ELARA POV
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the ceiling.
Black stone. Familiar by now. The East Tower ceiling I'd been staring at for days.
The second thing I saw was my arm.
I sat up so fast the room spun. I grabbed my left wrist with my right hand and held it up in the light coming through the window and just … stared at it.
Black veins. Running from my palm all the way up to my elbow. Thin lines, dark as ink, branching under my skin like cracks in glass. And they were moving. Slow. Shifting. Like something was flowing through them that wasn't blood.
"What…" I couldn't finish it. Just sat there holding my own arm and breathing.
I pressed a finger against one of the lines. It didn't hurt. It didn't feel like anything wrong from the inside. But it was there. Visibly, undeniably there. Moving.
I pulled my sleeve down fast when I heard the knock at the door.
"Come in," I said. My voice came out scratchy.
The door opened and a girl came in with a breakfast tray. Young. Maybe my age. Brown hair, eyes down, moving quick and efficient like someone who'd been trained to take up as little space as possible.
She set the tray on the table by the window. Turned to go.
"Wait," I said. "What's your name?"
She stopped. Looked at me for the first time and then immediately looked back at the floor. "Mira."
"Mira. Okay." I kept my voice easy. Normal. "I'm Elara."
"I know who you are." She said it quiet. Not rude. Just fact.
"Can I ask you something?"
She looked like she wanted to say no. She didn't. "Okay."
"Is it normal … after the ritual … for there to be. Physical changes. On the body."
Mira's eyes came up to mine then. Just for a second. Something moved in them … not quite fear, closer to the face people make when they know something they've been told not to say.
"I wouldn't know about that," she said.
"Right." I smiled at her. She didn't smile back. "Thanks for breakfast."
She left faster than she came in.
I sat with the tray in front of me and didn't eat anything. Just pulled my sleeve back up and looked at the veins again. Still there. Still moving. They'd reached a little further up my arm than before … past the elbow now, creeping toward my shoulder slow and steady like they had somewhere to be.
I needed to find Silas.
Except Silas, apparently, didn't want to be found.
I spent the better part of the morning trying. His rooms were in the west wing … off limits, obviously, because everything useful was off limits … but I went to every other place a person in this palace might be. The main hall. The upper corridor. The strange glass room on the fourth floor that I'd found by accident the day before and still didn't understand the purpose of.
No Silas.
But I found something else.
Every staff member I passed went quiet when they saw me. Not the normal quiet of people who didn't know what to say to the strange new girl living in the east tower. Different. One woman actually pressed herself against the wall to let me by, her eyes wide, her hands gripped together at her waist. A man carrying linens turned a full corner to avoid walking toward me.
I stopped in the middle of a corridor and just watched two people on the other end of it notice me and change direction entirely.
What did they know that I didn't.
I found the library by following the smell of old paper down a staircase I hadn't tried yet. It was on the second level … huge, way bigger than the room I'd been given, shelves going all the way up to the ceiling with a ladder on a rail to reach the top ones. The kind of library that looked like it had been collecting books for a few hundred years and wasn't planning to stop.
I wasn't looking for anything specific. I just needed somewhere quiet and this was quiet.
I walked the shelves slowly. Running my fingers along the spines. Most of them were in languages I couldn't read. Some of them weren't in any language I recognized at all … symbols and marks that looked more like the carvings on the ritual room walls than anything written.
I almost missed it.
There was a section at the far end, tucked behind a shelf that jutted out at an angle … half hidden, like someone had put that shelf there on purpose. The books there were older than the rest. Thinner. Some of them falling apart at the spines.
I almost walked past.
But one of them had gold on the cover. Not a title. Not a design. Just a mark. Thin lines. And it looked … it looked like the marks on my arm.
I pulled it off the shelf.
The cover was dark leather, soft with age, and when I opened it the pages were that deep yellow that meant seriously old. The writing inside was tiny and cramped and I couldn't read most of it.
But I found my name.
That's the thing. I wasn't looking for it. I wasn't expecting it. I turned to a page somewhere in the middle of the book and there it was … Elara. Right there. In writing that looked like it had been on that page for a hundred years at least.
My hands went cold.
I turned the page slower this time. Looking. Finding more. My name came up four times on the next two pages. And underneath it … underneath all of it … a word I did know.
Surrogate.
And then a sentence. Just one. Sitting at the bottom of a page like someone had put it there to make sure whoever found it understood the most important part.
The surrogate must die for the heir to live.
I read it three times.
Then I read it again because maybe I'd misread it. Maybe my brain was filling in words that weren't there. Maybe the translation was off and it actually meant something else entirely, something less like a death sentence and more like … anything else.
But it said what it said.
The surrogate must die for the heir to live.
I stood in the hidden corner of the library with an old book in my shaking hands and I tried very hard not to fall apart. I couldn't afford to fall apart right now. Falling apart was for later, for when I was back in my room with the door locked. Right now I needed to think.
They knew. Someone knew. The Council, the High Matriarch, Julian with his saint smile and his tracker … they knew what this ritual meant. They knew what would happen to me and they put me here anyway. Smiled at me and handed me a vial of blood-ink and let me sign.
And Silas.
Did Silas know.
The thought sat in my chest like something sharp.
I closed the book. Looked around the corner of the shelf to make sure the library was still empty. It was. I moved fast … back through the shelves, back toward the section where the normal books lived, and I pushed the old book behind two larger ones on a shelf near the middle of the room. Hidden. Not perfectly, but enough. Nobody was going to find it by accident.
I stepped back.
The door to the library slammed open.
I spun around.
Silas stood in the doorway. He wasn't looking at me … not at my face, not right away. His eyes were somewhere around my middle and his expression was doing something I hadn't seen from him before. Not cold. Not hard. Something that looked almost like he'd been hit.
"You…" He stopped. His nostrils flared. He was scenting the air. "You're…"
"I was just looking for a book," I said. Fast. "That's allowed, right? The library wasn't on the list of places…"
"You're pregnant." He said it like the words didn't fit in his mouth right. Like he was hearing them for the first time even though he'd been the one to start the ritual. He finally looked at my face. "The ritual worked. Last night it … you are actually…"
"Is that a problem?" My voice came out steadier than I felt. Impressive, honestly.
He stared at me.
His jaw moved. Something shifted behind his eyes … complicated and fast, too many things at once for me to catch any single one of them. He took a step into the library and I took a step back without deciding to and we both noticed and both stopped.
"The veins," he said. Quieter now. "On your arms. They started this morning?"
I pulled my sleeve up without answering. Let him see.
He looked at them for a long moment. The moving lines. The dark branching under my skin.
He didn't look surprised.
That told me everything.
"You knew," I said. "You knew this would happen."
He didn't answer.
Which was also an answer.