11 #2
She crossed to the pallet, set the bowl on the pine stool, and dropped to her knees beside me, pressing the back of her hand to my forehead with a gentleness that gripped my chest.
“The fever’s down,” she said, letting out a breath of relief so deep and earnest it left me speechless. “Last night you burned like an ember on the hearth, Liora. I had to slip up here to change your compresses four times before the shaking and muttering in your sleep finally stopped.”
I met her eyes, struggling to comprehend what was happening in this freezing attic:
“Was it you? You brought me all the way up here?”
Oria lowered her gaze to her knees, rubbing her hands against her apron with evident nerves:
“I found you collapsed by the woodshed at three in the morning. I’d gone out for dry kindling to start the kitchen stoves before Mina came down to knead dough, and I saw a dark bundle in the snow. When I realized it was you… that you couldn’t stand, that your hand was bloody and your body burning…”
She trailed off, swallowing hard as tears pricked her eyes.
“I hauled you up through the washroom stairs,” she continued in a choked whisper.
“You were dead weight, Liora. I had to drag you step by step through the dark, praying to every hearth spirit that Mother or Celene wouldn’t wake to the groaning timbers.
I stripped off that filthy sack you were wearing, burned the rags in the bread oven before daybreak, and washed the blood from your arm with warm well water. ”
I stared at her, unable to form words for several seconds.
Oria was Maevra’s younger daughter: the quiet girl who always kept her head down whenever her mother lashed out at me in the dining room, who hid behind floral embroidery rather than watch the humiliations at the stone washbasin.
“Why did you do it, Oria?” I asked, my voice raw and hoarse from parched thirst. “If your mother learns you helped me inside, she’ll lock you in the stables for a month and strip away your gala gowns.”
Oria pressed her lips together with an unfamiliar resolve, meeting my gaze squarely:
“Because I know what happened at the citadel.”
A sudden chill settled across the nape of my neck.
“What do you know?”
“Celene and Mother returned from Asteria two days ago, spitting venom like scalded cats,” Oria explained, offering me the steaming bowl of onion and thyme broth.
“Mother hasn’t stopped screaming at the servants, and Celene spends every afternoon locked in her bedchamber weeping because the Solstice Gala was canceled before midnight.
They say an unknown Alpha infiltrated the citadel in a silver mask, forced the trunks in the lower chancery, and compelled the sovereign to dance before the entire court before fleeing shifted as a beast through the lower yard’s drains. ”
“And they didn’t ask about me?”
“I told them you’d come down with the winter fever and that I quarantined you in the attic myself,” Oria admitted.
“I left a bucket of vinegar on the landing and carried down empty bowls to make it look as if you were eating. Mother is terrified of pestilence; she wouldn’t set foot past the first landing.
I didn’t know how long I could keep up the lie. ”
She held my gaze, a clarity in her face I had never seen there before:
“Mother searched the big trunk the second the wagons reached the estate. She spent half an hour tearing through her bundles, then came down to the office white as chalk, muttering that the royal clerks had stolen a sealed parchment from the bottom of her chest.”
Oria tilted her chin toward the straw pallet:
“It was you, wasn’t it? The brass key I hid in the thread spool… You opened the trunk and took back your mother’s will.”
I held her gaze without flinching.
I knew admitting it aloud carried lethal risk; a single misplaced word in this house would see Maevra summon the district bailiffs and hand me over in iron shackles. But I looked at the clean linen around my hand, the damp compresses in the basin, and the warm broth steaming between my fingers.
I nodded slowly.
“I recovered the clause naming me sole lawful heir of Elayne,” I said in a whisper. “The appendix that mentions the outlawed pack remains in your mother’s hands.”
Oria let out a smothered gasp, hands flying to her mouth.
“You’re out of your mind, Liora!” she whispered, eyes brimming with tears.
“The Crown Guard has seized the plateau roads! There are sealed notices nailed to the tavern doors and the watermill. The garrison captain announced they’ll search every farmstead for contraband, and anyone sheltering an intruder will hang for treason against the realm. ”
“Darian didn’t authorize executions,” I said before I could check myself.
Oria stared at me in startled confusion:
“What did you say?”
“The sovereign,” I corrected, dropping my voice and measuring every syllable.
“The proclamation you read in the village speaks of a health alert and the seizure of illicit substances, not summary hangings or hounds on the scent. He is hunting the source of clandestine blockers, not staging a slaughter of serfs.”
Oria frowned, studying me with mingled bewilderment and wariness:
“You speak as if you know the Lord of Vhal. Celene says he’s a ruthless monster who slighted her on the floor just to humiliate our house before all the plateau lords.”
“He isn’t a monster,” I replied, and the quiet certainty in my own words surprised me as much as it did her. “He refused to let his officers kill me.”
I took two sips of the hot broth. The salty, fragrant liquid sent a spark of warmth through my chest, easing the agonizing ache in my throat and steadying the tremor in my hands.
I brought my bandaged hand to the base of my throat, feeling the lateral glands beneath my skin.
The swelling had receded under Oria’s poultices, but the tissue remained tight, hot, and tender to the touch. I lifted the sleeve of my shift to my nose and drew a deep breath.
The reek of pitch and chemical resin had nearly burned away, but what lingered underneath was not the neutral scent-silence cheap suppressants had granted me through six years of confinement.
It was my own true scent.
Spring rain on warm stone. Wild river lily. And that unmistakable salt note filtering through the linen with every beat of my pulse, faint but alive, refusing to submit to the ash of the stoves.
*Soren’s formula broke my armor for good,* I realized, a cold dread prickling across my skin. *The old doses will never silence this again. If Maevra steps into this room and comes within two paces of my bed, she’ll know what I am in a single breath.*
“Oria,” I said, gripping her wrist with trembling fingers. “I need you to help me sew the mattress lining shut.”
“What for?”
“So the document stays put even if they tear this room apart,” I answered, pointing to the wooden sewing box on the shelf.
“And I need you to keep anyone from coming up to this attic for the next three days. If Mina or your mother asks, tell them I caught the winter fever and I’m coughing up black phlegm.
Maevra is terrified of pestilence; she won’t come near these stairs as long as she believes there’s plague beneath the rafters. ”
Oria nodded solemnly, rising to fetch the packing needle and waxed hemp thread from her sewing box.
“Mother won’t come up,” the girl promised, threading the needle with steady, precise hands.
“She’s far too busy entertaining Master Barel in the parlor downstairs.
They want to seal the sale of the eastern parcel before the guard reaches the estate, but the parish notary refuses to sign the deeds while the district remains under Crown alert. ”
A spark of hope flickered in my chest through the exhaustion.
Darian’s intervention in the capital—his choice to decree a health alert rather than martial law—had paralyzed the district bureaucracy, keeping Maevra from consummating the theft of my lands before I could recover.
I leaned back against the flock pillow as Oria knelt beside the frame to close the seam of the pallet with tight, secure stitches.
In the distance, along the highway flanking the plowed fields, the faint call of guard horns announced the advance of patrols toward the next hamlet.
I was trapped in a freezing attic, my body poisoned and the royal guard closing in on my door, but for the first time in six years, my mother’s will lay beneath my mattress and my wolf refused to be silenced again.