Morning came without sunlight.
That was the first thing Nyra noticed when she opened her eyes. The curtains were still drawn but the edges of them held no warmth, no gold bleeding through. Just a flat, colourless grey that suggested the sun existed somewhere above the clouds but had decided the castle didn't deserve it.
She was already dressed before the knock came.
Three quiet taps. Sera's knock — she could tell already, something in the hesitation of it.
"They're ready for you," Sera said through the door.
Nyra opened it. "All of us?"
Sera nodded, eyes down. She was holding a small bundle of dark fabric. "You're to wear this."
Nyra took it.
A dress. Simple, long, the colour of deep charcoal. No ornamentation. No softness to it.
Functional. Like something you dressed a thing in, not a person.
She put it on anyway.
The hall they were brought to was long and deliberately intimidating.
Nyra recognized the design of it immediately — the high ceilings, the distance between the entrance and the far end, the way the light was arranged so that whoever stood at the front of the room was always looking slightly down at whoever entered. She had never been in a room like this before, but she understood what it was built to do.
Make you feel small.
She kept her chin level.
The four of them stood in a line. Maret beside her, then the two older girls — she had learned their names in the corridor. Deva and Cass. Deva was the one who had spoken in the cart. Cass hadn't said a word since the square.
The silver-haired woman stood to the side, ledger closed now, hands folded.
At the far end of the hall, an elevated platform. A long dark table. Several figures seated behind it — advisors, nobles, something of that kind. Men and women in dark formal dress, faces arranged in that particular expression of people who held power and were entirely comfortable with it.
Nyra studied each of them quickly.
None of them were him.
She knew that without being told.
The energy in the room was formal and cold but not afraid. And she had already understood, from everything she'd heard and everything she'd felt since arriving, that when the Devil King was present — the room knew it.
An older man at the center of the table spoke.
"Step forward as your name is called."
He had a thin voice. The kind that had never needed to be raised because there had always been people to do the raising for him.
"Deva Sorn."
Deva stepped forward. Her jaw was set, her hands perfectly still at her sides. She was trying to look unbothered and mostly succeeding.
The figures at the table observed her. Murmured quietly among themselves.
Made notes.
Nyra watched the process with a kind of grim focus.
This is assessment. They're looking for something specific. Strength? Bloodline? Something else?
"Cass Miren."
Cass walked forward. Her stillness wasn't controlled like Deva's — it was the stillness of someone who had gone somewhere else inside their head. Nyra recognized it. It was a survival mechanism. Sometimes the only way to get through something was to not entirely be there for it.
"Maret Ollen."
Maret went. Her hands shook slightly. She pressed them flat against her thighs to stop it.
The table watched.
One of the men leaned forward, said something low to the woman beside him, and she wrote something down.
Then—
"Nyra Vale."
She walked forward.
The room shifted.
It was subtle — not dramatic, not the sudden silence of a story — just a small collective adjustment. Posture straightening. Eyes sharpening. Two of the people behind the table who had been writing stopped writing.
Nyra stopped at the mark on the floor where the others had stood.
She looked at the table directly.
Not defiant. Not performing confidence.
Just looking, the way she always looked at things — like she was trying to understand them before they understood her.
The thin-voiced man at the center stared at her for a long moment.
Then his gaze dropped to her wrist.
"Show it," he said.
Nyra pushed back her sleeve.
The mark was visible in the hall's grey light — dark lines, precise, strange, with that faint quality of depth that made it look like it went further into the skin than it should.
Silence.
Then three people at the table spoke at once, low and urgent, and the thin-voiced man raised one hand to quiet them.
He looked at Nyra.
"How long did it glow after the marking?" he asked.
"It still does," she said. "Sometimes."
More silence.
The woman beside him wrote something down quickly, covering the page with her hand as she did it.
They didn't expect this, Nyra noted.
They were looking for something but they didn't expect to find it here. In me.
That was interesting.
That was something to hold onto.
The thin-voiced man dismissed her with a small gesture.
She pushed her sleeve back down and returned to the line.
They were escorted back to their rooms after that.
No explanation. No information. No timeline.
Just go back, wait, someone will come.
Deva fell into step beside Nyra on the way.
"They reacted to you," she said quietly. Not accusing. Just stating.
"I noticed," Nyra said.
"The mark not fading — that's not normal."
"I know."
Deva was quiet for a few steps. She had a practical kind of face. The sort that had learned to evaluate situations quickly and emotionally.
"Does it frighten you?" she asked.
Nyra considered the honest answer.
"I don't know what I am yet," she said. "Hard to be frightened of something you don't understand."
Deva looked at her sideways. "Most people are more frightened of things they don't understand."
"Most people," Nyra agreed simply.
Deva almost smiled. It didn't quite make it.
They reached the corridor of doors.
Before they separated, Deva paused.
"The girl who served supper last night," she said. "Did she say anything to you?"
Nyra looked at her.
"Why?"
"Because she came to my room too." Deva's voice dropped. "She said not to go near the east wing."
Nyra said nothing.
Deva studied her expression, found nothing she could read, and nodded once — like she had confirmed something to herself.
"Good," she said quietly. "You're careful."
She went into her room.
Nyra sat at the window again.
The grey light hadn't changed. The courtyard below was empty, the dark climbing things on the walls moving very slightly in a wind she couldn't feel from here.
She thought about the table of faces.
The way they had looked at her mark.
The way the woman had covered her notes.
She thought about her aunt's words — something older, something they've been looking for — and she thought about Sera's warning, and she thought about the footsteps she had heard in the night, slow and deliberate above her ceiling.
She was piecing something together.
She didn't have enough pieces yet.
But the shape of it was starting to form and it was larger than she had initially allowed herself to think.
Her wrist pulsed once.
Slow and quiet.
Like a reminder.
She pressed her thumb over it and stared out at the dark beyond the walls.
Somewhere in this castle, something was waiting.
She didn't know yet if it was a threat.
She didn't know yet if she was the threat.
Both, maybe.
She was starting to think both.
That evening, Sera came again with supper.
This time Nyra didn't ask questions.
She just said, quietly, as Sera set the tray down: "Thank you. For last night."
Sera's hands stilled on the tray.
She didn't look up.
But something in her shoulders changed — loosened, just slightly, the way a person did when they had been braced for something that didn't come.
"Eat while it's warm," she said softly.
And left.
Nyra ate.
And somewhere above her, in the upper floors where no one was supposed to go, she heard them again.
Those footsteps.
Same pace. Same weight.
But tonight they didn't just cross and stop.
Tonight, they stopped directly above her.
And stayed.