#Chapter 112: The Reckoning

Ember Three days after Lady Chantarelle's sentencing, Kaine finds me in the armory with the look he gets when too much has changed too quickly to fit into one sentence. "Farrow confessed," he says without preamble. That gets my full attention faster than any shout would. I set down the oilcloth I was using on my blade and wait while he gives me the rest in the flat, controlled cadence of someone who has already spent the morning holding himself together for other people's benefit. Farrow lasted seventeen hours in the cells before deciding the Queen's protection was not worth dying for. He kept a ledger. Names, dates, bribes, poison routes, the guard he bought off, the courier who carried the orders, every link in the chain from Chantarelle's exile plot back to the Queen's private rooms. The King confronted Ines with it at noon. Not in the throne room, not publicly, but in private chambers where no one could call what followed theater. By week's end her titles are stripped and s