chapter Eleven

Constance

I didn't sleep so much as lie still and let my mind circle the same four walls all night — the archive, Ferdinand's watching, Elias's deadline closing in with every hour, four girls whose families were still waiting for letters that hadn't arrived. By the time gray light crept through the shutters, I'd made exactly one decision. I wasn't going to decide anything yet. Not until I knew which risk I could survive facing first.

Julian arrived with breakfast and my day's schedule, and something about him seemed off before he'd said a single word. He set the tray down too carefully, the way a person does when their hands aren't quite steady, and when he straightened, there was a tightness around his eyes that hadn't been there the morning before.

"Rough night?" I asked, before I could stop myself.

His gaze flicked to me, startled, like he hadn't expected to be seen so clearly. "Long one," he said, and didn't elaborate. He busied himself smoothing a wrinkle out of the tray cloth that didn't need smoothing. "You're wanted in the west wing this morning. The regent's steward is doing an inventory of the old records rooms and needs a companion present as a witness to the count. Purely administrative." He said the last part too quickly, as though he'd rehearsed it.

My pulse jumped. The west wing. The archive.

"An inventory of what, exactly?" I asked, careful to keep my voice light.

"Household ledgers, mostly. Some old pack records." Julian's eyes didn't quite meet mine. "It shouldn't take long. I'll be with you the whole time."

Of course he would. That was the entire point of him.

I glanced toward William, who lay motionless on the bed, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in that slow, borrowed rhythm, giving no sign he'd heard a word of it. But I knew he had. I knew, the way I'd come to know so many things about him in less than a week, that behind that stillness his mind was already three steps ahead of mine, weighing what this meant.

An inventory. A witness. The servants' passage he'd told me about ran behind the west wing.

I finished dressing in silence, turning the pieces over. If the steward's count happened in the same corridor as that forgotten passage, I might not need an excuse to be away from Julian at all. I'd simply need one moment, one gap in his attention, long enough to slip through a door nobody remembered existed.

The west wing looked nothing like the rest of the keep. Where the main halls were all polished stone and Blackwood crests, this corridor felt forgotten, dust thick on the sconces, the tapestries gone gray with age. A narrow door stood at the far end, unremarkable, easy to miss if you weren't looking for it. I filed its location away and didn't let my eyes linger.

The steward, a thin, anxious man named Corwin, was already waist-deep in an open crate of ledgers when we arrived, muttering figures to himself. "Ah. Lady Constance. Good, good. This will only take a moment of your time, I assure you. The regent likes a second set of eyes on the count, that's all. Formality."

"Of course," I said.

Julian took up a position near the doorway, arms crossed, watching the hall behind us more than he was watching me, which struck me as strange until I understood why. He wasn't guarding me from leaving. He was guarding the door against anyone else coming in and finding me somewhere I shouldn't be.

He was protecting me, even here. Somehow, he could make me feel both watched and looked after at the same time, and I didn't yet have a name for whatever held those two things together in him.

Corwin droned through the count, numbers and dates I barely absorbed, and I let my eyes wander, cataloguing the room. Shelves of bound ledgers stretched floor to ceiling, unlabeled, uncategorized in any way I could parse from a glance. If William's uncle kept the ones that mattered locked somewhere separate from this open storage, they weren't here. This was the room Ferdinand didn't mind me seeing.

Which meant the real archive was further in. Behind a door Corwin hadn't opened, past a shelf I noticed only because something about its angle looked wrong against the wall behind it.

"Julian," I said, keeping my voice easy, "would you mind finding me some water? All this dust has caught in my throat."

He hesitated, glancing between me and Corwin, torn in a way that told me exactly how much this small request cost him. "I'm not meant to leave you unescorted, my lady."

"I'll be standing in a room with the regent's own steward," I said, gesturing at Corwin, who nodded absently without looking up from his ledger. "I think I'll survive five minutes."

Julian's jaw worked. For one terrible second I thought he'd refuse outright, and the whole fragile plan would collapse before it had even properly begun. Then something in his face gave, guilt and reluctance tangled together, and he nodded once.

"Five minutes," he said. "I mean it, Constance."

The moment the door shut behind him, I moved.

Corwin didn't look up as I drifted toward the crooked shelf, murmuring something about wanting to see the older bindings while I waited, and he waved a distracted hand in my direction, too absorbed in his count to care. Behind the shelf was a second door, small and unmarked, its outline almost hidden beneath years of dust. I found the latch, old enough that it gave under a hard shove of my shoulder before I'd even fully committed to trying.

The room beyond was barely large enough to turn around in, shelved floor to ceiling with ledgers far older than anything in the outer room, their spines cracked and their ink gone brown with age. My heart was hammering so loud I could barely hear myself think, and I had no idea what I was looking for, only that I had maybe three minutes left before Julian returned with water he'd probably had to beg a kitchen servant to fetch on short notice.

I ran my fingers along the spines, scanning dates stamped in faded gold. Fifteen years back. Eighteen. Twenty.

My hand stopped on one, pulled slightly forward from the others, like it had been the last one someone had touched.

I eased it free and opened it with shaking hands to a page marked with a thin strip of ribbon, and the first name my eyes landed on stopped my heart cold.

*Marcus Hail.*

My father.