Chapter 75: The Silver Woman’s Hiding Place

Or is it Helia who is after it...

No. The Calamity Forest is too vast for that alone. There has to be something else they’re hunting besides the Black Castle, because if the Emperor simply meant to raze that castle to the ground, he’d have no reason to hide a plan like this behind so much careful staging.

But the moment Lucian’s gaze drifted past Helia to the masked figure standing near her, one name rose in his mind before any other, a presence he understood he needed to watch more closely than anyone else in this hall, because it might well be the true architect of tonight.

Rhaiven. What are you really after in there?

Rhaiven’s very existence had been a question mark for Lucian from the start.

How did a man from the continent of Eosia simply appear one day and slide into place as a princess’s personal guard, in an empire that wasn’t even his own? And Lucian remembered, with a clarity that unsettled him even now, just how strong that man truly was.

By his own estimate, Rhaiven’s strength rivaled Varka’s, or stood somewhere above it.

So why would someone with power like that, someone who could sit an emperor’s or a king’s own throne somewhere else in the world, choose to lower himself into the shadow of someone weaker?

Unless there’s something behind it he values more than any crown or any luxury this empire could offer him.

What could it be, then, that he’s hunting inside that forest? Is he after the Dark Beasts themselves? Some plan to tame them, bend them to his own will?

Lucian set that thought aside almost as soon as it formed. Taming a Dark Beast was, by every account he’d ever read, close to impossible.

History recorded only one figure who had ever managed it cleanly: the very Crimson ancestor the old records called the Nightkeeper, the same one who had stood against the four heroes of Arta eighty years ago.

Every scholar since who’d tried to walk that same path had failed, and more than once, that failure had ended with the forest’s other Dark Beasts thrown into a frenzy that nearly tore the continent open all over again.

If it isn’t that, then what else could it be? Is there some treasure he’s after?

His gaze drifted downward, without meaning to, toward the white blade resting at his hip. Half of the Kirana crystal still sat embedded there, fused into Sonata’s hilt, exactly where it had rested since that night seven years ago.

Something cold settled in his chest the instant the word treasure crossed his mind.

Damn it. How did I forget something so obvious. Of course he’s still after this crystal. That bastard hasn’t given up trying to claim it.

Everything from seven years ago up through tonight, the crystal’s continued existence and Rhaiven’s continued presence at this very court, formed a line too straight to be coincidence. Rhaiven was still hunting the Kirana crystal, exactly as he must have been that night.

But his approach this time is different.

Have they found where the other fragment is? Wait. Isn’t the other half of the Kirana crystal still with that silver-haired woman?

Unless she’s the one hiding inside the Calamity Forest.

The thought settled into place with an unpleasant certainty. Rhaiven might well have some fresh lead on the silver-haired woman, a lead that pointed him straight into that forest.

It made a grim kind of sense. The Calamity Forest, for all its horrors, might be the safest place on the continent for a person to disappear into.

Its sheer size, the strange variety of terrain buried inside it, and above all, the sheer density of Dark Beasts prowling its depths would filter out almost anyone who tried to follow her in.

And a woman who had once crossed blades with Rhaiven himself and lived to walk away clearly had little to fear from a few Dark Beasts. Hidden among them, she could keep her half of the Kirana crystal safer than in any vault in the empire.

That bastard is using the Emperor to comb the entire forest for her, all while wearing the mask of an imperial expedition.

Lucian felt something settle at last, a single thread pulled taut after searching blindly for it for longer than he cared to admit.

He turned his thoughts, reluctantly, back to Helia.

He understood now what her earlier words about the Pocket Orb had really meant. The Relic wasn’t a gift or a status symbol at all. It was a tool built to sweep an entire forest for exactly this kind of search.

Everything was clear to him now. He had been used, from beginning to end.

But why?

And since when?

Since when did you change, Helia?

He still remembered her clearly from childhood, a Helia who had never once shown him anything close to the calculation sitting behind her smile tonight.

The real Helia, the one he’d grown up beside, had been bright and warm to everyone she met. He remembered a day in the Sarnel gardens when she’d stepped on a flower by accident and immediately turned to apologize to Sebast and the groundskeeper for ruining it, though no one would have thought twice if she hadn’t.

That was simply who she was. Honest to a fault, quick to own even the smallest mistake and ask forgiveness for it.

It was for that girl, that memory of her, that some part of Lucian had gone on hoping he might still find a way to care for her.

But that girl was gone now, however it had happened, and he still couldn’t say why.

What struck him harder, watching her now, was how close she and Kaelyn had clearly grown. They stood together even now, heads bent, trading quiet words in the middle of all this uproar as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

They really do suit each other. And that letter she once handed me, the one I thought was only a formality, must have meant exactly what it said.

And this business with the Kirana crystal, all over again. I need to speak with Mother Sophia as soon as I can. I hope, this time, she has something to tell me.

Lucian let out a slow breath through his mouth, as though he could push something rotten out of his chest along with it.

Then, all at once, every head in the hall turned toward the same spot.

"What is that thing over there?"

Lucian followed the sound and saw it too, something large and dark being wheeled forward at the center of the room.

At the Emperor’s command, a line of soldiers carried in a shape bound inside a heavy iron cage, the whole thing still draped in cloth.

Slowly, the soldiers drew the cloth away.

What sat inside drew a collective breath from the entire hall. A black creature, built along the lines of some monstrous owl, but crowned with a pair of curling horns and covered in feathers so black they seemed to drink in the chandelier light rather than reflect it.

A single wing, folded tight against its body, was already the size of a grown man.

"Isn’t that a Dusk Feather?"

It should have been Irvine’s voice again, the same man who’d slammed his fist against the table only minutes before. But it was Cedric this time, staring at the caged creature with open shock that the Emperor had brought a living Dark Beast into his own hall.

Every eye turned toward him at the name. As Patriarch of House Pneuma, Cedric’s mastery of alchemy and formation work meant he knew the world’s creatures, dangerous or otherwise, better than almost anyone present.

The Dusk Feather was, by nature, one of the Dark Beasts native to the Calamity Forest, but among alchemists and Forgemasters alike, it carried a reputation all its own. Its feathers were prized, sought after for a range of potions and for certain warding techniques central to alchemical craft. Forgemasters coveted them just as fiercely, since the plumage lent itself especially well to Relics built in the shape of wearable armor.

Whatever value the creature held, though, the timing could not have been worse. Most of the hall’s sentiment toward Dark Beasts tonight ran nowhere close to admiration.

"Your Majesty, what is the meaning of this? You still haven’t answered my question, or anyone else’s here, and now you show us that you’ve already begun hunting Dark Beasts yourself?"

Amelia’s patience had finally run out. She had asked, more than once now, for some clarity on what Helia had said earlier, and each time Varka had simply sat there, watching, before quietly ordering his soldiers to bring forward whatever it was that had every guest in this hall on edge.

"Calm yourself, Amelia. All of you." Varka’s voice finally rose above the murmur, heavy and even.

"What Helia said earlier, and this creature in front of you, are connected. This, in fact, is part of the very reason I invited every one of you here tonight."

A hush fell over the entire hall at the promise of an answer, at last, to the chaos of the last hour.

Then Varka gave the order to open the cage, and the whole room tensed as one.

"Hey, Varka, what are you doing!"