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He stood between two senior Elders she recognised from the council chamber, his silver-edged robes catching the morning light, his posture still carrying its habitual authority even now. But the authority had nowhere to go. The people around him were not deferring to it.

One of the Elders was speaking. She caught the words formal inquiry. Collaboration with the rebel faction. Complicity in the assessment of scholars under his care.

Orell’s expression did not break. That would have been easier. It stiffened, the careful neutrality of a man who had spent a lifetime managing outcomes and was watching this one slip beyond his management for the first time.

He looked up as they passed. His eyes found Maia.

For a moment he simply looked at her, taking in the state of her, the glass dust and the dried blood and the exhaustion she had stopped trying to conceal. Something moved across his face, some last calculation running its course and arriving at a conclusion she didn’t care to hear.

Then he spat.

It landed short of her feet, the way Elgar’s had landed short of the dais. A small, bitter gesture from a man who had run out of larger ones. She wondered if he knew. She thought, looking at him, that he did not.

“Faithless girl,” he said. His voice was very controlled. “You have undone everything. Everything we built.”

He straightened and she watched him find the version he would tell afterwards.

“They will ask me how it happened. And I will have to stand in front of them and explain that a girl could not keep her head over a creature. Lustful. Conceited. Pathetic.”

The square went quiet.

Maia looked at him. She thought of the assessment. Of waking in white. Of the sentence he had handed her in the healer’s wing dressed up as concern. She thought of every time he had used the word clarity to mean compliance, and understanding to mean silence, and unfortunate to mean that someone had suffered and he preferred not to examine why.

She said nothing.

She held his gaze for one long moment, giving him nothing, not her anger, not her grief, not the satisfaction of a reaction. Then she looked away and kept walking.

Behind her, she heard Selinne’s voice, clear and carrying across the square.

“Everything you built was built on someone else’s suffering, Master Orell. I’d choose my words carefully from here. You’ll have plenty of time to think about them.”

Then the Elder beside Orell said something low and firm, and the sound of boots on stone followed, and when Maia glanced back, Orell was being walked, not roughly but with the irreversible purpose of people who have made a decision, toward the council chambers.

He didn’t look back. She was glad of it.

Someone touched her elbow.

Rhelas. Thinner than she remembered, his collar undone, a soldier’s coat over clothes that were not a soldier’s.

“They’re taking statements,” he said. “Inside. About what the Umbralyn did.”

“And?”

“I gave one.” He was looking at the cliffs rather than her. “He pulled me off that road. I never said it properly at the time.” His jaw worked once. “I said it properly today.”

Maia did not trust herself to answer.

“I’d like it written down,” Rhelas said. He looked at her. “That’s all. Somewhere it stays.” Then he turned and walked away.

Selinne caught up with them at the Archive step, falling into step beside them as though she’d never been anywhere else.

“Your mother?” Maia asked.

“Safe,” Selinne said. “The submission quarter held through the night. When the Umbralyn started disappearing at dawn, people didn’t know what to think. Some of them were relieved. Some of them—” She paused. “It was complicated.”

“It will stay complicated,” Maia said. “For a long time.”

“What do we tell people?” Julen asked, lowering himself carefully onto the Archive steps with the sound of someone who has been waiting a long time to sit down. “About what happened. About why.”