Phineas Duqaconvallis.
For half a heartbeat he simply stood there, the words echoing in his skull as if the stable rafters themselves had spoken. Phineas Duqaconvallis. The Sun Knight. The golden terror of Kazdel. The Sword of Kazdel that comes and goes like a lightning and still drew fear throughout Terra for century. Even here, in Kazimierz—land of knights, cradle of chivalry—his name carried the weight of storms. Songs named him radiant and accursed in the same breath. Lords and smallfolks alike would spat when they spoke of him, and yet no herald ever forgot to announce him.
Phineas Duqaconvallis?
Me?
The absurdity of it bloomed hot and strange in Dym's chest, tangled with something shamefully pleased. Even if the man was Kazdellian—cursed demon blood and lineage, sworn to a realm most of Terra named enemy—being mistaken for him was no small thing. Infamous or not, the Sun Knight was still… undeniable. A force to reckon with. A name that bent rooms when it entered them.
Dym swallowed.
Gods, what an honor that would have been.
And what nonsense.
He was no blazing champion of legend. No dread knight of foreign courts. No figure sung in dread or awe. He was a hedge knight with worn boots, a patched cloak, old sword, and a dead master whose name barely stirred anyone's memory anymore.
He turned at last, the fantasy breaking like soap foam in sunlight.
Only to find a Lupo stable hand staring up at him, reins clenched in both fists, a sweating courser dancing impatiently at his shoulder.
Dym blinked.
Then realization crashed down on him—he was standing square in the entryway.
"Uh—n-no," he stammered quickly, stepping back so fast his heel nearly clipped a bucket. "No, that's—not me."
The Lupo's ears twitched in irritation. "Then would you move the fuck out of the way?"
"Yeah. Yes. Of course." Dym bobbed his head and shuffled aside, hands lifting in automatic apology. "Sorry. Apologies."
The stable hand pushed past with a sharp huff, horse and all, leaving Dym feeling as though he had just been swept aside by a tide he had no business standing in.
He lingered only a moment longer before drifting clear of the stable mouth entirely.
Beyond it, the castle breathed movement.
Rudnicka's inner ward had become a hive—servants hurrying with basins and cloths, armorers bearing bundles of lances, grooms leading strings of horses toward overcrowded stalls. Silverlances moved through it all like fragments of winter sun, their plate bright against the stone. Among them, the darker hues of the Victorian riders slipped like stormclouds threaded through light. Voices overlapped, orders flew, doors banged, hooves rang on cobble. The air smelled of leather, hay, sweat, and the faint spice of noble perfumes newly arrived.
Dym tried to edge along the wall, suddenly conscious of how very large he was in a place suddenly very full.
He nearly collided with a passing man carrying folded linens.
"Watch where ya going, you big cunt!"
"S-Sorry!" Dym blurted at once, hands lifting again in reflexive surrender as the man shouldered past.
He exhaled slowly once the flow carried on without him.
The main entry arch now stood thick with guards—Rudnicka colors on surcoats, halberds grounded, eyes sharp. Beyond them, glimpses of movement showed nobles being ushered inward toward halls he had no right to enter. Even from here, Dym could see the press: Nearl silver, Victorian dark, castle liveries weaving between. No hedge knight would slip through that gate unnoticed, and certainly not without summons.
He shifted his weight, the earlier glow of hope cooling into something duller.
Had he come all this way for nothing?
For a dream of vouching that had already slipped past him in the stable aisle? For a chance he had not even grasped when it stood smiling before him and called him "Ser"? Six days of petitioning, and still he stood outside doors meant for others. Perhaps this—this gawking, wandering intrusion into halls of the great—had never been duty at all.
Only hunger.
Recognition.
A selfish longing to be seen.
The thought sat poorly.
He dragged a thumb along the seam of his glove, eyes drifting across the yard again without focus.
That was when a sharp voice cut through the bustle from somewhere off to his right.
"The lords and princes be needing their fucking hands washed!"
Dym turned his head.
Along the curtain wall, half-hidden behind stacked barrels and a rack of spare tack, a narrow side entry stood open—a servants' door, low and busy. A maid in plain livery hurried toward it, skirts gathered, answering over her shoulder, "I'm on my way, ma'am!"
Steam drifted faintly from within.
Water. Towels. Basins.
And an unguarded entrance.
The tall knight's gaze lingered on the side entry.
He looked once to the guarded arch—halberds, banners, lords' colors threading past—and then back to the narrow servants' door where steam curled out and voices snapped in the language of kitchens and basins rather than heraldry and lineage. No guards there. No eyes trained to measure pedigree. Only haste. Only work.
Around him, the yard churned on without notice. Grooms hauling tack. Stable boys swearing over buckets. Silverlances crossing in pairs. Victorians slipping between them like dark fish in bright water. No one watched him. No one cared.
Dym swallowed.
It would be wrong.
The thought rose at once, solid and stubborn as Ser Arlan's voice in his memory: A knight walks straight roads, lad. No creeping through hedges like a thief. He was no craven. He had never skulked for advantage. Every petition he had made these six days he had made in the open, he wore no helmet, he gave his name politely, he swallowed his own pride, but never hides it.
His mind balked.
And yet…
It was a chance.
A thin one, perhaps foolish, perhaps doomed—but still a path that led inward rather than away. One more door not yet tried. One more turn before the road ended. If he could only reach a hall, a corridor, a gathering where knights stood at ease rather than in procession—if he could only speak, just once more, to the right ears—
He could return to Soap with something other than dust and rejection.
The image came unbidden: the boy's face lifting, hope rekindling instead of dimming further day by day. Ser? he would say. And Dym could answer with good news at last. A name. A promise. A vouch.
His jaw tightened.
So long as he was careful.
He would not lie if challenged. He would not claim rank he did not hold. He would simply… be where he was not invited yet not forbidden. If discovered, the worst would be a cuff, perhaps a kick, maybe a spit and a boot back into the yard.
He had endured worse than that.
Hopefully it would not come to that.
Inside, someone barked, "Move! A carriage is comin' through!"
The maid hauled at the heavy door. Hinges groaned; the slab of wood dragged inward just enough for a body to slip through. She ducked aside, arms straining to keep it from swinging shut again.
Dym glanced once more over his shoulder.
No eyes on him.
No calls for him to stop.
He reached down almost without thinking and tugged his rope belt tighter around his waist. The familiar weight of his sword settled firmer against his hip. His other hand slid over the rim of his shield where it hung at his back, palm pressing the worn leather grip there—a small, grounding reassurance.
Then he moved.
Not a dash. Not a furtive scramble. He walked, long strides eating the few paces to the half-open door. He angled his shoulders, slipped through the gap as the maid braced it, and in the same motion took the door's weight from her for a breath so she could dart past toward the yard.
The hinges groaned again.
Wood thudded back toward its jamb.
Dym in now inside.
It is now or never.
=========
The dark tunnel swallowed him almost at once.
Light fell away behind him with the closing of the door, leaving only the wavering glow ahead where the maid hurried along with her lantern. Its small flame cast long, restless shadows that crawled over damp stone and low vaulting, turning the passage into something half cellar, half burrow. The air smelled of limewash, old mortar, and the faint sourness of stored grain.
Dym kept his distance.
Far enough that her light did not fall back across his face, close enough that he did not lose the path. He moved with care that felt almost comical in a body built like a siege tower—shoulders turned sideways through narrowings, head dipped beneath beams, boots placed heel-toe to quiet the scrape of iron hobnails on stone. The maid never once glanced behind. To her, the tunnel held only her errand and her breathless haste.
At a bend, she vanished through a door ahead. The lantern glow slipped sideways, then thinned.
Dym paused.
Listened.
Only the faint echo of her steps retreating upward.
He crossed the last stretch, set his palm to the door she had passed, and eased it inward. The hinges complained softly—just enough to tighten his throat—then gave way.
Beyond lay the castle.
A service corridor first: plastered walls, low arches, rush mats worn thin by years of traffic. Somewhere above, voices murmured and boots thudded. To his left, a stair climbed toward brighter air; to his right, the passage ran deeper, branching into storerooms and kitchens. Dym chose the dimmer way, instinct tugging him from crowds rather than toward them.
He went as he had on poaching nights in boyhood—hugging shadow, pausing at crossings, letting servants pass in blurs of linen and wood and copper. A cook rushed by with a tray; a pair of pages bickered over folded cloth; a guard's polearm rang lightly against a stone corner as he turned. Each time, Dym flattened himself into recess or alcove, heart hammering at the absurdity of it: a man half again the breadth of any here trying to become less than furniture.
It struck him, not for the first time, how strange it was that no one had yet noticed him.
He should have been a landmark.
And yet the castle was swollen with arrivals—colors and armor and errands tangling into one great, distracted organism. Here, a giant in travel-stained roghspun tattered cloths could be only another burden moving through the gut of the place.
He slipped along a narrower run, then up three shallow steps to a half-lit gallery where arrow slits admitted cold threads of afternoon. Voices drifted from ahead—clearer now, not servants' bark but the measured cadence of nobles at ease.
"…the spring rains have swollen many of our streams," one voice was saying, cultured and careful. "Perhaps the young lord and lady have just been delayed?"
Another answered at once, gravelly, edged with fatigue and irritation. "Fuck me. 'Delayed.' They're not delayed."
A third cut in, mild but reproving. "Do not curse our gracious host. Not to mention doing it in front of a lady."
"I said 'fuck me,' not 'fuck him,'" the gravel voice shot back. "It's not his fault Father bade us attend this miserable circus of a 'Grand Tourney' those Gaulish birds demanded. Of all places in God's fucked planet, why here instead of Lingones?"
"Might we discuss this another time?" a fourth voice murmured—smooth, diplomatic, already weary of quarrel.
A huff. "I say we go hunting, spar, and feast while we wait for the Lateran and Iberian delegations to crawl their way here with their guns."
Dym edged closer, drawn as much by curiosity as by the dangerous hope that had brought him inside at all. The corridor turned along the outer wall, where a carved stone screen—ornamental tracery cut into quatrefoils and slits—looked into a chamber beyond. He found one opening large enough to see through if he leaned just so.
He did.
Inside stood the men he had watched from the yard.
The elder Nearl—broad-shouldered, pale gold hair tied back, white riding doublet now exchanged for a lighter court coat—stood near a long table scattered with fruit and cups. Even at distance, something in him seemed burnished: the bearing of a man accustomed to command without effort. His brother lingered a step behind, silver prosthetic hand catching candlelight in hard glints as he shifted weight restlessly from heel to heel, sleeplessness etched at the corners of his eyes.
Opposite them, the older Draco prince of Victoria inclined his horned head in patient civility, scaled tail coiled neatly behind his boots. His expression was kind, composed—yet lined with travel and worry.
No sign of the younger one.
"The little dragon brat must've went to town", Dym thought with a private, ungenerous curl of the lip.
Then his gaze snagged on the fourth figure.
Smaller.
Hooded.
Black-clad, the cloth cut close and severe, with only the faintest thread of green worked along seams and hem. The person moved toward the table with a quiet, precise glide, heels striking stone in a measured clack… clack… that echoed softly beneath the vaulted ceiling. As they passed beneath a wall sconce, Dym caught a glimpse: the hood pierced by neat openings where white ears rose through, their inner fur touched with green.
A Feline, he realized. With the Victorians, then.
He leaned closer despite himself, breath held.
Inside, the elder Nearl plucked a grape from the platter, rolled it once between his fingers, and spoke with the calm of a man stating weather. "Damian has done this before," he said. He popped the fruit into his mouth, chewed once, swallowed. "You should not have commanded him to enter the lists."
Another word had barely left Młynar's mouth when something moved behind Dym.
A whisper of fabric.
The faintest scuff.
He inhaled sharply and snapped his head around—
—and found the Lord of Rudnicka Vale's daughter standing behind him.
Lady Gwin.
Her brown hair had been braided hastily for the day's ceremonies, wisps already escaping to curl about her cheeks, and her eyes were bright with a kind of reckless mischief that had no business surviving in a castle thick with princes and war talk. She pressed a finger to her lips in urgent silence, her expression conspiratorial, as though they were children hiding from tutors rather than intruders pressed to a nobles' council.
She leaned in until her breath ghosted his ear.
"Ser Aleksandr's children are missing," she whispered.
Inside the chamber, the gravel voice of Ser Aleksandr cut across the table again, tight with anger. "You'd be more concerned if it was your son, I wager."
"Oh," Dym breathed, barely a sound.
Gwin edged even closer, skirts brushing his greaves. "Probably dead," she murmured with morbid relish.
He blinked at her. "Dead?"
"Wars have started for less," she said, and there was no jest in that line at all. She looked him up and down—taking in the towering height, the broad shoulders crammed into travel-worn cloak, the expression still caught between awe and alarm—and wrinkled her nose. "You're big and stupid."
Before he could process that, she snapped a soft, mock punch into the side of his shoulder—more tap than blow—and darted away down the side hall, skirts flashing once before she vanished around a corner like a mischievous spirit.
Dym stared after her, stunned into stillness.
Inside, the talk rolled on.
"They have only been missing a day," Młynar said, calm as winter. "No doubt the Silverlances will turn up Damian—and Zofia along with him."
The older Draco prince inclined his head, voice warm with steady reassurance. "And my Tower Knights will ride beside them. You have my word, Aleksandr. Whatever has befallen the young ones, they will not face it alone."
Aleksandr scoffed harshly. "When the tourney is over, perhaps."
"It need not wait on ceremony," the prince replied gently. "You know as well as I that our houses are already bound beyond mere spectacle as this. Betrothal or no, our alliance stands. The Demons in the east will not care whose daughter marries whose son."
Dym felt the words like a draft down his spine.
Demons… alliance… east.
Kazdel.
His stomach turned cold.
Inside, Aleksandr gave a tired, humorless laugh. "You speak of the Sarkaz and alliances while my son wanders with my daughter to God knows where, likely drunk or rutting his way across some village."
Młynar's voice sharpened a fraction. "Damian belongs on a tourney field no more than Schmidt or Eddie."
"By which you mean he'd sooner ride a whore than a horse." Aleksandr scoffed.
"That is not what I said."
"Peace, both of you." the Draco prince murmured. "Grief makes cruel jests easy."
Aleksandr dragged a hand across his face, silver fingers rasping faintly against his short beard. "I do not need reminding of my children's failings. They can change. They will change—Gods damn them. Or I swear, I'll see him dead before he shames our house again."
The hooded Feline had been silent until then.
She stood slightly apart from the table, gloved hands resting lightly at her sides, green-threaded black garments swallowing light. When she spoke, the chamber seemed to cool.
"They are not dead," she said.
Her voice was low, precise, almost clinical—every syllable placed with surgical certainty. "Had either child perished within the last day, signs would already be evident. Absence is not death, Ser Aleksandr. Do not conflate anxiety with fact."
Aleksandr's eyes rolled. "You presume much for a foreign advisor."
"I observe," she replied. "And I conclude only what evidence permits."
The Draco prince gave a faint, conciliatory smile. "My companion means only that despair is premature. Your son has vanished before and returned, has he not?"
Młynar flicked another grape stem aside. "Damian has done this before. You should not have commanded him into the lists."
"He is my son, and he is a knight." Aleksandr snapped. "He will learn duty if it kills him."
"Or if you do," the hooded woman said quietly.
The room went still.
Even Dym, pressed outside in shadow, felt the air change.
Aleksandr's golden eyes darkens. "Careful. Dame Kal'tsit."
"I am," she said coldly. "More than you. Ser Aleksandr Nearl."
The Draco prince exhaled slowly, stepping between words before they sharpened further. "Enough. We are allies, not adversaries. The children will be found. The matter of their bethrotal may yet stand—or not. Either way, when the Crusade against Kazdel comes, Kazimierz and Victoria, as well as the other five nations will face it together."
Crusade.
The word struck Dym like a mailed fist.
His mind lurched backward a week—to Ser Don's grave, patient voice by the roadside fire: It sets a precedent. A possible war against Kazdel.
Then further still—to a decade ago, riding behind Ser Arlan among eighteen hundred hedge knights answering banners they scarcely understood. The sky split white. Demons' thunder-sticks roared. Men and horses torn apart in sorcerous storms of metal and flame. The smell of blood and burned leather. The field choked with the dying.
Are we going to war against Kazdel again?
The thought roared through him.
And in that moment, lost in memory and dread, he did not notice his cloak shift.
A fold of rough wool slid past the carved stone edge.
A dark curve intruded into the chamber's sightline.
Inside, the hooded Feline's head turned.
Cold and calculating green eyes fixed themselves on the opening.
Her voice cut clean through the room.
"You," she said.
Every head snapped toward the entrance.
"Who are you," she continued, calm as a scalpel, "and what do you mean by spying on us?"