In Schwarzholm, valor is sacred. A soldier who held a flank alone while everything else burned earns an iron cross and a golden regiment. The whispers behind the fans know more — but say it only in whispers: that young Captain von Breck looks too much like the man on the throne. That no baron of the backwater Black Tilth could have fathered a face like that.

The Emperor ignored him for twenty-one years. The Empress bites her nails and fears for her own son. The court watches and whispers. The army is silent, and salutes.

In half an hour, Falco von Breck will walk into the Hall of the Black Eagle and accept the Empire's highest honor before the entire court. Half an hour. For now, he has slipped into a guest antechamber — three minutes of quiet, the uniform checked, a breath drawn where no one will see it.

Twenty-one years old. Five at war. Scars beneath the dress coat. A streak of white hair from a blast that should have killed him. He knows how to hold a line, count his breaths under rubble, and speak the truth to men who do not want to hear it. He does not know how to live in a palace. And isn't certain he wants to learn.

The antechamber turned out to be occupied.