The Patron

One empty chair at breakfast.

The servants had set Dorian’s place anyway, gold gleaming against white linen, crystal catching the spring light that poured through the tall windows. Habit, perhaps. Or cruelty. Ilyra watched the footman arrange the cutlery with mechanical precision and wondered if anyone had thought to tell the kitchen staff, or if somewhere below, a plate of eggs was cooling for a prince who would never eat them.

No one mentioned it. No one looked at the chair. The dark stone of her engagement ring caught the light as she reached for her teacup.

Her mother picked at her food, shadows beneath her eyes that powder couldn’t quite disguise. Her father ate methodically, mechanically, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the gilt-framed portraits on the wall. They looked older than they had three months ago. Diminished, somehow, as though Dorian’s exile had taken something from them too.

Cassian broke the silence first.

“Finally,” he said, reaching for his wine, “civilised conversation at breakfast.”

Ilyra’s fingers tightened on her fork. Across the table, Seraine murmured something about divine will, her satisfaction barely masked beneath pious concern. Alistair ate in silence, his jaw tight, and she noticed how his eyes kept drifting to that empty chair before snapping away again.

One down.

The thought arrived unbidden, cold and clear. Three months ago, she would have examined it, been horrified by her own callousness. Now, she’d be surprised at the indifference if she took a moment to examine the though, but instead she simply took a sip of tea and let it settle.

Cassian was watching her now, his dark green eyes sharp with something that might have been reassessment. He’d barely looked at her in years, the invisible sister with her books and her opinions. Now he looked.

“Sister,” he said, and the word itself was a novelty, “that foreign archduke of yours is quite the influence. You almost look like you belong at court now.”

She smiled. The smile Evander had taught her, the one that said nothing and promised less. “Thank you, brother.”

He didn’t hear the edge. He never looked at her closely enough to learn her tells. None of them had. For years she’d resented that invisibility. Now she understood its uses.

“When is the wedding to be?” Seraine asked, her voice carrying the particular sweetness she reserved for questions with teeth.

“We haven’t set a date.” Ilyra kept her tone pleasant. “There’s no rush.”

“Prudent,” their father said, stirring to life. “The court needs time to adjust. After…” He trailed off, unable to complete the sentence.

No one said Dorian’s name.

Ilyra finished her breakfast in silence, watching her family as though through a pane of glass. Cassian, holding court about some poet’s new work, his smooth tones filling the air with words that meant nothing. Seraine, nodding along with pious approval, already calculating how the engagement affected her own position. Alistair, silent and watchful, the soldier who saw everything and said nothing.

And her parents, broken in some fundamental way, going through the motions of a meal they couldn’t taste.

She set down her teacup and excused herself. No one asked where she was going.

The mint green gloves were waiting on her vanity when she returned to her chambers.

Mira had laid out the day’s clothing with her usual care, spring colours arranged across the bed like an artist’s palette. Cream silk, gold accents, a dress that whispered rather than shouted. And the gloves, kid leather so soft it felt like a second skin, the silk lining ready to caress her skin.

“His Grace sent them this morning, Your Highness.”

Of course he had. Evander always knew what she needed before she did. His gifts arrived precisely when she would want them, in colours she hadn’t known she preferred until she saw them. She found it reassuring.

She slipped them on. Perfect fit, as always. The leather warmed quickly against her skin.

In the mirror, she examined the effect. The mint green complemented her colouring, drew attention to her eyes, made her look less like the awkward princess who haunted the library and more like someone who belonged in the sun-drenched halls of power.

She liked what she saw. Three months ago, she might have found that concerning.

“You’ve been quiet lately, Mira.”

Her maid’s hands paused on the laces of her stays. When she spoke, her voice was careful and colourless. “I’m always quiet, Your Highness.”

Once, Mira would have met her eyes. Once, there would have been the soft familiarity between them, the gentle back-and-forth of two women who understood each other. Now there was only this, the formal address, the averted gaze, the distance that had crept in somewhere between the bread riots and Dorian’s exile.

Ilyra let it pass. Servants were supposed to be invisible. She was only now understanding why.

“Prince Cassian’s salon is this afternoon. I’ll need to look the part.”

“Will His Grace be attending?”

“Of course.”

Something flickered across Mira’s face, there and gone before Ilyra could name it. She dismissed it. Mira didn’t understand court, the intricate dance of appearance and reality, the way every gathering was both performance and battlefield. How could she?

Ilyra turned back to the mirror. The woman looking back was polished, poised. Someone who expected to be seen.

She wondered, briefly, if she was still herself beneath all the polish. Then she decided it didn’t matter.

“The cream silk,” she said. “And do something different with my hair.”

Cassian’s salon was everything she had once envied.

Art covered the walls, paintings in gilt frames, sculptures on marble pedestals, beauty collected and displayed with the casual ease of immense wealth. Poets recited in corners, their voices rising and falling in practiced cadences. Musicians played something intricate, background noise for people who preferred to be seen listening rather than hear. Everywhere, the beautiful and the brilliant gathered to celebrate themselves.

The scent of hothouse flowers mingled with expensive perfume and the sweeter undertone of wine. Sunlight poured through tall windows, catching dust motes that drifted like gold in the air. Three months ago, Ilyra would have found it overwhelming. Now she moved through it like water through a channel, aware of every current.

Evander walked beside her, ever the attentive fiancé. He walked close enough for propriety, far enough that their sleeves did not brush. The court had accepted them now, the foreign archduke and the newly visible princess, and she could feel the shift in how people looked at her. Not through her anymore. At her.

She caught Mira hovering near the servants’ entrance, watching them with an expression Ilyra couldn’t read. Out of place among the artists and aristocrats, but present. Always present. Ilyra felt a flicker of something like pride. Let Mira see. Let her see what Ilyra was becoming.

“Remember,” he murmured as they entered, “a fan raised to the left cheek means interest. To the right, displeasure. Half-open is invitation. Closed and tapping is impatience.”

She’d learned the language of fans in theory. Now she watched it in practice, the subtle semaphore of bored aristocrats who couldn’t say what they meant directly. A duchess across the room fanned herself slowly, the gesture languid, her eyes on a young officer by the punch bowl. Invitation. The officer’s wife, nearby, had her fan closed and motionless. Warning.

Ilyra remembered it. Everything was information.

She noted the faces as they moved through the room. Lord Ashworth’s widow near the window, silver hair piled high in the old imperial style, deep wines and charcoal that spoke of dignified mourning even years later. The elderly countess whose opinions still carried weight with the conservative faction nodded as Ilyra passed, and she returned the gesture. Lady Ashworth’s approval meant something. Ilyra was learning which faces mattered.

A young poet approached, eager to flatter the newly visible princess. His name was Marcus, or possibly Marcellus, one of those interchangeable young men who orbited the salon hoping for patronage. He praised her dress, her bearing, her gracious presence, words tumbling over each other in his eagerness to impress.

She navigated the conversation with a skill she hadn’t possessed scant few months ago. “You’re too kind. But I’d rather hear about your work. I’m told you’re doing something quite original with the pastoral form.”

She hadn’t heard anything about his work. She didn’t need to. The lie flowed naturally now.

He talked. She listened with every appearance of fascination, asking the right questions at the right moments, laughing at his witticisms, saying nothing of substance in many words. By the time he drifted away, satisfied that she’d been charmed, she’d learned his patron was Cassian, his debts were considerable, his landlord was threatening eviction, and his loyalty was for sale to anyone who would pay.

“Notice how he angled for patronage,” Evander murmured when they were alone. “Everyone here wants something.”

“Including us?”

His smile was slight, appreciative. “Especially us.”

Two more encounters followed. A baroness fishing for gossip about the engagement, whom Ilyra deflected with vague pleasantries about taking time to plan. A retired general reminiscing about her grandfather’s military campaigns, whom she indulged with polite interest while filing away his complaints about the current military leadership. Alistair’s name came up. The general’s tone soured. Useful.

She was beginning to understand. Every conversation was an exchange, even when nothing seemed to change hands. Information flowed like wine, and those who knew how to listen could fill their cups while giving away only water.

Across the room, Cassian held court. He sat at the centre of a cluster of admirers, that polished voice carrying across the room, beautiful words spilling from him with practised ease. “The role of art is to illuminate truth,” he declared, and the assembled sycophants applauded as though he’d said something profound.

Ilyra watched him and thought of what she knew. The drug network. The alchemical compounds flowing through noble households. The gambling debts and the blackmail and the quiet corruption that funded this glittering display.

A young woman approached Cassian, pretty and fashionable, and something in his manner shifted. Subtle, but Ilyra caught it. The way his attention sharpened. The way his eyes tracked her. Not attraction, exactly. Something more calculating.

Another detail remembered.

She moved through the crowd differently than she would have months ago. No apologetic hovering at the edges, no grateful surprise when someone deigned to speak with her. She carried herself like someone who belonged, and people treated her accordingly. A matron who’d cut her dead at last year’s winter ball now smiled warmly and asked after her health. A viscount who’d once looked through her as though she were a particularly dull piece of furniture now bowed and inquired about her wedding plans.

She smiled and said nothing of substance, while noting every interaction.

When did I start thinking like this?

The question surfaced and she let it sink again. The answer didn’t matter. What mattered was that she could see the salon now for what it was: not a refuge of beauty and culture, but a battlefield where influence was traded, alliances were forged, and the weak were devoured by the strong.

She was learning to be a predator.

Cassian caught her eye from across the room. He raised his glass in mocking salute.

She returned the gesture, her expression serene.

He had no idea what was coming. None of them did.

They slipped away as the afternoon light began to fade.

Not obviously, Evander was too skilled for that. A word to Cassian about another engagement, a gracious farewell to their hostess, a natural drift toward the door that looked like coincidence rather than escape. She was learning his methods. Every exit could be made invisible if you understood the currents of a room.

The corridor outside was quiet, cool after the salon’s hothouse warmth. Ilyra felt the tension in her shoulders ease as the chatter faded behind them.

“You did well,” Evander said.

She should have felt pride. Instead, something uncomfortable twisted in her chest. “I lied to that poet. Told him I’d heard of his work when I hadn’t.”

“You made him feel seen. Is that cruelty?”

“It’s manipulation.”

“It’s conversation.” His hand found the small of her back, guiding her around a corner. “Everyone performs, Ilyra. You’re simply learning to perform consciously rather than stumbling through by instinct.”

She wanted to argue, but the words wouldn’t form. He wasn’t wrong, exactly. She’d watched her siblings perform all her life: Cassian’s cultured condescension, Seraine’s pious sweetness, Dorian’s careless charm. Even Alistair’s blunt honesty was a kind of performance, the soldier who spoke plain truths because it made people trust him.

“Cassian kept reminding me of Dorian, they look… looked so alike” she said. The words surprised her. She hadn’t meant to say them aloud.

Evander slowed his pace, giving her room to continue.

“He looked so…” She searched for the word. “Broken. When they led him away. Like he couldn’t understand how it had happened.”

“You’re not responsible for his choices.”

“I know.” She did know. Dorian had made his own bed with his gambling and his debts and his pathetic schemes. But knowing didn’t stop the image from surfacing at odd moments: her brother’s face in the moment he realised no one was coming to save him.

They reached a small alcove, one of the countless private nooks scattered through the palace for exactly these conversations. Evander stopped, turning to face her. The light from a high window caught his features, softening them.

“You carry too much,” he said. “Other people’s failures. Other people’s pain. As though feeling guilty could somehow change what happened.”

“Someone should feel guilty.”

“Should they?” His hand rose, touched her cheek with impossible gentleness. “Dorian destroyed himself. Cassian is destroying others. You’re the one trying to stop it. Where is your crime in that?”

She leaned into his touch without meaning to. The mint green gloves felt like a barrier suddenly, leather between her skin and his. She wanted to take them off, to feel him directly. But that would be improper. There were still rules she followed, still lines she wouldn’t cross.

“I just…” She faltered. “I used to believe I was good. Now I’m not sure what I am.”

“You’re learning.” His hand dropped from her face, and she almost reached out for it. “Bad people don’t examine themselves. They assume their own righteousness. The fact that you question, that you feel the weight of these choices, that’s what separates you from them.”

She wanted desperately to believe him. And she did believe him, mostly. It was just that sometimes, late at night, she wondered if the person she was becoming was the person she’d wanted to be.

She wanted him to touch her again. The wanting surprised her with its intensity.

“Cassian has to be stopped,” she said. “What he’s doing… those people - ”

“He does. And you’ll stop him.” His eyes held hers with quiet intensity. “Think of the bodies in those cellars. The children from the slums. They had no one to speak for them. No one to see what was happening.”

Until me. The thought settled into her chest. Someone had to see. Someone had to act. The people in those cellars had deserved a champion, and no one else had come.

Protect them. Yes. That was what she was doing. That was what all of this was for.

“We should continue,” she said. Her voice was steadier now. “You mentioned you had documents to show me.”

His smile deepened. “I do. But only if you’re ready.”

“I’m ready.”

They walked on, and she didn’t look back at the salon behind them. The empty chair at breakfast. The whispers about the exiled prince. The brother she’d helped destroy.

She was doing the right thing. Evander said so, and Evander never lied.

The candles had burned low by the time they reached her chambers.

Mira sat in the corner with her embroidery, needle moving in steady rhythm, the chaperone whose presence made these evening meetings proper. She’d been doing more of it lately, Ilyra noticed. Sitting with her sewing while Evander taught and Ilyra learned. Evander never commented on it, and Ilyra never saw a reason to. Propriety demands, after all.

“You wanted to understand your brother’s network.”

He produced documents from a leather satchel, spreading them across the desk with the care of someone handling something precious. Financial records. Letters with broken seals. Witness statements in neat copperplate. The paper was fine quality, the ink expensive, the handwriting of clerks and lawyers and men who kept careful records of terrible things.

Ilyra leaned over them, reading.

The drug trade she already knew about. Evander had shown her fragments before, enough to understand the shape of it. Cassian’s salons were distribution networks disguised as cultural gatherings. Noble clients with expensive habits came for the art and stayed for the alchemy, compounds that sharpened the mind or dulled the conscience or opened doors of perception that perhaps should have stayed closed. The coin flowed upward, always upward, into Cassian’s coffers. Standard corruption, really. Every great house had its secrets.

Then she turned the page.

Experiments.

The word jumped out at her. She read further, her hands steady even as her stomach began to turn.

Bodies from the slums. People who disappeared and were never found. Test subjects for Cassian’s alchemical research, brought to cellars beneath respectable addresses and subjected to compounds that no ethical practitioner would touch.

She read witness statements. A night-soil collector who’d found remains in an alley, bones that didn’t look quite right. A washwoman who’d heard screaming from a basement and been paid to forget. A former servant, dismissed and bitter, describing the carts that came late at night.

She read the financial records. Payments to resurrection men - the polite term for those who robbed graves and, when graves proved insufficient, made their own corpses to sell. Retainers to physicians who asked no questions. Bribes to magistrates who closed inconvenient investigations.

She read the clinical notes. Failed transformations. The bodies showed traces of compounds she didn’t recognise, substances that had done things to flesh and bone that flesh and bone were never meant to endure. Accelerated growth. Tissue liquefaction. Crystallisation of internal organs. The alchemist’s shorthand was precise, detached, as though describing the failure of an experiment rather than the death of a human being.

There were drawings. Anatomical illustrations in the style taught at the great academies. Clinical, detached, beautifully rendered. What remained of the subjects looked barely human.

“These…” Her voice caught. “These were people.”

“They were.”

Evander’s voice was quiet, almost gentle. He stood beside her, close enough that she was aware of every inch of distance between them, watching her read.

Ilyra’s stomach lurched. She gripped the edge of the desk and breathed carefully, the way her tutor had taught her during particularly gruesome passages of history. This was history too, in a way. History being made in cellars while Cassian held court above.

She forced herself to keep reading. The most recent notes were dated just weeks ago. Whatever this was, it was ongoing. People were still disappearing.

Cassian’s beautiful words. His cultured salon. His art and poetry and refinement. His declarations about truth and beauty and the nobility of the creative spirit.

Hiding this.

“How long has this been happening?”

“Years. Your brother has expensive tastes. Research is costly. The poor make convenient subjects. No one misses them.”

She thought of the slums. Mira’s district. The bread riots that had shaken the city before she’d ever met Evander. People who disappeared and no one looked for them because no one cared enough to ask. Daughters who never came home. Sons who vanished between the tavern and the tenement. The official explanation was always the same: they’d run off, found work elsewhere, fallen in the river. No one investigated because investigating cost money and the dead couldn’t pay.

This was genuine. This was worse than Dorian’s gambling, worse than his debts and his wastrel ways. Dorian had been dissolute, pathetic, a disappointment. Cassian was a monster hiding behind a cultured mask.

“He has to be stopped.”

“Yes.”

Evander didn’t push. He simply waited, watching her with an expression that seemed to see everything. Unhurried. As though he had all the time in the world.

She looked at the documents again. Evidence enough to destroy him. More than enough. But she remembered Dorian, the way brute exposure had turned him into a martyr in some eyes, the whispers about how the family had cast out its own, how cold they must be, how ruthless.

“Brute exposure made Dorian a martyr in some eyes,” he commented, echoing her thoughts as he so often did. “What if you appeared… merciful?”

The words landed. She turned them over in her mind. Merciful. Appearing merciful while ensuring justice was done.

She could see it now, the shape of what he was suggesting. Public horror at the revelations, genuine horror, she wouldn’t have to pretend. Then the moderate voice, the voice of reason amid the calls for blood. He is still my brother. He is still the emperor’s son. Let there be justice, yes, but let there also be mercy.

“Show me how.”

In the corner, Mira’s needle had stopped.

The candles guttered as the hour grew late.

Evander walked her through the theory with the patience of a born teacher. Appear moderate. Position herself as the voice of reason in a family prone to excess. When the scandal broke, as scandals inevitably did, she would be the one pleading for restraint.

“People remember mercy,” he said. “They forget justice. The crowd that calls for blood today will call you cruel tomorrow. But if you’re seen to weep for your brother even as the evidence damns him…” He let the implication hang.

She thought of Cassian’s salon. The network of artists and poets who orbited him, trading flattery for patronage. The way information flowed through those glittering rooms.

“There’s a theatre in the old quarter. The Gilded Mask. Artists talk about it at the salons. It’s where the serious ones go when they want to speak freely.”

“Tell me about the theatre district.”

She almost answered immediately. Then paused.

“What do you think we should do about Cassian?”

The question surprised her even as she asked it. But his opinion mattered. He saw things she missed. And together, they’ll be more successful than her alone.

Evander tilted his head, considering. “I think you should tell me what you’ve observed. Then we decide together.”

Together. The word settled into her like a promise.

She did. Everything she’d observed, every whisper she’d caught, every casual mention stored without knowing why. The performers who moonlighted as couriers. The back rooms where money changed hands. The young lord who’d mentioned, drunk and indiscreet, that Cassian’s patronage came with certain expectations.

Evander listened carefully. He took no notes. He never took notes.

By the time she finished, the candles had burned down to stubs, and the room was more shadow than light.

“That’s enough for tonight.” His fingers closed gently around her wrist. “You’re learning quickly. You have such potential.”

The words settled in her chest. She wanted to hold them there, examine them later when she was alone.

“When this is done,” he said, “we’ll have time for other things. The wedding, properly. The life we’ll build.”

Her cheeks warmed. She looked away, afraid he’d see too much in her face. “I’d like that.”

“I know.” His smile held. “There’s much still to learn. But we have time.”

She rose, gathering herself for the walk back to her own chambers.

“Tomorrow?”

“I’ll be here.”

Mira was already at the door, her embroidery bundled under her arm, ready to show Evander out.

After dinner, alone, Ilyra sat at her writing desk, the documents Evander had shown her spread before the candle’s glow.

She traced the edges of the papers without reading them. Somewhere out there, Cassian’s network operated. Somewhere, people disappeared into experiments that stripped them of everything human. Somewhere, her brother counted his coin and composed pretty speeches about truth.

She thought of the documents. The drawings. The bodies.

This was different from Dorian. Dorian had been weak, wasteful, a disappointment. He had fallen because he was already falling, and all she had done was hasten the inevitable.

Cassian would not fall so easily. He had networks. Loyal artists. Friends in places she did not yet know. When he realised what was coming, he would fight. And fighting back meant danger.

Are you ready for that?

The question surfaced, and she pushed it down.

This was justice.

Wasn’t it?

She didn’t answer herself. She undressed, she washed, she said her prayers from habit, not belief. She climbed into bed and closed her eyes.

She slept soundly.