Chapter Twenty-Four
Hermes walks the halls of the palace alone. At first, I think he’s heading to the alchemy wing, maybe sent by Adria to fetch her an elixir of some kind, but he keeps going past it and down some stairs to a familiar door.
It’s the locked door I went through when I arrived.
I don’t follow him through it—the hallway is too narrow, and he’ll be able to hear me within the passage even if he can’t see me in the shadows.
But I know exactly where the passage leads, so I head through the palace gates to the same alley, stopping only to ask one of the guards—it’s Stella, thankfully, one of the few that I recognize—to borrow her cloak.
Stella gives it to me without question, but then she offers to accompany me wherever I’m going.
“No need,” I say. “I’m just heading to the market.”
“It won’t be open, ma’am.” Stella gives me a sideways glance.
I hadn’t realized it before, but she doesn’t look much like your typical guard aside from the armor and closely cropped hair.
While she’s clearly strong enough to wear her chainmail day in and out without complaint, her facial features are petite, almost delicate.
Her brown eyes lack the sort of glazed look many of the guards take on after standing in the same place all day.
They’re shrewd, cunning. Something about her reminds me of my mother.
“Fine,” I say, seeing no point in trying to lie. “I’m not heading to the market.”
“I have to go with you,” she says with zero hesitation.
“Did he order you to? If I ever left the palace alone?”
“Yes.”
“And if I tell you no, you’ll follow me anyway?”
“Yes.”
Ronan won’t like this. There’s a chance, albeit slim, that Stella could be involved in whatever Hermes and the alchemists are doing. But I don’t have time to argue with her, and I don’t have the time or the inclination to get his permission.
“Keep a distance from me. I’m trying to remain unseen.”
If she can manage to track me in the darkness, I’ll be impressed.
I slip her black cloak on and vanish into the shadows just in time to see Hermes emerging through the passage.
I follow him through a series of alleys, concerned at first that he’s leading me into a trap, but eventually I realize it hasn’t even occurred to him that he could be followed.
He heads directly to the alley where Ronan and I were just this morning.
There’s someone else waiting there for him in a brown robe. The other person is turned so I can’t see them, but they’re smaller than Hermes. A tall woman, perhaps, or a smaller man.
They don’t stop for conversation. They enter a door—the door Mery must have shown the guards—and close it behind them.
It is the alchemists, then. Or at least some of them. If Hermes is responsible in some way for kidnapping Vesper—
Did Adria put him up to it? She asked me about the missing shadow-born that time, although she’s never mentioned it since. I can’t see why she would take an interest in them, unless she somehow knew about their connection to Ronan.
But what other explanation is there for Hermes being here?
I decide to leave somehow getting information out of Adria for another time. I have an opportunity right now to find Vesper, and I don’t intend to miss it.
I wait until Stella arrives in the alley, and then I creep along the shadows to her.
“Shit!” she says when I drop them. She has her sword halfway drawn before she realizes it’s me. “Sorry, ma’am. I lost you somewhere back there.”
“They went in that doorway,” I whisper. “I’m going to follow.”
“Who did?” she asks. “What are we doing out here?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just wait a few minutes, and if I don’t come back out, come in after me. Or let Ronan know where I went.”
“No,” she says. She sheathes the sword and stands in front of me, defiant. “The king would never allow it. Either you take me in there with you, or I’ll take you back to the palace myself.”
She’s bold for someone so young, much bolder than she was with Ronan. She’ll learn her lesson about defying nobility at some point, but right now, I’m actually glad she wants to go in there with me. I’m a little scared of what’s inside.
“Come on then,” I say, leading her to the doorway.
I listen through the door before we enter. Silence on the other side. I wish Ronan were here, and not just because he could tell how many people were waiting in the room.
I try the handle. Locked.
“Let’s go,” says Stella, looking around the alley anxiously.
I don’t have my rake with me, but I do have some pins in my hair from where the laurel crown was placed. I take them out and begin fumbling with the lock.
After a moment, Stella takes the pins from my hands. But rather than lead me away from the door, she begins to pick it. She makes quick work of it, even quicker than I typically manage with better tools.
“Where’d you learn that?” I ask her as the door pops open.
“I grew up in the palace,” she says, as if that explains it.
I swing the door in slowly. It creaks a bit, which makes me wince, but if Hermes and whoever he was meeting are still there, they don’t come to investigate.
“I’ll just go in first in shadow—”
“No,” says Stella, brushing past me. She draws her sword and looks around, the dim moonlight coming through the door the only light to guide her.
The room is small and sparsely furnished, with no doorways in sight.
Shelves cling to the walls at odd angles, their contents long since removed.
Between two battered desks with drawers hanging open and empty, a cluster of crates sits beneath moth-eaten fabric.
A few frames linger on the walls, their pictures gone.
Everything is coated in a layer of dust.
There’s no sign anyone has been here at all.
“There must be some kind of trap door. Some kind of passage. See if you can find anything.”
“Can I light a candle?” Stella asks, pulling one from her pocket.
“No.” It’s too much of a risk. If a candle is seen from within, they may realize we’re onto them. “Take this side.” I let her search the side of the room nearest to the door while I look in the dark corners.
It’s tense for the first few minutes, but we eventually relax somewhat once we realize no one is coming.
“How did you become a guard?” I ask her as we’re each combing over the walls for gaps or secret buttons. “You don’t seem much like one.”
“I grew up in the palace, as I said. My mother was one of Queen Calia’s chambermaids.”
Queen Calia, Ronan’s mother. “Was?”
“Until Queen Calia died. King Aurelian dismissed all of her staff a few months after her passing. I was eight years old. It was just before the war began. The harvest had been poor that year, and there wasn’t much work around. We struggled for about a month before Ronan found us.”
“Found you where?”
“At a boarding house near the docks, sleeping in a bunk room with a dozen others. He tracked down all of his mother’s dismissed servants and invented reasons to bring them back. He hired my mother to teach him the lute. She was playing in the tavern for a bit of coin at the time.”
So that’s how he learned to play. “Why did he do that? Just to be kind?”
“Maybe. But maybe also to keep his mother’s memory around for a bit longer. When the war began, my mother served with him, in his army.”
I can guess how the next part of the story goes. “She died in the war?”
Stella nods, looking at me out of the corner of her eye as she examines the desk in the corner.
“With her gone, they let me stay in the palace as long as I did some chores and stayed out of the way. After the war, I asked Ronan to train to be one of his guards. I didn’t want to be a maid, but I wanted to be around him.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think it was for the same reason that he saved us: to keep the memory of my own mother alive a while longer.
He still plays her lute sometimes.” She smiles as she says it for a quick moment before straightening her expression and returning to the task at hand.
She loves him, like they all love him.
And I’m beginning to understand why. The thought of him playing Stella’s mother’s lute just to make Stella happy is almost unbearable.
Everything I thought about him was wrong.
I think back to the time he told me that everyone loves him. I’d dismissed it as the sort of cocky nonsense that someone like him would say, someone who had been brought up to believe that he was better than everyone else by nature of his birth.
But he was right: everyone does love him.
And they love him not because they have to or in spite of who he is or what he does, the way that I love Adria and Seth.
They love him because he cares for them.
Because they all have a story just like this one, a moment where he saw something he could do to help, and he did it.
Because he’s kind and good. They choose to protect him because they believe he’s worth protecting.
I’m beginning to believe it as well, and that thought scares me more than anything that’s happened tonight.
We search the room until the bells chime the next hour, finding nothing. It’s like Hermes and his companion never even came in here.
“Come on, Sylvie,” says Stella. “There’s nothing here. Let me take you back to the palace.”
I let her, thanking her for helping me even though we failed and asking her to keep quiet about it to anyone other than Ronan. I’m heading towards Ronan’s chambers to wait for him to give him the news about Hermes when Adria finds me in the hallway.
She’s wearing one of our mother’s dresses, a navy-blue gown that fits awkwardly on her muscular shoulders, and it looks like she’s coming from the party.
“I heard you put on quite a show tonight before I arrived. Titus and then Ronan. They say Ronan was furious when you left the dance floor together.”
“Somewhat,” I admit.
“I really have to hand it to you, sis. You are far better at this than I expected.”
She’s been drinking heavily, by the smell of wine on her breath and the sway of her step.
I change my plans. I can tell Ronan in the morning about Hermes if Stella doesn’t tell him first. But I have a chance here with Adria while she’s drunk.
A chance to get some answers out of her.
“I have so many things to tell you,” I say. I stop a servant and ask for another bottle of wine to be sent to our chambers.
We change into our nightgowns, and I pour us each a glass once the bottle arrives. She drinks hers indulgently, but I merely sip mine.
I start by congratulating her on her victory over Quinn.
“It was too easy, really,” she tells me. “Titus was a better fight. I bet he’d be a better fuck too.”
She never talks to me like this. Either she’s really happy with me or truly drunk, but either way, I take it as a good sign.
“I think Quinn has a bit more experience than Titus on both counts.”
“He’s a baby, isn’t he? Same age as you, I think. You’re twenty-two?”
Almost. My birthday is in a month, right at the end of the Festival of Arts. I hadn’t even thought about it. “Twenty-one until next month.”
“That’s right. Quinn’s twenty-seven, same as Seth. I’m surprised her father didn’t force her to marry with only Typhon left to inherit.”
“I don’t think there’s much forcing that you can do with her.”
“I managed well enough today. Forced her to make a fool out of herself.” She laughs harder than her own joke merits.
I pour her another glass. “Why haven’t you married?”
“You want to know something fucked up? The only good thing about Mother and Father being gone is I don’t have to get married.
They would have made me if they were alive, but they aren’t, so they can’t.
You and Seth can carry on the family name.
I don’t give a fuck about any of that. Although I guess you won’t be getting married anytime soon with Ronan there blocking anyone decent from having a chance. ”
I shush her; she’s being loud, and the servants could still be nearby.
I don’t know how long I have until she’s incoherent or passed out, so I decide to try my luck with some of the things I want to know.
“I have some good news,” I tell her. “Ronan is increasing the grain shipments. I told him about our shortages, and he’s promised to send as much as we need to make up for the losses.”
“Oh,” she says. She sways on the edge of the bed. “That’s good. Good news.”
Her delivery is entirely unconvincing. I decide to press on.
“I thought you would want to know. So you can do something about it.”
“What do you mean?” She sits upright, suddenly alert. Is she faking being drunk, or is she just having a moment of lucidity?
It’s such a risk to say what I’m about to say, but I have to know the truth. “I mean that whatever you’ve been doing, you’re going to need to do more of it. To the grain. Whatever scheme you have going, it’s about to get harder.”
I clench my jaw and take a tiny sip of wine through thin-pressed lips, grateful she can’t feel what I’m feeling.
She starts to laugh. Then she stops, and she starts again, pointing her finger at me from around her wineglass. “Well, well, well. Look who’s finally living up to the family name. Even Larus hasn’t worked that one out yet.”
I do my best to appear nonchalant, unbothered by this sudden confirmation. “I figured he didn’t know. Or Typhon. That mustn’t have been easy.”
“You have no idea,” she says. “I’ve had to ride Seth’s ass about it for more than a year.
We hire bandits, they send more guards. We let water into the storage, they send more grain.
It’s a fucking arms race. But they handed us the opportunity with those rotten shipments, and we couldn’t let it go to waste. ”
“It’s a delicate balance,” I say, trying not to let her see my disgust. My horror. “Keeping the people fed enough to fight but hungry enough to want to.” It’s exactly the thought I had when Ronan told me, but deep down, I didn’t believe it.
But it’s true. They did this, my own siblings. They let our people sit on the brink of starvation—let some of them starve—on purpose.
For what?
Revenge?
“Those bandits on the road,” I ask her, piecing something together. The people who attacked us when we were on our way here—she had ordered me to kill one of them when she started talking. “Were they some of yours?”
“Probably. I don’t even know. Seth has one of his men hire them.
Fuck, Sylvie, we underestimated you. I underestimated you.
I thought Larus had made you soft. I hated that you grew up with him.
You needed Mother’s grit and Father’s firm hand to guide you.
I thought you were a lost cause. But you figured it out, and all on your own.
You’re clever. Cleverer than Seth by far. Maybe cleverer than me.”
“Maybe I will be someday,” I say. She takes it as a compliment, but it’s not.
It’s a promise.