“My lady? My lady, please wake up—”
Ren’s eyes snapped open to the sound of hands wringing fabric and a stranger’s face hovering too close.
She lunged upright, choking on air, hands flying to her throat.
No rope.
No burn of hemp cutting into skin.
No crowd below the gallows platform screaming for the thief to swing.
“You’re awake!” The girl — young, in gray wool, a maid’s apron — pressed both hands to her mouth.
“Oh, thank the Light, you’re finally awake—”
“Where’s the rope?” Ren’s voice came out wrong.
Soft.
Cultured.
Not hers.
“What rope, my lady?”
“The one around my neck.” Ren’s fingers dug into smooth, unmarked skin.
“I was hanged. I felt it—”
“My lady, you fainted.” The girl’s eyes were huge, terrified.
“During your awakening rite. Three days ago. We thought—” Her voice cracked.
“We thought you might never wake at all.”
“Three days.” Ren stared at her own hands.
Soft palms.
No calluses.
No scar over the knuckle where a guard’s blade had caught her two winters back.
“Who are you?”
“It’s Mira, my lady. Your handmaid.” The girl’s face crumpled with worry.
“Do you not remember me?”
“I don’t remember any of this.” Ren swung her legs off the bed and nearly toppled, her balance wrong, her body too light, too fragile.
“Get me a mirror. Now.”
“There’s one right there—”
Ren was already moving, crossing a floor draped in furs she’d have sold in her old life for a month’s meals, gripping the edge of a gilded frame taller than she was.
A stranger stared back.
Silver hair, pale as moonlight, spilling to her waist.
Amber eyes too wide, too delicate.
A face carved soft and fine, made for temple portraits, not back-alley shadows.
“That’s not my face.”
“My lady, you’re scaring me—”
“Good. I’m scared too.” Ren pressed a palm flat to her own chest, and something answered — a pulse of heat beneath her ribs like a second heart trying to climb up her throat.
“Mira. What’s happening to me?”
“I don’t understand, my lady—”
“Then explain what I am.” Ren’s voice sharpened without her meaning it to.
“Who is Lady Caelia?”
Mira flinched at the tone, then answered in a rush, like she’d been trained to recite it.
“Lady Caelia Vance. The Saintess candidate. You’ve lived in the Citadel’s cloistered wing since you were small, my lady — weak lungs, the healers always said, and a power that never woke properly until the rite three days past.”
*Saintess.* The word landed strange in Ren’s mouth even unspoken.
She’d grown up on temple charity bread thrown to gutter rats through a side door, never once let past the chapel steps.
Now apparently she was the chapel.
“And before that?” Ren asked.
“Before the rite?”
“You collapsed, my lady. Your holy mana surged too strong, too fast — the priests said it nearly tore you apart from the inside.” Mira wrung her apron again.
“They said it was a miracle you survived it at all.”
A miracle.
Ren almost laughed.
She hadn’t survived it.
Someone else had died of it, and she’d woken up wearing the wreckage.
She flexed her fingers, and heat gathered behind her sternum again, sharper this time, insistent.
“Mira. Step back.”
“My lady?”
“Step back.”
Mira scrambled toward the wall just as Ren opened her hand, and light poured out — white-gold, blinding, spilling between her fingers so fierce it washed the whole room in radiance and seared white spots across her vision.
Mira shrieked.
“Your grace, your light—it’s never done that before, not like that, never that bright—”
“Make it stop, then, tell me how!” Ren clenched her fist, but the light only flared hotter, biting into her palm like she’d grabbed a coal straight from the hearth.
“I don’t know how, my lady, only the priests know the forms, I’ve only ever seen you glow soft, like candlelight, not—not like a bonfire—”
Ren gritted her teeth and forced her fingers shut around the light by will alone, smothering it.
It died with a hiss, leaving a angry pink burn blooming across her palm and smoke curling faint off her fingertips.
“It hurt,” she said, staring at the mark.
“Why did it hurt?”
“Holy mana doesn’t hurt the vessel, my lady, that’s not — that’s not how it’s supposed to—”
“Well it’s not supposed to do a lot of things, apparently, and it just did them anyway.” Ren pressed her burned palm to her ribs, breathing hard.
“So either your Saintess is broken, or I’m not doing this right.”
Mira’s mouth opened, then shut, clearly unable to find a safe answer to that.
Ren almost smiled at that — some things translated across any body, apparently.
Servants going quiet rather than answering a question that had no good answer.
She’d done the same thing herself once, plenty of times, standing in front of men who could have her killed for a wrong word.
Focus, she told herself.
Survive first.
Panic later, if there’s a later to panic in.
She made herself breathe slow, the way she used to when a guard’s lantern swept past her hiding spot and one twitch meant a blade in the dark.
In.
Out.
Steady.
“Mira,” she said, quieter now.
“How long until someone comes looking for me?”
“They already are, my lady.” Mira’s voice dropped, and something like real fear crept into it.
“The Grand Inquisitor comes today. To finish what the rite started — to confirm you properly, before the Holy Council. He was meant to come at dawn, but they let you rest, on account of—”
A fist struck the chamber door.
Three blows, hard and precise, and the whole room seemed to lose its warmth at once, like a window had been thrown open onto a winter that didn’t exist beyond the walls.
Mira dropped into a curtsy so fast the tea tray in her hands rattled.
“Oh gods. Oh gods, he’s early, he’s never early—”
“Who’s early?” Ren’s pulse spiked, some old animal instinct in her gut recognizing danger before her mind caught up.
“Lady Caelia.” A voice through the door — low, flat, each word cut clean as a blade drawn from its sheath.
“The Grand Inquisitor requests entry.”
Mira’s face went white as the sheets.
“My lady, you have to answer, he does not ask twice—”
“Grand Inquisitor,” Ren repeated slowly, testing the weight of the title.
She’d heard it exactly once in her old life — a drunk in a back-alley tavern, three cups past sober, who’d gone gray in the face and changed the subject before he’d even finished the name.
The man the church sent when prayers weren’t enough and someone needed to simply stop existing.
“My lady.” The voice came again, quieter now, closer, as if he’d leaned in against the wood itself, patience running thin.
“Open the door. Or I will.”
Somewhere beneath the floorboards, stone cracked — a thin, hairline fracture spreading through solid rock like his presence alone was a wound the Citadel couldn’t hold shut.
Mira made a small, terrified sound and pressed herself flatter against the wall.
Ren stared at the door, holy light still humming hot and restless just beneath her skin, her borrowed heart slamming against borrowed ribs — and reached for the handle.