CHAPTER 106: THE PLANNED ACCIDENT

The King and Queen of Corvalith, Lorraine’s dreamland of escape stepped forward. Their dancers swept across the arena in jewel-toned silks, moving with easy grace as baskets of spices and gleaming elephant tusks were laid before the Emperor.

Lorraine’s chest tightened. Corvalith. Soon, she told herself, she would belong among them, not here choking on Vaeloria’s tyranny.

They bowed low, and their tributes were lifted onto the gilded platform. The Emperor, smug as ever, touched them with the flat of his sword—a performance of grace, as if he were a god bestowing favor.

Then came Kaltharion.

Corvalith and Kaltharion had always been like cousins, neighbors in land and blood, their mountains and rivers spilling into one another. When Kaltharion fell, Corvalith could not hold on for long; they too surrendered, crushed beneath Vaeloria’s heel. Corvalith remained the more hospitable, the more educated, yet the kinship between the two ran deep, and Lorraine felt it stir inside her now.

Their dancers circled the stage in darker garb, their offerings humbler. They offered mead, grain, and silk. Lorraine’s pulse throbbed at the sight. Behind them, Leroy strode forward, hand firm on his sword hilt, his broad shoulders set like stone, his gold mask catching the sun.

Pride. The word bloomed in her chest, unbidden and fierce. My husband.My people. They might never claim her as theirs, might whisper her name with scorn, but still, she belonged to this. To him. And in that moment, she had never been prouder.

But the pride was shattered.

The tributes were set upon the dais. Where the other royals merely bowed, Leroy was made to kneel.

Lorraine’s breath caught, her nails biting into her palm. Of course. Of course, they would strip him lower. He dropped to one knee, hand pressed solemnly to his chest, the picture of humility, yet in this arena, it looked like servitude. A prince forced to grovel.

And as though humiliation weren’t enough, the words followed. His voice, steady and resonant, carried across the hush of the crowd: apologies for the absence of his father and mother, "gravely ill" and unable to attend. Apologies, always apologies, when no one else was asked to debase themselves so.

It wasn’t a ceremony. It was a theater, designed to make her husband kneel.

Lorraine’s fists curled at her sides, but her anger wasn’t for the Emperor. No, this farce wasn’t his doing. He had merely sanctioned it.

This was Gaston’s hand at work.

Her gaze traced the dais, the straining ropes, the guards changing shifts with suspicious punctuality as Leroy bowed. She almost smiled. The scene played exactly as she had known it would.

She had stitched the threads together last night. She held various reports in her hand. A guard drunk in the courtesans’ wing, whining about a sudden shift change. Petty complaints about a blacksmith too busy with "new wedges" to service their hinges. Another soldier forced to rehearse the raising and lowering again and again. A slip of a note about thinner ropes, bought from a new vendor. Trivial things, easily overlooked...unless you knew where to look.

And she always knew.

It had begun with a single thread, one guard swaggering in the courtesans’ wing, pockets suddenly heavy, boasting of a night far above his means. Lorraine had asked her people to be aware of such people, as they always hid secrets.

And indeed, he was hiding secrets as the trail ran backward. The deeper she dug, the clearer the picture sharpened.

This was no windfall. He had not stumbled into fortune.

No. He had been bought.

And not just by anyone. Beneath the layered reports, under veils of rumor and half-truth, she found the root: this guard had been among those who spent a night of wine and women in Gaston’s company.

From there, the rest glimmered into place. The thinned rope from a new vendor. The blacksmith’s suspiciously urgent wedges. The shift changes at just the right hour.

The web stretched wide, but all its strands led back to one spider, waiting in the dark.

Gaston.

Now the trap waited. The ropes would snap, the dais would buckle, and all its weight would fall upon Leroy.

An accident, the crowd would believe. Or worse, it could be twisted as a Vaelorian plot to silence the rising darling of Kaltharion. Gaston would mourn his noble brother, then inherit his crown wrapped in sympathy and righteous vengeance. With Leroy dead, he could rouse their starving people against Vaeloria with fire in their throats and his name on their lips.

Clever. Almost too clever.

Lorraine’s lips curved. Gaston believed himself to be the only player. But she already knew every string he’d pulled, every hand he’d greased, every fragile seam in his scheme.

And knowledge, in her hands, was never passive. It was a blade.

Her gaze swept through the crowd, searching. Gaston would be here—of course he would. To witness the harvest of his scheming, to savor his brother’s crushing death.

Let him watch.

Lorraine’s eyes tracked the dais as it rose, the ropes strained to tautness, the wedges trembling with the burden. Just as she expected, it leaned toward Leroy, inch by inch toward his destruction. Her heart pounded like a war drum.

She had studied until her eyes burned, piecing scraps of gossip into a weapon, sketching countermeasures in the dark hours of last night. But what if she had overreached? What if her cleverness was only arrogance wearing a mask? What if, by daring to play God, she had laid her husband on the altar?

Crack.

The sound split the air. Not from the conspirators’ side, but the opposite.

Lorraine’s lungs caught. Her hand-picked blacksmith had done his work, weakening the supports on the other side, misaligning fate just enough that the trap would betray itself. To all eyes, it would seem an accident of poor craft. For Gaston it would look like his saboteur’s clumsy hand, a mistimed pull of rope.

But not to her. To her, it could be victory. If her calculations held, Leroy would live. The platform might buckle away from him, not toward him. The Emperor’s great dais might groan, the ropes might snap, the world might lurch sideways, chaos spilling into the arena like a wave. But Leroy would be spared.

Or it might all go wrong.

Lorraine’s nails dug into her palm as she held her breath, waiting to see which fate she had purchased with her gamble.

And Gaston? Oh, she had plans for Gaston. But not today. Today, his face would be forced into calm while his scheme turned to ash.

Lorraine’s heart leapt into her throat as the dais tilted further. She whispered to herself, not in prayer but in defiance:

Is my plan working?

Lorraine couldn’t hear a thing Damian was whispering in her ear. Sylvia was holding her hands together muttering prayers that Lorraine’s plan would work.

Each second passed like an eternity.