Blood and Bread

They left before dawn.

Mira had found clothes for her: a servant’s dress, worn at the elbows, the grey wool of someone who worked for a living. Ilyra had never worn anything so rough against her skin. It felt like penance, though she could not have said for what.

The palace was quiet at this hour, the guards drowsy at their posts, the corridors empty of the ministers and courtiers who would fill them by midmorning. They slipped out through a servants’ entrance that Mira knew, down a narrow alley that smelled of cabbage and ash, and into the city streets.

Valdoria looked different in the predawn dark. Smaller, somehow. More human. The grand avenues of the palace district gave way to narrower lanes, then to streets so tight that the upper floors of buildings nearly touched above her head. The smell changed too: less perfume and beeswax, more sweat and rotting vegetables and something sharper that might have been fear.

Mira walked quickly, her head down, her steps sure. She belonged here in a way that Ilyra never would. This was her world, or had been before the palace took her. Ilyra followed in silence, trying to match her stride, trying not to look like what she was.

“My Lady should not speak if we encounter anyone,” Mira murmured. “Your voice will give you away.”

Ilyra nodded. Her voice. Of course. She had been trained from childhood to speak in the cadences of the court, each word measured and placed with precision. Here, such speech would mark her as clearly as a brand.

The bread district was waking as they arrived. Shutters creaked open. Voices called greetings across the narrow streets. Somewhere, a baby was crying. It was all so ordinary, so mundane: the daily rhythm of people who had to work to eat, who rose before dawn because they had no choice.

And yet there was something beneath the ordinariness. A tension in the way people moved. Glances exchanged between neighbours that held too much meaning. Groups of men standing at corners, speaking in low voices, falling silent when strangers passed.

Mira led her to a tenement building wedged between a chandler’s shop and a cooperage. The stairs were steep and dark, the wood groaning under their weight. On the third floor, Mira stopped before a door and knocked: three quick raps, then two slow.

The door opened. A young man’s face appeared in the gap, wary at first, then breaking into recognition. “Mira. You came.”

“I came.” Mira’s voice was soft. “This is… a friend. She wanted to see.”

The young man’s eyes found Ilyra, studied her with the quick assessment of someone who had learned to judge threats. Whatever he saw, it seemed to satisfy him. He stepped back and let them in.

The room beyond was small: a single chamber that served as kitchen, bedroom, and sitting room. A woman sat by the window, thin and grey-haired, her hands busy with mending. She looked up as they entered but said nothing. Her eyes, Ilyra noticed, were the same brown as Mira’s.

“This is my brother Tobias,” Mira said quietly. “And our mother, Hester. This is the friend I told you about.”

Tobias nodded. He was taller than Mira, broader in the shoulders, with the kind of weathered hands that came from years of honest work. There was flour dust in the creases of his knuckles, the mark of a baker, though she had never really considered what a baker’s hands might look like.

“You’re from the palace.” It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“And you want to watch what happens today.”

“I want to understand.”

Tobias looked at her for a long moment. Then he glanced at his sister, something passing between them that Ilyra could not read. “The roof is safest,” he said finally. “You can see the square from there. But you need to stay quiet, and you need to leave before it gets bad.”

“Before what gets bad?”

His mouth twisted. “All of it.”

The roof was flat and tarred, littered with broken tiles and bird droppings. Someone had dragged an old crate up here, positioned where it offered a view between two chimney stacks. Ilyra perched on it, Mira at her side, and looked out over the bread district.

The square was already filling.

They came in small groups at first: twos and threes, families with children, old women leaning on younger arms. They carried nothing that looked like weapons. Some carried empty baskets, the kind used for market shopping. Others carried nothing at all, their hands hanging loose at their sides.

They were not a mob, Ilyra realised. They were not the howling rabble that the court imagined when it spoke of popular unrest. They were just people. Tired people. Hungry people. People who had run out of other options.

“How many?” she asked softly.

“Hundreds already,” Mira said. “There will be more.”

There were indeed more. The trickle became a stream, the stream became a flood. By the time the sun was fully up, the square was packed: a sea of bodies, a murmur of voices that blended into something like the sound of a distant storm.

Someone had erected a platform near the fountain at the square’s centre. A man climbed onto it, middle-aged, with the thick arms of a smith or butcher. When he raised his hands, the crowd fell silent.

“We have asked!” His voice carried across the square, hoarse but strong. “We have petitioned! We have begged! And what answer do we receive? Silence! Empty promises! The same words we have heard for years while our children grow thin and our elders die!”

A roar from the crowd. Agreement. Anger.

“They tell us the grain is coming! They tell us to be patient! But patience does not fill bellies! Patience does not keep the cold out when winter comes! We have been patient long enough!”

Another roar, louder this time. Ilyra felt it vibrate through her ribs, shaking the air itself.

“Today we make them hear us! Today we march to the guild-houses and we demand what is ours! Today we show them that the people of Valdoria will not starve in silence!”

The crowd surged forward, a wave of bodies flowing out of the square and into the streets beyond. The man on the platform was still shouting, but his words were lost now in the general tumult: the tramp of feet, the calls and cries, the sound of a city waking to its own fury.

Ilyra watched. She could not look away.

“They are going to the guild-houses,” Mira said. Her voice was very quiet. “The grain merchants. The ones who have been hoarding.”

“Will the guild-masters listen?”

Mira did not answer. She did not need to.

They waited on the roof as the morning wore on. The sounds from the streets below changed: the organised march giving way to something more chaotic, more scattered. Shouts. Breaking glass. Once, a scream that cut off abruptly.

Tobias came up to check on them twice. The second time, his face was pale.

“They’ve started burning,” he said. “Some of the warehouses. The ones they say are full of grain.” He looked at Ilyra. “You should go soon, my Lady. It will not be safe when the soldiers come.”

“When will that be?”

“Soon.” His jaw tightened. “They always come. The question is how many, and what orders they carry.”

Alistair. His cold certainty, his methods for dealing with unrest. Her mother’s dismissal, the contempt in that measured voice: How utterly useless.

“I want to stay,” she said. “I need to see what happens.”

Tobias and Mira exchanged another of those looks. But he did not argue. He simply nodded, once, and disappeared back down the stairs.

The soldiers came at midday.

She heard them before she saw them: the measured tramp of boots, the clatter of armour, the barked commands that cut through the chaos like blades through cloth. The crowd’s roar changed pitch, anger giving way to something sharper. Fear.

They came in formation, pikes lowered, shields interlocked. Rows of them. More than Ilyra had ever seen gathered in one place. They filled the street leading into the square, a wall of steel and discipline, and behind them, she strained to see, more soldiers, mounted, their horses stamping and blowing.

At their head, a figure in the armour of a commander. Ilyra could not see his face from this distance, but she knew the bearing, the way he sat his horse. Alistair. Of course it was Alistair.

A herald rode forward, the crown’s banner snapping in the wind.

“By order of Her Imperial Majesty!” His voice was trained for distance, cutting through the tumult. “This unlawful assembly is commanded to disperse! Return to your homes immediately! Those who refuse will be treated as enemies of the Crown!”

For a moment, the crowd hesitated. Ilyra saw it: the uncertainty, the fear, the desperate calculation of people weighing their hunger against their lives.

Then someone threw something. A stone, perhaps, or a roof tile. It struck a soldier’s shield with a clang that seemed impossibly loud.

The charge was orderly. Disciplined. That was what Ilyra remembered later: how organised it was, how precise. Not the chaos of a riot, but the efficiency of something rehearsed. The soldiers moved as one.

People ran. Fell. Were trampled. The square that had held hundreds now held only violence, the cobblestones slick with blood, the air thick with smoke from the burning warehouses. She saw a woman clutching a child, trying to shield it with her body. She saw an old man go down under the hooves of a horse. She saw -

Larsen’s bakery.

The building three streets over, the one where Tobias worked. Flames were climbing its walls, billowing from the windows, the roof already catching. Someone must have set fire to the grain stores inside, or perhaps a torch had been thrown in the chaos. It did not matter. What mattered was the figures at the door: small figures, children, stumbling out into the smoke-thick air. And behind them, pushing them forward, a man with flour-dusted hands.

Tobias.

He got three children out. Four. Ilyra counted them, barely breathing, as he shepherded them toward the alley. Then he turned and went back inside. The flames were higher now, licking at the doorframe, but there must have been more children trapped within. He went back.

The roof collapsed.

Mira made a sound. Not a scream. Something worse. A keening, high and thin, that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than her throat.

Ilyra did not move. Could not move. She watched the flames consume what had been Larsen’s bakery, watched the smoke rise thick and black against the noon sky. No one came out of the door. No one could have.

“No.” Mira’s voice was a whisper. “No, no, no.”

She was moving toward the stairs. Ilyra caught her arm, held her back. “You cannot. The soldiers - you cannot go down there.”

“He might have - the back door - he could have -”

“Mira, the roof…” Ilyra’s voice broke. She swallowed, tried again. “The roof came down. No one could have…” She held on when Mira tried to pull away. “The soldiers. Your mother. If you go down there…”

Mira stared at her. Her face was wet, her eyes wild, her whole body shaking with the effort of staying still. Below them, the massacre continued: the orderly slaughter of people whose only crime had been hunger.

“I am sorry,” Ilyra said. The words felt hollow, but she said them anyway. “I am so sorry.”

They stayed on the roof until the soldiers had passed. Until the screaming stopped. Until the square below held only the dead and the dying, and the smoke from the burning warehouses darkened the noon sky like a shroud.

Getting back to the palace was a blur.

They went by back ways, through alleys that had not seen soldiers, past houses with shuttered windows and barred doors. Mira moved like a sleepwalker, her face empty, her hands hanging loose at her sides. Ilyra led her, though she did not know the way, guided by some instinct that seemed to work independently of her numbed thoughts.

By the time they reached the servants’ entrance, the sun was beginning its descent toward evening. No one stopped them. No one noticed them. Two more refugees from the chaos, unremarkable and unseen.

Ilyra helped Mira to her small room in the servants’ quarters. Sat with her while she wept. Did not know what to say, so said nothing. What words could matter, after what they had seen?

“He was going to marry,” Mira said at last, her voice scraped raw. “In the spring. A girl from the chandler’s shop. They were saving for a home of their own.”

The flames. The collapsing roof. The way Tobias had turned and gone back inside, because there were still children to save. One moment a man with plans and hopes and a future; the next, nothing but ash.

“I am sorry,” she said again. It was all she had.

Mira looked at her. In her eyes, Ilyra saw something she had not expected: not anger, not accusation, but a kind of bleak recognition. As though they had crossed some threshold together, and words could not follow.

Mira said nothing. But after a long moment, her hand found Ilyra’s and held on.

Ilyra did not pull away.

She left Mira to her grief and made her way to her own chambers. The palace corridors were busy now, bustling with the evening’s routines, servants and courtiers moving through their prescribed patterns as though nothing had happened. As though, perhaps, they did not know. Or did not care.

In her chamber, Ilyra stripped off the borrowed servant’s dress and stood in her shift, staring at nothing. Her hands, she noticed, were trembling. They would not stop.

Tobias’s face. The flames climbing the walls. The roof coming down. She saw it when she closed her eyes. Saw it when she opened them. Saw it reflected in the window glass, in the mirror, in the polished surfaces of her own carefully appointed prison.

They were just hungry. They only wanted to eat. And then, unbidden: We killed them for it. But “we” felt wrong; she had not held a pike, had not given orders. Had only watched. She was not sure if that made it better or worse.

She tried again at the evening council.

It was foolish. Worse than foolish. But she could not stay silent, not after what she had seen. Not after Tobias. Not after the blood on the cobblestones and the smoke in the sky and the sound of Mira’s keening.

The council chamber was fuller than it had been the day before. Word of the riot had spread; the ministers wanted to be seen responding. Alistair was there, still in his armour, a thin cut on his cheek that he had not bothered to tend. Their father sat at the head of the table, present for once, though his eyes remained as empty as ever.

The Empress was reading reports. Her face gave nothing away.

“The situation is contained,” a minister was saying. “The instigators have been identified and arrested. Public order has been restored.”

“How many dead?” Ilyra heard herself ask.

The room fell quiet. Every eye turned to her, that same weight of attention she had felt the day before, but different now. Warier.

“Princess Ilyra.” The Chancellor’s voice was cautious. “You were not summoned to this council.”

“I am here nonetheless.” She kept her voice steady through sheer force of will. “How many dead, Chancellor?”

A pause. Glances exchanged. No one wanted to answer.

“The count is not yet complete.” This from Alistair, his voice flat. “Several hundred, we believe. Perhaps more.”

Several hundred. The words hung in the air.

“They were hungry,” Ilyra said. “They gathered to protest grain hoarding. They carried no weapons. They posed no threat to the Crown. And we killed them. Several hundred of them. For wanting to eat.”

“Ilyra.” Her mother’s voice was sharp. “That is enough.”

“Is it? Is it enough, Mother? Because I watched it happen. I saw soldiers ride down unarmed men and women. I saw a baker go back into a burning building to save children, and I watched the roof come down on him. I saw -”

“You watched?” The Empress’s eyes had narrowed. “From where?”

Too late, Ilyra realised her mistake. But she could not retreat now. Would not.

“From the bread district. I wanted to understand what was happening. What our family was doing.”

The silence that followed was absolute. Ilyra saw shock on the ministers’ faces, fury on Alistair’s, something that might have been concern on Seraine’s. The twins were not present; Dorian likely nursing a hangover, Cassian attending to his cultural pursuits.

The Empress rose from her chair. Not slowly this time. Not with the measured control Ilyra had seen yesterday. She stood as though yanked upright by invisible strings, and when she spoke, her voice shook.

“You went to the bread district.” The words came out clipped, bitten off. “During a riot. Without guards. Without permission. Without telling anyone where you were going.”

“I needed to see -”

“You could have been killed.” The Empress’s voice rose, cracking on the last word. Ilyra had never heard her mother’s voice crack. “Do you understand that? You could have been trampled, burned, taken hostage. Do you have any idea what they would have done if they had recognised you? The fifth princess, alone in the streets while soldiers rode down their families?”

“They would not have -”

“They would have torn you apart.” The Empress slammed her palm on the table. Ministers flinched. Even Alistair’s expression shifted, something almost like concern flickering across his face. “And I would have had to send more soldiers to retrieve your body. More soldiers, more blood, more death. All because you wanted to see.”

“I wanted to understand!” Ilyra’s voice broke. “I wanted to know why - why we were killing our own people -”

“Our own people?” The Empress laughed, a short harsh sound that held no humour. “Listen to yourself. You sound like a pamphlet. Like one of those seditious broadsides the city guard confiscates from tavern walls.” She turned to the council, sweeping her arm toward Ilyra. “This is what comes of letting children read unsupervised. This is what comes of sentiment.”

“It is not sentiment to care whether people starve -”

“It is sentiment to imagine that caring changes anything.” The Empress’s fury had gone cold now, which was somehow worse. “The bread district rose against the Crown. They burned guild property. They threw stones at soldiers. They committed treason, and treason has one answer. I did not invent that answer. I merely enforce it.”

“And the children?” Ilyra heard herself ask. “The baker who went back into a burning building to save them? Was that treason too?”

“There are always children.” The Empress gathered her papers. Her hands were steady again, her voice controlled. “There are always bakers. There are always sympathetic stories that make weak rulers hesitate when they should act. That is why weak rulers lose their thrones, and why the empire has lasted five hundred years.”

“Because we kill the hungry?”

The Empress stopped. Looked at her daughter. Really looked, for the first time since the council had begun.

“Return to your chambers,” she said, and her voice was quiet now, final. “Stay there until I send for you. Do not attend council. Do not speak to ministers. Do not help.” The word dripped with contempt. “Leave matters of state to those of us who comprehend what is at stake.”

She turned to go, then paused at the door. The ministers had frozen mid-rise, caught between wanting to flee and wanting to witness.

“You understand nothing of ruling.” The Empress did not look back. “You never have.”

She left. The door closed behind her with a sound like a coffin lid.

Ministers were filing out, carefully not meeting Ilyra’s eyes. Alistair passed her with a look she could not read, contempt or something colder. Even Seraine said nothing, only shook her head as she departed.

And their father, the Emperor, walked past without seeming to notice Ilyra at all. He might have been passing a piece of furniture.

She stood alone in the empty chamber, her hands still trembling, her mother’s words echoing in her skull.

You understand nothing of ruling.

That might be true. She might be naive, idealistic, a child playing at politics. The world might really require the kind of cold calculation that could order hundreds dead and call it “restoring public order.”

But she could not believe it. Would not believe it. There had to be another way.

Later, in her chambers, the door locked against the palace that had never felt more like a prison, Ilyra sat in the dark.

Nothing would change from within. She had tried, twice now, and been dismissed both times. She had no power, no allies, no leverage. She was the overlooked princess, the reader of dusty books in forgotten libraries.

But the books. The hints she had found. The passages that spoke of bargains and debts and the things sealed beneath.

The crypts. That heaviness in the air. The sense of something waiting.

It was madness, she told herself. Desperation. The sort of thinking that led to ruin.

But ruin was already here. Ruin wore a crown and ordered soldiers to ride down unarmed bakers.

If no one will listen, she thought, I must find another way.

The forbidden book was still in the old library, hidden beneath a stack of agricultural reports. It spoke of something sealed in the crypts. Something that might have power to change things.

It was madness.

But tomorrow, she would go and read it again.

And the day after that, perhaps, she would find the courage to do something worse than madness.

She would find the courage to act.