Page 31 of Broken Vow

There was one more shadow, and Selene named it on the last night, lightly, the way you mention a thing you do not want to give weight to.

“I have had word back about Marenne,” she said. “It is sound. The line is real and the rank holds. You could not have chosen better.” She paused. “Only, an old steward of the eastern households is said to have served a Marenne girl, years ago, before they withdrew. He is half-blind now and mostly forgotten and he keeps to the lower court, and you will likely never cross him. But he exists. So if you ever hear the name Vells, you smile, and you change the subject, and you find me.”

“Vells,” I said, rolling the name over my tongue.

“It is almost certainly nothing.” She did not say it as though it were nothing. “But almost is the word that gets people like us killed, so we hold it in mind.”

* * *

On the last night, when the papers were finished and the gown hung waiting and the introductions arranged through three careful intermediaries, Selene looked me over by the fire, the whole length of me, the way a smith looks at a finished blade, and I could feel the pride in her.

“Tomorrow. There is a reception in the lesser hall. Half the court will be there, which means the right people will be there, and a new face from a house no one remembers will be the most interesting thing in that room. But don’t try too hard to be interesting, gorgeous. We want them curious, not suspicious.”

“And Drystan?”

Her face darkened. “The emperor does not usually attend the lesser receptions. You most likely will not see him tomorrow. You may not see him for a while. We get you into the court first. We make you a face they know, a lady they trust, before we bring you anywhere near the functions he attends. Patience. Slowly. Slowly is how we win.”

I said I would remember.

But that night, curled in my fox form on the cushion by the dying fire, the brew long since let go of me and the dark pressing at the windows, I did not think about slowly, or about Vells, or about a curse that was winning the race against an old woman’s herbs. I thought about a hall full of light and a man at the far end of it, and how I had crossed his empire and a curse to reach him, and how tomorrow, at last, I would walk in through the front, with my head up, as someone no guard in the empire would dare to turn away.

I had been turned away from that palace as a madwoman and a fox.

This time, I was sure, I would enter it as a lady.

Let them try to send me home now.

Chapter 14

The night before they sent me into the court, the river came for me again.

I was deep in the brew-sleep, the borrowed hours running out, and the dream took me as it always took me now, down into the bright still water, into the arms of the man whose face I could not see. He held me, and the water did not rage, and I was at peace in a way I had no right to be. That was the part that frightened me. Where was it coming from?

The breadth of him against me. The warmth. The sheer strength of the arms that kept the current off me. And the smell of him, threaded through the water somehow, horse and leather and clean oaky soap, a scent I knew from somewhere I could not place, a scent my whole body answered to as though it meant home. All of it felt like coming home to a house I had never lived in.

I should not have felt safe there. He was not Drystan. Inside the dream the peace of it was the most blissful thing I could imagine, the deep animal ease of being held by him, and that was the cruelty of it, because the bliss curdled the moment I woke. It felt like a thing I had done wrong. It felt like waking with another man’s warmth still on my skin while the man I loved grieved me somewhere across the palace. I lay in the dark afterward sick with it, with how wrong it felt to have rested so easily against a body that was not his, and most of all with the question my mind could not answer: why my body should know a stranger’s scent and call it home. I told myself, fiercely, the way you press a bruise to be certain it still hurts, that it was nothing. A confusion the herbs made, a cruel trick of the brew, conjuring phantoms in a mind worn thin. My heart was spoken for, every corner of it, and had been since the afternoon we shared by the sacred pool, and whatever the dream-water did to me in the dark, it changed nothing, it meant nothing, I would not let it mean anything.

But the peace lingered into the waking, and I hated that it did, and I carried the unease of it into the longest day of my life, more than I wanted to admit.

* * *

Selene dressed me as the light came up.

The gown was the colour of deep water, dark and rich, with the elegance of a thing that has nothing to prove, no gold thread, no stones, only the fall of good cloth. She helped me bind my silver hair as a Marenne daughter would, simple, severe, a single ornament. Then she stood me before the polished mirror, and for a moment neither of us spoke, because the woman in the glass was not the half-drowned fox who had turned up at her door what felt like an eternity ago, and was not the village girl from the cottage. She was someone new, tall and still and composed, and she wore the look of a woman who had never been turned away from anything in her life.

“There she is,” Selene said softly, and her voice caught. “Lady Liora of House Marenne. Gods, you look like you were born to it.” She met my eyes in the glass. “Remember. Curious, not suspicious. Hold your composure even if the sky falls. And if you hear the name Vells, you find me.”

I smiled and promised her. “I will remember.”

“Ah, and one more thing.” She turned me to face her. “That hall is a pit of vipers in beautiful clothes. They will smile at you and measure you for a grave in the same breath. Do not mistake the smiles for kindness, and do not mistake anyone in that room for safe.” A pause. “Trust no one in there but yourself. Understand?”

I said I understood. I did not yet know how soon she would be proven both right and wrong, in the same hour, by the same man.

* * *

The ceremonial hall swallowed the breath out of me the moment I crossed into it.

I came in on the arm of one of Selene’s careful intermediaries, an elderly minister’s wife who owed Selene a favour she would not explain and who made it plain she was not amused to be spending it on me. The room opened around me, vast and pale and ceilinged in gold, lit through the same high windows I had once looked down from as a hunted thing, and I could scarcely believe I now stood in it as someone else entirely. I walked beneath those windows, received, a lady of a house in the annals, and the guards at the door who would have run a fox through inclined their heads as I passed. I had been carried out of this palace as a creature in a shawl. I walked back into it and no hand so much as twitched toward a blade.