Chapter 29

Wren's POV

All the same, there was another small face behind his, one I couldn't stop seeing. Linnet had the same dark eyes, and the same sweetness at the corners of her mouth when she smiled. One of them was in my arms, and the other was somewhere across the city in Briar's.

Sol fell asleep against me, deeply, the way he used to.

I laid him in the cradle and sang to him under my breath, an old song from the Lakelands that my mother used to sing to me.

"You're from the Lakelands, Darrow?" Dunne asked softly.

"My mother's people were. There's none of them left now." My eyes stung. "Or I'd have somewhere to go home to."

Dunne looked at me for a moment, and I watched something in her face give way, the way a knot gives when you have been worrying at it long enough.

"Don't dwell on what's done," she said, and her voice was gentler than I had heard it. "You're in this house now, and the young master's taken to you. Settle down here and look after him. Do your work well, and His Highness won't forget it."

"Yes, mistress. Thank you. I don't know the ways of a house like this. I hope you'll tell me when I go wrong."

She nodded. "He's sound asleep. Go and get yourself settled. You've nowhere else to go, have you? Then you'll live in. By the look of it, the young master won't do without you."

I stood up to go, and couldn't help a small wince. My hand went to my chest before I could stop it. Sol had drunk his fill, but I was still heavy and aching. I had always had milk enough for two.

Dunne's eyes went straight to the front of my dress, where a fresh damp patch was spreading. Her eyebrows went up. Then she looked almost pleased.

"You'd better draw some of that off," she said, "before it does you harm. I'll have hot water sent, and cloths, and clean shifts. Take care of it every day, mind. If you let it fester you'll be no use to him. You'll sleep in the little room off the young master's, so you're there when he wants you."

I thanked her for all of it. But the whole time she was talking I was thinking of the west gate, and whether Briar was standing by it already with Linnet in her arms. Sol was fed now. Linnet wasn't. I didn't know yet how I was going to manage both.

* * *

Evander's POV

I was sitting in my study, and I had been sitting there for some time without reading anything.

My thumb was moving back and forth over the cold edge of a paperweight. I kept seeing the back of her neck, bent over the child. Those wet grey-green eyes. The shape of her under that plain cloth.

Worse than that was the moment itself. She had turned away from the room to feed him, and I hadn't seen anything, not truly. Only a flash of white as she turned, there and gone. And the blood had gone up into my face so hard and so fast that my wolf rolled over inside me as if something had kicked it awake.

"Highness." Theo, at the door. "Captain Hollis is asking for you."

"Send him in."

I shut my eyes and pressed my fingers into them. What was the matter with me? I had never been a man for women. There were pretty girls enough in this house, and more had been sent to me from the palace and every great family in the city, and I had hardly looked at any of them. Yet now this one, a servant, from nowhere, who might be hiding any number of things, and I was sitting in my study thinking about her like a boy.

Was it how she was with the child, as though he were the only thing in the world? Was it the way she had cried and still not given an inch? Or was it nothing better than her face?

I let my breath out slowly. It was dangerous, whatever it was. Nobody knew where this woman came from, or why she wanted so badly to be near the pup. I had kept her for his sake. That was all. I would watch her, and keep my head.

When Hollis came in, I was sitting at my desk turning the pages of a report.

He went down on one knee and kept his voice low. "Highness. I've found out who they were, the men at the toll gate below the wharf, the ones chasing those two women. They were Duskmere's."

I looked up. "Duskmere again. Is there anything in this city they're not in?"

"It was the women they were after, Highness. No doubt about it."

"Why? Two women carrying pups. What could they have done to Duskmere, that Duskmere would put men on the toll gate for them?"

"I haven't found out yet." He hesitated. "But while I was asking, I heard something else. They say Hugo Calder, the Hollowbrook heir, has been keeping a woman at a hunting lodge outside the walls, and that she's just had a son. And Duskmere's eldest daughter is his mate. Lady Calder. Seraphine. Years without a pup, and only a few days ago the healers found she's carrying at last."

My fingers stopped on the desk. "So you think one of the women you picked up was Calder's mistress? And Duskmere was clearing her out of the way for their daughter?"

Hollis was quiet for a moment.

"Highness, I don't think it's that simple."