CHAPTER FOUR: THE OLD CONVENANTIC

ORION

He knew she had gone back to the library at the third hour past midnight because the wolf on night watch in the corridor reported it to Caius, and Caius reported it to him at breakfast with the expression of someone delivering news he found quietly interesting.

"She was in there for twelve minutes," Caius said. "Came back out empty-handed."

Orion set down his cup. "She was looking for the book."

"Presumably."

"She found it the night before?"

"She was there four hours the night before. She found a great many things."

Orion looked at the window. The morning light came in flat and grey over the mountains, the same as every morning, indifferent to the fact that two days ago everything in this Keep had been uncomplicated in a way it no longer was.

He had moved the book himself, the morning after her arrival, when the night watch had told him a light was burning in the library past midnight. He had gone down and found the gap on the shelf and understood immediately what she had been doing and put the volume somewhere she would not find it without knowing where to look.

He had not considered that she would go back for it.

He should have.

"Where is she now?" he said.

"Breakfast room. Eating alone. Lena is with her." Caius paused. "She asked Mira for a map of the Keep."

"Give her one."

"I already did." Another pause. "She also asked for access to the records hall."

Orion looked at him.

"She was very polite about it," Caius said, which was not reassurance, only fact.

He pushed back from the table and stood. The shift was bothering him this morning. It did that sometimes, coming at him in waves, the absence of it sitting somewhere in his sternum like a stone he could not dislodge. Four months since it had begun fading. Some days he barely noticed. Some days it felt like missing a limb. He had learned to stand the same way regardless, to move the same way, to let nothing show.

He walked to the records hall himself and unlocked it and stood in the doorway looking at the shelves for a moment.

Most of what was in this room was territorial pack agreements, border histories, and genealogical records going back six generations. Sensitive in certain contexts, but nothing that could actually damage him. The one thing that could damage him was no longer in the library where she had found it, and the records hall held no copies.

He was being careful about this. He was doing what the situation required.

He left the hall unlocked and went to find her.

She was not in the breakfast room anymore. Mira directed him to the eastern courtyard, where apparently his new queen had spent twenty minutes examining the stonework and then settled on a bench with a book she had brought from her own belongings.

He stood in the courtyard entrance and watched her for a moment before she knew he was there.

She read the way she did everything else completely, without looking up, without fidgeting. She had one knee folded up on the bench and the book balanced against it and she was turning pages at a pace that told him she was not skimming. Her hair was down this morning, which was the first time he had seen it that way. It made her look younger. He noted that and set it aside.

She looked up before he spoke. Not startled she had heard him, or sensed him, which was unusual for a human. She simply looked up and waited.

"The records hall is unlocked," he said. "You have access."

"Thank you."

He crossed the courtyard and stopped in front of her. In the grey morning light, her eyes were closer to silver than grey, which was a thing he did not need to notice anyway.

"What are you reading?" he said.

She turned the cover toward him without comment. It was a history of the Witch Covenant, one of the older ones, pre-translation, in its original language.

He looked at her.

"Have you read the Old Covenantic?" he said.

"Enough to get through it." She turned the cover back. "I have questions about some of the grammar. If there is someone in the Keep who reads it more fluently I would rather ask them than guess."

"What section are you in?"

"The chapter on conditional curses." She said it evenly, the way she said everything, but she was watching him the way she had been watching him since she arrived like she was reading him the same way she read everything. Completely, and without looking away.

He felt the particular quality of understanding that came when you realized you had underestimated someone by a significant margin.

"I'll send you a scholar," he said.

"I'd prefer a direct answer."

"To what question?"

She held his gaze. "Is the curse on you the kind that requires a willing marriage to counter, or the kind that requires a marriage that becomes willing?"

The courtyard was quiet. Somewhere above them a bird called once and went silent.

Those were two very different things. A willing marriage meant her agreement at the signing was sufficient. A marriage that becomes willing meant the contract required something to grow that was not currently there and its counter-curse would not hold if it did not. The Covenant woman had read the terms of the former, but Nyra had found the book, and in the book was the original language of the curse, which specified the latter, and which was the reason he had moved it before she could read it in full.

She could not know that. She had found three lines before he moved it. She should not have been able to deduce the distinction from three lines.

He looked at her sitting in the grey morning with her old book and her direct question and her eyes that did not move from his face.

"Where did you get that question?" he said.

"The Covenant woman paused before she read the child clause," Nyra said. "People only pause like that when they are choosing which version of the truth to say."

Something settled in him that he did not have a name for a heaviness, and something underneath it that was almost, despite everything, close to respect.

He said nothing. He had not decided yet what to tell her and he had learned long ago that silence was safer than an answer made before its time.

She seemed to understand that, because she looked back down at her book without pressing him, which told him she already had her answer and had only asked the question to confirm it.

He was still standing there, deciding what to do with this, when Caius appeared at the far end of the courtyard.

The expression on his face was not the quietly interested one from breakfast. It was the other one the one that had preceded every significant piece of bad news in the eight years they had served together.

"What," Orion said.

"Messenger," Caius said. "From the eastern border."

He did not say anything else out loud. He did not need to. Orion could read eight years of working alongside someone, and what Caius's face said right now was: something has started.

Orion looked at Nyra once more. She had not looked up from her book, but her hands had stilled on the page.

She had heard. Of course, she had.

He walked past Caius without a word and headed for the war room, and somewhere behind him in the grey morning courtyard his new queen sat with her old book about conditional curses and did not pretend she hadn't been listening.