The morning broke with a gray, thin light that did not warm the palace. Vanya walked the outer courtyard like a queen making rounds of an island, hands clasped behind her back, eyes like knives scanning. Servants moved with the furtive economy of those who had learned to make themselves small. The air carried the sour tang of damp straw and yesterday's cooking, and somewhere a bell tinkled the hour, a small ordinary sound that seemed insolent against the weight of what had happened.
She had gone out with the intention of seeing the morning's reports, which patrols had returned, which scouts had not. She wanted to prove to Gonzalo she could everything Liora could do. She had not expected to stop at the old tree by the eastern wall. The sight there hit the flat of her mood as if it were a thing thrown hard.
Liora was still tied, ropes knotted at her wrists and ankles, hips braced to keep her from slumping to the packed earth. The servants had done what they had been ordered, they had not loosened a single tie overnight. Where the swell of pregnancy had been, there was an unnatural flatness to the belly: a hollow, the skin slack where something had before been pressurized and tight. Her clothing hung oddly, the folds no longer stretched with a secret inside. Liora's face was pale and slack, lips parted; she lay with her head on her arms and breathed shallowly.
The smell—Vanya noticed it before she noticed the details. It was sour in a way that made the hair on her arms rise: the heavy, iron tang of loss and pain and unmade things. There was no dramatic weeping, no confession. Just Liora there, the fine of her hair plastered to her temple, the cloth around her limp. The sight did not soften Vanya. It sharpened her.
She stepped forward, the courtyard falling silent at the motion. A few guards clustered at a distance and the servants shifted like startled birds. Vanya's shadow crossed Liora's body and someone stepped forward, immediately lowering their head.
"No one speaks," Vanya said. Her voice carried unhurried and empty. The words were not cruel in shape—cruelty was too active for what she felt now. She felt annoyance, and annoyance folded quickly into calculation. "Tell me what happened. Her tummy is flat..."
One of the younger guards, eyes hollow, spoke with the caution of someone who had been taught to trim the truth to the shape of safety. "She—" he began, voice breaking as if the sound itself might rupture something. "She miscarried, Luna. Overnight. She was bleeding more seriously and then she lost—" He could not finish. The few words he gave were like a scrape.
Vanya looked at the body and then at the guard. She did not take comfort in the answer. She stood still as a winter branch and let the silence press the servant into memory. The fact was plain: the child was gone. The pack had been led to believe otherwise, had been forced to believe otherwise by stories and threats. Now that fiction had been stripped away by a thin morning and a body.
"No," Vanya said finally, and there was a softness of voice there that made the guard flinch. Then the softness hardened. "We are not letting this woman die an easy death. The miscarriage happened too fast."
Those words moved through the yard and changed the air. Where cruelty had been quiet and confident before, now there was an edge of duty in it. Vanya's eyes slid to the servants, to the guards, to the ropes that cut into skin. "Untie her. Bring her down to the healers at once."
The command was brisk, stripped of ceremony. Men moved, and the ropes that had bound Liora were cut with the quick efficiency of people who had done this before. There was no tenderness as they hauled her upright. They dragged rather than carried, as if to remind the world who had been punished and who had not. Liora's head lolled; her limbs responded like strings on a tired puppet.
Nyssa was summoned by messenger: a runner who knew the path and the speed of a woman who understood when the Luna required the healer's hands. Nyssa arrived in a flurry of skirts and pulled braids, steadying herself with the look of someone who had learned to keep fear small and useful. Behind her came two other women: older, quieter; their faces worn in ways that marked the difference between life that had always been hard and cruelty that was chosen.
Vanya watched them set Liora on a low cart the servants had pressed into service. She walked the edge of the small procession, hands still clasped behind her back, jaw set. For a brief beat the idea of letting the woman die again touched something like weariness inside her—cheap mercy that might have been an easy thing to give. But she did not give it. The thought of Liora's death being a clean line, an end that would let others forget and rearrange their loyalties—roused something like disdain in Vanya. Liora had been useful until the use was spent, the pack had not yet exhausted her.
"You will make her whole," Vanya said to the healers as they steadied the cart. The words were an order folded into a plan. "Clean her. Patch what is to be patched. Feed her. Strengthen her. When she wakes, she will be ready."
Nyssa's face, which had become a practiced mask for the better part of a year, slipped as the words reached her. The healer's hands callused and precise went still for a fraction. She had heard similar commands, and the words had worn grooves into her mind: the Luna's way of turning people into tools. The phrase "ready" carried an unspoken addendum that made the muscles around Nyssa's jaw tighten.
Nyssa's eyes met Vanya's. For a sliver of a moment the healer's mouth opened as if to protest, and then the training of a lifetime closed it: healers were not supposed to argue in the face of the Luna. They were given orders and they kept people alive if it suited the pack. They were also expected to fix the stains of failure, to smooth the seams.
"Nyssa," Vanya said, and the name was both simple and binding. "Do not fail me. I need her awake so the second batch of her punishment will begin."
Nyssa bowed her head, a movement so quick it was nearly invisible. She had no illusions that obedience bought absolution. She stepped toward Liora and felt her stomach twist with an old, dull sickening. Her own hands, hands that had birthed and stitched, hands that had held the dying, trembled a little as they reached for the limp woman being roughly placed on a pallet.