16
Ilinca
News of the broken Sorcha arrangement had apparently traveled through Castle Ironmoor faster than Kason's convoy had ridden out to meet the Unbound, and I understood the full shape of that traveling the moment I walked into the east courtyard the next morning and felt an entire cluster of visiting court ladies go pointedly, deliberately silent.
"The wardsmith," one of them said, once I'd passed close enough that pretending not to notice me had apparently become more effort than simply speaking plainly.
Lady Iolanthe, I'd learned her name was, wife to a Voivode from the southern packs, visiting ahead of the Gathering with the particular restless curiosity of someone who considered court gossip a competitive sport.
"I do wonder what it must be like, being the reason a decade of careful alliance-building came apart in a single conversation. "
"I wouldn't know," I said, keeping my voice as level as I'd once kept it facing down envoys who'd tried to cheat me over six coppers. "I wasn't in the room for that conversation. You'd have to ask the two people who actually were."
"How diplomatic of you." Something sharp moved behind her polite smile. "Though I imagine diplomacy comes rather easily when you've already secured everything you came here for."
"I came here to restore a three-year-neglected archive wing.
I've done that work honestly, and I intend to keep doing it, regardless of what conclusions you and your friends have already decided to draw about the rest of it.
" I held her gaze without flinching, the same steady refusal to lower my eyes that had once made a wolf envoy back down over a coin dispute.
"If you have a genuine question about my presence here, Lady Iolanthe, I'm happy to answer it plainly.
If you're simply looking for a story to carry back to the southern packs, I'd rather not waste either of our mornings pretending otherwise. "
"You're rather bold, for someone with no pack and no formal standing at this court."
"I've been considerably bolder with people who had far more power over me than you currently do, and survived it well enough.
" I let that sit a moment, watching her recalculate in real time.
"I spent six years telling wolf nobility exactly what I thought of their manners over a market stall, Lady Iolanthe.
I don't intend to start lowering my voice now that the stall in question happens to be a royal courtyard instead. "
One of her companions actually laughed at that, quickly smothered, and Lady Iolanthe's composed expression tightened by a fraction she likely didn't intend to show.
Something flickered across her face — not quite respect, closer to recalculation, the reassessment of a woman who'd expected easier prey and found, instead, someone far less inclined to shrink from the confrontation.
She didn't apologize. She also didn't press further, gathering her small cluster of companions and moving on with considerably less certainty in her step than she'd arrived with.
I understood, watching her go, that I'd just made an enemy, or at minimum a critic with a sharp tongue and a wide audience. I found I couldn't bring myself to particularly regret it.
I spent the rest of the morning in the archive wing, working through the specific restlessness the confrontation had left behind with the only tool I'd ever trusted to steady me — my hands, occupied, a ward taking shape beneath careful, deliberate cuts that asked for nothing except my full attention.
The wing had become, in seven weeks, something closer to a proper workshop than a restoration project, most of the failed shelving reawakened, the dead warding lines humming again under a trained hand for the first time in years.
I found myself, that morning, grateful for the work in a way that went beyond simple satisfaction — grateful, specifically, for a task large enough to occupy the part of my mind that wanted, badly, to spiral into every possible shape Halmar's Council might already be building around my name.
I overheard the Council by accident, passing the war room's outer corridor on an errand that had nothing to do with eavesdropping, and stopped the moment Halmar's voice carried clearly enough through the half-open door to catch a single word that stilled my whole body where I stood.
"—the Frostmark rumor has reached much further than this Council anticipated," he was saying, his voice carrying the particular gravity he brought to genuine security concerns rather than political maneuvering.
"If there's truth to it, this kingdom needs to know before the Gathering, not after.
An unconfirmed heir circulating as rumor among thirty Voivodes is a considerably more dangerous situation than a confirmed one this throne has already secured. "
"We don't have confirmation," another voice said — Renner, I thought, though I couldn't be entirely certain through the door. "Only the same pattern of interrogations we've been tracking for months. The Unbound clearly believes something. That's not the same as this Council having proof."
"Proof or not, the rumor itself is dangerous.
If Voivode Ossendrei believes he's close, and this Council has no official position on the matter, we risk him acting unilaterally before the throne has any chance to manage the consequences.
" Halmar's voice had gone harder, more urgent.
"I want an official inquiry opened. Discreetly, but properly — every unexplained arrival in this castle over the past two months, cross-referenced against the old Frostmark records, before this rumor forces our hand entirely. "
"And if the inquiry finds something?" A third voice, quieter, one I didn't recognize immediately.
"What does this Council intend to do with a confirmed heir, Halmar?
Restore a bloodline this throne was built over two centuries ago?
That's not a security question anymore. That's a succession question, and I don't think this Council has the stomach for the fight that particular question would open. "
"Then this Council had better find its stomach quickly," Halmar said, flat and final, "because I don't believe the question is going to wait for our comfort to catch up with it."
I did not wait to hear the rest of it. I walked, quickly and quietly, back the way I'd come, my heart hammering hard enough that I felt it in my throat, and found the nearest empty room to simply stand in for a moment, breathing, until the vertigo of hearing my own unspoken fear given official Council language finally began to ease.
Every unexplained arrival over the past two months.
That was me. That had always, from the very first day I'd walked through Castle Ironmoor's gates, been me, and I understood now, standing alone in an empty room with my pulse refusing to settle, that whatever careful anonymity I'd hoped my formal commission provided had already begun eroding, whether Kason had found the courage to tell me the whole truth or not.
A succession question. The phrase caught and held in my chest longer than the rest, significantly larger and more frightening than a simple matter of bloodline curiosity.
Whatever I was, however this eventually unfolded, some part of this castle's Council had already begun to understand it as something that could reshape the throne itself, and I did not yet have the first idea what that might actually mean for a woman who, seven weeks ago, had wanted nothing more from her life than a quiet stall and enough coin to eat properly through the winter.
Yeva found me there, drawn by some instinct I'd come to recognize as entirely genuine rather than merely convenient, and took one look at my face before closing the door behind her.
"You heard something."
"I heard the Council discussing an official inquiry into every unexplained arrival at this castle over the past two months.
" I kept my voice steady through sheer effort, the distinct discipline six years of careful survival had taught me.
"I don't need Kason to confirm anything at this point, Yeva.
I understand well enough what they're circling toward, and I understand that whatever protection his exemption bought me, it's not going to hold indefinitely against a Council actively looking for proof. "
"Did you hear the rest of it? About what it would mean for the throne?"
"Someone called it a succession question.
Not simply a security matter — a succession question.
" Saying it out loud made it realer, somehow, than hearing it through a half-open door had.
"I don't understand what that means, practically.
I don't want a throne, Yeva. I never asked for one and I don't know the first thing about ruling anyone or anything beyond a market stall's daily accounts. "
"No one's asking you to rule anything." Yeva's voice had gone careful, measured, the particular tone she used when she wanted a point to land without frightening me further than the moment already had.
"The Frostmark line hasn't held actual power in two centuries.
Whatever you are, however this unfolds, I don't think anyone sane expects you to walk into a war room and start issuing decrees.
But your existence, confirmed, changes how every Voivode in this kingdom understands the legitimacy of the throne my family currently holds.
That's the succession question. Not whether you'll rule.
Whether Kason's claim to rule, someday, stands on ground some of these Voivodes might suddenly decide to question. "
That landed with a weight I hadn't fully anticipated. "That's not a small thing to hand him, on top of everything else."
"No," Yeva agreed. "It isn't. But I don't think either of you gets to choose which truths are convenient enough to face and which ones you're allowed to keep avoiding.
That's rather the entire problem with avoidance, in my experience.
It doesn't actually make anything smaller.
It just delays the moment you finally have to look at the whole size of it at once. "
"It's not going to come to that. Not if Kason tells you first, and tells the Council on his own terms rather than letting Halmar's inquiry drag it out sideways.
" Yeva crossed the room, taking my hands in hers with a steadiness I badly needed in that moment.
"He's back safely. He returned this morning.
Whatever else is true, he's here, and I don't think he intends to let one more day pass without finally giving you what you're owed. "
"He said tonight."
"Then hold him to it." Something fierce moved behind Yeva's usual warmth.
"I love my brother, Ilinca, more than almost anyone alive.
But I've watched him let six weeks slip past on careful, well-intentioned timing that's cost you considerably more than it's ever cost him.
Don't let tonight become another casualty of that same careful timing.
If he tries to delay again, push. You've earned the right to push. "
"What if the truth is worse than I've already imagined?"
Yeva considered that seriously, not rushing to comfort me with an easy reassurance she couldn't actually guarantee.
"I don't know. I won't pretend to you that I do.
But I've watched you piece together most of it already, on your own, with noticeably more courage than most people would have managed.
Whatever the final shape of it turns out to be, I don't think it's going to be a shape you're unprepared to face.
You've been preparing for this, whether you meant to or not, since the day you walked through our gates. "
I carried that with me through the rest of the afternoon, through a supper I ate with considerably less appetite than the meal deserved, seated close enough to Lady Iolanthe's cluster that their lowered voices carried more than they likely intended, fragments of speculation drifting toward me across the hall — the wardsmith, and Council inquiry, and once, unmistakably, the word Frostmark itself, spoken low enough that I couldn't tell whether it had reached me by accident or by someone's deliberate cruelty.
I did not react. Six years of practiced composure served me well through that particular hour, and I found, finishing a meal I'd barely tasted, that I was grateful, at least, for the discipline Katra had drilled into me long before I understood why I'd ever need it this badly.
A letter from Dobrin arrived with the evening post, and I read it twice in the quiet of my room before supper's aftertaste had fully faded — an easy, ordinary account of Marta's continuing losses on her wager, of Petra's latest visit lasting substantially longer than any prior one, of the market's ordinary rhythms continuing exactly as they always had, entirely unaware of the storm gathering around the woman who used to hold a stall two down from his.
I found something steadying in the ordinariness of it, a reminder that whatever the castle's gossip and Council inquiries decided about my life, an entire world still existed where I was simply Ilinca, the wardsmith who undercharged for good work and argued with envoys over coin.
I held onto that resolve through the rest of the day, through supper eaten in careful, watchful silence with Lady Iolanthe's cluster whispering at the far end of the hall, through the long hours of afternoon light fading slowly toward evening, and felt, by the time the dinner bell finally rang, a steadiness I hadn't fully possessed in weeks.
Tonight. Whatever it cost either of us, I intended to have the truth by the time I finally slept again.
None of us had any way to know that the Gathering's formal announcement — moved forward to three weeks, the entire castle already bracing for the sudden shift in timeline — would reach every corner of Castle Ironmoor before the dinner bell had finished ringing, or that Kason's promise, however sincerely meant, would once again find itself competing against a kingdom's business that refused, stubbornly, to wait its turn.