Midnight on the Dragon Tower

The drums began before dawn.

Yolanthe heard them from her sleep: a slow, measured heartbeat rolling up from the harbour, answered by a second set from the distant barracks hill, then a third from the palace gate. Three voices finding each other across the sleeping city. War drums, she thought. The kind meant to shake an enemy’s courage. This morning, they rattled her own. She lay still, eyes open, staring at the silk ceiling where the embroidered dragons swam through the last of the dark. Around her, ten girls and one boy shifted and stirred, and, in Hajer’s case, did not sleep at all, she had been sitting upright since the second hour of the night, prayer beads silent for once between her fingers.

They were ten now. Ern’s empty pallet had been removed during the night, as if the girl had never existed.

“Up,” Valiane said. She was already on her feet, checking her ceremonial robes she’d laid out the night before. “We dress, we paint, we walk. Simple.”

Sure.

Yolanthe rose, aching from too little sleep and too much tension for the last two days. Through the entrance flap, she could see torches moving. The palace was awake. The empire was watching. She folded her pallet, smoothed her under-robe, and began the work of becoming Lady Yrilée one last time.

One more day. Then she could vanish leaving Imran to his throne and his vipers and Tahar to whatever freedom he’d claimed.

Outside, the drums kept up their patient count.

The ceremonial robes for the third day were red. Bright, arterial red, edged in black and gold, with the imperial thornrose embroidered in sea pearls along every seam, the colour of mandate, of military commission, of blood shed in imperial service. They painted each other’s faces in silence, in matching colors: black at the brow, dark red at the lip, a single gold line drawn from the outer corner of each eye and trailing back toward the temple. Gold for the sun, red for blood spilled in the empire, black for the earth that would claim them all. Yolanthe’s hands trembled drawing on Liantha’s cheeks.

“Steady,” the girl whispered. “Just one more day.”

In the mirror’s reflection she could see Valiane strapping something to her inner forearm. She caught Yolanthe’s eye in the glass. Said nothing. The look said it all: yes, I noticed, and so did you, and let us both keep noticing.

They filed out into the courtyard where Imran waited beside a white horse caparisoned in black and red, the mane braided with gold cords, the hooves painted. He wore ceremonial armor that caught the rising sun, all gold leaf and dragon scales worked in bronze. He looked every inch the prince.

He also looked exhausted.

Their eyes met for a heartbeat. She saw the same weariness there, the same bone-deep wish to be anywhere else. Then his mother appeared, and his face smoothed into princely composure.

Lady Rossamund wore red and black silk threaded with silver, her face paint severe as judgment. She surveyed the maidens with the expression of someone counting losses.

The Thorns assembled around them. This time, their faces were hidden behind ceremonial masks shaped like thorned roses. Elite guards, Yolanthe had been told. The emperor’s finest warriors. Now she watched them more attentively, noted the way one favored her left leg, how another’s sword belt sat crooked. Saw the gap in their formation. These weren’t warriors. They were noblewomen playing at war, given pretty armor and prettier titles. If an assassin came now, they’d die.

She took her place in the double line behind Imran’s horse. Valiane walked to stand ahead, Liantha to his right. The two who knew which end of a blade did the cutting.

The drums rolled again, calling them forward.

The palace gates opened onto the streets. This time, garlands of white flowers hung from every balcony, so thick their perfume made her dizzy. Red banners snapped in the morning breeze. The crowd pressed against wooden barriers, held back by soldiers in ceremonial red.

“Long live Prince Imran!”

“Long live the empire!”

The cheers rolled over them in waves. Yolanthe’s smile felt painted on. She waved mechanically, scanning the crowd for threats. Anyone could be hiding there. A blade. A crossbow. Another bomb sewn into innocent-looking robes. The Thorns walked beside them, hands on sword hilts. As if they’d be fast enough. As if they’d even know what to look for.

Imran rode ahead of them. He sat the animal well, better than she’d expected from a bookish prince. His spine was straight. His chin was up. He looked, from behind and at a distance, exactly like an emperor.

They processed through the Middle Ring where merchants stood outside their shops, offering ritual blessings. Children threw flower petals that caught in Yolanthe’s hair and clung to her robes. The prince smiled and waved.

A young man near a silk-merchant stalls whose eyes tracked Imran’s horse rather than his face. A woman in a brown headscarf standing rather too still in a crowd that moved and swayed like water. A knot of men near the base of one of the towers, watching the Thorns’ formation like they were counting something.

She kept walking. Kept watching. Decided the young man was simply a horse-fancier and the woman in the headscarf was merely exhausted on her feet. The men by the tower she was less sure about. She filed them away and moved on.

This was what Hawa had not prepared her for: that fear, sustained long enough, became a kind of labour. It had muscle and rhythm. It tired you like carrying a full pack: hour by hour, until your shoulders ached.

The Avenue of Emperors gave way to the Road of Processionals, broader and older. Here the crowd thinned slightly — the barracks district was less fashionable, the buildings lower, the smell of the sea and of old wood and of horses more present. Ahead, she could see the outer wall of the Imperial Barracks, white as bleached bone in the noon sun with the gate standing open.

The crowd roared again as Imran raised one gloved hand. Flowers rained from a balcony. The horse tossed its head. A child screamed his name. An old man wept openly, pressing both hands to his chest. Yolanthe smiled and felt like tears were raising to her eyes.

She had not meant it. She had come here with a purpose and no intention of caring about any of it, and yet here she was, having saved the enemy’s heir twice. She thought of Tahar. Of the garden, and the rain, and his hand spread at her waist. He was gone by now, surely. She would probably never know. She thought of Jael. Of his eyes, his smile, his voice. She had loved these eyes for three years, or had believed she did, with the wholehearted clarity available only to someone who had not yet been anywhere or seen anything. She still wanted him free. But the certainty of what she had felt had shifted somewhere in the last ten days, and she was not sure what filled the place, now.

The crowd’s cheering faltered as they passed a burned-out building with walls still black with soot. Recent. Whatever had happened there, the empire hadn’t bothered to hide it. More cracks in the façade.

Imran’s horse tossed its head, sensing tension. The prince murmured something and the animal steadied. Even now, he tried to comfort. To fix what could be fixed.

She’d miss him. Miss his earnest attempts at humor, his genuine interest in people’s lives, his stubborn hope that the world could be better than it was. Miss the way he looked at her as if he saw past the lies and the real Yolanthe beneath. He deserved better than this empire.

The barracks appeared ahead under the noon sun. The Tower of Midnight stood beyond, black stone against blue sky. The gate was flanked by two columns of soldiers in full dress: polished breastplates, horsehair crests, the crossed-swords standard of the imperial military. The drums reached a crescendo, then cut off.

Imran dismounted. Servants rushed forward to take the horse’s reins. Through the gates, she could see a straight path paved in white stone. It led to a raised dais where figures waited in dark uniforms. The final piece of this play. Then it would be over.

The procession passed through the gate and into the barracks compound. Ahead, the parade ground stretched wide and bare in the noon heat: a long rectangle of packed earth. Ranked companies of soldiers waited in parade formation, their armor and weapons catching the sun like sheets of fire. A cluster of high-ranking officers occupied the shaded reviewing stand, around the empty throne. Admiral Mazong’s weathered face prominent among them.

Yolanthe’s eyes scanned the gathering crowd. She recognised Admiral Mazong. Baskar Yader stood near the throne’s right side, his minister’s robes immaculate despite the heat. His expression revealed nothing. She expected to see the figure of the emperor which she had seen so many times on his numerous portraits. Yolanthe’s attention slid across the others. More generals. More ministers. Then Valiane made a small sound. “Is that—”

“Prince Asmand,” Liantha confirmed.

He stood apart from the others, wearing armor instead of court silk. Practical steel, not ceremonial bronze. A soldier’s choice. His face was hard angles and old scars, nothing like Imran’s soft features.

They were twenty paces from the dais when Yolanthe’s gaze caught on a figure standing apart from the clustered officials. Off to the left, flanked by four guards in black and silver.

Tall as an ancient temple statue, with skin dark as teakwood and a clean-shaven head that caught the sun like polished bronze. His naval uniform bore the same rank insignia as Mazong’s, but he wore it like a king’s regalia. Even flanked by guards, he dominated the space around him.

“Merciful ancestors,” Liantha whispered. “Is that—”

“Cyres,” Hajer finished.

Cyres. Thadros’ brother.

His guards shifted aside. He walked forward, with the stride of a man who’d commanded fleets and won battles. He stopped at the dais’s edge and raised his right hand in formal salute.

“My nephew,” His voice rolled across the square like distant thunder, “your imperial uncle sends his regrets. As his closest male relative, I stand in his stead today.”

The voice.

It crashed through Yolanthe’s memory. A deep booming laugh. Strong hands tossing her high in the air, the smell of sea-salt and spices. Her father’s voice.

“Pull with your whole body, little fish, not just your arms.”

Her father was not Thadros. He was this man.

The world narrowed to a pinpoint. Sound became muffled, distant. She watched Imran’s salute, a masterpiece of court choreography, precise enough to honor protocol, warm enough to hint at family bonds, yet carefully measured to avoid any suggestion of shifting loyalties, but the words turned to noise in her ears.

Her father was alive. He was a prisoner. He was standing twenty paces away and had no idea who she was.

She stared at him, memorizing the shape of his face. The set of his jaw. The way he held himself despite years of captivity. Searching for pieces of herself in his features.

“Yolanthe?” Liantha’s whispered. “Are you well?”

She forced herself to breathe. To blink. To remember she was playing a role.

“The heat,” she managed. “Just the heat.”

Look away. She had to look away.

She fixed her gaze on the empty throne instead, forcing her mind to work through implications while her heart hammered against her ribs.

Cyres was alive. He had been Thadros’ heir. The rightful emperor’s heir. If she was Cyres’ daughter, she still had a claim to the throne. A stronger one than Imran’s.

Shit and blood.

END OF BOOK TWO