جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 10

He had never taken it off. Not once. Not when the other hunters mocked him for it, not when the metal bit cold in winter, not even when a dying vampire grabbed his wrist mid-fight and stared at it like he recognised it. His mother had asked him to keep it on. He didn't know why. He was starting to think that was the point.The summons came at midnight, the way the serious ones always did.Aldric had been awake anyway. He usually was at that hour, lying still in the dark with his eyes open, doing the thing his trainer used to call resting and he privately called waiting for morning. Sleep came when it wanted to. He had stopped chasing it.He dressed without lighting a candle. Pulled on his coat, checked the knife at his hip out of habit. Touched the bracelet the way he always did — quick, automatic. His mother's voice lived in that gesture somewhere. Keep it on. Promise me. He had promised. He still didn't know what he'd promised to do, exactly. But tonight, for a reason he couldn't

Three days in, a guard named Sorel decided Aldric didn't move right. He found out about it the way he found out about most things — by paying attention to the room. Sorel had been watching him since the second day, in the careful way that people who are good at their jobs watch things they haven't categorized yet. Not aggressive. Not certain. Just tracking. On the third morning Sorel fell into step beside him in the east corridor and said, conversationally, that he didn't remember seeing Aldric in the servant rotation last month. Aldric told him he'd transferred from the outer estate. Sorel nodded slowly. Said he'd have to check that. Aldric said of course, no trouble at all, and kept walking, and spent the next four hours calculating exactly how long he had before the check came back wrong and what his exit options looked like from the servants' wing. None of them were clean. Two of them ended with him fighting his way out of a palace full of vampires, which the order

The morning assembly was exactly what it sounded like — the palace staff gathering in the main hall before the day began, receiving instructions, being seen. Aldric had attended it every morning since his second day. He stood in the back with the other servants and kept his eyes moving and learned things. What he'd learned so far: the guard rotation changed at dawn and dusk and there was a gap of approximately four minutes between shifts on the west side of the palace that a careful person could use. The king's private chambers were on the third level, east wing, accessible by two staircases and one service corridor that the senior staff used to avoid crossing the main hall. Dravon kept no personal guards inside his rooms. He was, for someone in his position, surprisingly undefended. What he'd also learned, and was trying not to assign significance to: Dravon noticed everything. He moved through the assembly each morning the way water moved — finding the level, touching every su

Dravon warned him on a Tuesday.Or what passed for Tuesday here — Aldric had started losing track of the days in the specific way that happened when a place began to feel less like a mission and more like somewhere he actually was. He noticed this and didn't like it and filed it beside the growing list of things he was choosing not to examine directly.The warning came in the late afternoon, in one of the smaller receiving rooms off the main corridor. Dravon had asked — told — him to bring a document from the administrative office, which was not a task that required a servant with Aldric's assigned duties but which nobody questioned because nobody questioned Dravon. Aldric delivered it. Dravon took it, set it aside without looking at it, and said:"What did you find in the library?"Aldric said, "I don't know what library you mean."Dravon looked at him with the particular patience of someone who has already decided not to argue about the thing being argued about. "The candle wax o

The rogue came from the east gate. Aldric heard him before he saw him — a shift in the air, a sound pitched just below the range that most people registered consciously but that had always lived clearly inside whatever it was that made Aldric better at this than anyone he'd trained beside. He was crossing the outer courtyard on an errand that didn't matter when his feet slowed without instruction from his brain and he turned. The vampire was young. Or looked young — Aldric had learned by now that appearance meant almost nothing here. But there was something unformed about his panic, something that hadn't calcified into anything yet, which made him read young regardless of what the years said. He was moving fast and badly, knocking against a wall, catching himself, his eyes gone full dark the way they went when the need had overridden everything else. Two servants who'd been crossing the yard had pressed themselves against the far wall and weren't moving. Aldric was already betwe