Lyra's defiant hatred, solidified by Cassian's blunt revelation of her permanent servitude, provided a raw, vital energy for her work. She was no longer battling simple debt; she was battling the King's absolute will. The thought of King Kaelen Rys, the unseen, immortal force who had casually cleared her family's ruin only to chain her spirit, fueled her scholarly focus. She worked longer, pushing past fatigue, driven by the secret truth of the Blood King's lie she now carried inside her.
The challenge of the Archives was no longer the complexity of the ancient scripts, but the complexity of the atmosphere. The cold, heavy scrutiny of the King had not returned in the intense, paralyzing form of Chapter 3, but the palace's silence seemed to have deepened. The absence of Kaelen's presence felt like a deliberate, ominous pause, like the moment before a predator strikes.
Lyra had fallen into a routine: deciphering coded scripts, reporting mundane details to Alistair, and hiding the true extent of her finds. She had yet to find the next piece of the Weaver's Thread, but she was becoming dangerously knowledgeable about the foundational lies of Aethelgard. She understood the intricate economic controls and the specific loopholes the night-kin used to drain the human population, knowledge that could be worth more than a thousand fortunes if ever used against the Crown.
One evening, while Alistair was away on a mandatory court function, the silence was broken not by a sound, but by a demand.
Lyra was working by the dim, flickering glow of her lamp when she realized a specific, heavy, leather-bound folio, a register detailing the movement of royal seals, had been silently placed on the table, precisely over the parchment she had been translating moments before. She had not moved it. No one had entered the Annex.
Her heart leaped into her throat. This was Kaelen's signature: power exerted without physical proximity.
She forced herself to breathe, lifting the heavy folio with cautious fingers. Beneath it, a small, tightly rolled scroll, secured by a wax seal stamped with the King's personal sigil, a stylized, obsidian serpent, had been placed.
This was a direct, unseen communication from King Kaelen Rys.
Lyra's fingers, slick with fear, broke the brittle seal. The scroll contained no threats, no commands. It held only a single, complex passage written in a deeply archaic human dialect she recognized as the pre-conquest language of the northern territories. It was a passage from an ancient oath ceremony, a beautiful, frighteningly formal declaration of eternal fealty.
The passage read: "To the one who is thread, the weaver who binds my eternal reign, I offer the sun's absence and the dark's cold surety. What is mine is yours; what is lost is found. The word spoken is the chain forged."
Lyra's mind, sharp and scholarly, instantly dissected the text. It was a fragment of an ancient marriage or vassal oath, but the language was impossibly old, predating the current King's official reign. More chillingly, the text was incomplete. The most crucial part, the name of the one taking the oath, was missing.
He is testing me, Lyra realized, the fear giving way to a professional, academic thrill, a dangerous distraction from her hatred. He didn't need the translation. He needed to know if I could even read the dialect.
Lyra retrieved her ink and quill and, working with meticulous care, she translated the passage onto a fresh piece of parchment. She purposefully left the interpretation ambiguous, returning the text as a faithful translation of words, not meaning.
She replaced the scroll and the folio exactly as she found them. Then, Lyra stepped back, crossed her arms, and waited, standing motionless in the center of the Annex. She sent out her own silent challenge: I am here. I completed the task. Now show yourself, Blood King.
For twenty minutes, the Annex remained still. The cold, heavy presence of Kaelen's scrutiny returned, pressing against her skin, searching for a trace of dishonesty or fear. He was not looking at the translated document; he was looking at her.
In the high, vaulted distance of the palace's surveillance chamber, Lord Valerius watched the thermal display. Kaelen was not physically present, but the King's projected focus was total.
Her analysis is accurate, Sire. She withheld interpretation, displaying political caution. A faithful rendering, Valerius reported through the psychic link.
Kaelen's cold, mental voice returned: She swallowed the first clue, Valerius. I tested her willingness to comply with an impossible demand. She complied. And she displayed caution. Good. Hatred anchored by intelligence is far more valuable than fear.
And the contents of the oath, Sire? Valerius questioned.
The oath is the essence of her purpose. She must live with it, Valerius. She must learn to fear not me, but the destiny I purchased her to fulfill, Kaelen responded, his mental presence receding.
Lyra, standing in the cold silence of the Annex, watched as the heavy folio and the oath scroll vanished as silently and instantaneously as they had appeared. She was left alone with the chilling certainty that she had passed a critical test set by the King, and the Obsession now had proof of her worth.
She hated the fact that her intellect, her greatest weapon, was also the key to her cage. She ran her hands over the cold stone walls, understanding that her servitude was now inextricably woven with the ancient, dangerous secret of the King's eternal crown.