The Purges

Ilyra unfolded her customary morning gazette at her writing desk, smoothing the creases against the walnut surface with gloved fingers. The autumn light was thin through the tall windows, grey and flat, the kind that made the ink harder to read. She angled the paper toward the nearest candle and began.

Three columns on the front page. Two devoted to Seraine’s purges, one to grain prices. The purges were winning.

The reading was methodical, the way Evander had taught her. Not for content, not at first, but for pattern. Which districts had been struck. Which families named. Which charges laid. Correspondence from the neat stack at her elbow served as cross-reference: court invitations on cream paper, council summaries on heavier stock, and nestled among them like fish bones in bread, the reports. Arrests in the forge district. A household dissolved in the merchant quarter. Three families taken from the weaver’s row near the southern gate.

Some of the names were familiar. Not because she knew the people, but because she had written them.

Some of her documents had produced results. Others had not. The forge district was moving slower than expected. The merchant quarter had responded exactly as predicted. The weaver’s row arrests were a surprise; the evidence planted there had been a secondary lead, meant to draw Seraine’s informants along the stronger trail first. They had not followed it. Either the informants were more thorough than she had credited, or someone in the Temple hierarchy was reading the same patterns she was.

A note. An adjustment to the mental map.

The gazette listed further arrests in smaller type, the names compressed to fit. The harbour ward, three taken. The old temple quarter, two households. The tanners’ district, one family.

The bread district had not been touched.

She paused on that. Her eyes moved back to the gazette’s columns, checking. No arrests. No investigations opened. No families taken. Mira’s district, where the bakeries still smelled of char from the riot that had started everything, where Mira’s brother had burned, remained untouched by Seraine’s purges.

Behind her, the door opened and closed. Mira set the tea tray on the side table. The clink of porcelain against silver. The soft rustle of a servant’s uniform. A stillness that meant Mira was waiting to see if she would be needed.

The next page held provincial reports. A failed harvest in the south. Grain prices rising. The first whispers of what might become a difficult winter. All of it filed behind the more pressing arithmetic: three confirmed, two unresolved, the forge district behind schedule.

The tea cooled beside her, untouched. Mira withdrew without a word, and the room settled back into the silence of work that could not be named aloud.

Alistair found her after the council session.

She had been expecting it, in the way she had learned to expect things at court. Not specific knowledge, but the recognition of a pattern. He had been watching her in the council chamber, his attention split between the proceedings and her face, and when the session dissolved into the usual shuffle of departing nobles and whispered negotiations, he had caught her eye and tilted his head toward the antechamber.

She followed.

The room was small by palace standards, a waiting chamber with tall windows and a pair of settees that no one ever sat in. The light was better here than in her rooms, the windows facing south, and beyond the glass the palace gardens were turning. Gold and copper bleeding through the green. The sky above remained grey and heavy with the promise of rain.

Their parents had presided over the council. The Empress had signed three documents without reading them. The Emperor had stared at a point above the assembled heads, searching for something in the vaulted ceiling that might explain how his family had come to this. Neither had asked questions. Neither had objected to anything.

“Mother looks through me now,” Alistair said, closing the door. He did not sit. He rarely sat when something was troubling him. “Father doesn’t look at all.”

“They’re tired,” Ilyra said. “We all are.”

“Tired ends. This feels like something else.”

He stood by the window, his shoulders tight beneath his military tunic. He had his mother’s colouring, the reddish undertones in his light brown hair catching what little sun pushed through the clouds, and his father’s build, broad and commanding. In another life, he would have made a fine emperor. In this one, he was a man watching his family disintegrate and trying to hold the pieces together with discipline and force of will.

A noise from beyond the far archway. Voices, low and urgent. Then Lady Ashworth passed through it, a companion at her side, the same silver head that had trembled over Cassian’s evidence, now bent close in urgent conference.

“Children,” Lady Ashworth was saying, her voice carrying the particular clarity of the elderly, who had long since stopped caring whether they were overheard. “They took children from their beds.”

Her companion murmured something inaudible. They passed. The corridor swallowed them.

Ilyra watched them go. Lady Ashworth had lost no one in the purges, not directly. But the Dowager Countess had spent forty years as the court’s moral compass. The countess was recalibrating again, her outrage as genuine now as it had been during Cassian’s judgement, her outrage genuine and her alliances shifting further. She had a grievance. That might be useful again.

She turned back to Alistair.

He had watched her watching. His expression was unreadable, but she recognised the quality of his attention. Military assessment. Terrain being read.

“She’s making my job impossible,” he said. “Every family she takes, I inherit their enemies. Soldiers are being asked to enforce religious edicts. My soldiers.” He took a breath, calming himself. “They signed up to fight border wars. Keep order. Not drag weavers from their homes because a priest found the wrong pamphlet.”

“She believes she’s right,” Ilyra said.

“That’s the problem.” He turned from the window. “If she were corrupt, like Cassian, I could work with that. Corruption has logic. You find the price and you pay it. But she’s a believer. You can’t buy a believer. You can only outlast them.”

“Then wait.”

“While she breaks everything I’ve built?” His lips thinned into a frown. “At least mine are contained. Soldiers with discipline, proper facilities. Not…” He gestured vaguely toward the corridor where Lady Ashworth had passed. “This.”

The words settled. Proper facilities. She did not ask what he meant by that. She already knew.

“Let her prove herself wrong,” Ilyra said instead. “She will.”

He studied her. The assessment continued, and she held still under it.

“You’ve changed, little sister.”

A simple observation. She heard the wariness in it, the careful weighing of a man who had watched two siblings die and a third begin to spiral, now looking at the suspiciously composed fourth sibling.

“The court teaches, if you listen.”

The answer came out too smooth, and she saw Alistair notice. His eyes narrowed, just slightly.

A pause. Then he shifted back to Seraine, and the ground beneath them became familiar again.

“Something needs to happen,” he said. “Before she breaks something that can’t be mended.”

“At least one of us still has sense,” he added, moving toward the door.

“Brother,” Ilyra said, and he paused with his hand on the door. “I’m glad we can speak plainly.”

He looked at her for a moment longer than was comfortable.

“So am I,” he said, before leaving.

She stood in the empty antechamber, listening to his boots recede down the corridor, and allowed herself to think: Not trust. Not yet. But the foundation is there.

She did not think about what she might build on it. Not yet.

The scream came at dusk.

She was in the upper corridor, returning from the library with a volume of provincial histories she did not need. The window was open, the air carrying the faint bitterness of burning leaves from the city below, and the sound came upward from the service yard with the sharp clarity of something that was not meant to be heard from this height.

She stopped.

It came again. A woman’s voice, high and ragged, stripped of everything but need. Not anger. Desperation.

Ilyra went to the window.

Below, in the narrow yard where the kitchen deliveries arrived and the laundry carts were loaded, a maid was being dragged toward the service gate. Two guards had her by the arms, their grip professional, practised. Temple guards, she noted. Seraine’s people.

The woman was young. Younger than Ilyra. A kitchen girl, perhaps, or laundry. She wore the grey uniform of the lower palace staff, and her cap had come off in the struggle, dark hair falling loose around a face contorted with terror.

She was sobbing. Begging. Fragments reached Ilyra through the open window, carried on the cool evening air.

“Please, I didn’t, I swear I didn’t, my family has always been faithful, please…”

A name. She was calling a name. Someone who could not hear her, or who had already been taken.

The guards did not answer. They did not need to. They had orders. The woman had been identified. Whatever document or testimony had placed her on the list, it was sufficient, and the machinery of the purge did not require her consent or her understanding.

Ilyra watched.

Her hands rested on the windowsill, gloved fingers against the cold stone.

She did not call out. She did not move toward the stairs. She did not think about the bell pull in her chambers that could summon a steward who could summon a captain who could ask questions.

The woman’s voice carried upward, thinner now, the fight leaving her as the guards reached the gate. One last word, half-swallowed by a sob. The name again.

Then the gate closed, and the yard was empty.

Her family might have been in the documents. The ones I helped create.

She drew back from the window.

Seraine did this. Not me. I only…

She could not finish the thought.

The corridor stretched ahead of her, long and lamplit, the evening candles already burning in their sconces. She walked. Her footsteps were steady on the marble. The provincial histories were still tucked under her arm. She held them against her side, something solid when the ground felt uncertain.

Behind her, the sound faded. With each step it thinned, until there was nothing.

By the time she reached the end of the corridor, there was only silence.

She walked through the door and did not look back.

Evander arrived as the candles in her sitting room were being lit.

He entered with the ease of a man who had been expected, which he had. Their afternoons together had taken on the rhythm of ritual, as reliable as the turning of seasons. He came. She was waiting. Mira sat in the corner with her mending, the chaperone who saw everything and was seen by no one.

He noticed immediately. He always noticed.

“Something happened,” he said, settling into the chair across from her.

Ilyra did not answer at first. She was looking at her hands, folded in her lap, fingers fiddling with the seam of her gloves.

“There was a woman,” she said. “In the service yard. She was screaming. They dragged her out through the side gate.”

He looked at her silently.

“Because of documents that I…” She stopped. Swallowed. “That we…”

“That Seraine used,” he said. His voice was warm, unhurried, the way one speaks to someone still catching their breath. “You didn’t arrest her. You didn’t order guards to her door. You showed Seraine a pattern she was already following.”

“But if I hadn’t…”

“Then she would have found them anyway. Or found others. The only difference is time.”

But the scream echoed. The name the woman had called, carried upward through the autumn air.

She looked at him. His dark eyes were steady in the candlelight, his expression open, attentive, entirely focused on her.

“What would you do?” he asked. “If you had the power?”

She thought about it longer than she expected.

“I would end Seraine’s authority. Not just slow it. End it.”

He nodded. His expression softened, the way it did when she surprised him.

“Remember that,” he said. “A crisis is coming.”

He reached across the space between them and took her hand.

“You’re not causing this,” Evander said. His grip was warm. “You’re revealing what was already there. What Seraine always was.”

She squeezed his hand. The guilt subsided, as it always did, here, with him. The screaming faded. The names on the lists became a pattern to be managed again. The yard below her window became somewhere she did not need to think about.

He was right. This was temporary. The suffering now prevented greater suffering later. Seraine was the cause, not Ilyra. And this was how it ended.

The conversation drifted. The crisis ahead. The council’s shifting loyalties. Alistair’s growing frustration.

“After this,” she said, after a while. “After Seraine. Do you think we might talk about the date?”

“After Seraine,” he said gently. His face looked like it pained him to delay. “One thing at a time.”

She nodded. She could wait. There were worse things than waiting for the right moment, and the future she envisioned was worth any number of difficult months between here and there.

“One thing at a time,” she agreed.

In the corner, Mira folded her mending and rose. She crossed to the side table, poured fresh tea, and set it within Ilyra’s reach without being asked.

Ilyra only had eyes for Evander.

He stayed until the candles burned low, and when he left, he pressed his lips to her gloved hand at the door. The gesture was courtly, correct, the farewell of a betrothed man who respected propriety.

Alone, or nearly so, Ilyra moved to the window.

The city spread below her in the gathering dark, its lamps flickering to life one by one. Somewhere beyond the palace walls, the purges continued. Somewhere, Temple guards were knocking on doors. Somewhere, families were being separated, households dissolved, lives ended or irrevocably changed.

She could not see any of it from here. Only the lights, scattered across the darkness.

A crisis is coming. And when it arrives…

She did not finish the thought. She did not need to. She already knew.