14
Ilinca
I heard him outside my door that night, or thought I did — footsteps that paused too long to be someone simply passing, a silence that stretched considerably longer than idle corridor traffic usually allowed before finally retreating the way it had come.
I lay awake turning it over, uncertain whether I'd imagined the whole of it, uncertain, more than anything, why the possibility that I hadn't imagined it left me feeling something closer to grief than relief.
He was going to tell me. I could see it building in him for days now, the tension of a man carrying something heavy enough that it had started to show in the set of his shoulders, the shorter answers, the way his eyes lingered on me sometimes like he was memorizing my face against some coming change.
And still, night after night, whatever it was stayed locked behind his teeth, and I had started to understand, with a clarity I didn't especially want, that waiting for someone else's courage was its own particular kind of exhausting.
I went looking on my own again the next morning, restless in a way sleep hadn't touched, and found, in a section of the sealed room I hadn't yet fully searched, a bundle of letters tied together with cord gone brittle and gray with age.
They were Katra's. I recognized her hand before I'd fully unfolded the first one — the same precise, economical script she'd used to label every ward I'd ever watched her carve, unchanged, apparently, across whatever years separated this correspondence from the woman who'd raised me.
The child is safe, the first letter read, addressed to no name I recognized, signed only with a small crescent-and-thorn mark drawn beneath the final line.
I have taken her south, beyond where the search has reached so far.
I will not write again until I judge it safe.
Tell the others the line holds, whatever else they hear.
The others. My hands had gone unsteady enough that I set the letter down carefully before I trusted myself to read further, and found, in the second letter, a name I hadn't encountered anywhere else in my search.
The loyalists grow fewer each year, Katra had written, in a hand that carried, even across the flat formality of old ink, something that read unmistakably as grief.
Three more taken this winter, in the eastern raids.
I do not know how many of us remain who still remember why we swore this particular oath.
I remain steady regardless. The child does not know what she carries, and I intend to keep it that way as long as I possibly can, whatever it costs either of us in the end.
I read that final letter three times, the singular ache of Katra's careful, deliberate silence finally given a shape I understood — not caution alone, not simple wardsmith's paranoia, but an oath, sworn to people whose names I would likely never learn, protecting a truth she'd carried, alone, for twelve years before it finally cost her everything.
The last letter in the bundle was dated barely a month before the night she died, and something in the particular urgency of its hand told me, before I'd read a single word, that Katra had known, even then, how little time she likely had left.
If this reaches you and I do not follow it, she'd written, the script noticeably less steady than the careful precision of her earlier letters, know that I do not regret the choice I made.
She has my whole heart now, whatever blood runs beneath it.
I ask only that whoever finds her next remembers she is a child first and a bloodline second, and treats her accordingly, for as long as the world allows her the mercy of being simply a child at all.
I pressed the letter flat against my chest, the paper thin and brittle under my fingers, and let myself cry for the first time in longer than I could easily measure — not the careful, contained grief I'd rationed out over six years of practiced smallness, but something larger, messier, finally given room enough to move through me the way it had needed to for a very long time.
The loyalists. An organization, or the remnant of one, scattered and dwindling, that had apparently spent generations protecting a bloodline they believed still mattered enough to die for.
Katra had been one of them. Katra had died one of them, on a shrine road with wolfsbane in her blood and a twelve-year-old girl she'd sworn to protect running ahead of her into the dark.
I sat with the letters a long while, feeling the vertigo of a life reorganizing itself around a truth too large to properly hold, and understood, with a certainty I hadn't fully possessed until that moment, exactly what Kason had been protecting me from telling myself, all these weeks.
Not simply a bloodline. A war that had never actually ended, only gone quiet, and a debt owed to people who'd died keeping me safe from it, entirely without my knowledge or consent.
I did not seek Kason out that day.
It wasn't a decision I made all at once, more a gradual withdrawal that built through the morning and into the afternoon, the specific defensive instinct of six years spent protecting myself from exactly this kind of overwhelming, unmanageable truth.
I worked alone in the archive wing with the door closed, turning away two separate attempts at conversation from servants passing through, and told myself, every time footsteps slowed outside the door and then moved on, that I was simply focused. Working. Not avoiding anything at all.
He came by at midday, I learned later, and left again without knocking when the door held firm against his hand.
I hadn't heard him. Some part of me understood, even then, that not hearing him had cost me considerably more than I'd realized in the moment, a small tear opening somewhere I couldn't see, widening slowly through the afternoon the way a hairline crack in old wood widens under weight it was never built to bear alone.
By mid-afternoon my hands had begun to shake on work that should have been simple enough not to require steady hands at all.
I dropped a folio I'd carried carefully for weeks, watched a corner crumple against the stone floor, and sat back on my heels with a frustration that felt entirely disproportionate to the small accident, understanding, dimly, that something substantially larger than clumsiness was moving through me.
By evening, something in my chest had tightened into a headache building slow and steady behind my eyes, the kind that had no obvious cause and refused to ease no matter how long I sat quietly in the dark, my appetite entirely absent though I hadn't eaten since morning, my thoughts sliding sideways whenever I tried to hold them on any single task for more than a few minutes at a time.
My wolf felt it too. Sluggish, restless in a way that had nothing to do with the wolf's usual rhythms, the particular discomfort of something straining against a distance it didn't want to hold.
I'd felt an echo of it once before, in the first week, when I'd deliberately avoided the archive wing for an entire day to prove to myself I still could, and dismissed it then as simple stubbornness catching up with me.
I no longer had the luxury of that dismissal. Sitting alone in my room with the headache building into something considerably worse, I understood, with the cold clarity that came from finally admitting something you'd spent weeks refusing to name, exactly what was happening to me.
The bond. Whatever it actually was, however it worked, it did not appreciate distance, and I had spent an entire day proving, deliberately, that I intended to keep some.
Yeva found me there near dusk, curled in the chair by my window with the shutters closed against a headache light only worsened, and took one look at me before crossing the room with real concern replacing her usual easy warmth.
"You look terrible."
"I feel terrible." I didn't have the energy to soften it further. "I think I've been avoiding your brother all day, and I think my own body has opinions about that decision it's making markedly more forcefully than I'd like."
Something shifted in Yeva's expression, careful understanding replacing surprise.
"The bond does that. I've heard the old stories — distance costs something, the longer either of you tries to hold it.
I didn't realize it started this early, before the bond's even been properly acknowledged between you. "
"I found something today. Letters. Katra was part of something — loyalists, she called them, sworn to protect the Frostmark line.
She died for that oath, Yeva, and I never knew, my entire life, that the woman who raised me was fighting a war I didn't even know existed.
" My voice cracked on the last of it, the exhaustion of the headache and the grief finally, fully catching up with me.
"I don't know how to hold all of this. I don't know how to be angry at your brother for not telling me sooner, when I understand, better than almost anyone, exactly how heavy a secret like this actually is to carry alone. "
Yeva sat on the edge of my bed, close enough to offer comfort without crowding it, and let the silence sit a while before she spoke again.
"You don't have to resolve all of it tonight.
But I don't think avoiding him is actually protecting either of you from the truth, Ilinca.
I think it's only delaying a conversation that's going to happen regardless, while making you sick in the meantime for no purpose beyond proving a point neither of you especially needs proven. "
"You sound like Dobrin."
"I'll take that as a compliment, given how thoroughly I approved of him." A small, tired smile crossed her face, though it faded quickly into something more serious. "Can I tell you something, Ilinca? About my own family, since I think it might actually help."
"Please."
"My father carried a secret about you for eighteen years before Kason ever brought you through our gates.
I only learned that a few weeks ago myself, and I understood, hearing it, exactly how a kind man can let a careful silence calcify into something that costs everyone around him considerably more than the truth ever would have.
I don't say that to excuse my brother. I say it because I don't think either of you is broken, or wrong, for struggling with this the way you're both currently struggling.
I think you're simply two people who've both spent your whole lives being taught that carrying things alone is safer than asking anyone to help carry them.
" She reached over and squeezed my hand, brief and warm.
"It isn't safer. It's simply lonelier. I'd like to see both of you learn the difference before it costs either of you as much as it's already cost my father. "
Something in the plain honesty of that settled deep in my chest, easing a tightness I hadn't fully realized I was still holding. "Thank you. For sitting with me tonight. I don't think I would have made it through the letters alone half as well as I did with you here."
"That's rather the point I'm making." She rose, smoothing her skirts, though her eyes stayed warm on my face.
"Rest tonight. The headache will pass faster with sleep than with worrying at it further.
And Ilinca — whatever Kason finally tells you, when he finds the courage, I hope you'll remember that the whole castle already thinks of you as one of us, blood or not.
Whatever name you carry, that part isn't going to change. "
She left me with that, and a cool cloth for my forehead that helped marginally, and I lay awake a long while after she'd gone, the headache finally beginning to ease as my own resolve settled into something far steadier than the day's exhausted withdrawal had allowed.
I gathered Katra's letters carefully before I finally let myself drift toward sleep, tying the brittle cord back around them with hands that had gone steady again for the first time since I'd found them, and set them on the small table beside my bed where I'd see them first thing in the morning — a reminder, deliberate and chosen, that whatever I decided to do with the truth they'd handed me, I intended to do it awake, and clear-headed, and no longer entirely alone.
I would go to him. Not to demand the truth he'd been withholding — I understood now, reading Katra's letters, precisely how much weight that particular silence actually carried, and found I no longer had the heart to be angry at him for struggling under it the same way she had.
I would go to him because Yeva was right, and because my own body had just spent an entire day teaching me, with headaches and hollow-boned exhaustion, exactly how much distance this particular bond was prepared to tolerate before it made its objections known.
Whatever waited on the other side of his silence, I understood, closing my eyes at last against the fading ache, we were going to face it together, or not at all.
Six years of managing everything alone had taught me considerably more about survival than about living, and I found, lying in the dark with Katra's letters still spread across my desk, that I wanted, badly, to finally learn the difference.