[Evelyn’s POV]

Sera calls everyone, literally.

Servants who polish the silverware and scrub the hearth stones. Cooks who have fed this compound through drought and plenty. Stable hands with straw in their hair and grime under their fingernails.

The invisible backbone of the household, summoned to the great hall on a Tuesday afternoon with no explanation beyond “attendance required.”

They file in with wary uncertainty. Most have never stood in the great hall for anything but feast days and funerals.

They cluster in groups — kitchen staff together, stable hands along the back wall, laundry women near the colonnade. Warriors line the edges.

I stand beside Draven at the front of the hall. My hands hang at my sides and every instinct I possess screams at me to fold them, to hide, to make myself smaller. I keep them where they are.

Sera steps forward and carries no notes. Whatever she’s about to say lives behind her eyes, organized with the precision I’ve come to associate with everything she does.

“Most of you know that the woman standing beside Lord Draven is Evelyn, the daughter of Lord Aldric of Mintia from the House of the Blue Dragon.”

Her voice carries to every corner without effort:

“Some of you have formed opinions about what that means. I’m here to give you the facts so those opinions can be informed rather than inherited.”

She begins.

“Evelyn was identified as a threat by her own family before she could walk. Her younger sister, Cassandra — currently detained in our guest wing — was designated the heir through a process of deliberate erasure. Evelyn’s dragon egg, which had bonded to her in the shell, was stolen from her chambers while she slept and awarded to Cassandra in a public ceremony.”

The hall is silent. I feel every pair of eyes like a physical weight.

“When Evelyn protested the theft, her sister staged an incident in the training grounds — threw a stone at her own head and blamed the injury on Evelyn. Their parents banned Evelyn from training based on that fabrication. She was eight years old.”

My throat tightens. Sera warned me, and I agreed — the household needs to hear it from someone they trust, presented as evidence.

But knowing doesn’t prepare you for your worst memories being catalogued aloud before strangers.

A murmur runs through the hall. Someone near the back shifts uncomfortably.

“She was isolated from peers, denied education beyond basic literacy, excluded from every social function her sister attended. When she was sixteen, her betrothal was arranged and then deliberately sabotaged by Cassandra, who seduced the intended groom and presented the humiliation as evidence of Evelyn’s inadequacy.”

I stare at the far wall. Every wound named aloud feels like being stripped bare — the skin pulled back, the bone exposed, every ugly thing I survived laid out for people I’ll face tomorrow in the meal hall.

“When the family discovered that Evelyn’s egg had bonded to her despite being given to Cassandra, they planned her disappearance and elimination. Evelyn overheard her parents discussing the arrangement and fled that night. She arrived in Black Dragon territory with nothing. She was thrown from a cliff by a border patrol and survived only because Lord Draven’s dragon intervened.”

Sera pauses. The silence is absolute — the kind that has texture, that you could press your hand against and feel it push back.

“I present this as an intelligence assessment, not an appeal for sympathy. These facts are corroborated by Alliance records, intercepted Mintian correspondence, physical evidence, and my own professional evaluation conducted over the past several weeks.”

Her dark eyes sweep the hall.

“What you do with this information is your own decision, but you deserve to make that decision based on truth rather than assumption.”

She steps back, and the hall holds its breath.

Nobody speaks. The silence stretches — five seconds, ten, fifteen — and the weight of it presses against my chest until I can barely breathe.

The hall disperses. I hold my position until the last of them file out, because if I move before it’s over, I’ll shatter.

Draven touches my elbow. “There’s a room off the eastern corridor.”

I follow him through the side passage. The room is small — a storage space, mostly empty, cool stone walls and a single shuttered window. He closes the door behind us and steps back.

He doesn’t touch me or reach for me. He just stands three feet away with his hands at his sides and waits.

The shaking starts in my hands and climbs through my arms, my shoulders, my chest.

Every wound Sera named is alive beneath my skin — the beatings, the stone, the stolen egg, the parents who planned my death over dinner like logistics.

Hearing it described without emotion makes it real in a way my own memories never did. Sera’s account is clear: clean and undeniable.

This happened to me, all of it, and a room full of strangers just heard every piece.

The first sob tears loose before I can stop it.

I reach for Draven. My hands find his chest, his shoulders, the solid warmth of his body. He catches me.

His arms close around me and hold — not gently but with the full, steady pressure of a man who understands that right now I need to feel something solid enough to keep me from coming apart.

I press my face into his neck and shake, and he holds on, and neither of us speaks, and the small stone room absorbs every sound I make without giving any of it back.