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TVisTV Book 3: Chapter 25 (RAW)
🕑 Added 2025-08-24 22:23:00 +0000 UTCChapter 25 - Revelations On a crowded path, a man carrying a cup was jostled. The tea splashed and stained his robe. He turned to blame the
Chapter 25 - Revelations
On a crowded path, a man carrying a cup was jostled. The tea splashed and stained his robe. He turned to blame the stranger. An elder said, “Do not fault the stranger. He only revealed what you carry. If a cup holds black tea, black tea spills. If a heart holds anger, anger spills. Fill your heart with loving-kindness and compassion—and when life bumps you, only kindness and compassion will flow.”
- The Book of Wise Tellings from the Land of Streams.
The whole Academy was in an uproar—whispers coiled through colonnades, and there were arguments and disagreements in the common rooms. The shockwaves from the duel resounded for weeks. Autumn had taken a heavier grip: fruit bruised the orchard air with sweet scent, gulls and seabirds wheeled inland before a salt-cold wind, and the mild promise of winter’s bite slid in under doors. With the cooling weather, the pleasant fiction of equality that the Academy liked to espouse was cracking. Students, faculty, and staff drifted—no, were pulled—into their proper orbits around class and coin and crown.
It was how Seraphina wanted it.
Her rooms in the dormitory were warm despite the draft, the fire burning merrily behind a thick pane of glass with a sleeping Cornelia beside it like a guardian beast. A ledger lay open on her desk beside three sealed letters and a chilled cup of tea she had not touched. Miriam stood on the carpet with a sheaf of notes clutched to her chest, while Eloise perched on the arm of a chaise, small and exquisite as a porcelain figurine with her ankles crossed and a look that promised knives.
“Report, Milly, if you would,” Seraphina said, not looking up as she dried a blot of ink with sand and tapped the page shut.
Miriam swallowed. “Your father, Lord Anatoli, marches with a very, very large ducal escort toward the capital as we speak, milady. He is accompanied by Lord de Montan, Lord de Lehman, and even the Bishop de Francey…”
“What is it? Continue your report, you silly thing,” Seraphina murmured, eyes on the wax of her signet ring. Her allies, it seemed, had not forgotten her.
Lord de Montan, however, had probably just seen where the wind was blowing. But he, and his spawn, would not to be watched.
“Your lord father, by all accounts, is most wroth,” Miriam rushed on. “He is demanding that Elidion pay the price of your dowry for the insult, and that the Crown Prince make a formal apology before the Hall of Lords…”
“Ha!” Eloise barked, inelegant as a slap. “That is the least a good father would do. Why, I do believe he is in his rights to demand the prince’s head to decorate the City Gate.”
“I think cooler heads must rule,” Seraphina said, and if her smile was thin, it was still very pretty. “I do not wish this to escalate further. The stability of the realm is threatened.” A lie slid from her tongue as cleanly as oil. “Damn that Velens for only thinking with his dangling bits.”
Eloise’s delicate nostrils flared in satisfaction. Miriam shifted from foot to foot. “Speaking of Velens…” she tried, wincing under Eloise’s immediate glare.
“Yes, I hope he wasn’t hurt too badly,” Seraphina said mildly, a ribbon of amusement winding through her voice. Eloise snorted, an unladylike little thunder.
Ah, how swiftly a heart turns, Seraphina thought to herself.
“He seems to have fallen into a sleep,” Miriam whispered.
“That’s not exactly unusual; everyone goes to sleep.” Seraphina lifted one shoulder in a shrug, vaguely annoyed. “He did strike his head. Nothing a healing draught and a night’s rest cannot mend.”
“The thing is, milady… the prince is not waking up.” The words came in a rush. “He hasn’t attended classes and shows no sign of recovery. He is simply not waking; all of the healers have tried already, even the Royal Healers—”
Seraphina’s green eyes sparked. “He’s breathing? He’s alive. That’s all that blackguard deserves.” Her fingers, pale and slender, drummed the desk once. “Why won’t the Church heal him? He has the little silver-haired trollop to cry at his bedside, does he not? Can’t she fix him?”
Miriam’s cheeks colored. “My sources say the Church is demanding… an exorbitant balance. They speak of equivalence before the Goddess; that the prince’s treatment requires a price to match the harm. The King—being, well… the King—hesitates. It is a great deal to weigh. But that is not what I—I mean, there are whispers. Rumors that you planned this. That you… tried to assassinate the Crown Prince. That the duel was only a mask, an elaborate part of a grand scheme.”
Seraphina stilled. The room seemed to breathe around her—the fire settled, a coal cracked. “And why in Heaven would they say that, Milly?” she asked, voice turned silk and steel. “It makes no sense at all. Everyone saw him insult me. Everyone saw Velens decide to sully his station in a rain-slick courtyard with a public tantrum. And then, he lost. The end.”
“If you will forgive me, but rumor seldom keeps to the road, milady,” Miriam said miserably. “It seems to take a life of its own. For example, why… there is another whisper that—”
“What is it, Milly? Spit it out,” Seraphina snapped, patience evaporating.
“That Lady de Laney’s brother was set a quest in exchange for your hand in marriage!” Miriam blurted. “That is why he has gone on an expedition.”
“Preposterous! Lady Seraphina would never—And my brother would never!” Eloise’s voice cracked like a glass. “He can barely walk with his crutches; he has always—” She bit the words off, throat working. She turned those dark eyes on Seraphina. “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t. He hasn’t… has he?”
“Of course not.” Seraphina dismissed the notion with a wave of her hand, as if batting away a gnat. “What silliness.”
Miriam twisted the hem of her apron. “If you will forgive me, the point I am trying to make, milady, is that these things grow legs. As I said before, they take on lives of their own.”
“What are we to do, Lady Seraphina?” Eloise asked, voice small as a child’s for once. “This whole business looks like it could become… rather messy.”
Seraphina pressed two fingertips to her temple and closed her eyes. Her mind rearranged people like pieces on a slate: father, King, the Bishop and the Church, Velens asleep like a sword returned to its sheath, a thousand gossiping mouths opening and closing like fish. Under it all lurked a familiar taste—bitter poison sweet, as from a memory. “Give me a moment,” she breathed. “All of this has the hallmarks of my mother’s meddling.”
“The Lady Anaselena?” Eloise’s doll-like features creased in confusion.
“Yes. Lady Anaselena.” Seraphina’s mouth tilted in a shape too sharp to be a smile. “With her Sight, she has a habit of sticking her fingers in where they do not belong. A push here, a whisper there… enough to set a boulder rolling or turn a trickle into a river. Into a flood. She plays with the strings of fate as a bard does his Chordrelle.”
Eloise worried her lip between her teeth. “Is her power truly so fearsome? I thought them only stories and tall tales.”
Miriam nodded quickly, fervent. “I have heard—”
Seraphina’s gaze slid to Eloise and held. “What most people call stories are simply the minutes of a meeting they were not invited to. My mother prefers people to think she is only clever. Insightful. It keeps them unguarded until the axe falls. She can glimpse, yes. But worse, she can… incline.” Seraphina’s voice cooled a degree. “Influence and destroy, as a weaver will pull one thread and ruin a whole tapestry. My mother is perhaps one of the most dangerous women on the continent. Even King Elidion and Emperor Erdian tread lightly when her fingers are on the skeins.”
The fire gave a soft sigh. Seraphina lifted her eyes to Miriam again. “Where is Hughes? Our great victor of a duel against royalty itself?”
“Hughes, I can’t say—” Miriam began, and flinched.
“Then find out.” Seraphina’s tone sharpened; the room seemed to come into focus around her words. “He is started all of this mess… and for some reason has grown annoyingly popular in certain quarters. Popular men fall prey to accidents.” She fixed her green eyes squarely on Miriam. “Have him secured. Quietly. Move him somewhere that is discreet and secure.”
“Yes, milady,” Miriam said, already backing toward the door, notes forgotten, relief at being given something to do like light in her face.
“And Milly,” Seraphina added, almost lazily, “put watchers on the Bishop de Francey and on any courier riding with de Montan or de Lehman. If my father is playing to the gallery, I would like to own the front row. We must see if we can head my father’s foolishness off.”
Miriam bobbed. “I will see to it at once.”
“Excellent,” Seraphina lifted the cooling teacup, then set it down untouched once more. “Eloise, would you be so kind as to pay a visit and offer respects to the Crown Prince. We must confirm his condition, after all. The future of the realm is at stake.”
Eloise’s smile came back slow and feline. “At once, my lady.”
“Lastly,” Seraphina said, and let her gaze rest for a heartbeat on a place in the middle-distance, “have our friends in the servants’ halls begin a different rumor. Whisper that I wept over the prince when he fell. Young love is a complex thing… it will add some drama and spice to the story.”
Eloise blinked. “You did not.”
“Of course I did not,” Seraphina replied, lids lowering like shutters. “But rumor, as Milly says, seldom keeps to the road. Let it wander somewhere useful.”
Miriam curtsied and fled; Eloise glided after, the click of her heels small and sharp as punctuation. Alone again, Seraphina drew the ledger back to her and opened it to a fresh page.
She needed to draft a plan. Favors owed, and favors that needed collecting. The young noblewoman felt in her bones that war was coming, or at the very least, some great change.
Seraphina lifted the teacup and tipped its cold contents into the ash pail by the hearth. The girl poured herself a fresh cup of tea, the liquid from the Empire, breathed up a dark, honeyed perfume. She cupped the warmth with both hands, inhaled once, and felt the tightness behind her eyes loosen by a thread.
Soft scales moved over the carpet. Cornelia uncoiled herself and flowed to her mistress’s slipper. Three white heads lifted in turn: the left head blinked slow and solemn, the right head tasted the air with a prim little flicker of forked tongue, and the middle rested its chin on Seraphina’s instep like a cat asking to be worshiped.
“You want something, don’t you?” Seraphina murmured, setting her fresh cup aside to run knuckles along smooth scales. The noblewoman fed it a small biscuit, which she happily gobbled up. “No going outside today, it is much today and there is much too much excitement outside these walls.”
Cornelia’s right head huffed, affronted; the left pretended not to hear; the middle melted into the touch and made the contented, thrumming sound that was not quite a purr. The fire threw points of gold into the serpent’s scales as Seraphina stroked her. It steadied the mind to touch something that belonged only to her.
She let herself think.
Father on the warpath. The movements of the Great Houses. Then there was the condition of the prince. Everyone was hungry for spectacle. Most of all, her mother was no doubt behind all of this. And Hughes.
She took a small mouthful of tea and let it roll over her tongue. It was good, excellent even. “Hughes,” she whispered into the steam without meaning to, as if the cup were a scrying bowl.
There was a chiming trill. “I like Hughes,” said a voice the size of a bell’s last echo.
The fairy dropped through the candlelight, wings leathery like a bat. She hovered at the level of Seraphina’s eyes and turned lazy somersaults in the heated air above the teacup.
Seraphina lifted one brow. “Why?”
“Because he is like me,” the little creature sang, as if that explained everything. Cornelia’s right head hissed at her; Tia made a face back and blew a raspberry at her.
“How do you mean ‘like you’?” Seraphina asked, mild as milk.
Tia shrugged and began to drift toward the curtained balcony, as if the conversation, like most mortal concerns, bored her within three heartbeats.
Seraphina’s hand moved without hurry and with perfect certainty. She caught the fairy around the waist between forefinger and thumb. Wings beat furiously; indignation rang like a little knife-edge in the air. “No dissembling, no evasion, when I ask a question, I will be answered,” Seraphina said, bringing Tia close until the tiny face filled half her vision. “Words. Now.”
“I do not like being held like this,” the Fae squeaked, struggling. “Tia will—”
“Do nothing, if you wish for more cake,” Seraphina finished for her, cool as an autumn morning’s breeze, “and then you will tell me what you meant.”
Threatened, the winged creature simply blurted out all of her thoughts. “He can make things not seem as they are!” she explained in a rush. “But not strong like me. He doesn’t even know he is doing it. Like—like a newborn Fae who has not learned the corners of their own shine. He hums wrong, and the world hums with him. It slips a little, see? Only a little.”
The fairy’s words were an epiphany. Seraphina’s sharp mind moved to fit the pieces together. He was too plain, he was too forgettable, he was… something else.
“Not strong,” Tia went on, smiling weakly as Seraphina’s grip eased. “Not trained. A wild place in him where the edges unbutton.”
“I see. You are beautiful,” Seraphina murmured, petting the fairy’s head before releasing her to hover sulkily above her before she settled on Seraphina’s shoulder.
Seraphina hid a smile behind her cup and let the tea touch the place on her tongue that measured truth. “Glamor,” she said at last, and the word felt right, a stone clicking into its niche.
Tia clapped once, delighted. “Yes! Glamor. Your no-see. A little one. He tucks it around himself without thinking, silly thing, and it makes people see sideways. The world misplaces him.”
It would be the perfect skill for an assassin. Maybe there was indeed some truth to the rumors after all.
