Chapter 99: The Council
Kreasial pushed through two bystanders to get to the front of the crowd, and stopped there.
Her expression went from annoyed to something else entirely the second she got a clear look at him.
Tattered coat. Dried blood soaked into the collar and down one sleeve, gone dark and stiff. Theodore beside him looked rough too, but nowhere near as bad. Behind them both, the carriages. And past the carriages, more elves than she’d ever seen in one place, being helped down one at a time by soldiers who kept their hands gentle and their faces carefully blank.
"Just what is going on?"
Arthur scratched the back of his head. He didn’t have an answer that fit in one sentence.
Theodore’s eyes landed on her and lit up before anything else registered. "Oh! Violet?"
Arthur opened his mouth. "Nice to see you, Kreasial. But I’m still too tired to tell you everything all at once right now."
"I can tell. You look horrible." She crossed her arms. "Did you go to war as your academy vacation?"
"Maybe."
"Huh?"
Theodore cut in before Arthur could clarify or not clarify. "That’s not fair, though! After the culmination you just left. Without a word."
Kreasial grinned, adjusting the collar of her beige coat like she hadn’t just been caught in it. "Well. I guess both of us have something to tell each other, then."
Solenne’s voice carried across the crowd before Arthur could answer that either.
"Let’s go! The Council is ready!"
Arthur looked back at Kreasial. "Let’s meet this afternoon. We’ve got important matters right now."
"Yeah, go." She waved a hand at both of them, wrinkling her nose. "I can’t stand next to either of you much longer. You both stink."
Theodore looked down at himself, sniffed his own sleeve, and grimaced. "Sorry."
Arthur smiled despite everything. Theodore laughed.
And for one second, standing in the middle of a crowd with the sun finally up and the cold biting at his face, Arthur laughed with him.
Then it caught up to him.
No. I just killed a man.
He couldn’t even remember doing it.
All he had were everyone else’s reactions, a missing piece of memory, and the certainty that somewhere inside that gap, he’d crossed a line he could never uncross.
Theodore laughed too, though it didn’t last long.
His eyes drifted toward Arthur’s hands before quickly looking away again.
Arthur noticed.
Neither of them mentioned it.
Theodore waved goodbye as they climbed into the carriage. It rolled forward, through the gate, toward the Council grounds.
[Solenne’s POV]
The war room at the Creslan garrison hadn’t changed since the last time Solenne had stood in it same long table, same faded map of the empire pinned across the far wall, same smell of old parchment and colder stone. What had changed was the number of people crowded into it.
Six Council delegates. Two generals from the imperial guard. A scribe in the corner taking notes fast enough that her pen never lifted off the page.
Solenne stood at the head of the table with the ledger in front of her, closed, one hand resting flat on the cover.
"Before I lay this out," she said, "I want it on record that we lost a companion last night. Veris. She held the eastern flank against Soltice’s people long enough for the operation to succeed. She died doing it."
A pause around the table. One of the delegates, an older man with a scar through his eyebrow, inclined his head. "Noted. Her family will be compensated according to Mageia rank."
"They’ll be compensated according to what she actually did," Solenne said. "Not Mageia rank."
The man’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue it in front of the room.
"Last month," Solenne continued, "the Archmagus of House Lestilaut ran an infiltration on a suspected Elven Tears production site here in Creslan. It succeeded — partially. We recovered shelved vials and confirmed the compound’s origin point. What we didn’t find were the elves themselves. No prisoners. No survivors on-site."
"Which meant they’d already been moved," one of the generals said.
"Which meant they’d already been moved," Solenne confirmed. "So a week ago, the Archmagus tasked his son, Vexis Lestilaut, along with two companions, to continue tracking the operation from where it went cold."
A delegate near the middle of the table frowned. "A student."
"A student who found what your entire garrison hadn’t found in a month," Solenne said, flat. "Last night we located and cleared the secondary facility. Forty elves rescued. Two Covenant commanders confirmed dead — a man identified as Soltice, and another known as Harren. We also encountered a third individual during earlier reconnaissance. A man called Malvric. He wasn’t present at the final engagement. We don’t know where he is now."
"Malvric." The scarred delegate said the name like it cost him something. "That name’s come up before. Twice in reports out of the northern border, both times attached to something we couldn’t confirm."
"Then start confirming it," Solenne said. "Because he’s real, and he’s still out there."
She unclasped the ledger and opened it flat on the table.
"This came out of the facility. Names, dates, shipment volumes. I want everyone in this room to understand what’s actually in here before the Council decides how to handle it."
She turned it so the nearest delegate could read.
"Vak Vernon is listed. Repeatedly. Second-highest recorded volume on the entire ledger."
The scarred delegate’s expression didn’t shift much, but something behind his eyes did. "He’s already under Allright Council investigation."
"Now you have concrete evidence tying him directly to distribution," Solenne said. "Not hearsay. Not suspicion. His name, in someone else’s handwriting, next to numbers."
"Then we move on him," the second general said. "Immediately."
"We will," the scarred delegate agreed. "The Council will authorize arrest proceedings the moment this is verified. Given the volume documented here, he won’t be walking away from this one."
Solenne turned the page. "There’s more than Vak in here. Count Ashgrave. A baron out of the eastern provinces. Two names I don’t recognize from outside the empire entirely."
The room went quieter than it had been.
"Ashgrave sits on the border council," one of the delegates said, slow, like he was hoping he’d misheard.
"He does."
"That’s not a drug case anymore." The man’s voice had an edge under it now. "That’s half the continent’s nobility with their names in a ledger next to a compound that’s been carved out of children."
"That’s exactly what it is," Solenne said. "Which is why I brought it here instead of sitting on it."
A knight who’d been standing near the door this whole time stepped forward. Solenne hadn’t caught her name yet — younger than most of the officers in the room, dark-haired, a scar along her jaw that hadn’t fully faded.
"Princess." She waited for a nod before continuing. "There’s something else the Council needs to hear, and it connects to this."
"Go on."
"The Emerald Kingdom." The knight’s voice stayed steady, but there was tension underneath it. "Reports from our contacts inside their border say the elven court is preparing military movement. Not a raid. A mobilization. They’ve been documenting the trafficking for months. And they’re placing the blame on Creslan directly."
"On Creslan," the scarred delegate repeated. "Not the Covenant."
"They don’t distinguish," the knight said. "As far as they’re concerned, this operation ran on Creslan soil, under Creslan’s nose, for eighteen months. They’re not interested in who’s technically responsible inside our borders. They see a kingdom that let their children get harvested for a drug and did nothing about it until now."
"But our own children are being killed too!"
Silence settled over the table.
"If this isn’t handled fast," the knight continued, "and if it isn’t handled visibly, we’re not looking at diplomatic tension anymore. We’re looking at war. Elves against humans, starting right here, and the empire dragged into the middle of it whether it wants to be or not."
Solenne felt the weight of that land the way it was meant to.
"Then we get ahead of it," she said. "We send a formal delegation to the Emerald Kingdom. Not soldiers. A message, directly to their court, laying out exactly what we found last night. The ledger. The names. The Covenant’s role in running this, separate from Creslan’s government, separate from the empire itself. We give them the evidence before they act on rumor."
"They may not accept that distinction," the general said. "Not after eighteen months of silence from our side."
"Then we make them understand it," Solenne said. "We arrived with force last night and rescued forty of their people with our own soldiers, at the cost of one of our own. That has to count for something when it reaches their court. It has to."
Nobody in the room answered that with confidence. She hadn’t expected them to.
"I’ll draft the proposal myself," she said. "I want it moving within the week."
The scarred delegate nodded slowly, though his eyes stayed on the ledger a moment longer, like he was still trying to absorb the size of what was written in it.
The meeting broke apart after that — orders given, names assigned, the scribe’s pen finally slowing as the room emptied out one delegate at a time.
Solenne stayed behind. She stood at the table with the ledger still open in front of her, the names sitting there in black ink like they weren’t attached to anything that mattered.
If the Emerald Kingdom didn’t wait for the message. If they moved before the proposal even left Creslan’s walls.
She closed the ledger.
If this stalled even a week longer than it needed to, there wasn’t going to be a diplomatic solution left to reach for.
There was going to be a war.