Her footsteps were silent on the stone, a habit she'd learned from watching the soldiers train. Quiet feet meant unseen movement. Unseen movement meant advantage. Each step carried her further from her mother's laughter, from the warmth of the bedchamber where the twins slept and Aric nursed and everything still felt fragile and precious and worth protecting.
The palace had two languages. The public one, spoken in the great hall and the throne room and the council chambers. And the private one, spoken in servant's passages and shadowed alcoves and the narrow corridors where the walls were rough plaster instead of polished marble. Imaria had learned both before she turned ten.
She reached the junction where the east hall opened into the servant's passage. The air changed here—colder, smelling of lamp oil and boot leather and the faint must of old stone. A single sconce burned at the far end, leaving most of the corridor in shadow. She pressed herself against the wall and waited.
A maid appeared from the left, arms full of linens, hurrying toward the kitchens. Imaria held her breath. The maid passed without looking, her footsteps fading into the distant clatter of pots and voices. The corridor was empty again.
Imaria turned into the servant's passage.
The door to Guard Richard's room was three down on the right. She knew which one because she had asked the right questions in the right ears—casual, idle, the way a princess might ask about anything. How many guards slept in the east wing. Which rooms were theirs. Who had been given a private chamber for his years of service.
She stopped outside the door.
Voices inside. Low. Laughing.
Her hand went to the small dagger at her belt, the one her father had given her two years ago. More symbol than weapon, she had thought then. She had practiced with it since. Every day. Until her wrist ached and her palm callused and she could draw it in the dark without thinking.
She pressed her palm flat against the cold stone wall beside the door. The rough plaster bit into her skin. She leaned in close, her ear toward the gap where the door met the frame.
"—doesn't know what's coming." That was Richard's voice. She recognized it from the training yard, where he always laughed too loud at his own jokes. "I saw her today. Waddling to the bath like a wounded deer. Weak. Easy."
Another voice, lower, rougher. Art. "The emperor's been in council all morning. Still making his plan, probably. Doesn't know we know his schedule better than he does."
Laughter. Low and ugly.
Imaria's jaw tightened. She forced her breathing to stay even, forced her hand to stay flat against the wall instead of curling into a fist.
"Tarven moves in two weeks," Richard said. "The northern roads will be clear by then. He'll come with twenty men, take the eastern gate before anyone knows to lock it. The empress will be in her chambers, recovering. Easy to reach."
"And the girls?" Art's voice. Casual, like he was asking about the weather.
A pause. Then Richard: "The emperor will be too busy searching for his wife to notice anything else. By the time he finds her, Tarven will have had his fill. And what's a soiled empress to a man who needs an heir? He'll have to keep her. No one else would want her."
Imaria's vision narrowed. The wall under her palm became the only solid thing in the world. Two weeks. The eastern gate. Twenty men. Her mother's chambers.
She had known the threat was real. She had heard her father's rage, seen the glass shards on the floor, watched her mother's pale face as she clutched the newborns. But hearing it spoken aloud, in a guard's lazy voice, over a shared laugh—that made it real in a different way. A way that settled in her chest like a blade.
The voices shifted. Chairs scraped the floor.
"I'll check the eastern corridor before dusk," Art said. "Make sure the night rotation knows to look the other way."
Footsteps. Coming toward the door.
Imaria moved. Silent. Fast. She slipped into the alcove three doors down, where a stack of old crates collected dust in the dark. She pressed herself into the shadow, her back against the wall, her hand on her dagger.
The door opened. Art stepped out, a stocky man with a beard that needed trimming and eyes that moved too slowly to be dangerous. He locked the door behind him—Imaria noted the key, the way he tucked it into his belt pouch—and walked past her hiding spot without glancing left.
His footsteps faded.
Imaria counted to thirty. Then she stepped out of the alcove.
The corridor was empty.
She walked back to Richard's door and stopped. The lock was simple, old, the kind that yielded to a thin blade and steady pressure. Her father had shown her once, during a lesson about palace security. She had paid attention.
She drew her dagger.
Not to threaten. To unlock.
The blade slid into the gap between door and frame. She found the bolt, pressed, felt it give. The lock clicked open.
She pushed the door inward a crack. No sound from inside. She waited. Nothing.
Then she pushed it open and stepped through.
Richard's room was small and cluttered. A narrow bed against the wall, sheets tangled. A wooden table with a half-empty bottle of wine and a single cup. A trunk at the foot of the bed, closed but not locked. A candle burned low on the windowsill, casting long shadows across the floor.
Richard was not inside.
She had seen him in the training yard this morning. He had been on duty then, which meant he would return soon. She had minutes, maybe less.
She crossed to the trunk and lifted the lid.
Clothes. Folded. A leather pouch. She opened it—coins, silver and copper, nothing remarkable. A folded piece of paper at the bottom.
She pulled it out and unfolded it.
Her breath stopped.
It was her mother. Drawn in charcoal, slow and careful, every line placed with attention. Her mother's face, soft in sleep. Her mother's body, naked, the curve of her pregnant belly, the swell of her breasts, the gentle slope of her hip. The drawing was detailed. Intimate. And it was signed in the bottom corner with a small R.
Imaria stared at it for a long moment. The paper trembled in her hands.
This was what her father had seen. This was what had made him throw the glass against the wall. Not just the threat. Not just the conspiracy. But this—the image of her mother, captured without consent, turned into something for men to pass around and laugh over.
She folded the drawing carefully and tucked it into her belt pouch.
She searched the rest of the trunk. More clothes. A second pouch, this one containing a letter sealed with wax—a northern seal, a bear rampant, the symbol of House Tarven. She broke the seal and read.
Richard—
The plan moves forward. The eastern gate will be opened by my men on the night of the full moon. Ensure the empress's chambers are accessible and that her personal guard is rotated away. You will be rewarded when the north takes what it is owed.
Imaria read the letter three times. Each pass burned the words deeper into her memory—the full moon, the eastern gate, her mother's chambers, the reward. She committed every detail to memory, then folded the letter and tucked it beside the drawing in her belt pouch.
She closed the trunk, careful to leave everything as she had found it. The leather pouch went back in the same position. The clothes stayed folded the same way. She had learned from watching the soldiers, from listening to her father's lessons on strategy. Evidence of a search was evidence of a threat discovered.
She crossed to the door and pressed her ear against the wood. Silence in the corridor. She slipped out, pulled the door closed behind her, and slid the blade into the lock mechanism again. The bolt clicked back into place.
She stood in the dim corridor, her hand still on her dagger, her mind racing.
Two weeks until the full moon. That was the timeline she had. Fourteen days to stop a plan that had been years in the making. Her father was making a plan—slow, careful, measured. He would consult advisors. He would weigh options. He would do what emperors did.
She did not have the luxury of being an emperor.
She was a princess. A daughter. A girl who had seen her mother laugh this morning for the first time in weeks, and who would burn the entire north to keep that sound alive.
She turned and walked back toward the main corridor, her footsteps silent on the worn stone. The maid with the linens had passed. The corridor was empty. The palace hummed around her with its usual rhythm—distant voices, clattering pots, the creak of a door somewhere above.
She reached the junction where the servant's passage met the east hall. Light spilled in from the main corridor, warm and golden, the kind of light that belonged to a palace at peace.
She stepped into it.
And stopped.
Her father stood at the end of the hall, his back to her, speaking in low tones to a servant she did not recognize. He had not seen her. He was absorbed in whatever orders he was giving, his broad shoulders tense beneath the imperial robes.
Imaria pressed herself against the wall, just inside the servant's passage, hidden by the shadow of the doorway.
She watched him for a long moment. Her father, who had thrown a glass against the wall. Her father, who had held her mother through the night. Her father, who was making a plan.
She could tell him what she had found. She could show him the letter, the drawing, the timeline. She could let him absorb this information into his careful, measured strategy.
But she remembered the way his face had looked when he saw the drawing. The rage. The helplessness. And she remembered what the guards had said—that the emperor did not know their schedule as well as they knew his.
Her father was being watched. His every move, every council meeting, every conversation—reported back to men who wanted her mother destroyed.
She could not tell him. Not yet. Not until she knew who else was listening.
She waited until the servant bowed and walked away, until her father turned toward the throne room. Then she slipped out of the passage and walked in the opposite direction, toward the eastern wing, toward the training yard, toward the only person she trusted enough to ask for help.
She had two weeks.
She would use every day.
The training yard was empty when she reached it—the morning drills had ended, and the afternoon session would not begin until the bell tower struck the second hour. Dust still hung in the air, stirred by boots and hooves, settling slowly over the packed earth. The wooden practice dummies stood in their rows, scarred from a thousand strikes, their straw stuffing peeking through the gashes.
Imaria walked to the center of the yard and stopped. She needed to think. She needed to move.
She drew her dagger.
The blade caught the light as she turned it in her hand—plain steel, unadorned, the kind of weapon a soldier carried, not a princess. Her father had chosen it deliberately. A tool, he had said. Not a decoration. Learn to use it, and no one will ever take anything from you that you are not willing to give.
She had not understood the weight of those words then. She understood them now.
She fell into the first stance—feet apart, knees bent, blade held low and forward. The movements came from muscle memory, from the hours she had spent in this yard before the sun rose, when no one was watching. Strike. Pivot. Block. Strike again. The rhythm settled her breathing, cleared the noise from her mind.
Two weeks. Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours.
She could not tell her father. Not yet. But she could prepare. She could watch. She could learn the names of every guard who came and went from the eastern gate, every servant who lingered too long in the empress's corridor, every face that did not belong.
Strike. Pivot. Block.
The dagger cut through the air. She imagined Richard's face. Art's. The men who would come through the eastern gate under a full moon.
"You fight like your father."
She spun, blade up, heart slamming against her ribs.
The old weapons master stood at the edge of the yard, leaning on a wooden staff, his gray beard braided with leather cords. She had not heard him approach. She never did.
"Master Aldric." She lowered the dagger, but did not sheathe it. "I did not see you."
"That is the point." He walked toward her, his steps slow and deliberate, the staff tapping the earth with each stride. "A soldier who can be heard is a soldier who can be killed. You were loud just now. Your feet. Your breathing. The blade cutting air."
She looked down at her boots. "I was thinking."
"Thinking is for the council chamber. In the yard, you move." He stopped a few paces from her, his dark eyes sharp beneath heavy brows. "What has you so distracted, little princess?"
She hesitated. Master Aldric had trained her father. Had trained her grandfather before him. He had seen three decades of palace intrigue, of whispered conspiracies and quiet betrayals. If anyone knew how to move through the shadows without being caught, it was him.
"I need to learn something," she said. "Something they do not teach in the training manuals."
His eyebrows rose. "Oh?"
"How to follow someone without being seen. How to listen at doors without being heard. How to move through the palace at night without leaving a trace."
He studied her for a long moment. The wind stirred the dust between them, and somewhere in the distance, a bell began to toll the hour.
"That is not soldier's work," he said quietly. "That is spy's work."
"I know."
"Why would a princess need to be a spy?"
She met his gaze and did not look away. "Because there are people in this palace who want to hurt my mother. And I do not know who else is helping them."
The old man's face did not change. But something in his eyes shifted—a flicker of recognition, of understanding, of a grief she could not name.
"You cannot tell anyone," she added. "Not my father. Not my mother. No one."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then I will do it alone."
He was silent for a long time. The bell stopped tolling. The dust settled. The sun climbed higher, casting long shadows across the training yard.
Then he sighed, a sound like wind through old leaves, and shifted his weight on the staff.
"Meet me here," he said, "an hour before dawn. Every day. Do not tell anyone where you are going."
She felt something loosen in her chest. "You will teach me?"
"I will teach you what I can. In two weeks, it will not be enough to make you a shadow. But it may be enough to keep you alive." He turned and began walking back toward the armory. "Do not be late, little princess. And bring your dagger. The one you hide in your boot, not the one on your belt."
She stared after him, her hand still wrapped around the hilt of her blade. She had not told anyone about the dagger in her boot. She had hidden it there three months ago, after a nightmare she could not explain, and had never mentioned it to a single soul.
Master Aldric reached the armory door and paused. He did not turn around.
"You are not the only one who watches, Princess. Some of us have been watching for a very long time."
The door closed behind him.
Imaria stood alone in the training yard, the dust settling around her feet, the dagger warm in her hand. She sheathed it slowly, her mind already turning to the morning ahead.
An hour before dawn. She would be there.
She turned and walked back toward the palace, her footsteps silent on the packed earth. The sun was higher now, the corridors filling with the rhythm of the day—servants hurrying, guards changing shifts, the distant murmur of courtiers gathering for the midday council.
She passed a cluster of maids outside the kitchens. They curtsied as she walked by, their eyes downcast. She nodded, the way she had been taught, and kept moving.
One of the maids looked up as she passed. A brief glance, barely a second. But Imaria caught it—the way the girl's eyes tracked her, the way her hands stilled on the linens she carried.
She filed it away. A face. A glance. A moment that did not belong.
She had two weeks.
She would learn every face in this palace. Every glance. Every moment that did not belong.
And when the full moon rose, she would be ready.