She Just Didn’t Know It Yet
She Just Didn’t Know It Yet
CAELAN
Four guards knelt in the corridor.
Two were still pressing hands to their faces. One had a split lip he wouldn’t stop licking. The chain from the cuffs had done that, probably. Efficient use of limited resources. All guards were kneeling in various states of recollection about what had happened to them.
Eight guards had been stationed in the guest wing. Eight armed fae guards. It had done nothing to stop one handcuffed human woman in a formal dress.
I could have made it easier with fewer guards, looser rotations. But I wanted to see what she was capable of.
And she had delivered.
Riven had returned from his investigation just before fifth bell with information about who she was. I had given him strict instructions to allow an escape if she tried. And then follow her when she did.
She had triggered the wards just as I had finished my dinner. Though I had known she was escaping the moment I felt the sharp sting of a cut along my ribs and arm.
One guard looked up at me. He paled and looked back down immediately.
I couldn't help the smile. It apparently communicated something other than what I intended, because the guard beside him went very still.
“When she comes back,” I said, “let me know.
He looked up with the expression of a man who had many questions but decided against asking them. So he inclined his head instead.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
She would come back. I wasn’t just being optimistic. As long as the bond existed, she could only put so much distance between us before it brought her back. If what the relic expert had said was true, she would come back on her own.
I almost felt sorry for her.
Almost.
It needed to happen for her to understand the implications. Her freedom was only allowed because it made control possible.
I turned and walked back down the corridor.
The guest wing was quiet behind me. It had always been quiet, since it was rarely occupied. Silence was only rewarding if you had something to compare it to.
She was going to be trouble. The particular kind that would be interesting rather than inconvenient.
I was looking forward to it.
Word came back last night at seventh bell.
She had come back. Walked up to the estate on her own with her chin up, which I appreciated. The guards had escorted her to the guest wing under my instructions. Politely.
I had braced for the pain the relic expert had described, the consequence of distance, but felt nothing. Therefore, the bond's reaction had everything to do with who was creating the distance. She had triggered it, and I wondered how bad it must have been that she rode back on her own.
The hearth flickered and died.
I crossed to it and held out my hand. I thought about fire. About the way it moved. How it felt at its source before it became heat, light, and destruction. It formed in my palm, small and quivering. I tossed it into the hearth. The fire roared back to life.
That was what my magic was now. Enough for a couple of fireballs, ice, or lightning. It did what I understood it to do, and the understanding was the only thing it had ever accepted.
A knock sounded on the door. Confident and contained, just like the person behind it.
“Come in.”
Riven entered looking more tired than I had seen him in decades. Even my captain was becoming undone by our guest.
He reported that she had been pacing the room since her return. The frantic movement that came from someone who realized she had run out of plans and options.
Riven had no opinion on the matter. He never did. It was one of his better qualities. Maelor was the opposite.
“The other was Lord Thorian Blackwood,” Riven reported.
The name rang a bell. Crown noble with a clean record and a carefully constructed smile.
She was not the only one who had tried three nights ago.
I laughed. “If it isn’t Verdant, it’s Crown.”
Riven had taken Thorian’s assassin quietly and then sent a guard to interrupt my dance with the woman who stole my drink. I had not forgiven Thorian for that.
“The masquerade works,” Riven said.
I moved to the cabinet and withdrew a bottle of whiskey.
“Every year, someone tries.” I poured a glass. “Masks give the impression of invisibility. People become careless. It gives me an evening to see who watches whom.”
Riven clenched his jaw once.
“She had been watching the wrong man.” I sipped. “Proves the idea works.”
The diplomat had reasonable height and dark hair. Not the worst assumption she could have made.
Still wrong, though.
Riven didn’t say anything else and dropped a pile of reports on my desk.
“Did we find the witch?” I asked.
“Yes. Eastern quarters. She opened a shop.”
I thumbed through the reports. Guard rotations, injury reports from the incident last night. Until I found the one that I was actually interested in.
“Her name is Seraphae,” he said.
“No surname?”
“No.”
She went by Sera. Belonged to the Obsidian Hand in Thalvarn, which I recognized as one of the largest assassination syndicates operating across both continents. Their policy for missed marks was theatrical.
The contract on me was paid with a considerable sum. Enough to make the syndicate cooperate and become conveniently blind or deaf as needed. Sera took it to save someone named Xander Flint.
I briefly wondered who he was to her.
Scanning the report again, I noted that there was nothing else except that the contract had gone through three intermediaries, all leading to dead ends.
The cleanliness of it was a signature in itself. Whoever had hired Sera knew how to disappear.
I narrowed down the list in my head considerably, and that still left too many options. I pinched the space between my brows and shut my eyes.
“Keep looking.”
The door creaked open without warning.
When I looked up, Riven was already gone, and Brie walked in as if she had every right to be in here.
She had been making unannounced appearances since we were children. Apparently, knocking was a social rule siblings didn’t need to bother themselves with.
Brie sat down across from me, balancing a plate of food in each hand. She placed them both on the desk, directly on top of Riven’s stack of reports.
I picked up a trade agreement and started reading it very seriously.
“Didn’t see you at breakfast this morning,” I said despite myself.
For decades, breakfast had always been the four of us. Maelor and Riven were brothers to me long before they were my commander and captain.
“I was with Mallas.”
I cursed. Mallas was in my kingdom, and I had forgotten.
He had attended my masquerade. There had been a silver shortage in Winter. When I offered my assistance, he insisted on staying couple days to collect the ores himself.
Mallas grew up in Aurelion. When he was five, Father had brought him into the palace. He had stuck by me since. I stood between him and anyone who dared to reduce him to his birth.
Brie had been protective of me the same way.
From the beginning, she had stepped between me and whoever it was on the other end.
Whether it was Luceris or the Crown nobles who called my powers an instability of the kingdom.
She wrapped herself around my small frame as if she could shield me from the world.
Even when I grew to tower over her and she could no longer fully embrace me, she never stopped.
She held on just the same, and I let her.
When the accident happened, Brie experienced the worst of it. She lost her mother and her place in court.
“There's a human in the guest wing,” she said.
“There is.”
“The servants say she put down ten guards trying to escape.”
“It was four.”
She looked more impressed rather than less. “I want to meet her.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She's an assassin.”
She gave me a once-over. “You're alive, aren't you?”
“Fortunately.”
“Then she's not a very good assassin.”
“She's an excellent assassin,” I said. “Which is precisely why you're not meeting her.”
Brie stabbed something on her plate. “You ruin everything.”
She was quiet for a moment, changing approach rather than giving up. “What are you going to do with her?”
“I haven't decided.” I lied.
Telling Brie would result in the information reaching three servants and Maelor before dinner.
“She sounds interesting,” Brie said.
“She tried to kill me, and you find her interesting.”
I agreed with her, but I would not tell her that and make her insufferable about it.
Her moss-green eyes missed nothing. “You're going to keep her here.”
“For a time.”
“Does she have something to do with the new tattoo?”
I looked up from the document.
“Mira mentioned it,” Brie said, watching my face for a reaction I nearly gave.
I tried to connect the name to a face, but I couldn’t.
Brie rolled her eyes. “The woman from your room the other night.” She pointed a fork at me. “Tall. Dark hair. Very enthusiastic about the ink apparently.”
I straightened the document and stared at it again. “Mm.”
“You don't remember her.”
“I remember the evening.”
“So what’s the ink?” She reached for my sleeve. I swatted her hand. “Some kind of bargain you made?”
“Something like that,” I said, glancing at her.
She smiled. The kind that meant she was filing something away for later. I recognized it because it was the same smile I used, and I had never decided whether she learned it from me or I learned it from her.
“I have work.” I lowered the document.
“You don't,” she replied with confidence. “Maelor told me your afternoon was clear.”
“Maelor should mind his own business.”
She stood, collected her plate, and blew me a kiss. “Eat your lunch.”
She left with her skirt sweeping behind her.
I set aside the trade agreement after not reading a single word of it.
Sera was likely hunted by her own syndicate by now. There was nowhere else left for her to go.
Until the bond broke, she was mine.
She just didn't know it yet.