The bells of Rowan tolled six times before the sun breached the eastern towers.
Alara was already awake.
The chill of early morning clung to the stone walls of her private quarters, seeping through mortar and granite as if the castle itself exhaled in the quiet before courtly chaos. Her room, tucked beside the great library, carried the scent of old vellum and ink—a fragrance woven into her hair, her clothes, her skin over the years.
She sat curled in the reading nook beneath a narrow arched window, knees tucked under a wool blanket the color of faded moss. Frost silvered the inner courtyard below. Stablehands moved like shadows in the pale light, their breath rising in brief clouds. Somewhere far beneath her window, a cartwheel creaked.
Inside, silence ruled.
One wall of her chamber was consumed by shelves—floor to ceiling, laddered and dense. The collection was not ornamental. These were not jeweled tomes locked in the royal gallery. These were hers: reference copies, annotated histories, unfinished transcriptions, censored editions, translations in three dialects. Their spines bore the marks of use—creased bindings, slips of parchment wedged between pages, thread markers dangling like quiet secrets.
Five years.
Five years since her appointment as Royal Keeper of Books at sixteen—an honor that unsettled half the court and amused the rest. The youngest in memory. A girl with ink-stained fingers and an unsettling ability to recite dynastic lineage backward without pause.
Now twenty-one, she no longer startled the courtiers.
She unsettled them in subtler ways.
Alara closed the leather-bound journal in her lap and studied the window. Her reflection hovered faintly in the glass—fine-boned and composed, pale skin luminous in the early light. Her storm-gray eyes, edged in blue, held a quiet intensity sharpened by years of reading what others overlooked.
Copper-red hair fell in untamed waves down her back and over one shoulder, catching the dawn like banked embers stirred to life.
Her Keeper's mantle rested across her shoulders—a midnight-blue cloak trimmed in restrained gold thread. Over her heart, embroidered with precision, lay the sigil of her office: an open tome beneath a single quill crossed delicately with a key.
Knowledge recorded. Words preserved. Secrets kept.
The sigil was small. Its meaning was not.
There was no vanity in her expression as she regarded herself—only calculation. A face that absorbed truths and stored them without comment. A face entrusted with a kingdom's memory.
She rose, folded the blanket, and crossed to her desk. To an outsider, its surface was chaos: stacked parchments, wax seals, an overturned sand shaker, folios splayed face-down. Yet the disorder held precision. She knew the position of every sheet, every margin note. Her quills stood in a chipped porcelain cup, their tips sharpened to dangerous fineness.
A draft lay at the center: a revised record of the Treaty of Elmreach.
Elmreach lay beyond Rowan's northern coast, separated not by walls but by water and wind. The treaty had secured peace on land.
At sea, it had required adjustment.
The original text had been altered—a single line erased generations ago. Alara had discovered it three months earlier, hidden in a secondary account written in a dying script few still studied.
She had not yet decided what to do with it.
The armoire creaked softly as the wood settled. Inside hung modest gowns of brown and deep green—practical colors befitting castle staff. She owned nothing that shimmered, nothing that invited a second glance.
Across the room, her bed stood neatly made beneath a tapestry bearing Rowan's true crest: a crowned sword enclosed in a shield, its blade dividing a constellation stitched in precise silver thread. The stars were not decorative. They were exact.
Rowan did not claim dominion by land alone.
It claimed the sky.
The slender crown echoed the geometry of the constellations it guarded. The sword ran straight through the pattern's heart—as though binding heaven to steel, decree to destiny.
Alara's gaze often drifted there in unguarded moments. The stars had guided Rowan's earliest kings. They had marked battles, coronations, betrayals. Every ruler was said to ascend beneath a sky that had already spoken their name.
Whether that was prophecy or carefully curated myth depended entirely on who kept the records.
And she kept them all.
A knock sounded at the adjoining door—the private entrance to the library.
Three measured taps.
"Enter," Alara called, already reaching for fresh parchment.
The door opened to reveal Erik, a junior archivist, arms laden with a precarious stack of books. Sandy hair fell into his eyes as he bowed awkwardly.
"Morning, Keeper."
"Erik." She finished her line before setting the quill aside. "You're early."
He shifted the stack. "The Chancellor has requested the maritime ledgers from the Third Era. All volumes."
"All?" Her gaze lifted, sharpened.
"So he said."
Silence stretched.
The Third Era.
Elmreach had been ratified in its thirty-second year—signed inland beneath vaulted ceilings and embroidered banners. But Elmreach did not border Rowan's fields.
It bordered its coast.
Her fingers rested near the revised treaty. The erased line had not concerned farmland or tribute. It had concerned jurisdiction—authority that did not sit comfortably on maps.
At sea, borders behaved differently.
"They haven't been requested in over a decade," she said.
Tomas nodded. "Shall I prepare them?"
Alara did not answer at once.
The northern maritime ledgers were meticulous: harbormaster tallies, naval dispatches, customs disputes. Ships entering under one banner and leaving under another. The sea recorded movement with an honesty parchment sometimes lacked.
Elmreach lay just beyond Rowan's northern waters. Close enough that, on clear mornings, its cliffs were visible from Northwatch's highest tower. Close enough that enforcement would never have been theoretical.
Her mind aligned dates, signatures, annotations memorized years ago. The Chancellor was not prone to coincidence. Nor careless with chronology.
Interesting.
"Yes," she said at last. "Prepare them. I will oversee their removal."
Relief flickered across Tomas's face before he disappeared back into the library.
Alara remained still.
The treaty lay open on her desk. The ledgers waited in the northern stacks. Separate records. Distinct categories.
And yet—
When separate records began to whisper the same year, it was rarely accidental.
Her expression did not change, but something sharpened behind it. Not alarm. Not concern.
Recognition.
She retrieved a deep green outer robe and fastened it at her throat. Her fingers brushed the treaty draft.
One altered line.
One buried truth.
The Royal Keeper of Books was not charged merely with preservation.
She governed the kingdom's memory.
Every decree, treaty, birth, betrayal, famine, war, coronation, and quiet amendment passed through her hands before settling into permanence. She organized the past, catalogued the present, and shaped the structure in which the future would be recorded.
Nothing entered the archive without her sanction. Nothing left without her knowledge.
She knew where each record lay—shelf, binding, page.
More than that, she knew their contents.
Ancient histories locked behind iron-bound doors. Star charts inked so long ago the lines had browned to dust. Marginal notes written by kings who had not trusted their heirs.
She had read them all. Learned them. Carried them.
And when summoned to court, she did not consult parchment.
She recited.
Dates. Clauses. Forgotten oaths. Her voice steady and exact. The court called it a gift. The older ministers called it unsettling.
Beyond preservation, she bore another duty: instruction. What was written did not remain dormant. It passed through her—to scribes, to scholars, to heirs. She determined what was taught, how it was framed, which histories were emphasized and which were merely… included.
Preserve the record, yes.
But also define its shape.
Even when it contradicted itself. Even when it threatened the crown it served. Even when remembering proved more dangerous than forgetting.
She extinguished the candle and stepped into the vast, cathedral hush of Rowan's library.
Towering shelves arched overhead. Sunlight filtered through high stained glass. Dust drifted like slow-falling ash. The air held weight—knowledge, secrets, quiet power that required no crown.
Alara inhaled.
Somewhere within these walls lay answers long forgotten.
And somewhere beyond them, someone had begun asking the right questions.
She adjusted her sleeves and moved between the shelves, footsteps silent against stone.
The day had begun.