Rosa’s search of Viktor’s chambers was efficient as it was fuelled by belief that there was no one to note her ransack. She upended drawers and emptied cupboards. She opened the curtains a crack to read correspondence beneath moonlight, and tipped mattress and cushions aside. Each tick of the grandfather clock drove her to greater recklessness.

Clothes and trinkets. Mementoes of past battles. The assorted ephemera of a man with an eye for curiosities, and the wealth to indulge it. Letters revealed nothing but friendships sustained by penmanship, or favours sought by nobles. But of the Crowmarket, there was nothing. Not even the merest trace. No correspondence. No tally of goods. No coded papers. No suggestion of influence peddled to the Parliament’s benefit.

Rosa screamed silently and set the last of the letters aside. She’d been a fool. There’d never been anything to find. Either Kas had been wrong . . . or Viktor was too canny to keep anything incriminating so close to hand. There she stood, in the scattered remnants of his possessions, and he’d needed to take only the simplest of precautions to protect himself. Queen’s Ashes, but he’d surely have burned any . . .

The fire. There might be some trace.

Rosa knelt at the grate, but the fire had seen no use in recent weeks. The fragments of charred but readable paper retreated back into her imagination.

She sank onto her haunches and stared at the firebox.

And she saw the fold of oilcloth, black against dark stone.

Questing fingers traced the material back to its source: a heavy bundle on the smoke shelf. She tugged it free. Spluttering as the soot clogged her throat, Rosa peeled back the cloth. Two leather-bound books, their spines cracked with age, stood revealed in the gloom. Her heart leapt. Was this what she’d searched for all this time? She didn’t know whether to cheer or to weep.

With trembling fingers, she eased back the cover of the first. Silver letters shone upon a jet-black page. No, Rosa realised. This wasn’t what she’d sought. This was much worse.

The bells chimed for midnight by the time Apara stood before the clifftop mansion. Jagged walls and paths that jutted into nowhere spoke to the sea’s timeless hunger. For now, Windchine mansion remained hale – even if its position grew more tenuous with each passing year.

A practical owner might have buttressed the cliffs, or else rebuilt the imposing towers further inland. No such precaution had been taken. The only stonework were remnants of burial alcoves, jutting from the windswept grass – outriggers of the sepulchres that riddled Tressia’s bedrock.

Apara wondered how many caskets the waves had swallowed. What had become of their occupants? Would Lumestra know to seek the faithful amid the waves as well as in stone’s cold embrace? Would those souls for ever wander the paths of Otherworld, never seeing their loved ones come the light of Third Dawn?