Chapter 40: The Patron's Seal

Darius carried Mara out himself. No one argued. Not even Nora. The midwife's body was wrapped in a white nursery sheet and placed in the snow under the first open sky she had seen in years. Lina stood beside the body with the ledger clutched under her coat, silent tears carving lines through soot on her cheeks. Nora wanted to mourn. Thornveil did not give her time. The hunters left one body behind alive enough to question. He was young, maybe twenty, with shaking hands and a Thornveil seal burned behind his ear. Darius crouched in front of him. "Who opened the nursery wards?" The hunter spat blood. "The patron sees." Darius looked unimpressed. "Vague loyalty is still vague after teeth break." Nora touched his shoulder. "Wait." She knelt, though Maeve protested. The hunter's eyes went to her stomach with trained hunger. "What patron?" Nora asked. He smiled. "The first mother." Nora's skin chilled. Darius went still behind her. "Seraphine?" Nora asked. The hunter laughed. "Seraphine serves the house. The house serves the patron." His seal began to smoke. Darius cursed and reached for him, but the brand ignited. The hunter died with his eyes open and one final sentence on his mouth. "The crown was never yours." The body burned too fast. Only the seal remained, a black thorn circle split by a crescent. Darius picked it up with a cloth. His expression had gone distant in the way men look when childhood nightmares develop names. "You know it," Nora said. "My mother's nurse wore one." No one spoke. Back at Frosthold, the ledger and the seal were placed under ward. Venn arrived with three Council scholars, all looking eager until Darius threatened to put the next person who said "remarkable specimen" out a window. The ledger confirmed what Mara had said. Thornveil tracked crown-moon blood through maternal lines, but one page had been cut out with a razor. The missing first survivor. Darius stood across from Nora in the archive. Between them lay the patron seal. "If Mara was right," Nora said, "your bloodline is connected to mine." "Not by mating." "By survival." He nodded once. Maeve, sitting nearby with a pot of tea no one had touched, said, "This family tree is starting to look like a crime scene." Nora almost laughed. It came out closer to a sob. Darius reached for the seal. The second his fingers touched it, the silver root on Nora's wrist flared. The archive vanished. Nora stood in a vision beside Darius, looking at a woman with his eyes chained in the Thornveil chapel. She held a newborn boy. Darius, tiny and furious, wrapped in black cloth. Seraphine stood before her. Beside Seraphine was another woman hidden behind a veil of white hair. The veiled woman touched the baby's forehead. "Not crown-moon," she said. "But he may guard the next one." The vision snapped back. Darius had gone pale. Nora reached for him. "Your mother knew." He closed his eyes. "She did not run from Thornveil because they wanted me," he said. "She ran because they wanted me saved for you." The archive door blew open. A Frost guard fell through it, bleeding from a black thorn wound. "My king," he gasped. "The traitor is in the nursery wing." Nora's blood stopped. Frosthold's nursery was empty. It had been prepared for her child.