Prologue

One Hour Before the Coronation

TALIA

The woman selling me my father’s last lie has sewn bells beneath her tongue.

They chime when she breathes. Tiny silver notes, too delicate for the work being done in this windowless room beneath the Creditor Court. Every sound strikes the glass shelves and returns thinner, sharper. Hundreds of oath-coins sleep around us in velvet slots, each one holding the exact moment somebody believed they were loved.

I keep my hands flat on the black table.

The forger watches them anyway.

"You came alone," she says.

"You insisted."

"And you brought no weapon."

I smile. "You didn’t insist on that."

One bell under her tongue gives a nervous answer.

She is older than the rumors made her, with opal eyes and the translucent skin of a moth-wing fae. Gold thread sutures the corners of her mouth. Every false oath she has ever copied is written there in scars. On the table between us rests a dead coin: clear glass, silver rim, no memory burning at its center.

By sunset, that empty circle must sit on the coronation pedestal in place of Lord Cael Ardyn’s master coin.

By sunset, I must be gone.

The forger pushes the counterfeit toward me with one long fingernail. "It will pass a guard’s glance. It will pass a ceremonial inventory. It will not survive a sovereign’s touch."

"He won’t touch it."

"Cael touches everything he owns."

The name pulls cold through my ribs.

Above us, the court is filling with silk, perfume, and people who survived my father’s rebellion by choosing the correct side before the blood dried. Somewhere in that glittering architecture, Cael is preparing to be crowned. Somewhere close to his body, perhaps in the inner pocket of his black coat, he carries coins filled with other people’s tenderness.

One of them contains my father’s memory of me.

I set a narrow ivory case on the table and open it.

The forger stops breathing.

Inside lies a sliver of red oathglass no longer than my smallest finger. A pulse of warm light moves through it once, weak as an animal dying under snow. I stole it from the ruin of my father’s study after the executioners finished searching. For three years I have kept it wrapped in salt and wool, because bare skin wakes it.

"A fragment," the forger whispers. "Whose?"

"You don’t need to know."

Her opal gaze lifts to mine. "You want the dead coin tuned to this signature. I need to know whose blood shaped the original oath."

I slide a knife from my sleeve and lay it beside the case—not a threat, merely a correction to her earlier assumption.

"My father’s."

All the bells beneath her tongue fall silent.

Everyone remembers Edren Sorn. Traitor. Warmonger. The lord who bought an army with love and lost both. The six courts displayed his body above the eastern gate until winter made a white mask of his face.

No one remembers how he used to leave rain on the carpet of his study. How his hand felt on my shoulder. How, on the eve of his rebellion, he bent close and said, I will secure our future, Talia. Remember that I love you.

Those memories are mine. The answers belong to me.

The forger reaches for the shard with silver tongs. "If this wakes—"

"It won’t."

It wakes.

Gold light floods the room.

The shelves begin to sing.

Every coin answers at once: a thousand trapped affections vibrating against their velvet beds. I lunge across the table, but the shard has already risen between us. Light spills over the walls and builds the outline of a man.

My father stands in the air, incomplete from the chest down. His face flickers. His mouth moves without sound.

For one ruined heartbeat, hope makes a fool of me.

"Father?"

The projection turns—not toward me, but toward a second shape assembling from the shadows.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. Silver-eyed.

Cael Ardyn.

The image is too fractured to reveal the room around them, too weak to carry their words. I see only my father extending something that shines in his palm. I see Cael refuse it. I see my father seize Cael’s wrist and force the light between them.

Then the vision tears apart.

The shard drops.

The forger catches it with the tongs, but a black line races from their tips into her hand. She screams. The nearest shelves burst, spraying glass across the room. Memories escape in ribbons of gold—first kisses, bedside songs, a child’s sleeping weight—and vanish when they touch the stone ceiling.

I vault the table as the forger collapses. The black line is climbing her wrist, an enforcement curse searching for the thief who woke the signature.

"Cut it out," she gasps.

I pin her hand to the table.

"Cut what?"

"The memory. Before it reaches my heart."

There is no time for mercy and no room for hesitation. I close my fingers around her wrist and follow the curse to the first bright image it has seized: a small boy asleep beneath a blue quilt, his cheek pressed to the forger’s palm.

"Your son?"

Her bells shake. "Please."

If I pull the memory free, she lives and loses him. If I refuse, the curse burns through her heart and keeps the memory anyway.

This is how the Creditor Court makes every choice.

I press the dead coin against the black line. The counterfeit drinks the curse with a crack of white light. Glass sears my palm. The boy beneath the blue quilt flashes inside the empty circle, then gutters out. The forger drags in a ragged breath.

For a moment neither of us moves.

"What did you do?" she whispers.

I lift the coin. A dim golden thread now circles its rim, enough borrowed warmth to fool the pedestal wards. Not enough to identify the memory. The child’s face is already fading from the forger’s eyes.

"I finished the copy."

She stares at me with hatred clean enough to cut. "You are your father’s daughter."

The words land exactly where she intends.

I close the ivory case around the shard, tuck the forged coin into my velvet pocket, and return the knife to my sleeve. Above us, the first coronation bell rolls through the foundations. Dust drifts from the ceiling. The answering bells in the forger’s mouth sound like grief.

At the hidden door, I look back.

"Did Cael steal the memory from him?"

She curls her injured hand against her chest. "Coins don’t remember innocence. Only bargains."

The second coronation bell sounds.

I climb toward the court carrying a dead coin warmed by a stranger’s lost child and a shard that showed Cael refusing my father’s hand. Neither proves what I need. Both make the need worse.

In one hour, I will stand three steps from the ceremonial pedestal.

In one hour, I will steal the only witness left.

And if Lord Cael Ardyn catches me, I will make him tell me why my father had to force my memory into his hands.