It was night already, but the grounds of the royal castle were still well lit. It wouldn’t do to have gone so far, to have used so many resources and so many opportunities just to be discovered now.

The Crown nobles were a solid hundred meters ahead of me, making their way down the long paved path leading towards the royal castle proper. There was a lot of cover inside the walls, but the supermajority of that cover was comprised of the carefully manicured bushes and plants to the sides of the path. I initially tried navigating my way through the maze of flowers and greenery, but even with the warm illumination of the oathlights along the paved path, I nearly fell over immediately, tripping through a branch that I couldn’t see in the dim light.

My heart leapt into my throat, my eyes snapping both ahead and behind me. Thank the gods, it seemed like nobody had noticed. Ahead of me, the Crown trio were too enveloped in their own conversation to notice the rustling behind them, and behind me the guards were still dealing with the aftermath of the explosive. It apparently hadn’t been quite large enough to catch the attention of the trio in front of me, but even from here I could see the blue smoke wafting over the walls. Were the Crown nobles really that absorbed in the conversation, gripped to the point where they didn’t notice an entire explosion behind them?

Then again, it wasn’t like the explosion had been particularly loud, and maybe they were just banking on the guards to deal with the issue.

I knew that the play I’d set up wasn’t going to hold forever. As much as I’d railed on them for all falling upon the exploding carriage, leaving the gates alone, I knew that the royal guards weren’t incompetent, not even the ones this far from the inner sector of the castle. They were going to figure out that they were being duped sometime soon.

All that mattered was maximizing the information I could gather and then leaving before they could find me.

Or maybe I could let them find me. Did House Byron really deserve for me not to betray—

A shock flew through my mind, a sensation that was vaguely familiar. I winced, crouching down next to a bush, obscuring myself from sight. Don’t make noise, don’t make noise…

The pain subsided as quickly as it had come, surprisingly enough, and then I was following the Crown nobles again.

The path itself wasn’t walled in, so I slunk along its edges quietly. If one of the nobles ahead of me looked like they were going to turn back, I could duck off to one side and find a nice tree or flower patch to hide myself behind. I was banking on them not doing that, though—if they were sufficiently distracted by each other to not catch the explosion then they shouldn’t turn for any reason, especially when my footsteps were as cloaked as they were.

I took each step with care and precision, meticulously placing my feet to minimize sound and maximize distance. A startlingly useful skill in the field, and not one that I’d had the opportunity to use in an actual scenario too many times before. At least my practice seemed to be paying off.

The path was long. I wasn’t the best time-teller, but I was pretty sure we’d been walking for a solid five to ten minutes before seeing other people, and at that point we still weren’t halfway to the castle.

The trio did, however, turn a corner, and it was only the warning of their voices greeting another that indicated that I needed to hide.

I leapt to one side, landing in a roll and laying myself flat against the ground. Even though the path itself was illuminated, the gardens weren’t, and the night sky was strewn with clouds tonight. It was an awful hiding place if I was being specifically looked for, but I was fairly sure that the guards wouldn’t have figured out that a House Byron member was on the loose already. If anything, the trail I’d left them indicated foul play from another House.

Anyway, the point was that if the guard that the trio ran into wasn’t actually looking for anyone and was rather just patrolling, they probably wouldn’t even bother to glance at the off-colored patch where I was hiding.

I listened to the conversation from my hiding spot, hoping to catch a glimmer of conversation. It was going on longer than I thought it would’ve, given the noble tendency to dismiss one’s guards the moment they got chatty.

“—incursion, it’s not safe for you out here,” the new person—a guard, I was pretty sure—was saying. A man, his voice deep and rich.

“We will find no issue alone here,” one of the Crown nobles replied. I recognized the voice. The woman who had been the first to speak at the funeral. “But if you would prefer escorting us, you may. I would dislike taking you away from your duties.”

“These are my duties, my lady,” the other person responded. “I will join you on your stroll. Fear not, I will also endeavor to be as minor a nuisance as possible.”

“Your presence is always welcome, Sergeant Kane,” the woman said. “Please do not inconvenience yourself too harshly.”

“Of course, my lady.”

They set off again, four sets of footsteps instead of three.

This was rather bad. From the guard’s—no, not just a guard, this was a military officer—words, I could guess that the detonation at the main gates had been reported already. Along with that, incursion implied… I reached for the word for a moment, then grasped it with a breath of clarity. That word choice meant that the assumption was that someone had breached the castle walls, which wasn’t incorrect.

Gods above. They had been even more competent than I’d pegged them for. This could be a problem.

As the footsteps receded, I chanced getting to my feet. A cursory look back indicated that no guards were searching from that side, at least, which… that didn’t make total sense. Did they know that the incursion wasn’t much of a threat alone? Had they been ordered to maintain a lower level of emergency?

Something wasn’t adding up here. I continued creeping along, distancing myself further from the group than before, but I still had a bad feeling forming in my gut.

The four of them still weren’t looking back towards me, and the path from there on was oddly clear of guards. That didn’t line up with what I remembered either—the last time I’d come to the castle had been months ago, when Jasper had died, and then we’d come under cover of my father’s Cyang oath. Sure, it had been earlier in the day, but the grounds had been positively crawling with guards, many of them oathholders.

Tonight, it was almost empty. It almost felt too easy, the way that they hadn’t looked back a single time, but if they were going to voluntarily ignore me I wasn’t going to question it too hard.

Still, I couldn’t let my guard down. As we approached the great doors of the royal castle’s front entrance, I reminded myself that just because I hadn’t been caught yet didn’t mean I wouldn’t be caught period. There were still a lot of things that could go wrong.

By the time the castle’s front door was in sight, I was moving away. There was no way I was going to be able to get through the great door undetected, even if the guard count was significantly lower tonight for some unforeseen reason. Instead, I retraced my steps from months ago, going into the gardens and following a long, winding path. I drew on my memory and found it crystal-clear, the steps I had once tread appearing into my mind as I willed it there. A benefit of the veil-lady’s treatment, no doubt.

It took a little longer in the dark, but I made it to the same side door that I’d travelled to before when I’d been here with the other Byrons. It hadn’t been fully repaired, damage still visible in the frame where one of our soldiers had broken it down.

Thank the gods, the door wasn’t properly locked. My plan of attack had been to try any entrance I could, and then maybe to break a window and climb in if I couldn’t find one, and I was terribly glad that I hadn’t had to move on to a plan B or C. Come to think of it, I really hadn’t planned this well at all.

When I’d been discussing this kind of eventuality with my father, it had always been in the context of cooperative assassinations. Most of it had just involved taking an opportunity to get into the castle grounds and then take a target down, but there had always been that implication that Lord Byron would be there to smooth things out, keep me from getting caught. I’d trained how to do this kind of thing on my own, of course—any self-respecting Byron knew how to hide themselves nonmagically and pick locks and all that fun stuff—but it still felt different without that safety net. I wasn’t sure if I liked it.

Even more than that, I didn’t know what I wanted to do here. Lord Byron had stated that if I ever managed to get an opportunity to sneak myself into the castle, I should do a little espionage and potentially thievery of state secrets if I could get access to any of them, but he’d never been specific on what he wanted me to achieve. I wasn’t sure if either of us actually knew what would help the Byron cause. At the very least, he hadn’t even given me any explicit directions for anything like this beyond “maximize damage and the gain for the Byrons”. Some days, I wasn’t sure if Lord Byron himself was even completely sure what his campaign was supposed to be accomplishing. My father was an incredibly talented killer, but as a strategist…

I shelved those thoughts for now. House Byron could come later. What did I want for myself out of this?

Well, when I phrased it like that, my direction of thought became clearer.

I wanted power, the kind that House Byron had been reluctant to offer me. I wanted options. I wanted to know whether to support the Crown.

In any case, I would—ow, I would be loyal to House Byron as much as I could, of course, but if I could gain something from the Crown’s pool too, that would be nice.

The kitchen was as quiet as it had been last time. From the looks of it, the damage that we’d done hadn’t been fully repaired. There were marks on the wall, seared into them by the aftereffects of the magic our House soldiers had used for the door.

A sign of weakness. At one hundred percent capacity, there was no chance that any House—let alone the royal one—would be willing to let damage remain in any part of their manor, even if it was a servant’s section.

Once again, there was nobody here. Another indicator of the same weakness, that. I filed it away inside my mind as I stole in, crouching down on and measuring my steps to keep them as evenly balanced and quiet as possible. As far as I could tell, there was nobody else in my immediate area, but better safe than sorry.

As I exited the side kitchen, finding myself in one of the royal castle’s gilded halls, I realized that I had no idea where I wanted to go.

There were so many potential places to explore. My father had made me memorize the blueprints of the royal castle a while back, and with the veil-lady’s enhancements I could bring it up in my mind’s eye clearly. I knew where things were, but I didn’t know what I should do.

I lacked an oath, and that meant that I had zero ability to track anyone. I didn’t have even an inkling of where the Crown nobles I’d been following earlier had gone. Then again, even if I had known where they were, I wasn’t sure I would’ve pursued them. Lord Byron had briefed me on them, and it didn’t seem like they were anywhere close to the primary line of succession to the Crowned King or Crown Prince.

What did that leave? The most distinct rooms in my mind were the Crown Prince’s bedroom, which we knew had enough security now that even a full Strike Team wouldn’t be able to enter it; the great hall for banquets and balls, which was sure to be empty at the moment; and the Crowned King’s quarters, which had never been a viable place to attack after our first assassination.

I shuddered just a little bit, remembering the sight of the flesh-puddle that had once been our soldier trying to enter that place. Perhaps if we had struck at the Crowned King first rather than putting the kingdom on guard, we could’ve made it, but the defenses had started as uniquely ridiculous and had only increased in complexity from them. Our intelligence was a little dated, but our last report said that four separate oathholders of the sub-minor gods had been enlisted to constantly maintain a single facet of the Crowned King’s security system. Why that protection had never extended to the Crown Prince, I would never know, but I suspected it had something to do with the whole trial by adversity ideology that some like to spout.

That, or really poor budgeting.

Anyway, the point was that the three highest priority locations I knew of weren’t viable targets for me at the moment. Where else could I go?

I thought back to my objectives. Power and information, preferably in that order. One for me and one for Father.

Power and information… there was only one place I could think of that covered both, though it wouldn’t serve the House Byron purposes in any real way.

Still, I had nowhere better to go, and I found my feet taking me towards the royal castle’s main library.

Access to this library was restricted, I knew, which meant that getting in would probably not be the easiest task, but once I planted the seed of the idea in my mind I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to let it go.

I wanted to go to that library. I knew what was in there, but I didn’t know what was in there. Mother and Father had both told me before that this library held a record of most of the kingdom’s secret research, as well as a litany of artifacts that had either hadn’t seen use or had been censored. Tantalizing contents, especially when I had only been allowed to read oath theory without ever being given access to the necessary tools to gain one.

Up three stories, if the blueprints I remembered were still right, through a maze of gilded halls and expansive rooms that might’ve made a lesser navigator’s head swirl. The servant’s pathways, mostly, since those tended to be less populated when there weren’t any events going on. There were a couple of times where a door swung open and I had to retrace my steps as quickly as possible, hiding myself from a passing servant’s sight, but for the most part they were just hurrying on their way from one point to a next, carrying a pile of food or laundry or some other stuff I couldn’t identify. Nobody noticed the rustling as I took cover behind a different wall, and nobody ever looked towards me.

The library was on the fourth floor, located deep in the center of the castle. Approaching it was going to require considerably more effort than it had to get to the fourth floor.

Agh. Planning. I kept on running into that issue.

The fourth floor was designed differently from the rest of the castle, primarily due to the presence of the library here. Where the other floors were practically labyrinths in their own right, every hallway in the fourth floor that didn’t lead to another floor would go towards the library. That was mainly because the library was almost two-thirds as wide as the entire building, so it occupied most of the space here.

Since the library took up most of the floor, there weren’t as many servant passages, and there was not a single side passage that led straight into my destination.

That meant that I was going to have to risk the main halls. I had largely avoided them earlier, since those tended to have guards and other nobles roaming them, but there was nothing that could be done about that now.

I chose the hall due east of the library, since I was fairly sure that this would be the entrance furthest away from common entry points for Crown nobles and live-in guests in the royal castle.

My choice paid off, and I found myself almost alone in a scarlet-carpeted hallway wide enough to fit a procession of carriages through.

Ahead of me at the end of the hallway lay the gates to the library. Nearly ten meters tall, occupying the entire space from floor to ceiling, the shining steel of the entrance was a presence in and of itself. There were guards in here, yes, but there were only maybe a dozen of them and they all stood stock-still at attention as I passed by.

I was banking on the chance that I hadn’t been identified yet—if they weren’t looking for a child, then they weren’t going to see a threat when they saw me. All they would see would be one of the live-ins. Children from non-Crown families stayed here for a year or two all the time, so a noble child of my age wandering the halls at this late an hour wasn’t too far out of the ordinary. It was an iffy skeleton of a plan, just like everything I had thought up so far it was, and I found myself holding my breath as I walked.

Thank the gods, nobody stopped me, and I made my way to the gate.

Now this was going to be an issue. We’d gone over the library before as well, Lord Byron and I, and I knew that live-ins weren’t permitted free access to it. The only ones who were supposed to have access were members of the Crown’s main succession line, of which I was decidedly not. If I remembered correctly, there were also oathholders at each of the entrances who would escort and oversee any non-Crown visitors who had been permitted in.

I didn’t have permission to enter, which was a bit of a problem. I slowed as I came to the gates, not wanting to attempt to pass the guard on it without thinking for at least a little bit beforehand.

This was a serious roadblock, I admitted, and probably one that I should’ve started thinking about earlier. Four armored guards stood in front of the steel gates, and I knew there would be more behind them.

Ah, screw it. If I sold the act as a live-in, they couldn’t really do anything to me anyway. It was worth a shot.

“Are you seeking passage to the Royal Library?” one of the guards by the gate asked.

“I am,” I said, pitching my voice just a little higher to sell the impression better. I hadn’t interacted with them all that much, but I knew live-ins tended to be a touch more sheltered than most of the rest of us were. As much as the Crown was the supreme body of the kingdom, it wasn’t willing to go so far as to train other families’ children like the Byrons would.

“Name?” the same guard asked.

Oh no. I didn’t know anyone that was still a live-in, and I couldn’t come up with any names. Fine, I was going to have to be honest. Better to get caught lying by omission than maliciously, especially if I was hiding our true purposes here.

“Lily of House Byron,” I said.

“House Byron…” the guard muttered. “Alright, follow us.”

Seriously? No way it’s that easy, right?

The guards pushed the gate open, the metal polished and silent but heavy enough that it took their team of four nearly a full minute to open it.

On the other side lay a cube of a room, ten meters by ten meters by ten meters of off-white wood. There were more people here, dressed in official-looking uniforms.

I wasn’t the only person in here, I noticed.

“Please wait while the group ahead of you finishes checking in,” one of the door-guards said.

“Got it,” I replied, still keeping that artificial lightness in my tone.

I peered into the room more, and my heart dropped.

There were two people in there right now, and I recognized one of them.

Unfortunately, the one I had only seen in shadow recognized me.

“That presence,” the voice of the oathholder sergeant I’d heard earlier proclaimed. “I thought I detected something earlier.”

He was pointing at me. The woman next to him turned to look, and so did the oathholders in the room.

“Hi,” I said.

“Fetch the Crowned King,” the sergeant said, the order not apparently directed at any of the guards in particular. “Seize her.”