”

There were other principalities that were still part of the Principate, of course. Arans, Bayeux, Aisne, Cantal and Lange. But those crowns were pretty much weathervanes. All of those princes and princesses were currently in their own lands, preparing their defences when they weren’t already fighting the dead, and their interest in the going-ons in Salia was minimal. Meanwhile further south Iserre, Creusens and Salamans hadn’t officially seceded, but they had stopped listening to any orders coming out of Salia so they were effectively nonentities. No, the power here laid where the armies did: on one side Prince Frederic and Prince Otto, on the other Princess Rozala and Prince Alejandro.

If those four couldn’t agree on supporting the same Warden of the West, this had the potential to get ugly.

“They have to know how fragile the situation is right now,” I said. “I have serious doubts Rozala Malanza would gamble with the fate of Procer just because she hates the First Prince.”

Vivienne grimaced.

“It’s not that I think you’re wrong,” she said, “but that I have no other explanation for why that meeting kept going for so long. They had two meals, Cat. Something was happening there.”

I grunted in assent.

“We’re missing something,” I said. “What has she been up to since?”

“Going through the Salian archives,” Vivienne said. “Or so we’re assuming, the Jacks don’t have eyes inside. She went in there and hasn’t come out.”

I couldn’t actually recall ever seeing Hasenbach read something for pleasure, so I doubted it was to indulge curiosity she’d gone in there. She must be looking for something.

“She take in anyone with her?” I asked.

“The usual servants and also the Forgetful Librarian,” Vivienne said. “The two have developed something of a rapport over the last few years, I’m told.”

Mhm. I’d left the Librarian in Salia for a reason: she had prodigious capacity to read and piece together disparate threads of information that would be but to better use in the Principate’s capital than anywhere else. That and the scope of her talents was narrow, for all that it was deep: there wasn’t much else she was useful for. So Cordelia was definitely looking for something in those archives, not using them as cover for something else she was up to. Or at least not just that.

“I want to know what she’s up to,” I said.

“As would I,” Vivienne said, “though we must be careful. Now is not the time for a diplomatic incident.”

“It’s not the time for timidity either,” I replied. “She’s beginning her move to become Warden and I need to know if the method is a problem. We’ll pull at the thread from both ways, Viv.”

I paused.

“I’ll look into what was discussed that afternoon with the other princes,” I informed her, “but I need you to find out what she’s doing in the Salian archives.”

“Those are very well guarded,” Vivienne reminded me.

I smirked.

“I’m sure they are,” I said. “Why, if only I had a professional thief I could pawn this off to.”

“Former professional thief,” the Princess objected.

“I’ll take your word on it,” I replied with a pleasant smile, “what with you being my royal expert on theft and all.”

Our conversation devolved into name-calling for a bit, but it was eventually settled that she’d handle looking into what the First Prince was looking for in those archives. We were both done eating by then and our tea had cooled, so before we parted ways I heaped one more task onto her plate.

“If Cordelia is making a move,” I said, “then Hanno will be doing the same. I know he’s much harder to follow around, but…”

“I’ll have the Jacks look into it,” Vivienne seriously replied. “I don’t want to be blindsided by him any more than you do.”

Good, I thought. Now I just had to look up an old friend and see what I could get out of him.

It took me a while to find where Prince Frederic Goethal was, though after I did getting to him didn’t actually take all that long.

Like all the royal lines of Procer, the House of Goethal had a luxurious manse in the nicest part of the city that wasn’t the Lineal – which was mostly palaces and old Merovins holdings, and as such could only be entered at the invitation of whoever then ruled Salia. Frederic’s ancestors had been rather tasteful, I decided when I got my first look at the manse. Though it had that inevitable Alamans dip into the ostentatious, the property was essentially a large four-story mansion in stone surrounded by beautiful gardens. Sunny ponds and carefully tended wildflowers were the order of the day, with the touch of luxury being half-hidden sculpted kingfishers made entirely out of precious stones.

They were startlingly lifelike, I found. Also each was probably worth enough to arm a company of legionaries, which I suspected the Principate would much rather have than the pretty birds right now. There were wards in place, old magic deeply anchored in the stone wall around the property, but they were nothing too tricky to get around. The easy way through was to dump all my presence into the Night so I wouldn’t even register to most boundaries, but the top of the wall actually had a nasty little enchantment set that’d burn anyone touching it to I had to slip in through the front door. Counter-intuitive as it might seem, that was actually where most wards tended to be weakest.

You couldn’t have people going through a place all day and expect the boundary to be as firm.

I slipped into the gardens in the wake of a messenger boy leaving through the door, veiled in shadows, and took the time to enjoy the walk through the little coves. It was a restful place, all water and shade under tall weeping willows. Frederic himself was outside, on a small terrasse by the side of the manse. It was beautifully done, all sculpted wood under a roof that was a grid of wood covered in climbing ivy. The sun peeked through in dappled spots and even the slightest wind had the leaves shivering. The Prince of Brus was not seated at the glass dining table but instead in a long seat by the edge of the terrasse, overlooking the gardens.

There was a small wooden table at his side, redwood, and on it there were three things: a thick sheaf of parchments, a glass and an open bottle of brandy. To my surprise, as I slipped up the stairs and got a better look at him I found that he’d just knocked back a glass and was already pouring himself another. The papers lay abandoned as he pushed back his long blond curls, hand coming to rest on his forehead. He was just as handsome as he had been in the Arsenal, but he looked tired. Tired and haggard. I quietly limped my way behind him, hand on my staff, and leaned forward to speak into his ear just before dropping the veil of Night.

“Rough day?”

Sadly, he didn’t drop the glass. He almost choked on the brandy he’d been sipping, though, which I took as sufficient entertainment. Prince Frederic coughed, then half-turned to offer me a woeful look.

“Was that entirely necessary?” he asked.

“Nah,” I grinned, drawing back. “Just keeping you on your toes.”

I limped my way around his seat, at which point Alamans manners kicked in and he realized I did not have a seat laid out for me. The blond prince rose without batting an eye and insisted I take his seat, which was an even split of charming and annoying. Instead I nudged him back into the chair with the tip of my staff and stole his glass of brandy.

“I’ll take my tribute differently,” I said before taking a sip.

If my voice had come out a little flirtier than usual, well, there were no witnesses. He was graceful enough in defeat not to argue the point any further.

“It would be as heresy to deny any whim of yours,” Prince Frederic easily replied, a smile tugging at his lips. “You are ever welcome into my home, Queen Catherine.”

Last time he’d called me that he’d been on his back and rather dishevelled, so I probably enjoyed it a little more than I should. I sipped at my drink again. Best not to get too distracted, I reminded myself. I had come for a reason.

“Don’t make promises too quickly,” I warned, wagging a finger. “I didn’t come here just to have a look at your pretty curls, Goethal.”

“Sweet flattery by a black-cloaked woman come in secrecy,” Frederic grinned. “I do believe you might be the very sort of woman my uncle warned me about, my queen.”

I grinned back, though in the back of my mind I did not he’d said his uncle. Not his father or mother. I’d known him not to be the son of the last Prince of Brus but instead his nephew, but the exact circumstances that’d seen him rise to the crown remained shrouded. He’d been the formal heir to his uncle even before Cordelia forcefully put him on the throne after smashing through Brus during the Great War, though, which smelled of an interested tale. Maybe another day.

“I was Arch-heretic of the East for a bit,” I conceded.

He laughed.

“Knowing my uncle, he would have minded that less than your being Callowan,” Frederic ruefully admitted. “He was an admirable man in some ways, but he did have… arrested ideas.”

An opportunity to moved the conversation towards what I’d actually come here for, and smoothly offered enough that I had no doubt he’d done it on purpose. I had a lot of unflattering things to say about Alamans highborn, but I did have to conceded that they exquisitely trained in certain regards.

“Lots of those going around, these days,” I nonchalantly said. “Makes a girl curious.”

I sipped at my drink. Blue eyes considered me. Frederic Goethal had never been one of the greats of the Highest Assembly, but he’d been far from inept at the Ebb and Flow. He was a fair hand at games far subtler than those I played.

“Curiosity is no sin, I would think,” the Kingfisher Prince said. “Especially between friends.”

“Good,” I smiled. “Because I have been wondering, you see, at what might have kept so many of my… friends busy for half a day in a room where no others were allowed to enter.”

The fair-haired man looked faintly amused.

“Princess Rozala,” he said, “believed you’d wait at least two days before approaching one of us. The First Prince replied she could not be certain she would not be visited that very night.”

“Had other irons in the fire,” I said. “Went to have a look at the latest prince of Procer.”

A pause.

“You know, the one in white.”

“Hanno of Arwad,” Frederic said, “is a good man. One of the pillars keeping this war from coming down on all our heads.”

But not, I read between the lines, someone the Kingfisher Prince wanted to follow as Warden of the West. Considering the Prince of Brus had been one of Cordelia’s most ardent partisans since the Great War, I was less than surprised.

“Takes more than a pillar to keep the roof up,” I agreed. “Thing is, we’re all riding the Principate these days. It goes, so do our chance. So when that many crowned heads disappear for an afternoon, questions need to be asked.”

“The First Prince availed us of the situation and shared her intentions for the future of the Principate,” Frederic candidly told me. “Though her claim on the Name of Warden of the West was discussed, it was not the heart of the matter.”

My eye narrowed. I’d used that trick before: speaking the truth, but just the right angle of it. Something was being left out. They want to keep something from me, I thought. Which meant something in that room had been agreed to that I’d object to. I sipped at the brandy, considering how best to wheedle this out of him. Concern, I decided. That it was a genuine concern would make it all the sharper a tool.

“I need to know if there’s going to be a split in what’s left the Highest Assembly,” I bluntly said. “We can’t afford the three largest Proceran armies left being at each other’s throats.”

He opened his mouth, but I raised my hand to silence him.

“This isn’t me being nosy, Frederic,” I said. “I’ve been approached by others who are worried about this mess blowing up in all our faces, and it’s not going to help when your people disappear for half a day and I have no goddamned idea what was being discussed.”

Secretary Nestor had been more concerned by the potential blowout of a confrontation between Hanno and Cordelia, but I wasn’t even stretching the truth all that much: we were all concerned about the Principate. We were well past its breaking point and it was not the kind of realm that would make for a peaceful corpse. Grimacing, the fair-haired prince conceded the point with a bob of his head.

“Your unease is understandable,” Frederic said. “There is, however, only so much I can say without breaking confidence.”

I eyed him for a long moment, then nodded. He wasn’t the kind of man who bent his morals even when it might be convenient, which I tended to admire more than not. There was only so far he could be pushed. I let him choose his words carefully.

“Accord was reached,” the Kingfisher Prince finally said. “We are of one mind.”

I did not hide my surprise.

“My people weren’t sure Malanza would stick with you,” I admitted.

He looked, I thought, ruefully amused.

“Princess Rozala is respected among her peers for good reason,” Prince Frederic said.

I hummed.

“So I can expect a common public front?” I asked.

He nodded decisively.

“As I said, accord was reached,” the fair-haired man said. “The main concern of the talks was how Procer must be forged going forward, which is not something I can share with a foreign crown – however charming the head on which it lies.”

Well, I did like the occasional bit of flattery. Especially when it was matched with the kind of genuine attraction I found in his gaze when he looked at me. That said, I was not so easy to distract. He was talking of Procer being reformed, but it could not have been a small sort of reform if it’d swallowed up an afternoon of the most powerful people left in the Principate. And it did nothing to narrow down what it was that Cordelia was trying to find in the archives. Some kind of precedent for the Highest Assembly? She shouldn’t need one, if she had the right people behind her. A simple vote would get anything she needed done.

So what was it that’d been decided in this room and they were keeping from everyone else?

Yet I had pushed Frederic, I thought, about as far as I could. If I tried to get more out of him he’d start pushing back, or more likely simply change the subject. Mhm, I’d not gotten as much as I wanted out of this conversation but I had gotten enough. The First Prince wasn’t about to lose her seat and key royals of Procer were willing to back her openly. That’d put Hanno on the backfoot, considering how much of his strength as a claimant came from popular support. It’s also not what she’s actually up to, I thought. Hasenbach would not be satisfied with just cutting the grass under his feet. She’d want to go on the offensive, push her claim.

I still had no idea how she’d do that, but it wasn’t here I’d find out. Time to make my exit, then, I figured. I sipped at the cup again, noting a third of it was still full. He must have filled it nearly to the brim when he’d poured, which seemed unlike Frederic.

“Dare I ask what kind of reading was enough to make you drink brandy like water?” I asked, gesturing towards the papers.

He looked startled.

“You have not heard, then,” Prince Frederic slowly said.

I cocked my head to the side.

“Heard what?”

“I only just got word from the First Prince,” he said. “Segovia has fallen.”

My fingers tightened.

“How bad?” I quietly asked.

“They had enough priests gathered in the capital to hold back the demons and evacuate,” the Kingfisher Prince said, “but this morning the army lost a pitched battles in the northern plains near Leganz. It was disaster: they were encircled, then slaughtered and raised to the last man.”

Meaning the principality was effectively finished. Even more worrying was that a great many of the northern refugees – more than half of the Lycaonese that’d escaped the death of their lands – had been sent there.

“The refugees?”

“Fleeing further east, towards Creusens,” he said. “They mean to reach Lake Artoise and take barges further south.”

I let out a small breath. Cordelia’s entire people were not to be ground to dust yet, then. Thank the Gods. Still, Segovia. Fuck. That was one principality away from the northern border of the Dominion. The Hidden Horror was moving south even quicker than we’d thought.

“We’re running out of time,” I murmured.

The Kingfisher Prince sadly smiled.

“We already have, Catherine,” Frederic said. “Now we can only hope that victory will buy us back a dawn.”