جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 10

Someone had strung lanterns along the whole length of the drive.Silver and black, the Lycan colors, forty of them at least, swinging in the rain. Two men on ladders were fixing banners to the gateposts. A woman I didn't know was hauling a rolled carpet up the front steps by herself, swearing under her breath. Nobody stopped when the car pulled in. Nobody looked up. The estate went on with its work the way a river goes on around a stone.Ezra came around to open my door and I was already out. He took a step back, as if I were something he'd have to be careful with, and I noticed that too.A young man with a clipboard hurried over. Neat collar, new boots. "Sorry, sir, deliveries go around the side. Kitchen's entrance is by the—"He was looking at me."She's not a delivery," Ezra said. "She's my—"And he stopped.I stood in the rain and watched my brother look for the word. *Sister* was right there. It had been right there for fifteen years. I watched him not pick it up."She's family,"

I woke at twenty to five, before any bell that existed in this house, with my back against the wall and my hand already curled against my ribs.I had slept on the floor. The bed hadn't been touched.Mama's morning began at six. Tea at six: willow bark, honey, a pinch of dried mullein, brewed exactly four minutes. Foxglove tincture at half past, two drops in a glass of water, never three. Cold flannel for her wrists if the heart was fluttering. Ankles checked when the weather turned. I knew that schedule the way I knew my own name. I had been the one who wrote it down, at fourteen, when the doctor had said that someone ought to.It was the whole reason I had come back. If I could do that one thing, I could bear the rest.The still room off the kitchen was where I'd left it. Almost. The jars were on the same shelves, but every label had been rewritten in a round, careful hand I didn't know. I read them anyway.They were all correct.Not one dose was wrong. The tincture was where it belo

I woke on a chaise in a room I didn't recognize, wrapped in a coat that wasn't mine.Cedar and cold air. I knew whose it was before I opened my eyes all the way."Don't sit up yet." A woman's voice, low and even, close to my ear but not touching me. "I'm going to take your pulse. I'll tell you before I do it."She waited. I didn't answer, which she seemed to take as permission, because a beat later two fingers pressed light and careful against the inside of my wrist. Warm hands. I noticed that the way you notice weather."Physician Anwen," she said. "I travel with the King's household. You're in the small sitting room off the east hall. The door's open. You can see it from where you're lying, if you want to check."I checked.It was open. Nobody was blocking it.She worked in silence after that, and I let her, because there was nothing left in me to fight with. She rolled back my sleeve to look at the wrist, and her mouth didn't change, but something in her hands went very still for a

I didn't show the document to anyone.I turned it over in my hands until the paper went soft at the fold, reading that one smudged line so many times it stopped looking like words and started looking like a pattern, the way anything does if you stare at it long enough. *Placement authorized per royal household request — confidential.* I thought about carrying it downstairs and setting it in front of Ezra at breakfast. I thought about what his face would do.Then I thought about what Mama's face would do, and decided I wasn't ready to watch either.Whatever this was, it hadn't come from a stranger. Somebody with a crown had known where I was going, at four years old, before I did. That meant somebody had decided, a long time ago, that I belonged in a house that would spend fifteen years loving me exactly until it was inconvenient. I didn't know yet whether that made it worse or simply made it make sense.I folded the page back along its crease and put it inside my pillowcase, because i

The King left three days later, and the house exhaled the way a body does after holding its breath too long.I stood at the top of the front steps and watched the black cars pull away down the drive, past the lanterns that hadn't yet been taken down, and Alaric didn't look back at the house the way a departing guest usually does. He looked at me, once, through the rear window, and inclined his head a fraction of an inch. I understood it for what it was. Not goodbye. A promise that this wasn't finished.Ezra came to stand beside me on the steps once the gates had shut behind the last car."Well," he said. "That's over, at least.""Is it."He glanced at me, and something in my tone made him go still. "What do you mean?"I hadn't told him about the decree. I'd promised Alaric I wouldn't, and a promise made to the one person in that house who'd looked at me and seen a person instead of a problem to be managed wasn't one I intended to break easily. But I'd been thinking, in the three days