Truce Beneath the Leaded Skylight

October rain in the northern kingdom didn't merely fall: it cascaded in leaden sheets that erased the alcázar towers and turned the parade grounds into an impassable swamp of churned mud.

The downpour drummed with a dull fury against the leaded skylight of the guard gallery, leaking rhythmic drips into a rotting wooden pail.

Violante sat on the broad stone window sill, a coarse wool shawl draped over her shoulders and an earthenware mug cradled between her palms. Ten feet away, beneath the stone overhang where the wind didn't drive so hard, Damián Sanchis watched the postern gate with his halberd propped against the masonry.

He had been standing in the deluge for four straight hours. Rust was already weeping from his chainmail onto his gray surcoat, and his lips were tinged a faint blue with cold.

"Sanchis," I called out.

The young guard snapped to attention on military reflex, his soaked leather straps creaking.

"My lady?"

"Quit playing the tin soldier and come drink this before you catch pneumonia."

Damián hesitated, glancing down both ends of the deserted gallery. Then he let out a defeated sigh, leaned his weapon against the stones, and marched over with heavy, squelching steps.

He took the clay bowl with numb, reddened fingers. The hot steam carrying elderberry bark and spiced clove enveloped his face like a warm towel.

"This is mulled wine with cinnamon," he said after a deep swallow that brought the color rushing back to his cheeks. "If Sergeant Arnau catches a whiff of this on my breath, he'll give me three days in the stocks."

"Sergeant Arnau is down in the stables shooting dice with the muleteers," I countered with a shrug. "Nobody is climbing up to this drafty perch in a deluge like this."

There are gray afternoons when being nobody is the greatest of all privileges.

Damián settled onto the far edge of the stone sill, maintaining that cautious vassal's berth that drove me up the wall but probably kept him breathing.

"Why didn't you flee to your estates in Albarracín when you had the chance?" he asked suddenly, watching the rain hammer the ramparts. "Everyone in the garrison knows Lady Sibila is tightening the noose."

"Because running away confirms the verdict, Damián. And because back in Albarracín there's nobody waiting for me either."

"At least there you wouldn't have the prince staring at you like a condemned felon awaiting the block."

I let out a short, dry laugh.

"Aurelio is a crowned clown. Back home I knew plenty like him: men who think just because they were born with a fancy name, the whole universe owes them a bow."

"Back home?" Damián turned his head, brow furrowing. "Weren't you born within these walls?"

I bit my tongue just in time. As I shifted my arm to pull the shawl tighter, the wide wool sleeve slid back along my forearm.

Damián froze, staring down at my right wrist.

There, standing out pale against the skin, was a clean, straight four-centimeter white surgical scar, closed with microscopic precision: the remnant of the radius bone surgery I had at Marly Clinic after taking a header off my bicycle in 2024.

In an era where palace leeches cauterized flesh with red-hot irons and closed gashes with frayed sheep gut, that modern surgical seam looked like something wrought by sorcery or alien craft.

"That mark..." he whispered, his calloused thumb brushing the edge of the scar before he could stop himself. "No barber in the realm stitches flesh like that."

I pulled my hand back slowly, holding his gaze.

"It's from a place far away, Damián. A place where people don't lose their heads over the wrong word at a banquet."

Dinner in the private parlor of my wing was served with the grim punctuality of a military barracks.

A pewter tureen of clear fowl broth, two slabs of barley bread, and a baked apple smelling more of chimney soot than cinnamon. The standard fare for a noblewoman in disgrace whom nobody bothered to flatter anymore.

Old Beltrán entered with the heavy silver tray resting across his forearm. He carried his seventy years with dignified grace, his spine bent from half a century of bows and his face wearing that unreadable mask of servants who have seen three generations of lords born and buried without changing their expressions.

Caterina stood by the sideboard, but the majordomo dismissed her with a crisp nod of his white head.

"Leave us, child. I must serve her grace's broth according to the ancient rites."

Caterina shot me an anxious glance and slipped out without a word, sliding the latch home behind her.

Beltrán placed the tureen upon the coarse linen cloth. As he lifted the heavy lid, no cloud of warm steam billowed out. Tucked beneath the shallow bowl, carefully concealed between two folded linen napkins, rested a yellowed scroll of vellum, its edges singed black to disguise how it was acquired.

The wax seal was black as pitch, stamped with the oval signet of the Grand Chancellery of the Realm.

"Beltrán?" I breathed, looking up into his weathered face.

The old man didn't blink. He stood rigid as a sepulchral effigy, hands clasped at his waist.

"Your grandfather, the third duke, bought my freedom from the penal galleys when I was barely a scullery lad accused of stealing a handful of oats," he said, his voice so faint it barely competed with the crackling embers in the hearth. "I owe nothing to the house of Moncada, nor to the churchmen who now write the law in this palace."

"What is this?"

"What you were never meant to read until the morning of the feast day, my lady."

I cracked the black wax with a thumbnail. The vellum was covered in cramped iron-gall script, written in chancellery Latin mingled with archaic judicial legalese.

My twenty-first-century designer eyes took several moments to parse the medieval phrasing, but the meaning hit me like a falling portcullis:

"By decree of the Council of Regency and under seal of the High Constable: In view of the persistent contumacy of the accused and the imminent peril of sedition in the northern provinces, the extraordinary tribunal of fealty is hereby moved forward to the seventh day before the kalends of November."

Seven days.

The trial from the otome walkthrough wasn't in three months. I didn't have eighty days to buy allies, stash silver coins, or arrange an escape on muleback over the border.

Sibila and her faction had forced the timeline. By refusing to play the screeching harpy at the spring banquet, I had broken the game's canon, and the system was accelerating the guillotine blade to purge the anomaly.

Fate is a lazy puppeteer: when the marionette refuses to dance, it yanks the strings until they snap.

"They have their paid witnesses assembled at Saint Savior's Abbey," Beltrán added, lifting the empty tureen. "They will swear you purchased hemlock at the harbor apothecary, and that Lady Sibila's hairpin was stolen by your own hands to work foul maledictions upon her."

"I have seven days," I whispered, staring at the date inked in red at the foot of the parchment.

"You have seven nights, my lady," the old man corrected gently, bowing low before stepping toward the threshold. "By day this fortress is a web of watching eyes. But by night, if you know whom to ask for an iron key, stone walls still keep secrets that royal coin cannot buy."