Lena Narvell's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Duchess Lena Narvell reached for the empty chair beside her and found only cold wood. She wore her gold gown and her crown, as she did at every meal, and she set a second plate for the person the palace swore had never lived. That person was hers, taken and hidden somewhere she could not yet name. Tonight the servants had stopped setting the second plate. So she set it herself. She carried a candle to the record hall. The ledgers there held every name born, wed, or buried in the palace. She found the page for the year her beloved arrived. The ink was gone. Not scratched out—gone, as if no hand had ever touched the paper. She turned back three years, then five. Every line that had held that name now showed clean blank space. Lena pressed her palm flat to the page. Without a record, she had no proof. Without proof, the court could call her mad and lock her away. Someone was erasing her beloved from the world, one page at a time, and they were nearly finished. She knew who might still hold the truth. Before the erasing began, her beloved had written letters across the border to Prince Aldric Valenheart, the rival kingdom's heir. Letters no palace hand could reach or unwrite. She rode two days to his manor. Its pale walls were stained with a creeping blight, dark spots spreading like old bruises across the ivory. Guards let her through only because a duchess arriving alone at night was too strange to turn away. Aldric met her in a cold hall. His white hair caught the torchlight. He was younger than she expected, and he watched her with the flat calm of a man who weighed everyone. "You've come a long way," he said, "to ask about someone who doesn't exist." "You have the letters," Lena said. "Proof. Give them to me." He studied her crown, her stiff gown, the grief she could not hide. "I have letters," he agreed. He drew a bundle from a drawer and held them just out of reach. "But I don't give gifts. Your kingdom took something from mine years ago. You want the truth back? Then you'll owe me." Lena took the bundle. The seal was her beloved's. The handwriting was real, alive, undeniable. Her hands shook as she read one line and knew, at last, she was not mad. "There's more," Aldric said. He tapped the last letter. "The final one tells where they were taken. But I've read it, and you won't like the name of the place." Lena looked up. She had come for proof and now held it. But the proof pointed somewhere worse than silence. Whoever had erased her beloved had not only hidden them. They had hidden them on purpose, and Aldric knew exactly where. And now she owed a debt to the one man who could show her.