The Ravenshade Estate was a house of whispers.
For as long as Zara could remember, the hallways had been suffocated by a heavy, velvet silence. The servants walked on tiptoes. Her father, Rowan, spoke in low, apologetic tones. The curtains were rarely fully drawn, leaving the rooms in a perpetual, dusty twilight.
It was a mausoleum built for the living, centered around the room at the end of the East Wing. The room where the Sleeping Prince lay.
Zara sat on the floor of the library, her back pressed against the mahogany shelves. A heavy book of history lay open on her lap, but she wasn't reading. She was listening.
Tonight, the silence had broken.
Earlier, there had been shouting. Then weeping. Then the frantic footsteps of the physician running up the stairs. The house felt like a beast that had suddenly woken up, its heart beating against the floorboards.
He is awake.
Zara pulled her knees to her chest. She was thirteen years old, small for her age, with hair the color of roasted chestnuts and eyes that were too big for her face. She remembered Kael only as a concept, a ghost story told by the maids. "Young Master Kael was brilliant," they would say. "He was going to be a Great Knight."
But the Kael she knew was the boy in the bed. She had sneaked into his room many times over the years. She would sit by his side and look at his pale, translucent skin. He looked like a porcelain doll that would shatter if you spoke too loudly. He was fragile. Broken.
She was terrified for him. The world outside these walls was sharp and cruel—her father's tired eyes told her that much. How could a porcelain boy survive in it?
Thump.
A sound from outside.
Zara froze. It came from the courtyard. It was rhythmic. A sharp exhale of breath, followed by a swish that cut through the drone of the falling rain.
Curiosity, that dangerous thing, uncoiled in her stomach.
She stood up, leaving the book on the floor. She crept out of the library, her woolen socks silent on the cold stone. She moved through the darkened corridors like a shadow, a skill she had perfected to avoid the pitying looks of the staff.
She reached the window that overlooked the inner training yard. The glass was cold against her forehead as she peered into the gloom.
The rain had thinned to a drizzle, misting around the mana-lamps that lined the garden.
There was someone down there.
Zara squinted. It wasn't a guard. The guards wore heavy armor and moved with the clanking clumsiness of metal. This figure was slender, wearing only loose trousers and a thin white shirt that clung to his frame, soaked through with rain.
It was him.
Zara's breath hitched. Kael.
He shouldn't be out of bed. The doctor said his muscles were atrophied. He should be weak. He should be trembling.
But the figure in the courtyard was not trembling.
Kael stood in the center of the wet stone, holding a wooden practice sword he must have taken from the rack. His feet were planted wide, rooting him to the ground. His eyes were closed.
Then, he moved.
It wasn't a stumble. It was an explosion.
Kael stepped forward, the wooden blade slashing through the air with a speed that blurred in the dim light. Water droplets flew from the wood in a perfect arc.
Swish. Snap.
He pivoted. A backhand strike. His footwork was silent, gliding over the wet stones as if he weighed nothing.
Zara pressed her hand over her mouth. She didn't know much about fighting, but she had watched the house guards train. They grunted. They heaved. They looked like they were fighting the air itself.
Kael looked like he was dancing.
He flowed from one stance to another, a seamless transition of violence. High guard. Thrust. Parry. Low sweep. It was mechanical perfection. It was terrifying.
How? He had been asleep for seven years. His legs should be jelly. His lungs should be burning.
But Kael's face, illuminated by a flash of distant lightning, was devoid of pain. It was a mask of absolute, chilling concentration. His eyes were open now, staring at an invisible enemy. They weren't the eyes of a confused invalid. They were the eyes of a wolf that had just found the gate to the sheep pen left open.
He executed a final move—a vertical slash that stopped an inch from the ground. The control was absolute. He held the pose, steam rising from his shoulders in the cool night air.
Zara felt a shiver run down her spine that had nothing to do with the cold.
She had thought he was glass. She had thought she would need to protect him, to read to him, to help him hold a spoon.
She was wrong.
The boy down there wasn't glass. He was iron that had been forging in the dark for seven years.
Suddenly, Kael's head snapped up.
He looked directly at the window. Directly at her.
Zara gasped and ducked below the sill, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. She waited, trembling, expecting him to call out. Expecting him to sound angry, or confused.
But there was only silence. The heavy, suffocating silence of the Ravenshade estate, wrapping around her once again.
After a long minute, she heard the soft click of the wooden sword being placed back on the rack, and the quiet footsteps retreating toward the East Wing.
Zara stayed crouched on the floor for a long time. She realized then that the ghost story was true. The Sleeping Prince had woken up.
But the maids were wrong about one thing. He wasn't a Knight.
Knights were loud. Knights were shiny.
The brother she just saw moved like something else entirely. Something much more dangerous.