Chapter 22

Evander's POV

Bram Hollis went down on one knee on my study floor and held up a brass case, sealed at both ends with my own wax.

"From the summer lodge, Your Highness. As you asked."

I took it without breaking the seal. "Any trouble?"

He hesitated, which Bram never does. "I picked up a pup on the way back, Highness."

He told it plainly. He had borrowed a carriage from the High Justiciary so as not to be noticed. Below the toll gate at the Low Wharf, two women with babies had stopped him, with men coming after them, and against his better judgment he had carried them past the gate and set them down. Something about it had sat wrong with him almost at once, and they had gone only a little way before he told the driver to turn back. The women were gone. But in the long grass by the road a pup was crying, wrapped up with care, and there was no sign of a struggle.

"A mother doesn't leave a pup that age by the road, Highness, unless something's happened to her. I gave it to Mistress Dunne."

"Bring it here."

Mistress Dunne came in with a bundle in plain linen and a softness in her face I hadn't seen there since I was in short coats. "Look at him, Highness. I never saw one made so well. Not since you."

He was awake and quiet, looking about him with great dark eyes. I put out one finger and moved it in front of his face, and his eyes followed it, and then he pursed his mouth and blew a small, shining bubble at me.

Something at the corner of my mouth moved before I could stop it. "He isn't shy. What does he eat?"

"A little warm barley water, Highness. He's a month old, no more. He wants a breast." She went on carefully. "You're not bound, and there's no lady in the house. I've a cousin, a good woman, with no children of her own. If he were to go to her..."

Before she had finished, the pup's mouth turned down at the corners, and he let out a wail that filled the room.

* * *

Dunne jogged him and begged my pardon. I watched his small red furious face.

"Give him to me," I said, and was surprised to hear it, but my hands had already gone out.

I had never held anything so soft. I settled his head in the crook of my elbow and put my other hand under him, and my arm was stiff inside a minute. The linen he was wrapped in smelled of milk and woodsmoke, and under those, faintly, of something that was gone before I could catch it, that made my wolf go quiet and lie down.

He turned his face in against my collar and breathed in. His crying broke up into hiccups and stopped. He looked up at me with his lashes still wet. Then the corners of his mouth went up, and he smiled.

"The old women say a babe brings luck to whoever he smiles at first," Dunne said. She bent closer and parted the fine dark hair on top of his head with one finger, and made a small surprised sound.

"Highness, look. He has two crowns. Two whorls, here, side by side." She looked up at me. "Just like yours when you were small."

My hand stopped.

I remembered her combing my hair when I was small, laughing over those two whorls. Clever and stubborn, she used to say.

My other hand went to the edge of his wrappings before I had decided anything.

"Too soon for that, Highness," Dunne said quietly. "Yours didn't come in until you were walking."

"Look at him properly," I said. "Is he like me?"

She stared at me. Then she studied the pup for a long moment, and stole a look at my face, and back.

"Forgive me, Highness. He is. When he's quiet, he's you at that age, to the life. If the Queen saw him, she'd wonder too." Her voice dropped. "But you're not bound. It isn't natural."

"Natural," I said. I looked down at the pup in my arm and drew a finger along his cheek. "From today, it is. He's mine."

Dunne's head came up.

"He's the son of an old friend of mine in the Lakelands," I said. "He's been sent to me."

I watched her think of the rumors about the woman in the Lakelands, and the men I'd had searching, and decide what I meant by it. When she raised her eyes again, there was nothing in them but obedience.

"Then it's a blessing he's come home, Highness. I'll care for him as my own, and not a word will get out."

"See that it doesn't." I gave him back to her. "He needs a wet nurse. Find one yourself, and quickly. No one from the palace, and no one the great houses send you. A decent woman from a clean family, gentle, with plenty of milk, that's the first thing. And she mustn't be a talker."

* * *

Wren's POV

That morning, after the carriage set us down, we had gone into the woods to come round to the wharf another way. When we came out at the edge of the trees, Pell and her women were turning out of the fork in the road ahead, searching toward us.

We drew back into the shadow. And Sol, against Briar's chest, opened his mouth and screamed.

There was no time. I took him out of her arms and ran a few steps to the long grass that grew beside the road, where nobody walking along it could see in. I knelt and pushed him down deep into it and pulled the long stems over him, and my hands shook so that I could barely do it.

"Hush, my love. Hush. Mama's coming back."

Then I got up and seized Briar's arm and pulled her the other way into the trees. This time I let the branches snap behind us. Pell shouted my name, and when I looked back, all four women were coming after us. I could still hear Sol crying, and I was crying too.

We stayed hidden long after the last shout had faded. More than an hour passed before we dared go back. We crept back step by step to the edge of the grass, and I pushed the stems apart.

There was nothing there. Only the grass, pressed flat.

Sol was gone.

My legs went from under me. I knelt in the mud and put my hands into the hollow where he had been, and there was nothing under them but wet earth and broken stalks. I couldn't even cry out. Something in my throat had closed.

Briar held me up with tears running down her face, and didn't dare make a sound.

I bit my lip until it bled, and the pain brought me back a little way from the edge. Linnet was still here. And Sol might still be alive.

I made myself look at the ground, a hand's breadth at a time. Our own footprints, running. Twigs we'd snapped. And at the outer edge of the grass, close to the road, there were wheel ruts. Fresh, deep, evenly spaced. A heavy carriage had stood here, and turned, and gone back the way it had come. Toward the city.

Not an animal. Not Pell's women, who were on foot.

"We can't go to the wharf now," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. "They'll be waiting there. We're going into the city. Separately, by different gates. We'll meet at the old oak by the market well."

"The city?" Briar stared at me.

"I'm going to find him. If I have to take Silverkeep apart stone by stone, I'll find him."

We met under the oak at dusk and took two rooms at a cheap inn called the Tallow Cat, going in separately. I carried Linnet in my bundle so no one would see I had a baby.

I barred the door and sat on the bed with her. I couldn't eat. Every time I thought of Sol in some stranger's hands, cold, hungry, crying for me, I had to hold on to the bedpost.

Briar slipped in with a bowl of porridge. "Miss, please. If you go under, what happens to Linnet? You have to keep your milk."

I looked down at my daughter, and took the bowl, and swallowed it all, spoonful by spoonful.

The next day we heard the innkeeper below talking low with someone. "...two young women with babies. Seen them?" We didn't go out at all.

On the second afternoon, a few peddlers sat down over their ale in the common room, and their voices came up through the boards.

"Have you heard? Prince Evander's house is looking for a wet nurse, quick. They're particular about it, too. Clean family, decent looks, plenty of milk. They say the pup's from that woman of his in the Lakelands. Precious as gold, he is."

The Prince's house. A wet nurse.