[Evelyn’s POV]

I’m walking the eastern wall when Kael finds me. The guards track his approach but don’t intervene — he’s a diplomatic detainee with limited movement privileges, permitted access to the courtyard and certain common areas under escort.

The escort hangs back twenty paces, close enough to watch, far enough to give the illusion of privacy.

He looks terrible. The confident jaw has eroded, bone more prominent beneath skin that’s lost its color.

Shadows under his eyes like bruises. Thinner — the broad shoulders diminished, a man whose body is consuming itself from the inside.

“Evelyn.”

“Kael.”

We stand on the wall with the sea wind between us. The last time we spoke was in Mintia, the night he told me the betrothal was off and he’d chosen Cassandra. He couldn’t meet my eyes then.

He meets them now, and what I see in them is worse than cowardice — it’s the particular devastation of a man who finally understands what he did.

“I need to tell you something,” he says. “You won’t want to hear it from me, but you need to hear it before it’s too late.”

“Talk.”

“The fleet is coming, but it is a diversion — the real assault comes through the Shattered Coast. A secondary force of two hundred elite warriors in shallow-draft longboats, approaching through the eastern channel during the spring tide window.”

My pulse kicks. This confirms what the captured spy revealed, but hearing it from Kael — from inside Cassandra’s operation — carries a different weight.

“Cassandra has been communicating with your father through a coded channel. The cipher is hers. She’s been feeding intelligence since the first week of confinement.”

“We know about the channel. The spy has been caught.”

“But Cassandra’s direct communication with Aldric goes through a different relay — one the spy didn’t know about. Separate chain, separate drop point. Kael-to-sentry-to-kitchen-corridor. The sentry doesn’t know what he carries.”

New information, and my hands tighten on the parapet stone.

“There’s more. The Shattered Coast pilot — a smuggler from the Strait of Callos — has already run preliminary reconnaissance. The tidal window aligns in roughly five weeks. The secondary force will position in advance, concealed among the outer reef islands, and move through the channel on the tide.”

“Numbers?”

“Two hundred confirmed. Your father’s personal guard and veterans from the Border Campaigns.” He pauses. “And your father is coming personally.”

The wind catches my hair. Father on the water, commanding.

The man who planned my death and held Cassandra’s hand in a mountain cave and told her she was the strong one — crossing the sea to finish what he started.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Kael’s jaw works. His hands hang at his sides, and I notice they’re trembling — a fine vibration that he can’t control, the body betraying what the face is trying to hold together.

“I can’t undo what I did.” His voice is halting, stripped of the easy confidence I once loved in him.

“Leaving you, standing beside your sister while she planned your destruction, pretending I didn’t see what your family was doing because acknowledging it would have meant giving up everything Cassandra offered.”

He swallows. “I watched them hurt you for years. I told myself it wasn’t my concern. That was a lie I chose because the truth was expensive and I wasn’t willing to pay.”

“Kael—”

“We need to adjust Riven’s flanking force. If they know our eastern defenses — and they do — the original ambush positions are compromised. Riven repositions to secondary concealment. New angles, new timing.”

“Can it be done in four weeks?”

“It has to be.” He’s already writing orders, his pen moving with the controlled urgency of a man redrawing a battle plan against a shrinking clock.

“Draven, Cassandra’s confinement… Are the guards sufficient? If she’s been communicating this whole time—”

“They have doubled since we caught the spy. Four-hour rotations, no gaps. She’s contained.”

“She still managed to run a coded intelligence operation from inside a locked room, so don’t underestimate her.”

He meets my eyes. “I don’t, but the room is secured. The channel is dead, and whatever she built, it’s dismantled now.”

The logic is sound. But through the bond, Aspis stirs.

Her presence rises from background warmth into sharp focus, and her voice carries the particular vibration she uses when something ancient and instinctive is pressing at the edges of her awareness.

“The sister has been working in her cage. She is patient, and patience is the most dangerous thing a caged creature can possess.”

I stand in the council chamber, watching Draven redraw his battle lines, and the unease coils in my gut like a living thing.

Cassandra is patient. In a woman raised to fulfill a prophecy, patience is a weapon no guard rotation can defend against.