Novels by patricia dickson

I don't know you well, Ilsa Thorne — I only ever really understood the shape of your fear, held up like evidence in a room full of people who preferred a simple story over the truth. I believe now that you were never truly my enemy. I think you were just as trapped as I was, only nobody ever thought to ask you what it cost.We walked back inside together, Ronan's hand lightly at the small of my back, and it wasn't until we reached the quiet of the small dining room — becoming, I realised, something like our room now, the place where the truest conversations in this house seemed to happen — that he finally let the careful neutrality slip. "You don't have to say anything," I told him, sitting across from him at the round table. "I know what you're not saying." "I'm not angry that you spoke with him." His voice was quiet, controlled. "I trust you to decide who gets your time and your forgiveness, Briar. That's not mine to manage for you." He paused. "I am finding it considerably harder

I used to imagine, in the year after you rejected me, all the things I'd say if you ever stood in front of me again. None of what I imagined prepared me for how it actually felt, watching you dismount at Ashgrove's gate with your hat in your hands like a man expecting to be turned away. He came alone, no guard, no pack colours visible on the plain travel cloak he wore — which was, I understood even before Grier came to fetch me from the archive tower, either a very carefully calculated choice or a genuinely desperate one. "There's someone at the gate asking for you specifically," Grier said, his usual levity absent. "Says his name's Kade Thorne. Ronan's already down there. Wanted me to come get you before deciding whether to let him past the wall." My whole body went cold, then hot, then something in between that I didn't have a name for. I set down the scroll I'd been reading with Ezra, aware of his sudden stillness across the table, the careful way he didn't ask a single question

You told me once, Fenn, that you'd rather be nobody's than somebody's mistake. I didn't understand what that meant until you told me the whole of it, three nights after Wren Halloway's confession, sitting on the training yard fence with a bottle you never quite got around to opening. I found Fenn on the training yard fence three nights after Wren's questioning, a bottle of something amber balanced on his knee, untouched, watching the last light drain out of the sky with an expression I hadn't seen on him before — not his usual restless energy, not even the careful focus he'd shown teaching me to fall. Something quieter. Something that looked, for the first time since I'd met him, almost sad. "You're not drinking that," I observed, climbing up beside him. "Waiting to see if I want to." He glanced at me sideways. "Shouldn't you be inside? Ronan gets twitchy when you're out past dark, even with guards doubled since the mill." "I told him I needed air. He let me have it." I studied Fe

I don't know what to call you yet — you never gave a name worth trusting, and I'm not sure you have one anymore that belongs entirely to you. But I remember the way you looked at your own hands after I asked whether you were free of whatever had been in you. Like you didn't believe the answer, even as you were living inside it. The prisoner — Ronan had taken to calling him simply "the guest," with the particular dry precision that meant he found the euphemism useful rather than kind — spent two days in the cellar before Fenn judged him steady enough to speak with properly. Those two days passed strangely for the rest of us. The household moved through its ordinary rhythms — Talia's cards, Grier's rounds, Mira's careful management of the kitchen and the wardrobe and a dozen small domestic tasks nobody else thought to track — all of it layered over a current of watchfulness that never quite switched off. I found myself pausing at odd moments, listening for sounds from below the floorb

You didn't step back from me, Ronan. I want that written down too, in the same ink that can't be argued with later. Every single person who mattered to me before you had, in one way or another, stepped back the moment I stopped being ordinary. You were the first one who stepped closer. Ronan reached the mill within the hour, riding hard enough that his horse was lathered white by the time he swung down, and I watched him take in the scene in a single sweeping glance — the collapsed, dazed attacker under guard, Fenn's shaken stillness, Ezra's careful, protective position at my shoulder, and me, standing in the middle of it with my hands still faintly warm. He didn't ask what had happened out loud, not at first. He crossed the clearing straight to me and took my face in both hands, tilting it gently, checking with his own eyes that I was unharmed before he said a single word. "I'm all right," I said before he could ask. "Ezra was in danger. I didn't think. I just — moved." "Ezra," R

I don't know your name yet, Voss, not with any certainty — but I know your shape now, the shape of what you send ahead of yourself when you don't want your own hands seen at the scene. I felt it at the mill before I understood what I was feeling. I won't forget it. We left at dawn, six of us moving quietly through mist that hadn't yet burned off the low fields between Ashgrove's walls and the old mill three miles east — Fenn scouting ahead with the loose, unhurried alertness of a man who'd survived on exactly this kind of vigilance for years before Ashgrove took him in, Grier and two guards holding the flanks, Ezra and I in the centre where Ronan's orders had placed us. Nobody spoke much on the ride out. The fields gave way to scrubby woodland the further east we went, old growth that had never been cleared for farming, the kind of half-wild ground that belonged to neither pack in any formal sense and so belonged, in practice, to whoever was patient enough to use it unwatched. I kep