Somewhere in the Foher Highlands – Three Days Later

  The carriage wheels groaned over another ridge, rattling against stones worn flat by centuries of rain. Beyond the narrow pass, the land dropped into rolling hills, all grey and green and empty. In the far distance, where the earth bowed and the sky began, something rose — faint, jagged, massive.

  “Vartis,” someone said.

  Fran didn’t look.

  Inside the carriage, no one spoke.

  The royal envoy sat opposite her, back straight, expression unreadable. The two Vartesi messengers rode alongside — one visible through the narrow window, stone-faced and damp from mist. The man hadn’t smiled once in three days.

  Her cats were tucked beside her on the bench, coiled in a single wooden cage lined with wool and packed herbs. Rudy had stopped trying to claw his way out. Nymph still glared at everyone as if plotting several crimes at once.

  Fran shifted, trying to stretch her legs.

  Her knees ached. Her hip was sore from sleeping upright. And her throat still burned from the moment they’d told her she could never go back — not truly.

  The house was sold. The clinic had a new assistant. The library would not hold her usual spot any longer.

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  And her name was Frances Serenna Elarion now.

  Not Fran.

  Not just the fever ward helper. Not the quiet woman with two cats and no past.

  “It’s a mistake,” she had told them. Over and over. “You must have the wrong records.”

  But they didn’t. And when they had spoken of the Duke, she had no argument.

  “Yes, of course,” she’d said. “I know who he was. Everyone does. He was… the Duke.”

  A man of stories. An old name. A good ruler, perhaps.

  But not hers. Not part of her.

  She watched fog curl past the window. The trees had thinned, and the wind grew sharper the closer they came to the valley.

  Her hands fidgeted in her lap, fingers tracing the stitching of her coat.

  “You don’t have to believe it,” the envoy had told her two days ago, when she’d wept in silence at the first inn.

  “But you do have to accept it.”

  She stared down at the ring in her palm.

  It was still too heavy for something so small.

  Gold. Green. A falcon in flight.

  She’d tried to throw it into a stream that morning.

  But Rudy had yowled so loudly at the window that one of the guards came running, and she’d panicked and stuffed it back into her coat pocket.

  It didn’t matter.

  They’d find someone else soon. Someone more suitable. Someone who actually wanted a title. A duchy. A court.

  Not someone whose greatest recent ambition was a better shelf for her herb jars.

  Not someone who didn’t know how to speak at banquets or sit on thrones or remember what fork went where.

  Not her.

  The carriage creaked again.

  Outside, the wind rose, and with it came the faintest echo of distant bells.

  “That’s the outer ridge,” the envoy said softly. “We’ll reach the lower gate by nightfall.”

  Fran didn’t answer.

  She only gripped the ring in her fist, tucked it deep into her coat, and stared at the rising silhouette ahead.

  Vartis.

  Stone. Power. Memory.

  A place that had never been hers — but would be.

  Whether she was ready or not.