The letter arrived with the morning post, delivered on a silver tray by a stone-faced academy servant. It bore the Thorne seal—a stylized, leafless black tree on a field of gray wax. The sight of it sent a familiar, chilly dread through me, unrelated to visions of the north. This was the cold of my old life, the cold of neglect, measured in parchment and ink.
I took it to the window seat, the morning sun feeling suddenly sterile. Breaking the seal, the crisp parchment crackled like frost. The handwriting was not my father's; it was the precise, uncompromising script of his seneschal, Anselm. That in itself was a message. The Duke of Thorne did not personally correspond with his disappointing daughter.
Lady Rosalind,
His Grace, your father, has been apprised of the recent… incident… at the Royal Academy involving Lady Seraphina Vale and the person of the Crown Prince.
