Page 36 of Broken Vow

The room went very still. The fire cracked. On the mantel, Tsuki had stopped moving.

And there, at the very bottom, with the coarse bright streak in my hair and the clock named aloud and the whole of it laid out plain, the faint thing with the spine in it stood all the way up in me, and I heard myself say the word before I had decided to say it.

“No.”

Selene looked at me.

“No,” I said again, and it did not come out as despair. It came out hard. “I have done nothing but be done to. He decided, and the witch worked it, and I drowned and I starved and I crawled across half an empire on a hope that turned out to be a lie I told myself, and through all of it I have been a thing things happened to. I am finished being that.” My voice shook, but it did not stop. “He chose his bloodline over me. So be it. He has made his choice. Now I make mine. I will not spend the rest of my life as an animal in a wood because of what he chose. I do not know how I am going to stop it. I do not know what I will become trying. But I am not going under. Not for him. Not for anyone.” I looked at the three of them, the squirrel gone still on the mantel and the old woman with fear in her face and the friend who had told me I was hers. “I crossed an empire because I believed a man was waiting for me. I can cross a court to save my own life. The same legs carry me either way.”

For a moment no one spoke. Then Selene let out a breath that was almost a laugh, and there were tears standing in her eyes, and she said, “There she is. There’s the one I’ve been waiting for.”

* * *

So we stopped grieving and started planning, which for the first time since the garden made me something other than a thing the gods toyed with for their amusement.

The one who had done this to me was the woman from the hidden door, and the way to undo a working, Rainthorn said, was to understand the hand that had made it. So that became the shape of it, plain enough to hold in a sentence: Find the woman. Learn what she is and what she did. Find the undoing before the brew fails for the last time.

But the woman surely lived at the heart of the court, behind doors that showed on no map of the palace, and that heart was exactly where Selene could not take me. She had standing enough to move through the wider court, to host and to make introductions, but an old feud between her house and one of the great families had long since shut her out of the emperor’s inner circle, and no manoeuvring would unlock that door for her. It would open only to someone new, someone with no history at this court, someone the inner circle had not yet learned to keep out.

Someone like Lady Liora of House Marenne.

“It has to be you, then,” Selene said. “You go back in. You get close to the people who would know who she is and what was worked in that palace, and you do it holding your grief down every hour, in the same rooms as the man who put it in you. It is the cruelest thing I have ever asked of anyone.” She held my eyes. “But you just told me you would cross a court. So tell me who you cross it toward, because the great houses will only use you and trade you to one another like a coin, and you would be unmasked in a week.”

“The Veilborn,” Tsuki said.

When no one answered at once, he flicked his tail.

“Honestly, I do not know why you bother discussing palace secrets without consulting the creature who spends his days listening outside palace windows.” For the first time that night, a ghost of his usual dryness came back into his voice. “The great houses know power. The Veilborn know where it is hidden.” He looked at me. “They guard the emperor. They carry his messages. They stand beside him when the doors are closed and everyone else is sent away. The lords see the throne. The Veilborn see what happens behind it.” His ears twitched. “And if anyone in that palace knows who you are, and what was done to you, and why, my acorns are on one of them.”

Selene threw him a stern look.

Tsuki spread his paws and pointed one at her. “What? I have been stealing their secrets for years. Not always successfully, I admit. But often enough to know where they are kept.”

“And how does a Marenne nobody get close to the emperor’s own elite,” I said, “when the whole court cannot win a civil word from them?”

That was when Selene’s strategist face came back, the one I had not seen since before the garden, and she looked at me as though she were watching the answer assemble itself with great satisfaction.

“Because of what you already are,” she said slowly. “Think, Liora. The Veilborn are not courtiers. They are an order. Old, disciplined, sworn, rooted in the imperial traditions from before any of these gilded houses existed. They keep a language of service and ritual and the old annals that not one perfumed lord in that hall has ever troubled to learn.” She leaned forward. “And you keep it too. You were raised in a temple. You have read the histories no one reads. You can speak to those men in the tongue of their own world, the discipline, the rites, the old order of things, and you will be the only soul at that whole court who can. The great ladies will bore them. You will not. Your cover is not a disguise, gorgeous. It is a key cut to fit their lock.”

“Then I have to find one of them,” I said, “and stand still long enough to be spoken to. Which they do not make easy. They keep to their own wing and their own duties, and they do not mix.”

“No,” Selene agreed. “Not in the court.” And here she paused, and something careful came into her face, the look of a woman deciding how much of all she knew to lay bare just yet. “But they are still men, and even sworn men have lives the court never sees. I have made it my business, this past while, to learn what I could of where they go when they are not guarding him. Most of them I could not predict at all. They scatter. But there is one.” She turned the cup in her hands. “I think you may even have seen him, your first evening in the ceremonial hall. He keeps a practice. Every few days, before the light, he goes down off the palace hill to a little temple in the lower city. Not a grand one. A poor one, a commoners’ shrine, the kind a great lord would not be caught dead in. He goes alone, and he kneels with the washerwomen and the carters, and he keeps the old rites the way they were kept before the court gilded everything it touched. No guards. No retinue. Just a man at his devotions among ordinary people.”

Something turned over in me, slow and cold and certain, before she had even finished.

“Which one,” I said.

“The fair one. Young, gold-haired. They say he is the gentlest of them, and the court despises him for it. His name is Auden.” She held my eyes. “I know the temple, and I know the mornings, and I know that a temple is the one place in this whole city where a Marenne girl belongs more than he does.”

I knew him before she named him. I knew him from a bright hall and a wet floor and a serving girl no one would miss, and from the strange quiet that had come over me watching him go down on his knees for someone the rest of the room had thrown away. The golden man. The one I had set aside and had not, it turned out, set aside at all. I said nothing of any of that. I did not fully know why I kept him to myself, only that the keeping felt necessary, a small private thing held back from the open planning of the room.

“A temple,” I said instead, and my voice was steadier than I was. “I can do a temple. I have spent my whole life in temples. It is the one ground in all of this where I will not have to pretend to be anything I am not.”

“That is exactly why it is the place,” Selene said. “Everywhere else in that court you are a woman wearing a borrowed life. There you would simply be yourself, and let him come to that. Men like him do not trust the polished thing. They trust the true one.” She set the cup down. “So. Day after tomorrow, before the light, you put on something plain and you go down the hill, and you kneel, and you keep the rites, and you let a lonely sworn man discover that there is, after all, one person in this city who speaks his language. You do not chase him. You do not perform. You let the temple do the work. And we begin.”

And so it was settled, in a warm room on the palace fringe, by three women and a flying squirrel, that I would go back into the court that had thrown me away, not for love this time, not for Drystan, but to hunt the woman who had unmade me and tear the cure out of the heart of the place, and that the first step on that road was a poor shrine in the lower city, two mornings off, where a golden man knelt among the washerwomen at first light.

I believed I was choosing a weapon. I told myself the careful private gladness I felt, at the thought of seeing him again, was only the relief of a plan with a true shape to it at last. I had no idea I was choosing the first step of the long way home.