Chapter 10 - The Feast of MasksThe palace had announced that the disturbances were over. Banners fluttered over the gates and a second masked feast was scheduled to assure foreign guests that the crown remained secure. Chancellor Voss had ordered every witness from the first ceremony to surrender their account of events and sign a statement declaring the second princess an impostor. Those who refused would lose their court appointments. Those who agreed were promised protection.
Mara entered with the staff under a borrowed name. Roran came through the western guardroom disguised as a minor knight. Elara and Iris followed wearing plain masks and cloaks, their silver crowns hidden beneath the fabric. They had left the river granary by the northern tunnel and emerged before the palace kitchens at dusk. Each knew that once the feast began, the royal gates would close. None had spoken about what would happen if Voss recognized them.
The guests wore peacock feathers, painted antlers, and porcelain faces. Music filled the hall where the battle had begun. Servants had scrubbed the scorch marks from the marble, but one line of broken stone still ran from the throne to the great tapestry. The queen's portrait had been repaired with gold thread. It now looked more expensive, and much less like the woman Elara remembered.
"He has stitched her mouth closed," Iris murmured. It was true. A new line of gold crossed the queen's lips.
Mara stole a moment to retrieve the Witness's Palm from a curtained alcove. Voss had placed it under guard after the ceremony, but servants were still permitted to dust the glass. She wrapped her fingers around its cool wrist. The artifact reacted to her touch, displaying the names of twelve citizens whose statements had been erased that morning. She recognized Hester's name at the top.
Across the room Voss approached a foreign envoy. "The disturbance was an illusion," he said. "Our beloved princess was endangered by a sorceress pretending to be her. We are tracing the impostor's associates."
"And the queen's portrait?" the envoy asked.
"Old masonry. Nothing more."
Iris stood behind a gilded pillar and watched him with an expression Mara could not read. In the weave she had heard Voss speak as he counted stolen money. She had imagined a monster with fangs. Finding a courteous man with polished fingernails was somehow worse.
Elara moved toward the throne and confronted her father. "You called me an impostor," she said without removing her mask.
Aldren recognized her voice instantly. He reached for her hand, then stopped. "I did not authorize that proclamation."
"Your seal is on it."
"Voss has access to my seals."
"You gave him access."
Behind the throne the tapestry stretched. The stitch across Yselle's mouth snapped. A thin line of black opened along her forehead. Aldren looked over his shoulder, then back at Elara. He seemed older than he had that morning.
"I was trying to keep you alive," he said.
"Both of us?"
He did not answer. The silence was enough.
Voss saw them at the same moment. He gave a short signal to the musicians, who stopped playing. Guards gathered at the entrances. Elara removed her mask. Iris stepped from the pillar and removed hers too. A murmur raced through the guests. Someone dropped a glass. The two identical faces turned toward the throne like a single accusation.
"People of Asterhall," Elara said, loud enough to reach the balconies, "the royal treasury has been emptied in your name. The queen did not die as you were told. And the man seated beneath her portrait knows why."
Mara raised the crystal hand. Its fingers opened, projecting the first line of the king's oath above the banquet tables. The guests read it in dead silence.
At the banquet a visiting ambassador asked why the palace's musicians were playing a mourning tune under bright flags. The master of ceremonies answered that it honored the late queen. Mara, passing with a tray, recognized the tune as a harvest song that Yselle had loved. The court had changed its meaning without asking the people who remembered it. In Asterhall, even a melody could be repurposed to protect a convenient story.
Iris saw the throne for the first time from outside the tapestry. It was taller than she had imagined, its gilded back rising beneath a carved arch. For years the king's voice had reached her as a muffled vibration through woven walls, the words almost never clear. Now she could see his mouth moving and the ordinary fear flickering across his face. He looked less powerful in person. That realization did not make her safer, but it made the past less mysterious. A man, not a natural law, had chosen to leave her in confinement.
"You could walk away now," Mara whispered as they waited beside the curtain. "No one outside the palace knows you exist. We could take you beyond the river."
"I don't want to disappear again just because the room is larger," Iris said. "If I leave, I want it to be my choice."
Mara accepted the answer. She had offered escape as an act of care, but recognized the danger of deciding for someone whose life had already been controlled by other people's assurances. She pressed an ordinary kitchen knife into Iris's hand, not as a weapon for battle but as a tool to cut a curtain or a rope if needed. Iris slipped it into her belt and smiled at being trusted with something so mundane.
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Near the throne, Elara remembered the last banquet she had attended beside her father. He had introduced her as the kingdom's singular hope and kissed her forehead for the crowd. She had felt loved then. Now she understood that public affection could be sincere and still conceal private cruelty. The thought gave her the steadiness to approach him without demanding that every memory be rewritten at once. Iris waited.
Then Voss ordered the doors locked and said, very softly, "Kill the witnesses. Leave the princesses breathing."
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