Chapter 6: The Man Behind the Door

I turned with the candle thrust out in front of me. It was a poor weapon, but it was all I had.

The flame found a woman's face, and my stomach dropped.

Not a guard. I almost wished it had been. Ilyra Sorn, the king's chief strategist. The laundry maids lowered their voices to say her name, and the cooks said she was the only person in the Citadel who spoke to Kaelith as an equal. She should have been anywhere but here. So should I.

She stood with her back to the door, one hand still on the latch she had just closed. She wasn't looking at me. Her eyes had gone past my shoulder to the desk, the open book, the line of black ink at the bottom of the page.

I watched her read it. Her mouth went flat. Something crossed her face that looked a great deal like fear, and then it was gone, folded away so neatly I might have imagined it.

"You were never supposed to see that," she said.

Her voice was low and level. It told me nothing.

My wolf lifted her head behind my ribs. She isn't here to seize us. Not yet.

That was no comfort. "Who wasn't supposed to?" My voice came out thinner than I wanted. "Ilyra, what is..."

"No questions. Not in here."

She crossed the room in three strides. I flinched. The candle jumped in my fingers, and she plucked it from my hand the way you take a blade from a child and pinched out the flame.

Darkness dropped like a lid. It smelled of hot wax and old stone. I had been inside for maybe six minutes, two more than I'd allowed myself, and I had spent them reading the dead.

Her fingers closed around my wrist, hard and practiced, the grip of someone who had held sword hilts. She pulled before I could decide whether to fight. I went. There was one door and she stood in front of it. Fighting in the dark, in a room she knew and I didn't, would have been stupid.

I did one thing right. My free hand found the desk, closed on the leather cover and swept the book against my chest. I couldn't have said why. It had my name on it. Nobody else got to carry it.

Ilyra dragged me past the end of the shelves into a gap I hadn't seen, a slot between the last case and the wall, barely wider than my shoulders. She pushed me back into it and stepped in after, so close I felt her breath on my cheek. Wood dug into my spine. The book's corner bit through my dress.

Outside in the corridor, boots.

I heard them before I understood what I was hearing. Not the paired beat of the patrol. One man, walking alone, in no hurry. The tread slowed and stopped on the other side of the door.

The handle turned. The latch held. It turned again, with a patience that frightened me more than force would have.

I stopped breathing.

There was a gap on the shelf now, a missing tooth in a row of gold names. The desk was bare. If he looked at either, he would know someone had been here, and the first thing he'd go looking for was whoever it was.

Who is that? I mouthed into the dark. Her grip tightened on my wrist. A hard no.

Last night, through a door much like this one, there had been two voices. Kaelith's, strained. And a second, calm and quiet and certain. She already knows. I had spent all day trying to put a face to it, and now a woman stood close enough to touch and wasn't speaking, and I couldn't tell. A whisper strips a voice down to breath. If it had been her, she'd known what I was before I ever walked through the gates. If it hadn't, there was someone else in this Citadel who knew, and I hadn't met them yet.

My wolf pressed hard against my ribs. Not afraid. Listening.

My thumb had slipped between the pages without my meaning it to, holding my place the way you keep a finger in a letter you can't bear to finish. Tomorrow's date. The words wouldn't leave me alone. Somebody had sat at that desk and written my death in a steady hand and left the cause blank, as though they were still choosing. I thought of the man on the other side of the wood. I thought of his shaking hands in the throne room, the wet shine in his eyes, Forgive me, and I hated how badly I wanted those things to mean something. If I was wrong about him, I would stand here in the dark with the proof against my heart and not know it until the knife.

I counted my heartbeats, because they were the only thing in the room I could still control. Nineteen. Twenty. My fingers had gone numb around the leather.

Twenty-six.

Then came the sound I had been dreading. A key, sliding into the lock.

The metal scraped, slow and deliberate. Whoever stood out there didn't need to pick anything.

Ilyra's hand left my wrist. A fingertip came down on my lips, firm and a little cold. I could see nothing but the thin grey seam under the door and the shape of her, one darkness against another. Her breath touched my ear.

"Whatever happens, Seraphine," she whispered, "do not let the king see that page."