The king’s winter banquet gleamed like a painting: warm golden light on crystal goblets, long tables draped in red silk, silver platters spilling with roast pheasant and wild apples, and firelight dancing across polished marble. But Madeline knew better. She had copied enough court records to know what glimmered here was not gold — it was illusion.

  And illusion was always a kind of lie.

  She stood at the edge of the feast, cloaked in the garb of a court scribe: ink-stained fingers, plain gray robes, a single ribbon pinned to her collar to mark her station. She was invisible to most of the nobles — seen but not regarded — and she preferred it that way. Especially tonight.

  The king was hosting the banquet in honor of the autumn’s victories in the northern provinces. The war was “won,” the rebellion “quelled,” and peace “secured,” or so the bards sang. But Madeline had seen the casualty ledgers. Peace had come, yes — but it had bled into the ground to get here.

  She wasn’t here for the king’s empty words or the nobles’ hollow praise. She was listening. Watching. Waiting.

  The name from Hollowby — Saldrith — had surfaced again. Not in any official record, of course. But in whispers. In fragments. It was being passed like a secret at court, spoken behind fans and over wine. Some called it a curse. Some, a god. One drunken baron had simply called it “a riddle in a crown of thorns.”

  And then there was the word she heard tonight — low, slipped between a pair of merchants’ wives in the shadow of a marble column:

  “The Hollow Crown returns. The Red Moon is the sign.”

  Madeline turned, but they were gone, trailing silk and laughter down the hall.

  She followed slowly.

  The banquet spilled into the King’s Garden, a walled courtyard of frost-touched roses and black iron statues. Lanterns glowed in amber clusters, and low music wound between the hedges like smoke. The nobles here had peeled off their masks — some figurative, some literal — and drank more freely.

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  That’s when she saw her.

  Lady Amara Veylin, duchess of Halethorne and one of the king’s most trusted allies. She stood alone beside a fountain, her hands clasped at her waist, her expression distant. Madeline had heard rumors about her — her sudden rise in court, her ties to obscure cultic lineages, her obsession with relics from the Sable Age.

  Madeline approached, quiet as shadow.

  “My lady,” she said softly.

  Amara turned. Her eyes — pale silver, like a wolf’s — caught the lantern light strangely. “Scribe,” she said, not unkindly. “I don’t recall requesting a record.”

  “I don’t write for you,” Madeline said. “I write for the crown.”

  “Which one?” Amara asked. The corners of her lips turned upward — not quite a smile. “The golden, or the hollow?”

  Madeline’s pulse quickened. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Don’t play the innocent,” Amara said, taking a step closer. Her perfume smelled of crushed lilies and something fainter — old ink, maybe, or soot. “You’ve been in the sealed wing of the archives. I can smell the dust on you still.”

  Madeline said nothing.

  Amara leaned close. “Tell me, did you see the runes? Do they burn when you close your eyes?”

  Madeline swallowed. “What do you know about Hollowby?”

  Amara tilted her head. “Nothing more than I dreamed. And in my dreams, the crown bleeds, and the seal groans, and the dead walk with smiles.”

  She turned, then, her silk cloak whispering behind her like a sigh. “You shouldn’t be here, Madeline. You’re too clever. And clever things break.”

  She vanished into the garden crowd.

  Madeline stood frozen by the fountain, heart hammering.

  She wanted to run. To go back to the archives and bury herself in old tomes. To forget. But something in Amara’s voice — that singsong certainty, that awful knowing — struck too close to the whispers she’d heard in the chapel ruins.

  She made her way quickly to the outer court, past the musicians, past the drinking nobles.

  And then — a scream.

  Madeline turned just in time to see a servant staggering from the rose-hedge path, her dress torn, her face pale as snow.

  “She’s dead!” the girl shrieked. “The lady—! She’s—!”

  Guards rushed past. Madeline followed.

  They found Lady Amara Veylin collapsed at the foot of the obsidian statue of King Thane the Martyr. Her lips were blue. Her eyes wide. A sigil — a crown with broken spikes — had been scorched into her throat.

  There was no fire.

  There was no wound.

  And yet her last breath had seared something into the stone itself.

  Madeline stared at it, cold settling into her bones. The same rune. Again.

  One of the guards leaned close to inspect the mark and stepped back, cursing. “It’s still warm.”

  Madeline turned away.

  She already knew what word would be found on Amara’s tongue — if it was still there.