Chapter 7: The Date on the Page

"The result says he isn't yours."

Damaris Reyne says it like she's reading a weather report. She doesn't stand, doesn't raise her voice, just lets the sentence drop onto the table between us and waits for it to do its work.

Caius doesn't answer. His fingers are flat on the folder, and I watch the knuckles go pale one by one, like something is draining out of his hand and into the wood.

"Authorization was signed by the council's medical office," Reyne goes on. "Standard procedure when a consort's pregnancy raises questions of succession. Consent is presumed in matters of the heir."

"Presumed by whom." Caius's voice is low enough that the man at the far end of the table leans in to catch it.

"By the law you swore to uphold, my lord."

Nobody at that table looks at me. That's the part I feel most, the way six people can decide, all at once and without a word, that I'm furniture in a room where something is being decided about me. The fire pops. Somebody's chair creaks. I press my palm to my stomach under the table, where no one can see, and count my breaths the way I used to on hospital waiting room chairs, in a life that ended on a kitchen floor.

Eleven weeks. The flicker on the screen this morning. Small, fast, stubborn.

"Show me," Caius says.

The younger councilwoman slides the second page across. I read it upside down as it goes by. A grid of numbers, a column of percentages, a line at the bottom in bold. Paternity excluded. The words look so clean sitting there. So sure of themselves.

Caius reads it once. Then again. I see his eyes move across the same line twice, and something in his face breaks that he has spent thirty four years training not to break. It's tiny. A tightening at the corner of his eye, a swallow that takes too long to finish. If I hadn't spent the whole morning learning the shape of his contempt, I'd have missed it completely.

He isn't looking at me. He hasn't looked at me since he opened the folder.

"Rowan," Reyne says, almost gently. "This is the moment where an honest person would speak."

My mouth is dry as paper. "I told you everything I know."

"Then you told us you know nothing. Which, I'll admit, is a very tidy position." She folds her hands. "A child conceived before the marriage, by a man who is not the Sovereign. A photograph. An arrest. The consort, conveniently blank. I don't need to draw the picture for this table."

"I do," says the man to her left, mild and dry, and something like a laugh goes around the room and dies fast.

I could beg. Some part of this body wants to. Some old reflex in Rowan's muscles, in his throat, in the way his shoulders want to fold in on themselves when a room turns against him. I know that reflex. Julian had it too, at the end, on the floor, right up until he understood nobody was coming.

I don't fold. I let my eyes drop to the page instead, because I'm not going to spend my one chance staring at Reyne's face like a rabbit staring at a hawk.

Numbers. Lab stamp. A signature in blue ink, loopy and unreadable. And in the top corner, in small gray type that the eye slides right over, a line I almost miss.

Sample received: 3 days prior.

I read it again. My pulse does something strange.

Three days prior.

Iris told me this morning the bloodwork came back an hour before she walked into my room. She told me she'd wanted to confirm with an ultrasound first, that she'd been worried after the fainting spell in the hallway. Nobody had a reason to draw my blood three days ago. Nobody knew there was a reason.

Unless someone already knew I was pregnant before I did.

Three days ago was the council session. The one where the old Rowan supposedly stood up in front of everyone and announced he'd married for money. The night that turned this whole house against him.

That isn't a coincidence. That's a schedule.

"Caius." I keep my voice level, and it doesn't shake, which surprises me. "Look at the top of the page."

"Rowan." His tone is the flat one, the one that means he's holding a door shut with his back. "Not now."

"The sample date. Look at it."

"Do you have something to say to this council or not?" Reyne cuts in, faster than she needs to. The smoothness is gone from her voice for half a breath, and I catch it, and she knows I caught it. "Because if you don't, I'll ask you to spare us the theater."

The quiet councilwoman across the table has gone very still, her eyes on the page in front of Caius, and I realize she's read the date too. Her hand moves toward her collar, then stops.

"It's not theater," I say. "It says three days. The doctor only confirmed the pregnancy this morning. So who drew my blood before that? And why?"

The room shifts. Not a lot. A cough. A sleeve brushing paper. But I've spent my whole first life reading rooms for the moment they turn on someone, and I know the sound of one turning back.

Caius lifts his head at last.

He looks at me. Really looks, for the first time since the folder opened, and his eyes are the color of the sky before snow, and there's something in them I can't name. Not trust. He's not close to trust. But the wall behind his face has a crack in it now, and I can see a shadow moving on the other side.

Then he does something I don't expect at all.

He closes the folder.

Slowly, deliberately, he slides the pages back inside, squares the edges against the table, and stands. Every head at the table follows him up.

"This session is adjourned," Caius says.

"My lord," Reyne begins, "the council has not concluded its —"

"It has." He doesn't look at her. He lifts a hand toward the door, and two guards step out of the shadows like they were never gone. "Escort my consort to his rooms in the east wing. He isn't to leave them. He isn't to receive visitors. Not the doctor, not his family, not anyone."

My stomach drops through the floor. "Caius."

"Go, Rowan."

He still won't look at me. I stand because two large men have arrived at my shoulders, and I don't have the strength left to make them carry me. As they turn me toward the door I twist for one last look, because I need to see it, I need to see what he's doing with that folder.

He doesn't lay it on the table for the council's clerk to file.

He tucks it inside his coat, against his chest, and buttons it closed.