The council room of House de Vaillant had been built for the kind of decisions that required oak panelling and the quiet authority of old money. It seated twelve in comfort. This morning it held six, and the room had adjusted its expectations accordingly, settling into the resigned dignity of a ballroom hosting a committee meeting.
Maximilian sat at the head of a table buried in correspondence. He had dressed for authority, or tried to. The effect was undermined by the cuff he hadn’t fastened, which Percival would have caught in the first thirty seconds and which nobody else in the room would mention. The air around him held a faint warmth that had nothing to do with the hearth.
? Divina ran the household betting pool on days between pyromantic incidents. Current odds favoured ‘less than a week.’ The fire insurance adjuster had stopped returning correspondence.
“Right,” Maximilian said. “Let’s have it.”
The room arranged itself around his attention. Wylan occupied the chair to his left, coffee in hand, alert through a combination of poor sleep, caffeine, and conviction. Isabella leaned against the windowsill with her arms folded, watching the room the way she watched tree lines: for movement. Cedric stood by the door, his posture so impeccable it constituted a form of commentary. Elariana had her customary sheaf of notes and the expression of someone who had been awake since the fourth bell and resented everyone who hadn’t.
“Security first,” Maximilian said. “Elariana.”
“Perimeter wards are holding. Divina and I have reinforced the eastern approach.” She set her notes on the table. “But we were breached by a single operative who walked through walls. Wards address conventional threats. If the cult sends something unconventional again, we need intelligence, not mechanisms.” Her gaze moved to the empty chairs at the table. “Which brings us to the question of who isn’t here.”
Maximilian did not look at the chair where Mirembe usually sat. He looked instead at the correspondence in front of him, though the words had stopped meaning anything several minutes ago.
“Cedric. How is the household?”
The gnome stepped forward. He had built an entire career on the art of saying difficult things in comfortable ways. “The staff are holding, Your Grace. Morale is... considered. There is a general awareness that recent events have been unusual, though the precise nature of those events remains, for most, a matter of speculation.”
“What kind of speculation?”
Cedric paused with the delicacy of a man selecting which landmine to describe first. “The more creative accounts involve a dragon in the wine cellar, Your Grace. The more sober ones merely note that the household chaplain has had a theological disagreement with his employer.”
“Theological disagreement,” Maximilian repeated.
“It was the most diplomatic phrasing available, Your Grace.”
Isabella straightened at the window. “They know about Lambert.”
“They know that something has changed,” Cedric corrected. “The staff attend chapel services, my lady. Or rather, they attended. The chapel has been notably quiet these past two days, and the absence has been observed.”
Lambert was House Chaplain. Lambert had declared war on the Church. These two facts occupied the same sentence the way a lit match occupies a room full of lamp oil: with mathematical inevitability.
“The chaplaincy,” Maximilian said.
Wylan set down his coffee. Isabella’s arms uncrossed. Even Elariana, whose interest in theology ranked somewhere below her interest in decorative needlework, looked up from her notes.
“Lambert’s appointment as House Chaplain was my first act as Duke,” Maximilian continued. He sounded like a man reading terms he had not yet agreed to. “It was done at our mother’s request. It has not been reviewed.”
“You’re thinking of removing him,” Isabella said. Not a question.
“I’m thinking of what happens if I don’t.” The warmth in the air ticked up a fraction. “One cannot serve as chaplain of a Church one has declared fraudulent. The position is a contradiction.”
Nobody offered a counterargument.
“We’ll address this when Lambert returns,” Maximilian said. “He should answer for his own position. I won’t make this decision without him present.”
Cedric cleared his throat. “If I may, Your Grace. There is the matter of the child.”
The room’s attention shifted. Maximilian’s expression didn’t change, but the warmth in the air steadied. Something inside him had decided to hold very still.
“Aurora is well,” Cedric said. “Greta is with her. She slept through the night.”
“Good.”
“Madame Mirembe has not visited the nursery this morning.”
Maximilian nodded, once and short. Not now. It was an entire conversation he was not prepared to have. “Thank you, Cedric. That will be all on household matters.”
Cedric inclined his head, paused, and then did not leave.
“Your Grace. Your mother has returned from her morning engagements. She is waiting in the gallery with a guest.”
“A guest.” Maximilian’s tone suggested the word had arrived uninvited. “What kind of guest?”
“A Monk, Your Grace. She has asked to present him to you at your convenience.”
“Send them in.”
Laila walked in like a woman who had been made to wait and intended everyone to know it. She was still wearing her outdoor coat, frost on the hem, and her expression carried the temperature of the street she’d come from.
“Thirty minutes, Maximilian.”
“Family business. Council members only.” He did not look up from the requisitions. “Your guest is not family.”
“Funny you should say that.”
Maximilian looked up.
Behind Laila stood a man in Monk’s robes. Tall, lean, dark hair cropped close in the monastic fashion. He carried himself with the stillness of someone who had been trained to wait, and the robes hung on him with the resigned familiarity of a garment that had lost every argument with its wearer and accepted the situation.
? Monks don’t make sartorial statements, but they do have an ascetic.
Wylan was the first to react. He set down his coffee, tilted his head, and said, “Why is Alexisoix dressed like a Monk?”
Isabella’s hand moved to her hip, where a weapon would have been if she’d been wearing one.
“He’s not Alexisoix,” Laila said. She stepped aside, giving the room a clear view. “This is Sadriel. Formerly Julius Beaumont. Your cousin.”
Elariana studied the newcomer with professional attention, her gaze tracking the way he held his weight, the set of his shoulders, the balance that belonged to someone who had been hit often enough to learn how not to be.
“He moves like a warrior,” Elariana observed, as a caution.
“He’s a Monk,” Laila said.
“I said what I said.”
“Your Grace,” Sadriel said. Measured, respectful, and carrying no deference beyond what the title demanded.
Maximilian considered him. The Beaumont jawline, the dark hair, but sharper than Alexisoix and more weathered, as though monastic life had filed away everything that wasn’t necessary.
“Julius Beaumont was convicted by the Inquisition a decade ago,” Maximilian said. “Sentenced to monastic penance for his alleged role in the dragon egg theft. There has been no correspondence since. No visits. No indication he intended to return. And now you appear in my mother’s company, in my council room, on a morning when I have rather a lot on my mind already.”
“I wouldn’t have come without good reason,” Sadriel said.
“People who say that invariably bring the worst kind of reason.”
Maximilian looked at Laila. “You’ve assessed him.”
He meets your standards it seems. Of course, she would not have brought an unknown quantity into this house without reading him first.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
“At St. Dreven’s this morning. He found me at the cloister.” Laila removed her coat and draped it over the back of a chair, transitioning from the street to the council table. “I’ve done a preliminary empathic assessment. No deception that I could identify.”
“That you could identify,” Maximilian repeated.
“He’s a trained Monk, Maximilian. His mind is more orderly than your wardrobe. If he’s hiding something, it’s behind walls I’d need more time and fewer witnesses to breach.” She sat. “But I don’t think he is.”
“You will explain yourself,” Maximilian said. “Completely. My mother may be satisfied, but this is my house and my decision. And you will do so knowing that a prodigal Beaumont returning in surprise, one sent away in disgrace, brings exactly the wrong kind of scrutiny at exactly the wrong time.”
“I understand,” Sadriel said.
“Then sit down. You’re making the room taller than it needs to be.”
It was not warmth. It was not welcome. But it was permission, and in Maximilian’s council room, permission was the currency that mattered.
Sadriel sat. Upright, centred, hands on the table, fingers interlaced. He began.
“Since you began with my conviction, I shall start there. The case against me was built on fabricated testimony. I was nineteen. The trial lasted two days.” He paused. “I suspect that is not news to this household.”
“Lambert investigated the archives,” Maximilian said. “He reached similar conclusions about the evidence.”
Something shifted in Sadriel’s expression as he recalculated. “Then you know the conviction was manufactured. I have spent ten years trying to understand who arranged it and why. I do not have that answer yet. But I did not come here to relitigate my conviction. I came because of what I found while trying to clear my name.”
Laila, who had settled into the chair beside Maximilian, gave him the smallest nod from behind Sadriel’s line of sight. He believes what he’s saying.
“Go on,” Maximilian said.
“When you spend ten years in a monastery for a crime you did not commit, you have a great deal of time to think about the crime itself. Who benefited. Who had access. Who ensured the trial moved so quickly that no one had time to ask the obvious questions.”
Sadriel’s hands remained still on the table.
“I began tracing the administrative trail. Not the theft itself, but my conviction. The orders that expedited my sentencing. The correspondence that ensured my case bypassed the usual ecclesiastical review.”
He looked at Maximilian steadily. “That paper trail leads to the office of Prelate Vaziri.”
Laila and Maximilian exchanged a glance that contained an entire conversation and resolved nothing.
“I have letters routed through her office that reference keeping me ‘out of the way.’ Routing documents that show my case file was redirected before sentencing. None of it bears her signature directly, and none of it would survive an ecclesiastical tribunal on its own. But the pattern is clear, and the pattern points to her.”
He let that settle.
“I was not investigating a conspiracy. I was trying to prove my innocence. But the trail does not stop at my conviction, and the institution that would formally exonerate me is the same institution that appears to have had a hand in covering it up.”
Something in his voice shifted. Max heard the monastery fall away.
“I have spent a decade navigating this alone. I do not have allies. I do not have resources. What I have is evidence that is dangerous enough to make powerful people uncomfortable, and insufficient to make them answer for it.” He paused. “That is a particularly lonely position to occupy.”
He glanced at Laila.
“I was not going to approach anyone. I came to Pharelle to find work, not allies. I found work at St. Dreven’s. And then I watched your mother arrive at the cloister every morning, without escort, without ceremony, and serve soup to people who had nothing to offer her in return.”
He paused.
“A noble house that sends servants in livery to distribute bread is performing governance. A duchess who sits in a back room and listens to a woman tell her that ten thousand people are starving in the provinces is something else.” He met Maximilian’s eyes. “I decided I could trust her. I was not certain I could trust this household. But I could trust her.”
The room was quiet. Laila’s expression did not change, but Maximilian saw something move behind her composure that she would not have wanted him to see.
“If your evidence holds, it could serve as leverage. Your return must remain discreet. The household will recognise you only as a visiting Monk. You will be accorded hospitality, not status.”
Sadriel inclined his head again, well-practised at accepting less than he was owed.
“Isabella,” Maximilian said. “Our cousin’s claim will need verification. The intercepted correspondence, whatever he has. Your eyes.”
Isabella pushed off the windowsill. “Professionally so,” she said, and looked at Sadriel the way she looked at anything she hadn’t yet verified.
Cedric materialised at the door. He had been waiting for precisely this moment and would never admit it. “Your Grace. Monsignor Lambert has returned from the Basilica.”
The room rearranged itself. Wylan straightened. Isabella’s attention moved from Sadriel to the doorway. Laila looked up with careful neutrality.
Lambert entered with a sealed packet under one arm. His stride was long, purposeful, and checked itself entirely when he saw the man sitting at the table.
Lambert’s face performed a rapid series of operations: recognition, confusion, anger, and then guarded neutrality.
“Julius Beaumont,” Lambert said.
“Sadriel.” The correction was quiet but immediate. “I haven’t used that name in some time.”
Max watched them regard each other in ecclesiastical symmetry: cassock against robes, both wielding composure as a weapon. As easily as they might draw blood on theology.
“You signed my arrest warrant,” Sadriel said with brutal candour.
Lambert was quiet for a moment. “I did.”
“You were seventeen.”
“I was.”
“Then it must have been very formative.”
“It was.”
Lambert paused, visibly letting something pass.
“But perhaps not the way you think. The experience of sending one’s own cousin to a monastery on fabricated evidence has a way of clarifying one’s views on institutional integrity.”
Sadriel blinked. “You know the evidence was fabricated?”
“Indeed, I discovered recently that the witness statements were template copies; constructed from my own speeches, I might add.” Lambert’s voice was precise and clinical. You are prosecuting your own case, Lambert. “So it was rather educational to find my rhetoric and my signature co-opted for someone else’s scheme: my own words weaponised.”
Max swore he could have fired an arrow between them and neither would flinch.
Then, by some unseen signal, they both relaxed at once. He had not even realised they were battle ready until Sadriel’s shoulders dropped and Lambert’s fingers unclenched.
“It seems,” Sadriel said carefully, “that we were both made use of.”
“It would appear so.”
Lambert pulled out a chair and sat across from Sadriel rather than in his usual space. A deliberate choice for all to see.
It was the strangest peace deal Max had ever witnessed. Perhaps Invictus allows us our own small miracles.
“I have intelligence from the Basilica. I expect someone will explain why my cousin is sitting at the council table.”
Laila obliged. She was brief, efficient, and omitted nothing of substance: Sadriel’s arrival at St. Dreven’s, his account of the fabricated conviction, the administrative paper trail he had traced, and where that trail led.
When she said Vaziri’s name, Lambert went very still.
“Say that again.”
“Prelate Vaziri’s office. Letters routed through it referencing Sadriel’s case. Routing documents showing his file was redirected before sentencing. Circumstantial, not definitive. But the pattern is consistent.”
Lambert reached into his cassock, broke the seal on Calderon’s packet, and spread the contents across the table. Then he looked at Sadriel with something Maximilian had never seen on his stepbrother’s face: gratitude.
“You have no idea how long I have been looking for this connection.” He turned to the room. “Vaziri is being positioned for the Pontifarchy. Based on indirect evidence, I believe the Pontifex is in his dying days. Her reputation is spotless — genuine healer, tireless advocate — but her charity does not operate in a vacuum. Every good deed is magnified. Every misstep swept away.”
Lambert glanced at Sadriel. “What you’ve found is the piece I was missing. I knew Vaziri was ascending. What I did not know was that her office had a direct administrative connection to the egg theft.”
“She didn’t just cover it up,” Sadriel said. “She made it efficient. Two days from filing to conviction.”
“Yes, that conforms to what I’ve been able to find out,” Lambert said. “It speaks to influence from the top.”
Max swore he heard an echo.
“It would seem she’s been pulling the strings for a decade to achieve this.” Lambert tapped one of Calderon’s documents. “When Esteban disappeared and cleared her path, was when she rose to prominence.”
“She may be family, if somewhat distantly,” Laila mused, “but I am beginning to dread what this ambition might do once she has the authority of the Pontifex’s seat behind her.”
“Yes.”
Wylan cleared his throat, waited until every head turned, and downed his coffee like a man steeling himself for surgery.
“So let’s be clear: we have d’Aubigne and the dragon cult on one front, and this unknown but potential threat in Prelate Vaziri ascending to the Pontifarchy on the other.” He paused. “The question nobody has asked yet is whether those are actually the same front.”
“Meaning?” Isabella asked.
“Meaning: is Vaziri a cultist?”
“Seraphina was quite clear,” Lambert said. He had staked everything on this ground. “The Church was built to contain Aeloria’s power. Valère made it in his own image, projected onto an idea of Invictus. It has served the cult’s interests for its entire history. If Vaziri sits at the top of that institution, the implication follows.”
“Seraphina was clear about that,” Isabella shot back. “She remained rather cryptic about everything else.”
“And are we forgetting that they’re sisters?” Wylan said, louder than he’d intended. “Am I the only one seeing how absurd this is?”
Nobody had an immediate reply. Wylan pressed on.
“Follow the logic. We have Seraphina working for R?zvan and the vampire court in opposition to Aeloria. And on the other side, her own sister, possibly aligned with either the cult or Valère’s legacy.” He looked around the table. “Why do I feel like we’ve found ourselves caught up in an ancient fight between giants?”
Lambert’s hand went to his prayer beads. Your nervous tick, Lambert. You’re thinking out loud again.
“You’re right,” he said quietly, and the room stilled, because Lambert agreeing with anyone unprompted was unusual enough to warrant attention. “It’s cyclical. Invictus and Death. Valère and R?zvan. And now, perhaps, the sisters.” He turned the beads between his fingers. “I’ve been trying to reconcile two forces that the Church teaches are locked in opposition. Light against dark. But what if that’s the wrong frame? What if the opposition itself is the point?”
“Lambert,” Isabella said. “What do you propose we actually do about it?”
“We bring them together.” He looked up. “Neither side dominant, neither side victorious. They keep each other in check.”
“Allow me, my children, to bring this discussion back to other matters.” She had been commanding this room long before her son inherited the chair. “Vaziri is beyond our reach, and more importantly, we have a more immediate threat.”
“D’Aubigne,” Isabella said.
Laila inclined her head. “She is a known operative and still acting against us. She poses a clear and active danger. We have two matters to pursue. The first is to uncover who the assailants were upon our house, and perhaps why they wanted to take Aurora from us.”
“We also have an appointment with Seraphina tonight,” Isabella said.
“Then move fast and be home before the Pendulum reaches the western reach.” Laila paused. “Even though I would advise you against this meeting.”
The household began to rise.
“I have not dismissed anyone,” Maximilian said.
The room stilled. He drew himself up, reclaiming the authority his mother had so effortlessly taken from him.
“Lambert.”
The single word was enough to draw everyone back to their seats.
“I am surprised to hear your olive branch in this moment. But is it genuine, or will I see another revelation in a few days’ time?”
Lambert said nothing. He waited.
“This morning, I asked myself whether a man who has declared the Church fraudulent can serve as its chaplain.” Maximilian held his stepbrother’s gaze. It was the first time they had properly looked at each other since the other night, and what Max found there wasn’t defiance. It was hope.
“You have put me in a difficult position. Family against Church against the reputation of this duchy.” He let the weight of that settle. “I do not think I will remove you as chaplain.”
“Thank you, Your Grace.”
“Do not thank me yet. I retain my right to return to this at any time. For now, I am not backing your war. But I am not removing you either. Not until we know what Vaziri actually is.”