Chapter 15: The Last Entry
~ The Capital. Merchant's Quarter. Day Ten. ~
[PLAYER 1 — SERAPHINA VON ASTRA]
[DAYS REMAINING: 21]
[RITE IN: 2 DAYS]
[CURRENT STATUS: READING]
The package arrived before breakfast.
It came in a wooden box the size of a ledger, wrapped in plain brown paper and sealed with a single drop of white wax. No crest. No letter. Just the box, handed to Berman by a Temple acolyte who had vanished before the door closed.
Cassian was in the parlor when I came down. He had been sleeping in the room next to mine since the attack on Emily, not in my bed, nothing so improper, but close enough that I could hear him moving in the night. He was standing by the window with a cup of tea in his hand, watching the street below, and he turned when he heard my step on the stair.
His eyes went straight to the box.
"From her," he said. It wasn't a question.
"From her."
"Open it here. Where I can see."
I set the box on the table between us and broke the seal. The lid came off with a soft, dusty sigh, and inside, wrapped in a square of faded velvet, was a book.
It was small. Bound in dark green leather, worn smooth at the corners, with a brass clasp that had tarnished with age. There was no title on the cover. Just a single letter, pressed into the leather in gold that had long since dulled.
S.
I opened it.
The handwriting was looping and elegant and slightly hurried, as if the writer had been taught penmanship by a tutor who despaired of her. The first page was dated three years ago. The ink was faded to brown.
I am told that a young lady of my station should keep a journal, the first entry read. I am told it will help me reflect on my conduct and improve my character. I am also told that if I do not write in it, my governess will tell my father, and my father will be displeased. So I am writing in it. There. It is written. I hope everyone is satisfied.
I laughed. I couldn't help it. It was such a teenage thing to write ,petulant and sarcastic and desperate to seem above it all.
Cassian set down his tea and came to stand behind my shoulder. "That's her?"
"That's her." I turned the page. "That's the girl they want to execute."
We read it together, in the grey morning light, over tea neither of us touched.
The first year of entries was exactly what Isabella had promised. Seraphina von Astra was petty, bored, and cruel in the small, casual way of a girl who had never been told no. She wrote about the maids she had dismissed for looking at her wrong. She wrote about the court ladies she had humiliated at parties. She wrote about her father, who she feared and despised in equal measure, and her mother, who had died when she was young, and the tutor who had taught her to read and who had been sent away when Seraphina complained about him.
She was not a good person. Reading those words, in that hand, I felt something cold settle in my stomach.
This is who I'm defending, I thought. This is the innocent woman.
I turned another page.
The entries changed in the second year.
Something is wrong with Isabella, Seraphina wrote. I cannot explain it. She is perfect. Everyone says so. She heals the sick and blesses the harvests and weeps at the right moments. But when she looks at me, I feel as though I am being measured.
She knows things she shouldn't know. Last week she told my father that the eastern orchard would fail before the frost came. She said she had dreamed it. And then the orchard failed. Father thinks she is a saint. I think she is something else.
Cassian leaned closer. He was reading faster than me now, his eyes moving down the page.
I turned the page.
I tried to tell Father. He said I was jealous. He said I was making trouble because I was no longer the center of attention. He said if I continued to speak against the Saintess, he would send me to a convent in the south where I would have nothing to do but pray and think about my behavior.
I stopped telling Father after that.
I turned the page.
Isabella came to my chambers last night. She sat on the edge of my bed and told me she forgave me. She said she knew I had been spreading lies about her, and she wanted me to know that she held no anger in her heart. She said it so sweetly. And then she said, very quietly, that if I continued to spread lies, the Light would find a way to silence me.
I have not slept since.
I looked up. Cassian was staring at the page.
"She was afraid of her," he said. "The girl in this diary. She was afraid of Isabella."
"She was terrified." I turned another page. "And nobody believed her."
The entries in the third year were different. They were shorter. Sharper. Written in a hand that had stopped being hurried and started being careful, as if the writer had learned that her words might be read by someone else.
I have begun to keep a record. If something happens to me, this record will be found. I have hidden the first copy in the garden, beneath the third rosebush, and the second copy here in this book. I will write everything. Every dream Isabella claims to have had. Every coin that moved through her hands. Every person she has silenced.
I am not a good person. I know this. I have been cruel and idle and vain. But I am not a murderer, and I will not let her make me one.
I turned the page.
I have found proof. The Southern Grain Merchants. The bribes to the Temple. The forged miracle in the Black Bog. I have names, dates, amounts. I have enough to bring her down.
I will confront her tomorrow night, at the Midsummer Banquet. I will show her what I have, and I will give her a choice. She can step down quietly, or she can face the court. I know she will not step down. But I must give her the choice. Otherwise I am no better than she is.
Tomorrow, I will need to be careful. I will need to be...
The entry ended.
There was no period. No closing sentence. The last word was half-finished, the stroke trailing off the page as if the pen had been pulled from her hand.
I sat very still.
"She was going to expose her," I said. "The night of the banquet. That's what she was doing in the East Wing. She wasn't poisoning Isabella. She was confronting her."
Cassian's voice was low. "And Isabella knew she was coming."
"Because Seraphina told her." I turned the page, and then the next, and then the next. The rest of the book was blank. "She gave her the choice. She gave Isabella a chance to step down. And Isabella poisoned herself , just enough to make it look like an attempt on her life , and had Seraphina dragged out of the East Wing before she could say a word."
The parlor was silent. Outside, the capital was waking up , carts in the street, a merchant shouting, a bell ringing somewhere in the Temple. It all felt very far away.
Then I turned back to the first page and looked at it again.
Something was wrong.
I couldn't name it at first. The handwriting was the same throughout , the same loop, the same slant, the same pressure on the pen. The ink was faded in exactly the way old ink fades. The pages were worn at the corners in exactly the way pages wear when a book has been carried in a pocket.
But the first entry was dated three years ago. And the ink on the first page was darker than the ink on the last page.
I turned back to the middle. The entries from a year ago were lighter than the entries from two years ago. And the entries from two years ago were lighter than the entries from three years ago.
That was backwards. Ink faded with age. A three-year-old entry should be lighter than a one-year-old entry. Not darker.
I closed the book.
"Cassian," I said slowly. "How long does it take for ink to fade in this climate?"
He frowned. "Years. Why?"
"Because this diary was written all at once." I held it up. "The ink on the first page is darker than the ink on the last. Whoever wrote this started at the beginning and worked their way through. Over a few days. Maybe a week. And then they aged the paper artificially to make it look old."
Cassian's expression changed. "It's a forgery."
"It's a very good forgery." I flipped through the pages again, my mind racing. "The details are right. The names are right. The dates are right. Whoever wrote this knew Seraphina's life well enough to fake her diary. But they made one mistake. They wrote it too fast, and they aged it too evenly, and they didn't know that ink fades from the outside in."
I set the book down on the table.
"Isabella didn't send me this to help me," I said. "She sent me this to trap me. If I use this diary at the Rite, she'll have a scholar ready to prove it's a forgery. She'll have the real diary , or something like it and she'll show the court that I tried to fabricate evidence. She'll destroy my credibility in front of the entire Empire."
Cassian's voice was quiet. "Then why does it feel true?"
I looked at him.
"Because it is true," I said. "Or most of it is. The part about Isabella being dangerous, about Seraphina being afraid of her that's real. I can feel it. But the diary is a fake. Isabella took the truth and wrapped it in a lie."
I sat back in the chair.
"So what do I do?" I said. "If I use it, I lose. If I don't use it, I have nothing."
Cassian looked at me for a long moment.
"Then we find the real one," he said.
I looked up.
"The diary says Seraphina hid a copy in the garden. Beneath the third rosebush." Cassian's eyes were steady. "If she was telling the truth about that ,and she might have been, even in a forged diary , then there's a real copy somewhere. A real record. In Seraphina's own hand. And it will have the one thing this forgery doesn't have."
"What's that?"
"The truth about the night she died."
I stared at him.
"Cassian," I said slowly, "the banquet was three months ago. The garden has been replanted twice since then. The third rosebush is probably gone."
"Probably," he said. "But we won't know until we look."
I looked at the diary on the table. The forged diary. The trap that Isabella had built for me, carefully, over weeks, knowing exactly what I would do when I read it.
And then I looked at Cassian.
"Get Berman," I said. "We're going to the Astra estate."
---
The Astra estate was empty.
Duke Astra had been summoned to the capital for the Rite, and the house had been closed for the season. The gates were locked, the windows shuttered, and the garden , the garden that Seraphina had written about in her diary , was overgrown and wild.
Cassian's scouts had found a way in through the servant's entrance. We walked through the dark corridors with a single lantern, past covered furniture and dusty portraits, until we reached the garden door.
The garden was a ruin. The rosebushes had grown into a thicket, tangled and thorny and taller than my head. The third rosebush , if it still existed , was somewhere in the middle of it.
"Wait here," Cassian said. He drew his sword and stepped into the thicket.
I waited. The lantern flickered. Somewhere in the house, a shutter banged against a wall.
Then Cassian's voice came back through the thorns.
"Seraphina."
I pushed through the rosebush. He was standing in a small clearing, his sword in one hand and something else in the other.
It was a small tin box, rusted at the edges, half-buried in the dirt beneath the third rosebush.
He handed it to me.
I opened it.
Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a second diary. It was identical to the first ,dark green leather, brass clasp, the letter S pressed into the cover. But this one was real. I could feel it. The pages were warped from years of damp, the leather was cracked, and when I opened it, the ink on the first page was lighter than the ink on the last.
I turned to the final entry.
The handwriting was the same as the forged diary. But the words were different.
I have given her the chance to step down. She has refused. Tomorrow, I will expose her at the banquet. I have asked Father's archivist to bring the mirror form. Two parties, one light. Let the Light show which of us is lying.
If I do not survive tomorrow, this is my final record. I am not a good person. But I am not a murderer. And I will not let her make me one.
— Seraphina von Astra
I closed the book.
"It's real," I said.
Cassian looked at me. "Does it change anything?"
I looked at the diary in my hands. The real one. The one that had been buried under a rosebush for three months, waiting for someone to find it.
"Yes," I said. "It changes everything. Because now I don't have to prove Seraphina was innocent. I have to prove that Isabella knew she was innocent. And she killed her anyway."
I tucked the diary into my pocket.
"And I know exactly how to do it."
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: AUTHENTIC EVIDENCE ACQUIRED — SERAPHINA'S DIARY]
[FORGERY DETECTED — TEMPLE-SUPPLIED COPY]
[WARNING: OPPOSITION IS EXPECTING YOU TO USE THE FORGERY]
[RITE IN: 2 DAYS]
[CURRENT STATUS: ARMED]