8
Ilinca
I understood, in the days that followed the Council's vote, exactly what it meant to trade one kind of smallness for another.
I'd spent six years making myself unremarkable enough that no one important ever thought to look at me twice.
Castle Ironmoor had solved that problem entirely, and replaced it with a different one — I was, as of a formal Council record I hadn't been present to argue against, the specific and named exception to a relocation order that applied to every other rogue in the kingdom, which meant every guard, every servant, every Voivode passing through the halls on Council business now knew precisely who I was and precisely why a prince had gone to the trouble of protecting me.
I couldn't leave the grounds without an escort.
I hadn't been told that directly — no one had sat me down and explained the new shape of my life in plain terms — but I'd tested it twice in the first week, walking toward the main gate with no particular destination in mind beyond simply wanting to know if I still could, and both times a guard had appeared at a polite, unhurried distance and asked, with perfect courtesy, whether I required an escort into the lower town.
I did not require an escort. I required, more than anything, the freedom of a life where no one noticed which direction I walked in, and that freedom, I understood now, had ended somewhere between a market wind carrying wet stone and clove-smoke and a Council vote I'd had no say in.
Be still.
The words followed me into sleep more nights than I wanted to admit, not as memory exactly but as sensation, the specific, wordless quiet that had settled over my wolf the instant Kason spoke them, and I spent considerable time in that first week trying to understand precisely what had happened to me, with no one to ask who might actually know the answer.
I'd grown up hearing pieces of the old stories, the way anyone raised near wolf territory did — mate bonds, Alpha commands, the particular supernatural intimacy that supposedly passed between two wolves fated to each other before either of them had any say in the matter.
I'd always assumed, in the vague, unexamined way you assume things about a world you've never expected to actually enter, that those stories were exaggerated.
Romanticized. The kind of tale that grew taller with every retelling until the truth underneath it had worn away entirely.
I no longer assumed that. I lay awake instead, turning the two words over and over, trying to reconcile the fact that a virtual stranger's voice had reached past six years of hard-won control and stilled something in me I hadn't given anyone permission to touch, and finding, every single time, that I had no framework at all for what that actually meant about the two of us, or about whatever this was, growing steadier and more certain by the day whether I gave it permission to or not.
The dream came on the fifth night, the way it sometimes did, though it had been months since the last one and I'd let myself believe, foolishly, that a new bed in a new castle might have finally left it behind in the Sorrowmarket where it belonged.
Wolfsbane, first. The acrid green bite of it, thick enough in the dream-air that I could taste it at the back of my throat, and then the horns, and then Katra's hand closing hard around my wrist, pulling me faster than my six-year-old legs wanted to run.
I never saw the hunters clearly in the dream, any more than I had that night — only shapes, moving fast through smoke, and the sound Katra made when the wolfsbane blade finally found her, a sound I still couldn't fully separate, waking, from a sound my own throat had made at some point during those same minutes and never quite finished making since.
I woke with my hand pressed hard against the scar at my collarbone, breath coming too fast, the taste of wolfsbane still somehow present at the back of my throat though nothing in the actual room carried even a trace of it.
I sat with it a long while before I trusted myself to move, the way I always did, letting my own pulse slow on its own schedule rather than fighting it. Six years of practice had taught me that fighting the aftermath only ever made it last longer.
It was the birthmark I found myself thinking of, once the shaking finally eased — the crescent-and-thorn mark under my hair that I'd carried my entire life without once wondering, seriously, where it had come from, or why Katra had never once mentioned it, or why a painted woman on a two-century-old wall had worn the same mark carved into stone at her throat like it meant something considerably larger than decoration.
I had spent six years not asking questions, because questions, in my experience, tended to be the exact thing that got a person noticed by whoever was doing the hunting.
But I was noticed now, formally, permanently, recorded in a Council vote I hadn't been present for, and the specific safety of staying unremarkable had already been taken from me regardless of anything further I chose to do about it.
If I was going to be seen, I decided, sitting alone in a castle bed with my pulse finally slowing and the last of the wolfsbane taste fading from the back of my throat, I intended to at least understand what I was being seen as.
The archive wing held records going back generations, Yeva had said. Old royal lineage work. Birth records, succession disputes, the kind of history nobody thought mattered until the day it suddenly did.
I intended to start there, at first light, and find out exactly why a stranger's two words had reached a part of me no stranger had any business reaching, and why an ancient painted queen wore my own birthmark like a crown.
I told myself I was there to work. That was true enough, in the way most of what I told myself was true enough without being the whole of it — the failed shelving genuinely did need my attention, and I spent the better part of the morning restoring warding lines on records nobody had properly protected in three years, my hands finding the old satisfaction of careful, exacting craft even with my mind circling elsewhere entirely.
But I worked my way toward the lineage records eventually, the way water finds the lowest point in a room without anyone deciding it should.
Most of it told me nothing useful. Generations of Draguvane succession, births and deaths and the occasional scandal recorded in the dry, formal language of court clerks who'd clearly never once considered that anyone outside the family might read their work centuries later.
I found nothing with a crescent-and-thorn mark attached to it, nothing that named the woman in the throne room mural, nothing that explained why a birthmark I'd carried my entire life sat quiet under my hair like a question nobody had ever thought to ask me.
I found, instead, gaps.
An entire section of shelving, near the back where the failed warding had been worst, held records that stopped abruptly at a specific date roughly two centuries past, resuming again only after a gap of nearly forty years with no explanation offered for the missing span.
I checked twice, certain I'd simply misplaced a folio somewhere in the disorder, and found, both times, the same clean, deliberate absence.
Not damage. Not decay. The kind of gap that came from someone, at some point, removing records on purpose and leaving no trace of what they'd taken.
"Looking for something specific?"
I hadn't heard Kason in the doorway, which told me how deep I'd gone into the search, and I straightened fast enough that a stack of loose folios slid sideways under my elbow.
"History," I said, which was true, and vague enough not to require further explanation I wasn't yet ready to give.
"There's a gap. Forty years, give or take, right around the time the throne room murals were likely painted.
Records stop, then start again decades later like nothing happened in between. "
Something crossed his face, there and gone fast enough that I might have doubted I'd seen it at all if I hadn't spent five days now learning the particular grammar of his expressions.
Caution. Careful, deliberate caution, the kind that came from a man weighing exactly how much truth a given moment could safely hold.
"A lot of records were lost during the old wars," he said. "Whole libraries burned in some of the border conflicts. It's not unusual to find gaps that far back."
"This isn't burned. It's removed. There's a difference in how the shelf reads, if you know what you're looking at.
" I watched him carefully, gauging the stillness that had come over him, the same stillness I'd watched him hold in front of a full crowd of Voivodes, and understood, with a cold certainty I didn't entirely want, that he knew something about this gap he wasn't currently telling me.
"Do you know what happened, forty years before the murals were painted? "
"I know the general history. Nothing specific enough to be useful to you.
" He said it evenly, carefully, and I might have believed him entirely if I hadn't caught, underneath the words, the same careful flatness he'd used describing the murals themselves on my first night in the castle.
"The old founding history. Before my family held the throne. "
"You said that before. About the murals."
"Because it's true."
"It's true and it's also not the whole of it," I said, echoing, without entirely meaning to, the exact words I'd used to describe my own careful honesty to him five days ago in a market stall.
Something in his expression flickered at the recognition, and for one long moment neither of us said anything at all, the silence stretching taut between two people who'd both just noticed the other one holding something back.
"Ilinca." My name, careful and low, and something in the way he said it made my pulse do the unsteady thing it always did around him, even now, even with suspicion sitting cold in my chest. "I need a little more time before I can give you the answers you're looking for.
I promise you'll have them. I'm asking you to trust that the timing matters, and that I'm not withholding anything to hurt you. "
"That's a very careful sentence for a man who claims he doesn't know anything specific."
"It is," he admitted, and didn't try to walk it back, which was somehow worse than a denial would have been, because it meant he knew exactly how it sounded and had chosen to say it anyway.
I let it go. Not because I believed him entirely, but because six years of careful survival had taught me the distinct value of not pushing a door before you understood what stood on the other side of it, and because some traitorous, bond-warmed part of me wanted, badly, to trust the plain honesty of I'm asking you to trust that the timing matters even as the wardsmith in me catalogued every gap in his answer with the same careful attention I gave a stranger's craft before I trusted it with my own hands.
"Fine," I said. "I'll wait for your timing. But I'm not going to stop looking in the meantime."
"I wouldn't expect you to." Something that might have been respect moved across his face, quiet and real. "You're not built for waiting quietly. I noticed that the first day I met you."
"Was that before or after your soldier nearly lost a hand."
"Before," he said, and something in the easy give-and-take of it loosened the tension enough that I found myself, despite everything, almost smiling. "Well before. I noticed much before that."
He left me alone with the gap in the shelving and a great many more questions than I'd walked in with that morning, and I sat a long while after he'd gone, running my thumb along the empty space where forty years of history should have been, and thought of a birthmark I'd never questioned, and a scar I still couldn't look at directly, and a prince who'd just told me, as plainly as careful words allowed, that whatever waited in that gap concerned me more than either of us had said out loud yet.
I intended to find out what, with or without his timing.
Yeva found me still sitting among the folios that evening, well past the hour any reasonable person would still be working, and settled onto the floor beside me without a shred of the formality I'd have expected from a princess sitting on dusty stone in an evening gown.
"You've found the gap," she said, matter-of-fact, glancing at the empty shelf space I hadn't bothered to disguise.
"You knew it was there."
"I grew up in this castle. I've known about that gap since I was old enough to be curious about things I wasn't supposed to ask about.
" She said it lightly, though something careful sat underneath the lightness, the same careful flatness I'd heard from her brother an hour before.
"I'm not going to lie to you and tell you it's nothing.
I'm also not going to be the one who tells you what it actually is.
That's not mine to give you. I hope you understand the difference. "
"Does it have something to do with why I dream about wolfsbane most nights?"
The question surprised her, I could tell, though she recovered fast enough that I might have missed it if I hadn't spent five days now learning to watch for exactly that kind of flicker in both Draguvane siblings.
"I don't know what you dream about, Ilinca.
I do know that whatever's in that gap matters enough that my father's kept it sealed for longer than I've been alive, and I know my brother wouldn't have claimed you in front of the entire Council over a simple restoration commission if the two things weren't connected somehow. "
"That's not an answer."
"No," she agreed, gentle about it in a way that took most of the sting out.
"It's not. But I'll tell you this much, because I think you've earned at least this — whatever's in that gap, it's not something that happened to you by accident.
And when it comes out, and it will come out, I don't think you're going to be alone standing in the middle of it.
Whatever else you decide to think of my brother, I don't think he'd let that happen to you. "
She left me with that, and a hand briefly warm on my shoulder, and I sat alone in the archive wing long after the last of the daylight had gone, turning the birthmark under my hair and the scar at my collarbone and a forty-year gap in a royal family's history over and over until they'd worn themselves into a single, unshakable question I no longer had any way of putting back down.
What am I, that a kingdom would go to this much trouble to keep it from me?
I didn't have an answer yet. I understood, closing the last folio and finally rising to find my bed, that I was no longer entirely certain I wanted one — and that wanting or not wanting it had stopped, somewhere in the last five days, being a choice that belonged to me alone.