[Cassandra’s POV]

The message arrives at the secondary drop point behind the armory cistern, folded into a square no larger than my thumbnail.

Kael delivers it during the evening meal, palming it beneath the table while Harath argues with Loren about protestation wording. I lock myself in the bedchamber and unfold the parchment.

Father’s cipher and hand — the precise, angular script I’d recognize anywhere.

I read it once for content, and twice for detail. Three times for the information between the lines.

The fleet mobilizes with twenty-eight warships, confirmed. Twelve minor house vessels committed, estimated arrival at Black Dragon waters: six weeks.

The southern approach, through the deep channels, will carry the primary fleet — visible, overwhelming, designed to pin Draven’s defenses along the harbor mouth and western cliffs.

But the next paragraph makes my pulse quicken.

A secondary force will approach through the Shattered Coast — the rocky channel east of the compound, a maze of reefs and tidal surges marked on every chart as impassable for warships. Impassable for warships, not for longboats.

Father has found a pilot. A fisherman from the Strait of Callos who ran smuggling routes through the eastern channels for twenty years.

He knows the tides, the gaps in the reef line, the three-day window each lunar cycle when the water clears the worst of the stone teeth.

The fleet from the south is a diversion. The bombardment, the naval engagement, the spectacle of thirty warships bearing down on Draven’s harbor — all of it designed to pull defenders west while the real assault lands on the unfortified eastern shore.

Two hundred warriors in longboats through the back door while every eye watches the front.

I memorize the details and hold the parchment over the candle flame. It catches, curls, and blackens. I crush the ash and scatter it across the windowsill.

“Kael.”

He enters from the main chamber and closes the door behind him. His face is composed, but I’ve learned to read the tension he carries in his shoulders — higher than usual tonight, pulled tight toward his ears.

“The fleet sails in six weeks. Father’s committed the full strength of the house, plus twelve allied vessels.”

“Forty ships against a coastal fortress…That’s a significant engagement.”

“They are the distraction, and the real assault comes from the east — the Shattered Coast. Father has a pilot who knows the tidal channels. A secondary force of two hundred will land on the eastern shore while Draven’s defenses are engaged at the harbor.”

Kael absorbs this. I watch the information settle behind his eyes, watch him build the tactical picture the way I taught him — approach routes, timing, force distribution.

“The eastern shore is barely defended,” he says. “Low walls, no catapult positions, a single patrol route along the cliff path.”

“Which is exactly why Father chose it. I need you to confirm those details. Everything you can observe about the eastern defenses — wall heights, patrol frequency, any recent construction or reinforcement. The assault force needs to know what they’re landing against.”

He nods slowly and then stops.

“What happens to the people in this compound when the assault comes?”

I look up from the windowsill where I’ve been scattering the last of the ash. “They fight or they surrender. That’s war.”

“Some of them will die.”

“That’s also war.”

The prophecy demands a confrontation. Father’s fleet can take the compound, seize the dragon, and dismantle Draven’s house stone by stone, but the prophecy requires my hand. My blade and my blood against hers.

Guards abandon interior posts to man the walls. Sentries rush toward the threat rather than watching prisoners.

In the chaos of a military assault, a locked door is just a suggestion.

I pace through the timeline. The fleet appears, and Draven scrambles. The compound empties its garrison to man fortifications. In those first frantic minutes, through the window, across the courtyard, into the kitchen passages.

The compound opens like the map I’ve been building in my skull for weeks.

Find Evelyn.

I press my hand to the window glass. The compound sleeps below. Somewhere in the lord’s wing, my sister sleeps beside a man who thinks he can protect her.

He can’t. The prophecy is older than his house, older than his bloodline. It will be fulfilled regardless of who stands in its path.

My reflection stares back at me from the dark glass — copper hair, green eyes, the face Father built into a weapon.

The prophecy has to be done. If it doesn’t — if the witch was wrong, if Father was wrong, if everything I’ve done and everything I’ve become was built on a misreading — then there’s nothing underneath me.

No foundation or purpose. Just a woman who destroyed her sister’s life for nothing. That possibility is more terrifying than any war.

I press harder against the glass until my palm aches, and I don’t let myself think about it again.