The fallout didn’t come as a crash. It came as a whisper. A dozen closed doors. A dozen more half-finished letters. A noble found slumped in his carriage with ink-stained fingertips and a sealed envelope under his tongue.
The satire had ended, but its echo hadn’t.
I sat in the Ashcombe library with the curtains drawn tight, not out of fear but control. The more the court saw of me, the more they’d circle. Best to give them a ghost for now—one that smiled only through rumor.
Wren entered without knocking, parchment in one hand, a ledger in the other. “We’ve had a response from the Western baronies. Half want to distance. The rest are sending their scribes north.”
“Good,” I said. “Let them come.”
“There’s more.” She hesitated, then passed me a folded letter. The wax seal had been sliced
