"Is he alright?" Aleric asked, looking up.
Kaedrin was already crouching beside his son, brow furrowed with genuine concern, checking his pulse with quick, practiced fingers.
"What's wrong with him," he said. "Did he overtrain this morning? He seemed fine earlier—"
He looked up, frowning, glancing between Aleric and the flower bed as if the answer might be written somewhere in the begonias.
Then he straightened.
Stood back up, folding his arms, the concern smoothing itself over into something more resigned as the pieces — the wind, the shouting, the word cousin still hanging faintly in the air — arranged themselves into an entirely different picture.
"He'll live," Kaedrin said, quieter now, mostly to himself, with the specific weary patience of a man who had, apparently, just watched his son discover several devastating truths within the space of four minutes and was choosing not to unpack any of it out loud just yet.
Blaze looked down at her cousin, pale and unconscious among the flowers.
Then looked away.
Aleric, still processing everything, looked up at Blaze with dawning wonder.
"Sis — you're Lain's cousin. That means you're a princess." He turned the thought over out loud, delighted. "How amazing. I've been traveling with a real princess this whole time."
Kaedrin, who had been about to check on his unconscious son again, paused mid-motion.
"Wait." He looked between Aleric and Blaze, brow furrowing. "What's going on here. How do you two know each other?"
"This is my sis," Aleric said simply, gesturing loosely at the whole situation. "Also Lain's master."
"I'm not," Blaze said, flat, without missing a beat.
"That's good," Kaedrin said, exhaling, "because for a moment I thought you were traveling with some kind of ghost, and I genuinely wasn't sure which explanation I preferred."
"Little brother!"
Alden's voice arrived across the garden before he did, warm and booming, striding through the hedgerows with the specific delighted energy of a man who'd heard his brother had finally returned and had abandoned whatever he was doing to come find him.
"You're back—" He stopped short. Blinked. Looked down. "Wait. Why is Lain on the floor."
"Fainted," Kaedrin said, entirely unbothered, as if this were a perfectly normal Tuesday morning update.
"Fainted." Alden looked at his nephew, still pale and unmoving among the begonias. "Oh — someone, take him inside, get him to a bed, ten servants, whatever it takes—"
"I'll handle it," Maze said.
She crouched, gathered Lain up with the same effortless ease she handled everything, and was gone toward the palace before anyone finished reacting, moving at a pace that suggested she'd rather this be resolved quickly than discussed at length.
Alden watched the girl disappear toward the palace with Lain slung effortlessly over her shoulder, blinking.
"Who was that."
"Maze," Aleric offered helpfully.
"And you?"
"I'm Aleric." He tilted his head toward Blaze, still holding her hand, entirely unbothered by the sudden appearance of a second imposing royal figure. "Sis — is this your father?"
Something shifted in Alden's face the moment the name left the boy's mouth — quick, involuntary, the specific flicker of a man who had heard a word land somewhere old and unhealed before his expression had a chance to catch up and smooth over it.
"Aleric," he repeated. Quiet.
His eyes went distant for half a second, somewhere far past the garden entirely.
Blaze's voice cut through it immediately, flat and final.
"Not that one."
Kaedrin went still too.
"He has the same name," he said slowly, looking at Aleric properly now, something old and careful settling into his expression.
"Stop," Blaze said.
Neither of them stopped fast enough — the silence that followed sat a beat too long, Kaedrin and Alden exchanging a look neither of them explained, before Alden shook his head once, as if to clear it, and managed something close to a laugh that didn't quite land right.
"It's nothing," he said. "Just an old name. Common enough, really. Doesn't mean anything."
Aleric looked between all three of them, entirely lost. "What happened?"
"Nothing," Blaze said again.
"You all looked very strange for a second. All three of you, actually, at the same time, which is somehow worse."
Kaedrin was quiet a moment longer than Alden, still looking at Aleric with something unreadable in his face — not quite the same distance Alden had gone to, but close enough that it took him a beat to shake it off. He exhaled once, short, and looked away, the tension leaving his shoulders deliberately, the way a man sets something down rather than lets it fall.
"It's nothing," he said, finally, echoing his brother, though his voice came out a shade too even to be entirely convincing.
"It's nothing," Alden repeated, recovering fully now, the warmth sliding back over his face with visible effort, visibly grateful for something else to focus on.
He cleared his throat. Ran a hand back through his hair. The kind of small physical reset people do when they're deciding, deliberately, to leave a thought where it is and not go back for it.
Then, as though a switch had been thrown, the warmth flooded back into his face — the specific, total redirection of a man who had clearly been waiting his whole life for a distraction exactly this good.
"Blaze," he said, delighted, turning fully to Blaze. "I didn't know you'd adopted such a cute boy for me. Blaze — is this—"
"I didn't adopt him," Blaze said, flat. "I hired him as a cook."
"Oh," Alden said, nodding sagely, entirely unbothered by the correction. "I thought you missed your brother, so you adopted one."
"I do not miss anyone," Blaze said.
Kaedrin, without warning, pulled Aleric to his side with one arm, entirely unbothered by the fact that he'd known the boy for barely a day.
"No worries," he said cheerfully. "Well, if you're just going to keep him as staff, I'll happily promote him. Adopted son. Much better title."
"No," Alden said immediately. "I'm adopting him."
"You cannot adopt my cook," Blaze said, flat. "I have already invested significant money in him. That investment does not transfer."
Aleric, currently being fought over by an Emperor and a Grand Duke while his actual employer defended her claim to him purely on financial grounds, looked between all three of them with the specific delighted stillness of someone witnessing something extraordinary.
"This," he said, "is definitely going in my diary."
"Go train," Blaze said, without looking at him. "Don't disturb this."
Aleric considered arguing that being fought over by two of the most powerful men in the empire was, arguably, a form of disturbance he was fully entitled to enjoy — but decided against it, gave a small salute, and wandered off toward the training yard with the unbothered ease of someone who had learned that arguing with that particular tone never worked.
Blaze watched him go for exactly as long as it took him to be out of earshot.
Then she turned back to her father and uncle, the warmth of the last few minutes gone from her voice entirely, replaced with something colder, more precise.
"Do you know," she said, "that someone has been using my army's name."
Alden's smile faded.
Kaedrin's arm dropped from where it had still been resting near his side.
"What," Alden said, "did you just say."
"Someone is using my name to commit insignificant murders," Blaze said. Flat. Bored, almost — the specific tone of someone reporting a minor inconvenience rather than an assault on her own identity. "Artists, mostly. Village level. Small enough not to matter individually. Frequent enough to matter collectively." She examined her nails briefly, as though the whole topic warranted no more attention than that. "It's tedious. I've had to deal with it personally on several occasions, which has been an unnecessary use of my time."
Alden stared at her.
"An unnecessary use of your time," he repeated. "Blaze, this is—"
"An inconvenience," Blaze said. "Yes. I've established that."
"This is treason committed in your name. Against a princess of this empire. Against—"
"I'm aware of what it is," she said, cutting through him without raising her voice. "I'm simply not interested in performing outrage about it. Outrage doesn't solve anything. Finding the source does."
She turned her attention to Kaedrin.
"You knew."
It wasn't a question.
Kaedrin's jaw tightened. "I've been piecing it together. From the magistrate's reports."
"Since when," Blaze said.
"Since Lain's arrest crossed my desk."
Alden's head snapped toward his brother. "Since Lain's arrest—"
"When your son was arrested for a murder connected to it," Alden said, sharper now, "and you didn't think that warranted a letter."
"I was three days from the capital with him," Kaedrin said, evenly, though it clearly cost him to keep it that way. "No confirmation of anything beyond one village's account. I wasn't going to alarm the Emperor over a rumor."
"It stopped being a rumor the moment it reached the point where villagers were angry enough to march on it," Blaze said. "Which it has. I watched it happen. Twice."
The garden had gone very still.
Maze arrived without sound, as she always did — appearing at the edge of the clearing having deposited Lain safely inside, positioning herself a step behind Blaze the way she'd done a thousand times before.
She said nothing yet. She simply listened, reading the tension in the space the way she read everything, cataloguing it for later use.
Blaze glanced at her once — brief, wordless — and Maze understood the glance the way she understood most things master didn't bother explaining.
It's begun, it said. Properly, this time.
Alden exhaled slowly, dragging a hand down his face, looking suddenly considerably more tired than he had five minutes ago.
"Start from the beginning," he said. "All of it. Now."
"Little flames," Blaze said. "Do the talking."
She sat.
A chair hadn't been there a moment before — gold-trimmed, high-backed, appearing beneath her with the same unhurried inevitability as everything else she summoned — and a tea set arrived alongside it, delicate and absurdly fine for a garden conversation about treason, the porcelain cup catching the morning light as she lifted it without looking at it.
Maze stepped forward.
She explained it cleanly, without embellishment — the villages, the pattern, the way the story had shifted from rumor to conviction to organized anger over the course of weeks, the marked men who moved ahead of it, the murders that were never random. She laid it out the way she laid out everything, complete and without unnecessary detail, while Alden's expression darkened further with every sentence and Kaedrin's silence grew heavier beside him.
Blaze sipped her tea and said nothing, letting Maze carry the weight of it.
When Maze finished, Blaze set the cup down.
Looked behind her, at nothing visible.
"Come here," she said.
A figure rose out of the shadow beneath the garden's largest tree — not stepping out from behind it, simply arriving, the way things arrived for Blaze when she asked them to. A man, middle-aged, younger than Alden by perhaps a decade, dressed in the dark, unadorned uniform of someone who commanded rather than served.
The Commander of the Flame Army.
He knelt the moment his feet found solid ground, head bowed, saying nothing, waiting.
Blaze looked at him the way she looked at most things — briefly, thoroughly, without particular interest in whatever he had to say for himself.
Her fingers moved.
Small. Precise. A gesture that took less effort than lifting her teacup had.
A shard of light — thin, bright, unmistakably deliberate — settled itself into the skin above his right eyebrow, sinking in without blood, without pain visible on his face, simply there now, the way a brand is there once it's finished being applied.
"Two days," Blaze said. "Maximum. I want an answer."
The commander bowed lower, said nothing, and was gone from the garden the same way he'd arrived — not walking away, simply no longer present.
What a hassle, she thought, watching the space where the commander had just vanished, tea still warm in her hand.
I could simply erase the entire country responsible for this. Wipe the border clean off every map that mentions it. It would take considerably less effort than what I'm currently doing.
She took a sip.
Simple. Efficient. Over within the hour.
A pause.
But that requires no patience at all. No unraveling. No watching the threads pull tight one at a time until the last one snaps in someone's hand and they realize, too late, exactly whose name they borrowed.
Killing them one by one is considerably more effort.
It's also considerably more satisfying.
She looked at her father, still visibly working through several stages of fury and helplessness at once, and at Kaedrin beside him, jaw tight, already calculating troop movements he hadn't been asked to calculate.
Let them think in terms of armies and borders, she thought. That's their scale of thinking. Mine is smaller. Slower. Considerably more personal.
She set the teacup down.
Two days, she thought again. Let's see who's still standing after that.