Five Petals

CHAPTER 14

RHAELEN'S POV

I wrote the letter to the Veyrden Alpha that same night, at my desk in the study, with two candles burning beside me and the door closed.

It took four attempts. The first three were so full of rage that I threw them into the fireplace, and the fourth said only what a king needed to say to a lesser Alpha. The girl's inheritance was to be returned in full, every document was to reach my fortress within ten days, and not one Veyrden grain wagon would cross my border road until I held them in my hands.

I pressed the Blackthorn seal into the wax and set the letter at the corner of the desk for the morning messenger. Then I leaned back and rubbed two fingers against my temple, where a dull ache had been pulsing for the last hour. It was nothing compared to what I had felt in the saddle, and I told myself I had simply grown used to it.

A knock sounded at the door.

"Enter."

Orren walked in. He had washed the mud off his uniform, but the bandage on his arm was already stained again, and the bruise on his neck had turned a deep, dark purple. He stopped in front of the desk and did not sit.

"Maelora has sent word that you must come to the cells," he said. "She asked me to bring you at once."

"Has the maid been found?"

"No." He hesitated and rubbed the back of his neck. "It is the kitchen servant, Rhaelen. He is dead."

I stood up so quickly that the candles shook. "I posted two guards at that door."

"I know."

We went down together, through the stone corridor behind the war room and down a long spiral staircase into the lower levels of the keep. The air grew colder with every turn, and the torches along the wall burned low and smoky. By the time we reached the bottom, the ache in my head had sharpened into a steady hammering.

Orren glanced at me once, and I could see exactly what he was thinking.

"Do not say it," I told him.

"I said nothing."

Maelora was waiting outside the last cell with her leather satchel pressed against her chest. Her face was drawn and pale in the torchlight, and she lowered her eyes when I came near, just as she had done in my study yesterday morning. Two guards stood against the opposite wall, their backs rigid and their hands shaking at their sides.

"Tell me," I said.

The older of the two guards stepped forward and dropped to one knee. "Your Majesty, we did not leave the door. I swear it on my life. A maid from the kitchens brought his supper at dusk, and we passed the bowl through the slot ourselves. We watched him eat every bite."

"What maid?"

"A young one, Your Majesty. She wore a gray scarf over her hair and kept her face down. We did not think to look at her."

"A short while later he began to cough," the other guard said. His voice cracked. "By the time we found the key and opened the door, he was already gone."

I looked at Orren. His jaw had gone tight. Neither of us said the name of the other maid, the one who had set a poisoned pitcher beside the girl in the war room and then vanished, but I knew we were both thinking of her.

I stepped past the guards into the cell.

It was a narrow stone room with a cot against the back wall, a bucket in the corner, and a slot in the door for passing food. The servant lay on the cot with his face turned toward the wall, and one arm hung over the side. I had seen him last in my study, coughing on the floor with my hand around his throat, and I had told myself that I would question him when I had time.

I had not found the time. I had ridden to the border instead.

"Silver," Maelora said quietly behind me. "The bowl is still half full. It was mixed into the soup in a dose large enough to kill a horse. The fever had broken, and one of the guards says that he spoke once today, to ask for water. He would have answered your questions, Rhaelen, if you had come sooner."

"I know."

The words came out harsher than I intended. She flinched, and I turned my face away from her.

For two days, I had believed that the danger was a single bottle of medicine and a single servant with a grudge. Now a bowl of soup, a pitcher of water, and a maid with a scarf had shown me that the danger was much larger. Someone inside my fortress had known I meant to question this man, and had made sure he would never speak. Someone had also watched the pitcher fail in the war room and decided that a living witness was more dangerous than a dead one.

"Whoever did this is cleaning up after themselves," Orren said from the doorway, as if he had followed my thoughts. "They struck at the moment the pitcher failed, and they did it inside a cell with two guards at the door."

"They did it with a maid from my own kitchens."

"Yes."

"Find her." I did not raise my voice. I did not need to. "Search every room in the servants' quarters, every storeroom, and every stable. If she has left the fortress, I want to know which gate she used and who opened it."

"I will do it tonight."

"Take the body to Maelora's laboratory," I told the guards. "No one else is to touch it."

Four men carried the dead servant out on a board. As they passed beneath the torch, I saw his hands, and I stopped. The tips of his fingers were torn and gray, and the nails were broken down to the quick, as if he had clawed at something very hard.

"Move the cot," I said.

Orren frowned. "Rhaelen?"

"Move it."

He and one of the guards dragged the cot away from the wall, and the iron legs scraped loudly against the stone. Orren lifted the torch from its bracket and held it close to the place where the cot had been.

A little gray grit was still clinging to the folds of the blanket. Above it, at the height of a man lying on his side, something had been scratched into the wall with a stubborn, shaking hand.

It was a flower. It had a short stem, two curved leaves, and five rounded petals, each one cut deep into the stone with the point of a broken nail. The lines were rough and uneven, and one of them ended in a smear of brown that had once been blood.

Orren lowered the torch slowly. "Do you know it?"

"No," I said. "Do you?"

"I have never seen it in this fortress."

I stared at the five small petals until my eyes began to ache.

A dying man with a poisoned stomach and a fever still in his blood had used the last of his strength to carve this into my wall, and I did not know what it meant or whom it was meant for.