The silence that followed answered more clearly than words could have.
"I'll deliver my own report, in my own time, through proper channels." Seraphine's voice didn't waver. "You may tell Lady Isolde I said so directly. And you may tell her that if she wants this young man's evaluation badly enough to send riders after her own sister, she can ask him herself, to his face, rather than through soldiers on a cold road."
For a long moment nobody moved. Then the lead rider inclined her head, a small, controlled concession, and reined her horse back a step.
"As you say, my lady." Something almost like respect had crept into her voice, grudging but real. "I'll deliver the message exactly as given."
She hesitated, then reached into her coat and drew out a small sealed letter, offering it not to Rhys but to Seraphine directly.
"Lady Isolde asked that this be given to you, regardless of how the rest of the conversation went."
Seraphine took it without a word, and the four riders turned and rode back the way they'd come, leaving the road quiet again, the morning mist beginning to burn off under a sun that had somehow already climbed higher than Rhys expected, as though the entire encounter had taken far longer than it felt.
She didn't open the letter immediately. She stood holding it, staring at the wax seal, her earlier hard composure slowly giving way to something more tired, more uncertain, closer to the version of her Rhys had glimpsed by the fire.
"You didn't have to do that," Rhys said quietly, still sitting in the dirt, his numb hand slowly beginning to prickle back to life. "Stand between me and your own House like that."
"I know." She finally sat down beside him, letter still unopened in her hands, some of the day's exhaustion catching up to her all at once. "I did it anyway, and I don't entirely know why, which frightens me more than the riders did, if I'm honest."
"Maybe it's simpler than you're making it."
"Maybe." She didn't sound convinced. She turned the letter over once more, then finally broke the seal, scanning the contents in silence, her expression shifting from wary to something far darker before she'd finished.
"Seraphine?"
"Isolde isn't interested in you because of politics." Her voice had gone quiet, almost hollow. "Or not only because of politics. She's interested because our family has a history with the Thirteenth Art that goes back further than anyone in House Duvall likes to admit, further than I even fully understood myself, until this letter." She looked up at him, something raw and unguarded finally breaking through. "Rhys, I think my family may have had something to do with the original erasure. Not House Thane alone. Mine too."
***
They made camp early that day, both of them too drained to pretend otherwise, and it was there, with a small fire finally warming the chill out of the morning's aftermath, that Seraphine told him what little she actually knew.
"It isn't much," she admitted, staring into the flames rather than at him. "Family rumors, mostly, the kind you grow up hearing in fragments and learn not to ask about directly, because the one time I did, as a child, my mother's face went so pale I never tried again. There's a sealed wing in the Duvall archive that no one under Isolde's rank has ever been permitted to enter.
There's a name, a great-grandmother several generations back, that used to appear in our official lineage records and doesn't anymore. I always assumed it was some old scandal. An affair, a disgraced marriage, something embarrassing enough to bury and forget."
"But it wasn't that."
"I don't know what it was." Her jaw tightened. "That's what frightens me. I've spent my whole life assuming my House's secrets were small, human, forgettable things. If Isolde's letter is telling the truth, if my family had any real hand in erasing your bloodline, then everything I thought I understood about where I come from is smaller and uglier than I ever let myself imagine."
Rhys didn't answer right away. He understood, more than he wanted to, what it felt like to have the ground shift under everything you thought you knew about your own family, and there wasn't a version of comfort he could offer her that wouldn't have sounded hollow coming from someone still bleeding from his own version of the same wound.
"The archive," he said instead, practical, giving her something solid to hold onto rather than the vast uncertain shape of family guilt. "That's where we'd need to go. If there's an answer, it's there."
"Isolde controls access to it. Has for years, since she came of age. Nobody gets in without her permission, not even our father, not anymore." Seraphine finally looked over at him, something steadier returning to her expression now that the conversation had a direction again. "Which means whatever this is, whatever she wants from you, getting into that archive and getting the truth out of it may run through her, whether either of us likes it or not."
They sat with that for a while, the fire cracking softly between them, and Rhys found his mind drifting, unbidden, back to Hollowmere, to Ren's hands steady around a needle and thread, to a version of his life that had ended less than a week ago and already felt like it belonged to someone else entirely.
"Can I ask you something," he said quietly, "that has nothing to do with archives or your sister."
"You can ask."
"Does it get easier. Losing someone who mattered that much." He kept his eyes on the fire, unwilling to watch her expression while he asked it, unwilling to see pity there if that was what came. "I haven't had time to actually feel it yet. It just sits there, this whole enormous thing I haven't looked at directly since it happened, because there's always been something else that needed handling first."
Seraphine was quiet for a long moment.
"I don't know," she admitted finally. "I haven't lost anyone the way you have. But I think the sitting there is the part you can't skip, even if you delay it. It waits. It doesn't go anywhere on its own."
"That's not very comforting."
"No." A faint, tired almost-smile. "I'm better at strategy than comfort. You'll have to forgive me the gap."
He huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, but was closer to one than anything he'd managed since Hollowmere, and for a few minutes neither of them said anything at all, letting the fire and the quiet do the work that words couldn't.
It was Seraphine who broke it, sitting up straighter, reaching again for the letter she'd tucked away after reading it the first time.
"There's something else." She frowned, turning it over in her hands. "I almost missed it earlier, I was too shaken by the first part to look closely, but there's a second seal underneath the first. A smaller note, folded into the paper itself."
She peeled it open carefully, and Rhys watched her expression change as she read it, confusion giving way slowly to something far more unsettled.
"What does it say?"