Chapter 5 — The Woman Beneath the Yew Trees

Grey Gull Trading bought all three properties before noon.

Lucien needed ready gold badly enough to accept less than half their value. He never asked who hid behind the company seal.

Arrogant men rarely looked beneath anything they considered cheap.

The riverside warehouse held imported steel beneath sacks of barley. The cavalry yard had stabled no royal horses in two years, but its account books showed payments to officers in the First, Sixth, and Ninth Regiments.

The townhouse concealed the most useful prize: unsigned supply warrants bearing the names of dead monks.

"He is building an army out of ghosts," Julian said.

We stood in the Bell & Briar’s map room while his agents marked the purchased properties in black ink.

"Then let us frighten the dead," I said.

I dictated a false notice stating that the Royal Court of Auditors would search every warehouse west of the river within forty-eight hours. Julian’s printer copied the Chief Auditor’s preferred phrasing but not his signature. We did not need a convincing forgery.

We needed a convincing rumor.

One copy was left where Cedric’s former secretary would find it. Another reached a tavern favored by Lucien’s equerries. The third passed through the hands of a clerk who sold secrets to both sides and believed neither knew it.

By evening, Lucien began moving assets.

At dawn, a palace groundskeeper on Julian’s payroll sent word that Prince Lucien had requested private access to the Queen’s yew garden.

I wore the dark green cloak of one of Eleanor’s ladies and entered through the old orangery. Julian followed dressed as a physician’s assistant, his black hair hidden beneath a plain cap.

"I preferred you in silk," I whispered.

"I preferred you when you were pouring medicine down my throat."

"How unfortunate for us both."

We climbed the narrow stair of an abandoned music pavilion. From its cracked upper window, we could see the paths between the yews.

Lucien arrived first.

He wore no royal sash. He carried no sword. To any casual observer, he was a thoughtful prince walking alone before council.

Seraphina came ten minutes later.

She kept her hood low and glanced behind her twice.

My chest tightened despite myself.

In my third life, I had believed exposing Lucien’s part in her mother’s death would make Seraphina my ally. Instead, she had killed Lucien, returned to Adrian, and let him build forty years of devotion upon another lie.

Hatred had not made her honest.

It had only made her useful to different men.

Below us, Lucien said something too softly to hear.

Seraphina drew a black glass bottle from her sleeve.

Lucien closed his hand over hers before taking it. The gesture looked intimate from a distance. Seraphina did not pull away.

Julian lifted a small brass viewing lens.

"Blue wax around the stopper," he murmured. "Bellflower tincture."

"Poison?"

"An antidote base. Not enough to cure Adrian, but enough to keep a slow compound from killing him too quickly."

"Lucien controls the supply."

"And Seraphina controls the dose."

Each held the other by the throat and called it an alliance.

Seraphina spoke more loudly.

"He nearly died on our wedding night."

"Then use less," Lucien replied. "A dead husband cannot make you queen."

"You promised me the truth about my mother."

"And you will have it when Adrian can no longer stand before the council."

He tucked the bottle inside his coat.

Seraphina caught his sleeve. "You said the old order carried the King’s seal."

"It did."

"Then why have you never shown it to me?"

Lucien smiled and touched her cheek.

"Because grief makes you reckless, Sera. Trust me a little longer."

Julian’s hand closed around the window frame.

Lucien and Seraphina left by separate paths.

We remained still until the garden emptied.

"She believes the Crown sent an order against her mother," Julian said.

"Someone did send one. It frightened her mother into taking her own life."

"You think Lucien wrote it."

"I know he benefited. This time, we prove the rest."

Julian’s oldest palace contact was a retired royal courier named Elias Wren. We found him that afternoon in a cottage beyond the city wall, living among pigeon cages and stacks of old dispatch boxes.

At first, he denied remembering any letter to the Morcant Marches.

Then Julian placed his mother’s signet on the table.

"You served her before you served my father," he said. "I am not asking for loyalty to me. I am asking whether the palace seal was used to murder another woman."

Wren stared at the signet for a long time.

Finally, he opened a locked drawer.

Inside lay a broken flake of dark red sealing wax wrapped in linen.

"I carried the letter," he whispered. "The order came through Prince Lucien’s secretary, but the outer seal belonged to the King. The wax broke in my case. I kept this piece because something about the impression was wrong."

Julian turned it toward the light.

The royal lion was visible, but one claw had split into two points.

"A copied seal," he said.

"Perhaps," Wren replied. "A tribunal will require the matrix or the man who made it."

Not proof yet.

But it was the first surviving wound in Lucien’s perfect story.

"Who knows you kept this?" I asked.

"No one."

"Then by tomorrow, Lucien will assume no one. That is not the same thing."

Julian sent two agents to remove Wren and his dispatch boxes before sunset. The old courier protested until I showed him the false audit notice.

"Lucien is already moving whatever frightens him," I said. "You may be one of those things."

We made impressions of the broken seal in wax and metal before placing the original in a locked case. One copy went with Wren. A second went to Queen Eleanor’s private secretary without explanation. The third remained at Bell & Briar.

Evidence survived only when no single knife could reach all of it.

When we returned to the Bell & Briar after midnight, one of Julian’s palace maids waited in the back room. She had served Adrian since boyhood, and fear had drained all color from her face.

"His Highness collapsed again," she said. "He was asleep when it began."

"What did he say?" I asked.

She looked at me as though the answer frightened her more than the blood on his pillow.

"He woke screaming your name, my lady."

My fingers went cold.

"His exact words."

The maid swallowed.

"He said, ‘Evelyn—why did you die for me?’"