ADAEZE POV
The throne room was marble. White and cold and so big it made sound behave strangely, like the room was eating noise before it could land anywhere.
Adaeze walked in and stopped three steps past the entrance because that was where Zara's muscle memory told her to stop, and she trusted the muscle memory more than her own instincts right now. Two guards at opposite walls, still as furniture. Morning light just starting to push through the high windows, thin and grey, not enough to warm anything.
And Cael.
Crown Prince Cael Eryndal was standing with his back to her, looking at something through the far window, hands clasped behind him. He did not turn when she came in. She had about four seconds to look at him before he did and she used all four of them.
Tall. Not in a way that was trying to be impressive, just in the way that some people are built like they were designed to take up exactly the right amount of space. Dark clothes, no ceremonial anything, which was interesting at this hour. Hair almost black. And when he finally turned around, the silver-grey eyes the novel had described were exactly that. Grey. Not warm grey. The kind of grey that was genuinely looking for something.
He looked at her face and she looked at his and neither of them said anything for a moment that went on just a beat too long.
He expected something. She could see it in the way his jaw was set, braced, the way you brace when you know someone is going to come at you with something sharp. He was waiting for the usual Zara. The fury. The sharp tongue. The kind of attitude that walked into rooms already burning.
She gave him nothing. Just stood there.
He blinked. Just once. Barely visible.
"Lady Voss," he said. His voice was low and even and completely empty of anything she could read.
"Your Highness," she said back.
Another pause. He moved then, walking toward the center of the room, and she tracked him the way she used to track the senior consultant on ward rounds, watching for the thing that would tell her what kind of morning it was going to be.
"You said something last night," he started.
She waited.
"At the Harren function. You made a remark to Lady Sevan about letters. Private letters belonging to the Corvel family." He stopped about four feet away from her. "You implied you had access to correspondence that would be, and I am using your word here, illuminating, if it were to reach the wrong ears."
Inside her chest, something lurched.
Corvel family. Letters. She had no memory of this. Zero. She ran through everything the body had given her this morning and came up empty on this specific piece and the problem was that he was watching her face right now with those grey eyes and she needed to say something before the silence became its own answer.
"I said a lot of things last night," she said.
"I am aware." He tilted his head slightly. "This particular thing concerned me."
"It was a function," she said carefully. "People talk at functions."
"People talk," he agreed. "You threatened."
She held his gaze and said nothing. Let the silence sit there. It was the hardest thing she had done in this body so far, harder than walking down the corridor in Zara's clothes, harder than looking in that mirror. Because her instinct right now was to explain herself, to clarify, to be the medical student who had an answer ready. But Zara would not explain herself to anyone and if she broke that pattern right now, in this room, she would give herself away completely.
"You are not going to tell me what you intended," he said. Not a question.
"I don't think I need to," she said.
Something moved in his expression. Not softening. More like recalibrating. He looked at her the way she had looked at her hands that morning, like the thing in front of him was not quite matching the picture he had filed away.
"The Corvel family has been a consistent presence in this court for thirty years," he said. "Whatever you think you have on them, using it publicly creates a problem for everyone in this room, including you."
"I understand that," she said.
"Do you."
"Yes."
He looked at her a moment longer and she kept her face neutral and her breathing steady and thought about absolutely nothing because thinking about something meant the thoughts might show up on her face and her face right now was the only thing standing between her and disaster.
"You can go," he said finally.
She nodded once and turned toward the door and walked at exactly the speed Zara would walk, not fast, not slow, like the room behind her was not worth hurrying away from.
She was almost at the doors when she heard him say, quietly, to no one in particular, "That was different."
She did not look back.
She pushed through the doors and stepped into the corridor and the cold hit her again and she let out a breath that had been sitting in her chest for the entire conversation.
"Lady Voss."
She stopped.
A man fell into step beside her. She had not heard him coming, which meant he was either very good at moving quietly or he had been standing near the doors already, waiting. Big. Broad across the shoulders. A scar running from his jaw down past his collar. He was looking straight ahead as they walked, not at her.
Oryn. She knew who he was. Cael's shadow commander. The man who, in the novel, was always in the room right before something went wrong and always on the right side of it afterward.
She said nothing. Let him talk first.
He did not talk for ten full seconds. They just walked, their footsteps hitting the marble at the same pace, and she counted the seconds the way she used to count compressions during CPR, keeping her rhythm even.
"You held your tongue in there," he said.
She glanced at him sideways. He was still looking forward.
"Was I supposed to say more?" she asked.
"In my experience," he said, "you always say more."
There was nothing warm in how he said it. Not hostile exactly. More like a man making a note in a file he was going to review later.
"Maybe I had nothing to add," she said.
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "In four years of watching you operate in this court, Lady Voss, you have never once had nothing to add."
She did not answer that. Could not answer that without stepping on something she did not know the shape of yet.
They reached a junction in the corridor and he stopped walking. She stopped too.
"Whatever changed between last night and this morning," he said, and now he did look at her, and his eyes were doing the same thing Cael's eyes had done, that quiet looking-for-something, "be careful with it. People in this palace notice when the pattern breaks."
"I appreciate the advice," she said.
"It wasn't advice," he said. "It was an observation."
He turned and walked back the way they had come and she watched him go for exactly one second before turning toward her own corridor and walking, steady pace, not hurrying, until she was far enough away that she could let her shoulders drop half an inch.
She got back to the chambers and closed the door and leaned against it with her eyes shut for a moment.
That had been. A lot.
Cael was sharper in person than the novel had prepared her for. Every line of dialogue felt like it had a second line underneath it that was the actual point. And Oryn was already watching her and she had been in this body for less than three hours.
She opened her eyes.
And stopped.
There was something in the room that had not been there before. Hovering at eye level, right in the middle of the space between the door and the bed, a panel of light. Translucent, faintly blue-white, the kind of light that did not come from candles or windows. Letters forming themselves across it like someone was typing from the other side.
She stared at it.
It said, in clean block letters that she could read perfectly clearly, TRANSMIGRATOR DETECTED.
Then below that, ORIENTATION BEGINS NOW.
And below that, a number.
A timer.
43 days remaining.
She looked at it for a long time. The cold from the stone walls was still sitting in her clothes and her hands were not quite steady and she was standing in a dead woman's body in a world from a novel she had read on a couch in Lagos, and apparently there was a timer.
Forty-three days.
"Okay," she said, for the third time that morning.
This time she did not sound okay at all.