Chapter 13: Would It Matter

Emeric POV

I found the shed by accident, mostly. Went walking the grounds after breakfast to clear my head, and there it was, tucked behind the hedges, smoke curling faintly from a little vent in the roof.

Wren was inside, sleeves pushed up, hands buried in a mess of dried leaves and roots spread across a wooden table. She didn't look up when I stepped through the door.

"Didn't peg you for a gardener," I said.

"Didn't peg you for someone who wanders into other people's sheds uninvited." She kept working, sorting stems into little piles, not the least bit rattled by my showing up. "What do you want?"

"Just curious what you're doing out here."

"Sorting feverbane from wolfsroot." She held up two stems that looked almost identical to me. "One clears a fever. The other stops your heart if you brew it wrong. People mix them up more than you'd think."

"That's so."

"Mm." She set them into separate piles, like I was furniture instead of a guest of political importance. "You're not usually this bad at subtlety. Whatever you came here to ask, just ask it."

I almost laughed. Nobody in this house talked to me like that. Everyone else measured every word like it might get reported back to somebody important.

"Fine." I leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. "Last night at dinner. You said you had nothing to add. That's it?"

"That's it."

"Everybody at that table told a version of events that painted you as the villain, and you just sat there and agreed with it."

"I didn't agree with anything." She glanced up at me for the first time, briefly. "I said I had nothing to add. Different thing entirely."

"Fair. But you didn't correct it either."

"No." She went back to sorting. "I didn't."

"Why not?"

She set down the stems in her hand slowly, like she was actually considering whether I deserved a real answer or one of the flat ones she handed everyone else at that table.

"Because it doesn't matter," she said finally.

"It matters if it's not true."

"Does it?" She looked at me properly now, arms crossed loosely, something tired behind her eyes that made her look older than she probably was. "Say I correct it right now. Say I tell you everything, every detail, exactly what happened that night. What changes?"

"People would know the truth."

"Which people?" She tilted her head slightly. "Damian? He already half believes something's off, and it hasn't changed anything he's actually done differently. Rosalind? She's spent two years choosing not to ask a single question, and that's not because nobody offered her the answer. Calla?" A short, humorless breath, almost a laugh. "She already knows the truth better than anyone in this house."

"What about the King? What about me?"

"What about you," she echoed, not quite mocking, more curious than anything. "You're here to marry my sister. Why would my version of events matter to you at all?"

That question landed harder than I expected. I didn't have a clean answer for it, not one I felt ready to say out loud yet.

"Maybe I want to know who I'm actually dealing with in this family," I said instead. "Before I commit to anything."

"That's a decent enough reason." She shrugged, going back to the herbs. "But it still doesn't change my answer. Would it matter if I told you?"

I opened my mouth to answer and found I didn't have one ready. Because the honest truth was, I didn't know yet. I believed something was wrong here, that much I was sure of. But whether one conversation in a garden shed would actually shift anything, whether it would protect her from anything, change how this family treated her, stop whatever Calla was clearly capable of, I genuinely didn't know.

"That's what I thought," she said, reading my silence easily enough. "So I don't waste my breath."

"That's not the same as it not mattering."

"Isn't it?" She wiped her hands on a cloth. "Where I come from, truth only matters if somebody's willing to act on it. Otherwise it's just words. And I've said plenty of true words in my life that changed absolutely nothing except how much it hurt to say them."

"What happened to you in that prison?"

The question came out before I fully decided to ask it. She went still for half a second, hands pausing over the table.

"Why do you want to know?"

"Because whatever it was, it's still sitting in you," I said. "I've seen enough soldiers come back from bad places to recognize it. That's not something two years of quiet dinners fixes on its own."

Something flickered behind her eyes, briefly, something almost like a surprise that I noticed at all.

"You don't need the details," she said finally. "You need to decide whether you're actually here for Calla, or whether you're here because you like poking at things that don't add up."

"Can't it be both?"

"It usually is, with men like you." She almost smiled, small and dry. "Curiosity dressed up as concern. Doesn't make it less real. Just means it's not really about me."

"Maybe I want it to be about you."

The second I said it, I regretted the shape of it, too honest, too soon, hanging there in the small space between us like something I couldn't take back.

She looked at me for a long moment, unreadable, something calculating behind those eyes that had nothing to do with flattery or flustered nerves.

"Careful," she said finally. "That's a dangerous thing to say to someone who stopped trusting kind words a long time ago."

"Noted."

"Good." She turned back to her herbs, the conversation apparently over as far as she was concerned. "Feverbane and wolfsroot don't sort themselves."

I stood there another second, watching her work,not bothered by my presence, uninterested in whatever I might think of her either way.

Would it matter if I told you.

I walked back toward the house turning that question over and over, and the longer I sat with it, the more it felt like the truest thing anyone in that entire family had said to me since I arrived.