Stolen by the Fae Prince のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 20

I had been carrying the ledger line for a day, the way you carry a stone in a shoe. You can walk. You can work. Every step tells you it is there.Elowen Calloway. Paid, in full, in advance.In the old tithe-book, in the third press where the Chancellor's clerks had misfiled it the winter the old king died — in the archive I had entered at a consultation priced as duty. I had read the line four times with my finger resting under it, in the hush of that room, and then I had closed the book and set it back true on its shelf and told no one. Not Isolde, who had earned better. Not Nix, who trades in secrets and would have paid in kind.A thing told is a thing priced. I did not yet know what my mother's line was worth, and until I did, it stayed behind my teeth.What I needed was the other book. Tithe-books record what is owed. Settlement-books record what was paid — by whom, in what coin, for what consideration. The settlements lived in the high press of the archive, bound in grey, never s

I went down at first light to see it with my own eyes, because a thing read in another woman's handwriting is only ever half believed.It was there. Hair-fine, black, seated in the exact root-seat we had emptied the day before, in the exact grain — as if the branch had never been cut, only briefly persuaded to pretend otherwise. Isolde stood at the stone with her ledger open and said nothing at all, which from Isolde is a paragraph. Six grains reversed. Six grains restored. The net of the rehearsal, of the blade I had made and named with its first cut, of eleven minutes of a prince counting like a man holding a rope: zero.I charted it twice. The numbers did not improve for being mine.The knife buys the length of the cutting and not one breath past it. Isolde had said that to him, not to me, but the palace carries sentences the way it carries everything else — eventually, and to the wrong door, and mine is apparently a door this house delivers to. I stood over the chart with my hands

The Frost Court arrived three days early, which is to say it arrived exactly when it meant to.Seventeen days remained to me. I had the number from Isolde at dawn, and I carried it downstairs the way I carry everything: itemised, and where it could not be used against me. Below it, unitemised, the other number — the one the rehearsal had given me. A branch regrows in a night. The knife buys the length of the cutting and not one breath past it. I had not yet found the sentence in which that could be told to the woman holding the knife, and the Frost Court had come to dinner in the meantime.I counted the embassy as it came through the garden court. Twenty-one riders in white and silver-grey. Six carriages that had no business being that clean after the north road. One herald, announcing a prince who required no announcement. And behind the courtesies, placed the way a second knife is placed, four clerks with a seals-box — the Frost Court had brought its registry office with it, in trav

Sixteen days remained to me. I had spent the first of them since the ball in the company of clerks, which is how a prince makes a confession in advance: on paper, in triplicate, with witnesses.The embassy had gone at dawn. The court had spent the day being very busy at the shapes of things. I spent it at a table in the chancery's back room with the name-keeper's clerk, Isolde, and an old seal, putting my affairs into the only order I have ever fully trusted — and at night I carried the third copy of the instrument myself, across the garden court, to the workroom range.There are thirty-seven steps from my door to hers. I counted them the night she arrived, out of professional habit, and I have used them since the way I use all the palace's measurements: as furniture to hold on to. Tonight I arrived at her door at twenty-nine and could not account for the difference. I stood in the corridor with the discrepancy and understood that my discipline, that old horse, was failing in an order

Fourteen days remained to me, and on the morning of the first of them the Frost Court stopped threatening and started filing.The demand came into council under seal — not Caspian's seal, which would have made it a letter between cousins, but the seal of the travelling registry itself, which made it an instrument. It was read aloud by the name-keeper's clerk, in the clerk's voice, which is trained to make any sentence sound like weather. The Court of Frost gives notice. An iron-hand found within the Dusk demesne, unentered. The court of record having had its season from the day of finding, the Court of Frost requires entry of the asset in the courts' register before the season closes, in default of which the Court of Frost will enter the asset in its own registry, with all that entry entails.Asset. Three times in nine lines. I have been a prince of this house for a hundred and forty-seven years and I had never heard the word do so much work while pretending to do none.The Frost regi