6
Ilinca
Castle Ironmoor announced itself an hour before we reached it, the way weather announces itself before it arrives — a darkness on the mountain that resolved, slowly, out of what I'd assumed was simply more stone, into towers and battlements and a black-rock face that seemed to grow directly out of the cliff it was built on, as though someone had asked the mountain politely to become a castle and the mountain had obliged out of pure stubbornness.
I had spent six years telling myself I had no curiosity left about the world past the market gates.
Six years was, apparently, not quite long enough to kill it entirely, because I spent the last mile of that ride with my head out the carriage window like a child, and caught Yeva watching me do it with an expression I couldn't fully read and didn't have the composure to ask about.
"Everyone does that," she said, not unkindly. "The first time."
"I'm not everyone."
"No," she agreed, and there was something underneath the easy words that I filed away without examining too closely. "You're really not."
The road climbed steadily the last few miles, pine giving way to bare black rock, the air thinning enough that I found myself pulling my cloak tighter than the temperature alone accounted for.
I'd grown up, in the years before Katra, hearing the wolf kingdom spoken of the way people speak of weather too far off to worry about — real, certainly, but distant enough not to require any particular feeling about it.
Six years in the Sorrowmarket had taught me otherwise.
The mountain wasn't distant at all. It had simply been waiting, the entire time, at the very edge of a life I'd built specifically to never require me to look at it directly.
I looked at it directly now. I couldn't seem to stop.
The gate guards knew Yeva by sight and waved the carriage through without a second glance, which told me more about how rarely anyone questioned a princess's business than any conversation could have.
I'd expected questions. Papers. Some formal accounting of who I was and why I'd been brought through a gate that, six years ago and every year since, would have had every reason to turn a hooded rogue away without a word of explanation owed.
Nobody asked me anything at all.
The courtyard opened up into more stone, black and ancient and worn smooth in patterns that suggested centuries of feet crossing the same ground, and I understood, walking it, in a way I hadn't quite understood from the carriage window, the exact scale of what I'd agreed to.
My entire rented room above the dye-shop could have fit inside the courtyard's central fountain with room to spare.
My entire six years in the Sorrowmarket, every coin counted twice, every ward carved small enough to matter to nobody, sat somewhere very far away from black stone halls two centuries old.
Kason met us at the base of the main steps, and something in his posture shifted the moment his eyes found mine — not the careful, commanding stillness I'd watched him hold in front of his own soldier, but something looser, almost unguarded, gone again so fast I might have imagined it if I hadn't spent two days now learning to read the particular grammar of his face.
"Welcome to Castle Ironmoor," he said, and there was nothing in the words themselves that should have landed the way they did, except that he'd said my full name the same careful way two days ago, like it deserved more attention than most people had ever given it, and some part of me had apparently decided that pattern was worth paying attention to.
"It's larger than I expected," I said, which was true and also the safest thing I currently had available to say out loud.
"Everyone says that." Yeva was already moving, brisk and purposeful, the same efficiency she'd shown at my stall two days before. "Come on. I want to show you the archive wing before the light goes. You'll want to see it in daylight the first time, trust me."
The archive wing smelled like every old room I'd ever loved — dust and old paper and the dry mineral scent of stone that had held silence for longer than anyone currently walking its halls had been alive.
Three years sealed off, Yeva had said, and it showed in the careful layer of neglect over everything, shelves half-collapsed, warding lines gone brittle and cracked along seams that should have held for another century at least.
My hands itched the moment I walked in. I hadn't felt that particular itch — the wanting, the need to fix something broken with my own two hands — in longer than I could easily place, and I stood in the doorway a moment just letting it settle over me before I trusted myself to move further into the room.
"This is the worst of it," Yeva said, leading me past shelf after shelf of records I didn't yet have permission to read, toward a section near the back where the warding lines had failed almost completely, wood gone gray and lifeless where it should have hummed faintly under a trained hand.
"Records going back generations. Some of it's the old royal lineage work — birth records, succession disputes, the kind of history nobody thinks matters until the day it suddenly does. "
I crouched by the failed shelf and let my fingers hover over the dead warding line, reading its shape without touching it yet, the way Katra had taught me to read a stranger's craft before I ever tried to repair it.
Old work. Old and good, once, carved by a hand that had known exactly what it was doing, decades before whatever neglect had let it die.
"Whoever carved this originally," I said, "knew the old scripts. Properly. This isn't decorative work. This is protection-grade craft, the kind you'd use on something worth actually protecting."
"That would be the point, yes." Yeva's voice had gone carefully neutral in a way I noticed and couldn't yet place a reason for.
I let my fingers rest properly against the dead ward this time, testing the shape of the old script under my palm the way Katra had taught me — not reading it exactly, more feeling for the memory of what it had once been, the ghost of a working craft still faintly present in wood that hadn't held a proper charge in years.
"This could be restored. Not easily. Whoever did the original work used a script I've only seen in a handful of very old House-wards, the kind nobody carves anymore because nobody's bothered teaching it. But it's not gone. Just asleep."
"Can you wake it?"
"Given time, and good light, and probably more patience than either of us currently has for one afternoon.
" I looked up at her, and something in my own voice surprised me — an eagerness I hadn't let myself feel about my own craft in longer than I wanted to admit.
"I'd need to study the rest of the wing first. See how much of it shares the same original hand.
Restoration only works if you understand the whole pattern, not just the piece in front of you. "
"Take whatever time you need." Yeva said it easily, though there was something underneath the ease that I couldn't yet place — a carefulness that didn't quite match the casual tone. "The wing isn't going anywhere. Neither, I suspect, are you, for a while."
I didn't ask what she meant by that. Some part of me suspected I already knew, in the vague, unexamined way you know a storm is building before the first cloud crosses the sun, and I wasn't yet ready to look at it any more directly than I'd looked at the mountain from the carriage window.
"Come on," Yeva said, before the silence could stretch too long. "I'll show you the throne room before we lose the light entirely. You'll be sleeping in the east wing tonight, and the throne room's on the way."
I would like to say I walked into the throne room and understood, immediately, in some great clarifying flash, exactly what I was looking at.
I did not. I walked in the way anyone walks into a room built to overwhelm — slow, small, aware of my own insignificance against the scale of black stone columns rising three stories to a ceiling lost in shadow — and let my eyes travel the murals covering the walls the way anyone's eyes would, admiring craft without recognizing history.
They were old. Older than the castle itself, I thought, judging by the style — figures rendered in the flat, formal lines of an era before anyone currently alive had been born, wolves and crowns and a woman standing at the center of the largest panel with her hand raised, palm out, something carved into the stone at her collar that the torchlight caught and lost too fast for me to properly place.
A crescent. A thorn beneath it, curved to cradle the crescent's open edge.
My hand went to the back of my own neck before I'd decided to move it, fingers finding the place beneath my hairline where a birthmark I'd stopped thinking about years ago sat quiet under my hair, and I told myself, the way I told myself most inconvenient things, that it meant nothing.
A common enough symbol. Crescents and thorns were the kind of decorative flourish that showed up in half the old craft I'd ever studied, meaningless as coincidence, and I had absolutely no reason to feel the singular cold that had just settled low in my stomach looking at a wall of paint two centuries dry.
"Are you all right?" Kason's voice, closer than I'd realized, and I dropped my hand from my neck fast enough that I hoped he hadn't caught the gesture.
"Fine. It's a lot to take in, all at once."
He studied me a moment longer than the answer strictly warranted, the same careful, reading attention he'd given the ward on my table two days before, and I had the distinct, uncomfortable sense that he'd noticed considerably more than I'd meant to show him.
"The murals depict the old founding history," he said, gesturing at the panel with the raised-hand woman without quite looking at it himself, in a way I noticed and filed away without understanding why.
"Before my family held the throne. It's ancient enough now that most of the specifics have been lost to time.
We keep the murals for the craft, mostly. History for history's sake."
Something in the careful, deliberate flatness of that answer didn't sit right, though I couldn't have said precisely why, and I let it go the way I let most things go when I didn't yet trust my own instincts enough to chase them.
"It's beautiful work," I said instead, which was true, and safer than anything else currently sitting in my chest.
"It is." He was looking at me when he said it, not the mural, and I felt my pulse do the same unsteady thing it had done every time he'd looked at me like that since a market wind first carried his scent to me two days ago.
Yeva insisted I take supper with the two of them rather than alone in my room, on the grounds — stated with a perfectly straight face — that a wardsmith who'd just crossed an entire kingdom deserved a proper meal before her first night in a strange bed, and I hadn't yet found the will to argue with anything Yeva decided on my behalf.
The dining hall was smaller than I'd braced for, a private table set near a fire rather than the vast formal chamber I'd half expected, and something in that smallness let me breathe a little easier than the throne room had allowed.
"You're staring at the cutlery like it might attack you," Yeva observed, halfway through the first course, not unkindly.
"There are four forks."
"There are four forks because the kitchen staff enjoy showing off, not because anyone actually expects you to use all of them correctly.
" Kason said it with the particular dryness I was starting to recognize as entirely his own, distinct from anything I'd have expected from a prince raised on formal court manners.
"I still don't use all of them correctly, and I've had eighteen years of practice. "
"That's reassuring."
"It's meant to be."
Yeva watched the exchange with open, unhidden interest, the way a woman watches a puzzle assembling itself faster than she'd expected. "You two have known each other three days."
"Two," Kason corrected.
"Two, and you're already bickering about cutlery like an old married couple.
I find that fascinating." She said it lightly, though her eyes, when they moved to me, carried something significantly more searching underneath the teasing.
"Do you have family, Ilinca? Somewhere you'll want word sent, now that you're settling in for a while? "
The question landed harder than she likely meant it to. "No. It's just been me for a long while now."
Something shifted in Yeva's expression, quick and gone, replaced by an easy warmth that I suspected cost her more effort than it looked like. "Then you have us for now, for whatever that's worth. Kason's insufferable at cards, but I'm told I'm excellent company."
"She cheats at cards," Kason said.
"I redistribute luck. There's a difference."
I found myself laughing before I'd fully decided to, an easy, unguarded sound I hadn't let out in front of strangers in longer than I could comfortably measure, and caught Kason watching me do it with an expression that made my chest go warm and unsteady in a way I still hadn't found the words for.
They gave me a room in the east wing larger than my entire life above the dye-shop, a bed with more pillows than any single person could reasonably need, and a window that looked out over the black cliffs toward mountains I'd spent six years pretending I had no interest in crossing.
I did not sleep well. Not from fear, exactly — nothing in that room had given me a single reason to be afraid, and the guards Yeva had mentioned in passing, stationed discreetly enough at the corridor's end that I'd nearly missed them, suggested someone had already thought considerably harder about my safety than I'd expected anyone to bother doing.
It was something quieter than fear that kept me awake.
The, dislocating strangeness of a room too large and too silent after six years of a market town's noise never quite fully fading even at midnight.
The crescent-and-thorn mark on an ancient painted woman's collar, and the birthmark under my own hair that I hadn't let myself think about properly in years, sitting side by side in my mind in a way I didn't yet have the courage to examine directly.
And underneath all of it, quieter still, the fact that somewhere down the same dark hallway, close enough that some traitorous part of my senses had already located the exact direction without being asked to, was a man whose voice had reached into me two days ago and stilled something I'd spent six years keeping leashed entirely on my own.
I fell asleep, eventually, with my hand curled against the scar at my collarbone, the way it always ended up whether I meant it to or not, and dreamed of a woman with a raised hand and a hollow oak and a name I couldn't quite catch before I woke.