Chapter 218: Lady Astraea requests An Audience

Her voice rose as the implications continued to cascade through her mind.

"If you met her, she saw you," Rowan continued, pacing now, her anxiety manifesting as movement. "And if she saw you, she would have noticed you. And maybe she already suspects that something is going on between you and the kings. And now....now the servants are whispering about King Kaelen’s shattered windows. They’re saying the glass was everywhere. They’re saying it looked like magic."

She turned to face Morgana, her eyes wide with fear.

"The shattered windows will only confirm everything," Rowan said, her words tumbling over each other in her desperation. "Everyone will know. Everyone will understand. And what will that mean for you?"

Morgana looked at her friend...really looked at the panic written across every feature, the way Rowan’s hands were shaking, the way her voice was breaking.

She stood up and took Rowan’s hand, pulling her back toward the bed and making her sit down. She could see her friend spiraling, could see the fear and worry taking over.

"Rowan," Morgana said gently, "you don’t need to panic. Nothing is going to happen. I promise you that."

"How?" Rowan demanded, and her voice was desperate. "How are you so sure? You don’t have the power to face this, Morgana. You just became their ward days ago. You don’t have the power to face such a creature. That girl.....I’m certain she’s either a witch or some other very powerful supernatural being. How are you going to face her? How are you going to stand against her?"

Morgana held Rowan’s hand tightly and looked directly into her friend’s eyes.

"Trust me," she said simply. "That’s the only thing I’m asking you to do, Rowan. Trust that I will take care of this. Trust that nothing is going to happen. I need you to believe in me."

Rowan looked at her, clearly seeing something in Morgana’s eyes, a confidence, a certainty, a sense of knowing that ran deeper than anything Rowan could understand.

Slowly, Rowan took a deep breath.

"Okay," she said finally, her voice still uncertain but her acceptance genuine. "I’ll trust you on this. But you need to tell me as soon as anything happens. Promise me."

"I promise," Morgana said, squeezing her friend’s hand.

For a moment, they sat in silence, the weight of everything unsaid hanging between them.

Then came the knock at the door.

Rowan released Morgana’s hand and stood, walking to the door. She opened it to find a female servant standing in the corridor, a young woman Rowan didn’t recognize, with nervous eyes and a carefully neutral expression.

"What can I do for you?" Rowan asked.

The female servant straightened, clearly delivering a message she had memorized.

"Lady Astraea requests an audience with the King’s ward," the servant said formally. "She wishes for a meeting with Lady Morgana, if it pleases her."

Rowan’s entire body went rigid.

"Lady Astraea?" Rowan asked, her voice sharp.

"Yes," the servant confirmed. "Lady Astraea. She has asked that I tell the King’s ward that she would understand if she could not meet with her immediately."

There was something deliberate in that phrasing, something that suggested Astraea understood the implications of what she was asking, understood that Morgana might not want to meet with her, but hoped that she would anyway.

Rowan turned to look back at Morgana, her expression torn between fear and something that might have been resignation.

Morgana stood and walked to the door. She looked at the servant with a calm she absolutely did not feel.

"Tell your lady," Morgana said quietly, "that I will be there."

The servant bowed respectfully.

"My lady said I should tell you that she would be expecting you," the servant replied, and Morgana understood that Astraea was waiting, had perhaps been waiting since last night, since the moment she’d seen her in the throne room.

The servant bowed again and departed, leaving Rowan and Morgana alone in the doorway.

Rowan closed the door slowly and turned to face her friend, her eyes wide with a mixture of fear and something that might have been awe.

"What now?" Rowan asked softly.

Morgana took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and met her friend’s eyes with a calmness that belied the racing of her heart.

"Now," she said quietly, "I go meet the Mother of Dragons."

***

The palace corridors seemed to stretch impossibly long as Morgana walked through them.

Her feet moved with purpose, carrying her forward even as her mind raced with questions that had no answers, with fears she couldn’t name, with a sense of inevitability that pressed down on her like the weight of the entire world.

Every servant she passed paused in their work and stared.

She could feel their eyes on her back...curious, fearful, speculative. The whispers followed in her wake like smoke, carrying words she could almost but not quite make out. The king’s chamber. Shattered windows. Magic.

The rumor mill was turning, grinding her life and her secrets into gossip to be shared over breakfast and laundry duties.

But Morgana didn’t have the energy to care about gossip.

Because something deeper than vanity, deeper than social concern, was pulling her forward. It was a call she could feel in her bones, in her blood, in the magic that hummed beneath her skin. It was as if every cell in her body recognized that she was walking toward something she had always been destined to meet.

She climbed the stone stairs that led to the guest chambers, her hand trailing along the cold wall as she ascended. The stone was ancient, worn smooth by centuries of hands...nobility, servants, dragons in human form, all of them leaving their mark on this palace that had stood for longer than most kingdoms had existed.

Her heart was racing.

By the time she reached the upper corridor where the guest chambers were located, her breathing had become shallow, her palms slightly damp. She passed door after door...all of them closed, all of them anonymous, all of them belonging to people whose presence in this palace was temporary.