The king's messenger

I let the curtain fall and step back from the window.

My heart is pounding, and  I force myself to breathe slowly. It's a trick I learned in my first life. Panic is useless. It's only fear convincing you that something bad is about to happen.

He made her gesture, Mneme says. The two fingers to the lips. Nadia, that was Seraphine's gesture.

"I saw it."

"I know." I press my fingers against my own lips. "Everything means something now, that's the problem."

Downstairs, I hear the front door open. A man's voice drifts up,  smooth, calm, and unhurried. 

I know that kind of voice. I spent years married into a family full of people who spoke like that.

I get dressed quickly, but I don't put on my best dress. That would be a mistake.

A girl who dresses up for a royal messenger looks like she's trying to impress him, and a girl who wants to impress him is a girl who can be easily used.

Instead, I put on my plain gray work dress. The one I wear to clean the kennels. The dress that says: I'm a nobody, I'm boring, look somewhere else.

***************

The messenger is standing in our front room. He's younger than I expected. He has dark hair and sharp, clever eyes. A blood-red cloak was thrown back over one shoulder so everyone could see his sword. My father stands stiffly in the corner, looking like a man who just realized his house is too small and too poor for his guest.

"Nadia," my father says carefully. "This is Lord Aldric, from the King's household. He rode all the way from the capital."

There's a warning in his voice, and I hear it clearly.

"That's a long way to ride," I say, "for a house like ours."

My father nearly chokes, but Lord Aldric tilts his head, and something flickers in his clever eyes.  I've surprised him.

Good- I think and file that away. When you've died once, you learn to collect small advantages. Surprise is worth more than gold.

"A long way, yes," Aldric agrees smoothly. "But the King takes an interest in the marriages of his packs, even the small ones." He smiles. "Especially the small ones. Your bloodline is about to join with the Kane bloodline. That makes you a matter of royal attention, Miss Nadia."

And there it is, here's what bothers me. In my first life, this visit never happened. There was no messenger or royal attention. Nobody cared about a poor girl marrying up, not until years later, when the marriage made my husband powerful.

So why now? What's different?

Someone changed the story.

Whether that someone is me... or someone else... I don't know.

The thought should scare me, it actually does, but underneath the fear, something else is growing. A rage that I haven't felt in two lifetimes.

Because now I know that they planned everything.

They planned how I would fall in love with the man they chose to destroy me.

They built a beautiful cage around me, and I thanked them while they locked the door and sent a woman to murder me inside it.

If this isn't a coincidence... then someone is moving pieces across the board.

"You're staring, Miss Nadia," Aldric says softly.

"I'm memorizing you," I say.

The room goes dead silent, and my father's face turns white.

Aldric's fingers pause against his gloves. "That's an unusual thing for a girl to say." 

"I'm an unusual girl." I hold his eyes and don't blink. "You rode a long way, my lord. You should remember the  reason for your journey."

************

He leaves soon after. But before he goes, he hands my father a scroll with a heavy wax seal. 

"The King's blessing for your daughter's marriage," he says with a smile. "A great honor."

My father accepts it with trembling hands, as if he's been given the greatest gift in the world.

My poor father, he doesn't understand.

He thinks being noticed by the King is a blessing and that if the King knows your name, you're safe.

But it doesn't. I know that better than anyone. Being noticed means being watched, and when you stop being useful, you will be killed.

I stand in the doorway and watch Aldric climb onto his black horse. Before he rides off, he looks back at me one last time. He doesn't smile or make the gesture again.

He just looks at me for a long time before riding away

************

My father turns to me, hugging the scroll to his chest; his eyes are wet.

"Do you understand what this is?" His voice cracks. "The King himself blessed your marriage. Do you know what this means for us, Nadia? For our whole pack?"

And this is the part I wasn't ready for. I look at my father; his hair is still dark. His hands are still strong. He's young. In my first life, my death destroyed this man. He aged ten years in one year. He died of a broken heart before my husband even finished building my tomb.

I never got to bury him. I was already in the ground myself.

I couldn't hold his hand at the end. I couldn't tell him it wasn't his fault. I only know how he died because Mneme knows, and because some part of me was still watching from the other side, unable to reach him, while my death killed him slowly from the inside.

That is the cruelest thing they took from me. Not my life but his.

And now he's standing in front of me, alive and crying happy tears over a piece of royal paper, because he believes it means his daughter will be safe.

Something inside me breaks.

"Papa," I say. My voice comes out small, and I cross the room and throw my arms around him and hold on tight.

For one moment, I let myself have this. 

He laughs, surprised, and hugs me back. "There now," he says into my hair. "Whatever scared you, it's over. The King has blessed us, nothing bad can happen now."

I press my face into his shoulder so he can't see my tears.

Oh, Papa. You have no idea.

Nadia, Mneme says quietly, the scroll.

I don't move. "Give me one minute. "

Look at the scroll now- she hisses

Something in her voice makes my blood go cold. I lift my head and look down at the scroll pressed against my father's chest. At the heavy wax seal. At the royal mark stamped into it and the moon of the Aurelian kings.

Except it's not the King's mark.

I've seen the royal seal a hundred times in my first life. The Aurelian moon is full and bright, with rays like a crown.

This moon is hollow. Just a black ring with nothing inside it. An empty circle with a moon that something has eaten from the inside out.

And underneath it, pressed into the wax in tiny letters, are three words. They're written in the old tongue, a dead language no one has spoken for a thousand years.

I shouldn't be able to read them, but I can. The knowledge is just there, rising from somewhere deep inside me, from a memory that is older than my whole life.

She is awake- the words say, and Mneme goes completely silent.

And when I touch the wax seal with my fingertip,  it's still warm.

Someone never intended it for the King's messenger to deliver in the first place.

"Nadia?"

My father's voice sounds far away.

I don't answer. My eyes stay fixed on the hollow moon pressed into the wax.

Mneme hasn't spoken since the words appeared, and that frightens me more than anything.

"Mneme?" I mutter, but there is complete silence, and for the first time since I woke up, I'm completely alone inside my own head.

Then, the hollow moon on the seal gives off the faintest pulse, like a heartbeat.

The wax cracks beneath my thumb.

And somewhere, impossibly far away...Something wakes up.