Chapter 10

Wren's POV

Hester's neighbor at the east end, Joan, took in plain sewing for a shop in Silverkeep called the Gilded Thimble, and when the weather warmed she walked me there herself.

I went as Hester's niece from the country, a soldier's widow, in Hester's old brown dress with a shawl over my hair and my belly. Mistress Rowe, who kept the shop, was a sharp-faced woman with a thimble on every finger of her left hand. She took the sample I had brought, a linen square with a spray of meadowsweet in the corner, and carried it to the window.

She turned it over and looked at the back for a long time. The back is where poor work shows.

"Who taught you?"

"My mother, mistress."

"Six handkerchiefs and a pair of pillowcases, initials and a border. Bring them in ten days and I'll pay you a mark for the lot." She looked at the meadowsweet again. "If they're as clean as this, there's more."

A mark for ten days' work was less than the Luna had paid for one of her ribbons. I thanked her and meant it.

On the way out, a lady's maid was at the counter collecting a parcel, and she said Duskmere's name to the girl wrapping it. The Duskmere Luna had ordered mourning gloves, gray kid with jet buttons. I kept my head down over my basket and walked out into the street, and I didn't let myself look back at the window until I was round the corner.

I was five months gone by then, and the pup kicked hardest at night, so I sewed at night, by Hester's one lamp, with my feet up on the bench and Briar asleep across the room. My hands were steady. My back ached all the way down. I counted stitches instead of weeks, and when I finished the sixth handkerchief, I sat for a while with my palm on my belly, feeling it turn over, before I let myself sleep.

Mistress Rowe sent more work the next week, and more the week after.

* * *

Evander's POV

I dreamed of the scent again, rain on wild orchids, and woke with my wolf pressing against the inside of my ribs as if it wanted to go somewhere.

Theo was waiting outside my door with his hands clasped and a face like a boy who had broken a window.

"Your Highness. A message from the Queen." He swallowed. "Her Majesty says she has found her. The woman from the Lakelands. She's already at the Queen's apartments."

I had invented that woman in my father's study eleven days ago.

"Found her where?"

"A farm near Port Merrow, they say. Her Majesty's people have been through every village in the Lakelands." Theo hesitated. "She has a token of yours, Highness. They say she knew the story before anyone told it to her."

I had told that story to one person, and he was the King.

"How kind of my mother," I said, and went to dress.

* * *

My mother's sitting room smelled of lilies and the sweet resin she burned to cover them. She was in her high chair by the window, looking more pleased than I had seen her in a year, and in front of her, on a cushion, knelt a young woman with her eyes down.

She was pretty, in a soft way, with brown hair under a plain cap and a gray traveling dress let out at the waist. Under it her belly was round. She held a painted fan in her lap, and I knew it. I had painted it myself at fifteen, and given it to one of my mother's ladies.

"Evander." My mother held out her hand to me. "You might have told me. To keep a thing like this from your own mother."

I kissed her hand and turned to look at the girl.

Her heart was going fast, light and quick. That told me nothing. Any girl brought before a prince and a queen would be frightened. I breathed in. Lilies, resin, lavender water, and the faint starch of a dress that had been pressed that morning. Nowhere was there rain, or anything like an orchid.

I kept my face pleasant.

"You've come a long way," I said.

"Yes, Your Highness." Her voice was low. "I didn't mean to come at all. I swore I wouldn't. But the Queen's people found me, and I thought, for the child's sake..."

"For the child's sake," my mother agreed warmly. "She nursed you, Evander. She told my women all of it, the ambush, the weeks at the farm, the fever you ran. She even knew which shoulder took the blade." She smiled at the girl. "You may stop being frightened now, child. No one will send you away."

Every word of it was my lie, handed back to me with a ribbon on it.

I said nothing. My mother was watching me, and so were her women, and I could feel the room waiting for me to fall to my knees. Under the murmur of the women and the fountain splashing below the window, I began to listen past the girl's quick heart for the second one, the small one that should have been beating beneath it.

Before I found it, the girl lifted her eyes to mine. A deep flush rose up her throat, and she spoke so softly that only a wolf could have heard it.

"Your Highness has a mark on the left hip," she said. "A crescent moon, holding a small star in its curve."

My mother's eyes went to my face.

No one outside my family knew where that mark was. Only the royal blood carried it, and no one who had not undressed me had ever seen it.