Page 64 of Broken Vow

And I understood, even through the haze of holding myself together, that this was the moment, that whatever I said here would decide it, and that the true thing and the right thing were for once the same thing. I had not done anything to Auden. That was not how it worked. So I told him what was true.

“I did not do anything to him,” I said. “We only found each other. Two people who had each been carrying something heavy alone for a long time, and then were not carrying it alone anymore. That is all it was. That is all it ever is.” I held his cold eyes with my swimming ones. “It turns out the weight gets lighter the moment one other person knows the true size of it. He let me know his. That is the whole of what I did.”

I watched it land. I did not understand then why it landed so hard, why something behind the wall of him flinched as though I had reached through and touched the old wound directly. I only saw the cold face change, there and gone, a flicker of something raw crossing it before it sealed over again, and I know now what I did not know then, that I had described to a man starving in a locked room the exact shape of the meal, and that some buried part of him had heard it and would not afterward be able to stop being hungry.

“Get up,” he said roughly, to all of us, turning back to his map and the shut door coming down over his face. “If we are doing this, we do it now, before I think better of it. And we do not skulk. Skulking is how people get caught.”

Against my ribs, Tsuki said, very softly, “Oh, I am going to enjoy watching that one come undone.” I told him to hush. He hushed, but I felt him settle smug against me, and despite everything it steadied me to have him there.

* * *

We went in through the front.

I had braced for tunnels, for a servants’ stair, for the kind of creeping I had done all my cursed life, and instead Cael walked us up to the great south gate of the inner palace in the full light of its lamps, and when I balked he said without slowing, “The best place to be unseen is the middle of where you are not meant to be. A man sneaking is a man with something to hide. Walk like you have every right to the air you are breathing, and most eyes will agree with you.”

So I walked. I lifted my chin and walked into the heart of my enemy’s house like I owned it, and I steadied my satchel against my hip as I went, one hand flat to the worn cloth, and felt through it the soft knock of glass, my few brews shifting gently against one another with every step, and among them, riding cool against my thigh where it had ridden since the night my shelf was swept, the green counterfeit I had carried home and never once looked at, the twin of the thing now eating me alive. I had carried the witch’s poison back into the witch’s own house. The fox dragged at me the whole way, and the little glass weight knocked at my thigh like a second pulse, and against my ribs Tsuki held very still and very warm, the one living comfort on me, and I kept walking.

The gate guards stopped us. Of course they did. The whole palace was strung tight as a bowstring, lamps doubled, men everywhere, the emperor’s high alert lying over all of it like a held breath, and the captain of the gate watch put himself in our path with his hand not quite on his sword and said he had orders, that none passed into the inner precincts tonight without the watch knowing their business, not even, he said with a glance at the dark of their uniforms, captains of the Veilborn.

Cael did not answer him. He turned, instead, to Auden, as though the sergeant were a draught from a badly hung door rather than a man.

“Do you find this as troubling as I do,” Cael said. “A gate sergeant who stops two of the five and asks them to account for their evening.”

“Deeply troubling,” Auden agreed, falling in at once, and I heard for the first time how alike the two of them could sound when they chose, two instruments tuned to the same cold key. “In a quieter week I might let it pass. But this week, with the court hunting spies behind every arras, a low officer who takes a sudden interest in the private movements of his commanders. One wonders where the interest comes from.”

“One does wonder.” Cael let it hang. “One wonders who he reports to. One wonders whether the questions are even his own.”

“It would want looking into,” Auden said. “After. In a quiet room.”

By then the sergeant had gone the colour of cold ash, and Cael turned to him at last and said, very softly, “Open the gate, sergeant. And forget you were curious tonight. It is the healthiest thing you will do all week.”

The man opened the gate.

* * *

We were three turns into the painted halls, and I had let myself believe the worst of it was behind us, when we rounded a gallery hung with silk and walked directly into the one person in the empire I least wanted to see.

Vasstent of the north stood square in the only way through, grey-clad, in no apparent haste to be anywhere, two of her own people at her back, and there was no turning aside and no pretending we had not seen her. She saw us. She saw me, in a wing of the palace where a minor provincial nobody had no earthly business to be, walking between two captains of the Veilborn, and I watched her clever cold face do the small swift recalculation it did, and my stomach dropped clean out of me, because of all the things that could have gone wrong in that house, this was the one I had not armoured against.

Against my ribs Tsuki had gone to stone. He knew her for what she was as well as I did, and he made himself a dead weight in my coat, not a breath of movement, and I was glad of his silence and gladder of his stillness, because if she had seen so much as a whisker twitch at my collar she would have filed that away too.

And of course it was exactly then, with her whole attention fixed on me, that the fox surged.

It came up all at once, a great wrenching pull, my skin crawling and my sight flaring gold at its edges and the bones of my hands aching to break and change, and I stood in the silk gallery under the envoy’s gaze and fought it down with everything left in me, holding my own face on by main force, smiling, smiling at her while inside me a war was being lost by inches. I do not know to this day how I held. I held because to lose was to drop to four feet on the floor of the inner palace before the one woman who already half guessed what I was, and some animal stubbornness in me would not give her the satisfaction. The gold pulled back. The ache banked. I kept my hands.

“Lady Marenne.” Her voice was warm as a knife laid flat against the skin. “What an unexpected pleasure, and what very unexpected company. I had heard you were unwell.” Her gaze moved over me, slow, missing nothing. “You look feverish. The palace air does not suit everyone.” She inclined her head a precise degree. “Captain Auden. Commander Cael.” Something glittered under the grey. “I confess a little envy, Lady Marenne. A year I have spent at this court and not won the devotion of even one of the famous five, and you arrive a handful of weeks ago and walk between two of them. You really must tell me your secret, and soon. I find I am dying to know how a girl from nowhere becomes the most interesting person in the palace. We will talk. I will see to it.”

“Envoy,” Cael said, with a curt cold nod that was somehow also a closed door, and he did not stop walking, and the weight of who he was carried us past her before she could pin us in place. But as we drew level with her, she turned her head a fraction toward Auden, and said, low and pleasant, only for the three of us, “I let you pass tonight, Captain Auden, on your mysterious errand. Do remember that you are mine to call on, when I choose to call. A debt is a debt.” And she smiled, and let us go, and I felt her gaze on my back the whole length of that gallery, taking notes.

Auden’s jaw was tight as we walked. Whatever that debt was, it had teeth, and she had just reminded all of us they were still in her keeping.

Then the silk halls fell behind us, and the corridors grew older and barer and colder, the painted wood giving way to plain dark stone that had been old when the pagodas above it were a dream in a conqueror’s head, and against my ribs Tsuki had gone rigid again, his small heart going fast where it pressed to me. He did not say anything. He did not like this part of the house, and neither did I. Cael stopped before a low black door set deep in that ancient wall, a door with no guard on it because none was needed, because no one in three hundred years had been mad enough to want through it, and on the stone above its lintel, worn but unmistakable, was carved a sun with chains laid across its face.

“This is as far as anyone living has gone,” Cael said quietly, and for the first time the cold in his voice had something under it that might have been unease. “Whatever is on the other side of that is yours, not mine. I can open it. I cannot make you ready for what it opens onto.” He looked at me, and the priced look was gone, and what stood in its place I could not name. “Are you?”

I looked at the bound sun on the stone, the mark from the water, the mark from all my dreaming, the door at the bottom of everything. The fox dragged at me. The little glass weight knocked at my thigh. Tsuki’s heart beat fast against my ribs.

“No,” I said. “Open it anyway.”