Chapter 5: The Secret Room

By the next evening I knew three things about the king's private wing.

The first was that the corridors never stayed empty for long. Guards passed every twenty minutes, in pairs, their boots striking the flagstones in a steady beat. The second was that Kaelith Veyr kept to a rigid schedule: council in the morning, training yard at noon, dinner alone at dusk. The third was that on the last night of every week, he left the wing entirely and did not return until the small hours.

Tonight was that night.

I spent the day polishing candlesticks and carrying linen, keeping my head bowed, my steps quiet. Twice I passed him in a hallway. Neither time did he speak. He walked by me as if I were furniture, and neither time did I believe it.

He knows you're here. He's watching.

I watched too. And what I watched was a locked door at the end of a dim hallway, the same door where I had stood the night before with my ear against the stone.

When the evening bell rang, I set down my tray and counted.

Twenty minutes. The guards would pass, turn the corner and go down to the west stair. In the gap, I would have perhaps four minutes.

It would be enough. It had to be.

The lock was old and sturdy, but not clever. I knelt before it with two thin picks I had carried since the day I left Moonfang the first time, and listened. A faint click. Another. The third pin resisted, then gave.

The door swung inward without a sound. I slipped inside and closed it behind me.

Darkness. A close smell of dust and ink and something faintly metallic, like old blood dried on stone. I fumbled out the candle stub I'd stolen from the kitchen and struck a flint with shaking fingers. A small flame bloomed.

The room was bare.

It was no bigger than my own chamber. A heavy oak desk against the far wall, a single chair, and a shelf of leather bound volumes running from floor to ceiling. No windows. No hearth. No sign of the second voice I'd heard the night before. The chair was pushed in. The desk was clear. Whoever had stood in here with Kaelith had left without a trace.

I held the candle higher, and the spines caught the light. Every one had a name stamped in faded gold.

I stepped closer and read the first one aloud, barely a breath. "Marisse Orel."

The name from the registry. The woman whose line of ink had simply stopped.

My pulse stuttered. I pulled the volume out and opened it with both hands.

A page of tight writing. Her birth. Her mating. A list of her children. At the bottom, in a different ink, a date of death, and beside it a single word: drowned.

The registry had said nothing. And yet here it was, recorded in careful detail, as if someone had wanted the world to forget her and had wanted to remember her all the same.

I put the book back and took down the next.

Hesper Valmoor. Fever.

The next. Annelise Orel. Fall from a height.

The next. Dorrin Wyck. Found in the north field. Cause unknown.

I worked faster, dragging books off the shelf, my candle guttering as my hands shook. Every entry was the same. A birth. A mating. A death. Every one of them was a woman, and every one traced back, however thinly, to a single line.

My mother's line.

Not an accident, I thought. Not one accident. Dozens.

My breath came in short gasps. I'd chased these names for years and thought of them as missing. They weren't missing. They had been killed, and someone had kept the records the way a hunter keeps trophies.

Where is she? The thought came from nowhere, bright and terrible. Where is my mother?

I spun to the shelf and ran my finger along the spines, reading, discarding. The names blurred. My hands were slick, and the flame swayed in the draft from my frantic movements.

Then my eyes caught on the last book on the last shelf.

It was newer than the others. The leather still had its sheen. The gold on the spine was bright, as if pressed only recently.

I read the name once.

I read it twice.

Seraphine Veyra.

The candle shook so hard that the shadows leapt.

For a long moment I couldn't move. Then, slowly, as if the book might bite me, I drew it from the shelf. I carried it to the desk and opened it with numb fingers.

Seraphine Veyra. Born in the first month of spring. Daughter of...

My mother's name, spelled out in a hand I did not recognize. I read on with my throat closing. Every detail of my life was there. The village where I'd been raised. The Convergence. The rejection. The banishment, written coldly, in a single line.

And then, at the bottom of the page, the entry I had been dreading.

Death.

A date, written in firm black ink. The cause column beside it had been left blank, as if whoever filled it in had not yet decided how it would happen.

I stared at the date. It meant nothing. And then, with a slow cold lurch, it meant everything.

It was tomorrow's.

No.

I read it again. I counted the days on my fingers, like a child. I checked it against the day of the week, the month, the year.

There was no mistake. Whoever had written this had written it with certainty. They had already decided when I would die.

The pages blurred. A roaring started in my ears, loud enough that I almost missed the faint sound behind me.

A soft, deliberate click.

I turned my head.

The door was no longer open. Someone had closed it, quietly, with practiced care, and I had not heard them come in.

I was not alone.