The scroll refused him.
Nysa had read kings and beggars, thieves and saints. She knew how the living scrolls worked: they remembered. They kept names like breath and spat out nights like facts. You put your hands on them and they showed you a face or a fall or a laugh and they didn't lie—unless someone had cut a truth out and hidden it under another life.
She set the scroll on the lectern. The ink breathed. The hall waited.
Kaelthrax stood at the dais like a verdict. Scales at his jaw. A mouth that did not soften. He did not smile. He did not need to. People smiled enough for him.
"Read," he said. His voice did not ask.
Nysa read.
The scroll offered a name that tasted wrong in her mouth: Idran. A single frame with it. A lantern slipping from a hand. Glass and water. The black bite of harbor. A little sound, then gone.
Her fingers shook. She told herself to steady them. The scroll did not care about hands.
Kaelthrax's eyes narrowed. He expected his name. He expected the scroll to bow to him the same way everyone else bowed. He did not get his name.
"You read it wrong," he said. No heat. Just a blade.
"It says Idran," Nysa answered. Short. Clean. She did not search for softness. There was no time.
He walked to the lectern. He read for himself. The hall pulled its breath in one exact sound. No one spoke. No one moved.
"You will find him," Kaelthrax said when he turned to her. He spoke the order like a clean sentence. "One month. Bring him here. If he does not stand before me on the thirtieth day, you will be displayed."
Nysa's throat went dry. The word for display had a shape she could not unsee: wood, ropes, a public lesson. The court liked lessons. The court ate them.
She should have said the scroll showed more. The living ones always did—names and fragments and small, repeating images. They did not hand out whole stories. They offered snapshots and let you stitch the rest. This one had given her a lantern, a splash. It had also, small and tucked, shown a handwriting, a looped letter curl—her own slash of handwriting in the margin. Only a sliver. Almost nothing. But visible.
She did not tell him.
You do not tell the Dragon King you are in his own margins. You do not tell a man who calls himself a king that his archive bears your handwriting tucked inside a stranger's grief. You do not offer him questions that might pull threads.
"You will leave tonight," he said. "You will take what you need and nothing more. A seal will be bound to you. If you cross the city line without my leave, I will pull you back and make you an example."
The High Archivist, Serene, watched from the side. She folded her hands like someone who liked neat things. Her face was an old book—lines of a woman who had read truth too many times. She did not speak. Her silence was heavy.
"Do you understand?" Kaelthrax asked.
"Yes." The word was a stone. No extra.
He stepped closer. Up close his scent was ash and something else—an ache the scrolls did not name. Nysa felt the old, useless tug in her chest and hated it for being human. He watched her as if weighing her.
"You will be watched," he said. "A single guard. If the guard seems kinder than necessary, do not mistake it for mercy. Trust no one. Not even me."
"Even you?" she asked before she could stop herself.
"Especially me," he said. He turned and left the hall. The silence that followed him felt like a room after a body had left.
Nysa's hands stayed on the lectern. She looked at the margin. Her handwriting. A tiny curl where she always looped her y. It made her stomach drop low and hard. She did not remember writing it. She did not remember ever touching this scroll.
Serene came forward at last, slow as a page turning. She placed an iron seal, the same the King had called for, into Nysa's palm. Her fingers brushed Nysa's hand like a warning.
"We stitch names to names," Serene said, blunt. "We hide one truth under another. It keeps the Sentinel from waking whole. Sometimes we stitch people out. They are safer gone than present."
"Who stitched me?" Nysa asked. She kept her voice level, but the words wanted to break.
Serene's eyes cooled. "Not who. Why." She did not offer comfort. She did not own excuses.
"Why?" Nysa asked again.
"Because the thing you remember would burn. You were a dangerous stitch." Serene did not say more.
That should have been impossible. Nysa's life was the stack. She was small, precise. She did not know how to be dangerous.
But the margin proof was there. Her hand in the scroll. A signature that belonged to a version of her the city pretended not to have had.
"You have a month," Serene said. "Find Idran."
Then the court dissolved into motion. Servants, scribes, whispering nobles. The seal hung around Nysa's wrist. She wrapped her shawl tighter and left the hall with the scroll clutched against her chest. The Archive watched her go. The stacks shifted like lungs.
Outside, the palace gate spat her into the ash-wind. The sky was the color of old paper. Nysa kept her head down. She had a month.
At the edge of the gate a man waited. Plain clothes. A guard's cuff. He looked as if anyone could have missed him—except for the notebook pressed to his palm. He opened it when she came close.
There, in a tight line, was her looped y. A single initial: N. A flourish she recognized like the bite of a coin.
"You Nysa?" the man asked. His voice was low. He did not look at her. He looked at the city as if checking for storms.
"Yes."
He closed the notebook and slid it back into his coat. "You're not only a librarian," he said, plain. "There's a ledger that says otherwise. Some of us were told to keep you from wandering off and keep you safe."
The way he said safe made Nysa's scalp prickle. The word sounded different when it left his mouth. It was not the King's kind of safe.
"How long?" she asked.
"One month," he said. "Or until they pull the chain."
He reached for her hand and took it as if it were a thing to hold for balance. She did not yank her hand away. She did not hug him. She let him close her fingers around the seal and feel the cold iron bite. It felt like a promise and a threat both.
She looked once more at the scroll tucked under her arm. Idran. Lantern. Harbour. Her handwriting in the corner. A life that was both hers and not hers.
She had a month to find a ghost. She had a seal to tell the King where she was at every hour. She had a guard who might be a thief and might be a traitor and might be the only person who had been told to keep her alive.
The ash settled. Nysa pulled her shawl up and walked into the city that had pretended she never belonged to it. The scroll hummed against her ribs like a heart. She did not know whether it meant to kill her or save her. She only knew the first night of the month had already begun.