Chapter 3 Isolde

The road to Morvane changed before the border did.

I noticed it in small things first — the trees growing sparser, straighter, planted in rows instead of scattered by whatever the land wanted. Then the stone markers, cut clean and square, nothing like Solenne's worn, moss-covered boundary posts. By the time we crossed into Morvane proper, even the air felt different, though I couldn't have said exactly how. Colder, maybe. Or maybe I only expected it to be.

I'd spent most of the journey rehearsing. Not lines — Elowen didn't have lines, she had a life I'd only ever watched from the edges of, and I'd spent six days trying to fold myself into the shape of it. Softer voice. Slower movements. A woman who'd never once had to talk a creditor out of collecting a debt, because someone else had always done that for her.

I was not doing a very good job of it, and I knew it, and there was nothing to be done about that now.

The palace came into view an hour before dusk — not a ruin of a place, as I'd half expected from the stories, but something worse in its own way: orderly, deliberate, built by someone who wanted every stone to say exactly what he intended it to say. Power, not menace. Though I supposed, for a man like the one waiting inside it, those were probably the same thing.

Guards met the carriage at the gate. They didn't speak to me directly — only to each other, brief and efficient, the way people talk about a delivery rather than a person. One of them looked at me for a moment too long before looking away, and I understood, without being told, that I was being catalogued. Weighed against whatever they'd been told to expect.

I kept my chin level and my hands still in my lap, the way I'd practiced, and said nothing until someone asked me to.

They brought me through a series of halls too fast for me to take in properly — tall windows, dark stone, banners in colors I didn't recognize — until I reached a smaller receiving room, not the grand court I'd braced myself for. A handful of officials. An older woman who introduced herself as someone in charge of the household, her eyes doing the same careful cataloguing the guards had done at the gate. And, near the far wall, a man I didn't need anyone to introduce.

I had imagined him a hundred different ways on the ride here, and none of them had prepared me for the actual weight of standing in a room with him.

He wasn't what the stories built him into. There was nothing theatrical about him, no cruelty worn openly on his face for effect — dark-haired, broad-shouldered, dressed with the kind of plainness only someone who never had to prove his rank could afford. If anything, he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour — the specific tiredness of someone who'd stopped expecting anything from a room before he even entered it. His hands were the thing I noticed longest. Still. Deliberately still. I knew enough about controlled people to distrust stillness that deliberate. He watched me the way you'd watch a door you weren't sure was locked.

"Lady Elowen." The woman in charge of the household supplied the name before I had to risk saying it myself. "Welcome to Morvane."

I inclined my head the way Elowen would have — a little lower than I would have on my own, softer at the edges. "Thank you for receiving me."

The king said nothing. He was looking at me the way he'd been looking at me since I entered the room, except now there was something else in it, something I couldn't read — not suspicion exactly, not yet, but the particular stillness of a man who'd noticed something didn't line up and hadn't decided what to do about it.

I made myself hold his gaze for exactly as long as courtesy required, and not a moment longer.

"You've had a long journey," the household woman said, filling the silence he didn't seem inclined to fill himself with. "You'll want to rest before the proceedings begin properly."

"Yes," I said. "Thank you."

It was the closest thing to an ending the room offered, and I took it, letting myself be led out by an attendant before anyone had the chance to ask me a question I didn't have Elowen's answer for. I didn't look back at him. I didn't trust myself not to be caught looking.

My room, when I reached it, was larger than any I'd had at home — a cruel kind of joke, given everything. I sat at the edge of the window instead of the bed, watching the last of the light drain off the stone courtyards below, and pressed my thumbnail hard into the pad of my forefinger until it left a mark. A small, private way of reminding myself I was still here, still whole, still exactly as careful as I needed to be.

He had looked at me like he already knew something was wrong.

I picked the thought apart, turning it over the way I would a column in a ledger that didn't sum correctly — checking it for an error, for some innocent explanation that would make the unease go away. Kings likely looked at everyone that way. Suspicion was probably just the shape of his face. I ran through every version of that argument I could construct, and none of them held their weight for longer than a few seconds before the fear crept back in underneath them.

I was still sitting there when someone knocked.

The attendant who'd led me here stood in the doorway, her expression carefully arranged into something professional and unreadable.

"The king wishes to see you," she said. "Now. Alone."

For a moment I couldn't make the words mean anything. "Now?"

"Before the proceedings begin. He was very clear about that."

I understood, in the space of that sentence, that whatever this was, it wasn't a ceremony. Ceremony didn't happen alone, in private rooms, before anyone else had even settled in for the night. Ceremony didn't make an attendant's face go that carefully blank.

"Of course," I said, because there was nothing else to say, and because refusing had never once been a door that opened for me.

I followed her out, already trying to remember everything I'd said in that receiving room, searching for the exact moment I might have given myself away. I found nothing.

Only the sharp, wordless certainty that he had noticed something.