HE GAVE ME AWAY, NOW HE BEGS ME
Chapter 2: What the Guard Never Told
Later, Wren would think of the cellar beneath the old chapel as the place where she stopped being a discarded fiancee and started being something the Dowager Queen had spent twenty years trying to make sure never existed. She would remember the smell of tallow and dust, the ring of iron keys in Cassian Duskmere's hand, and the moment he knelt in front of a locked chest and said, in a voice stripped of all its usual command, "I swore an oath to your mother the week before she died, and I have kept it badly ever since."
That confession came near the end of a very long night. First, there was the run through the rain.
Cassian did not take her through the front gates of the city, and he did not take her to the barracks of the Night Guard, where any of a hundred loyal men might have seen her and reported it before morning. He took her instead through a service tunnel behind the gatehouse that Wren would have sworn did not exist, down stone steps slick with a century of damp, until they came out into the undercroft of a chapel so old its dedication had worn smooth off the lintel.
"Where are we," Wren asked, when she had breath enough to ask anything.
"Somewhere the Dowager Queen forgot to burn," Cassian said. He lit a lamp with hands that were, she noticed, not quite steady, which unsettled her more than anything that had happened in the Hall of Vows. A man like Cassian Duskmere did not tremble over nothing. "This was the Emberblood chapel, before your grandmother's generation. It has been sealed for twenty years. Officially it doesn't exist. Officially the whole line doesn't exist. That has been very convenient for a great many people."
Wren sank onto an old stone bench because her legs had stopped being reliable somewhere around the third turn of the tunnel. The scar at her wrist still throbbed faintly, a low coal-heat that had not fully faded since the Hall of Vows, and when she looked down she thought, for one dizzying instant, that she could see the faintest thread of orange light beneath her own skin, gone before she could be sure.
"You keep saying my line as though you know exactly what it is and I don't," she said. "So tell me. Who was my mother?"
Cassian was quiet long enough that she thought he might refuse. Then he crossed to the far wall, where a section of stone looked, on close inspection, less like a wall and more like a door that had been built to look like one, and pressed his palm flat against a worn carving at its center, a stylized flame inside a circle, the same shape, she realized with a jolt, as the faint scar on her own wrist.
The door groaned open onto a small chamber that had clearly once been a shrine. A stone altar, cold and bare, stood at its center, and on the wall behind it hung a portrait so old the paint had cracked into a thousand fine lines, of a woman with Wren's own dark eyes and a crown of woven gold and copper set among plaited hair.
"Her name was Aveline," Cassian said quietly. "Sovereign of the Emberblood line, last true heir before you, bound to the Veil in her own right rather than through any king's favor. I served in her personal guard for two years before I was old enough to know what that honor actually meant. I was eighteen when she was murdered. I was standing forty feet away."
Wren's chest ached looking at the portrait, an ache with no memories attached to it, only the terrible blank shape where memories should have been. "I don't remember her at all."
"You were an infant. Someone got you out of the palace the night the assassins came, before they could finish the work. I have spent eleven years trying to find out who did that and where they took you, because everyone who might have told me died within the same season, one by one, in accidents that were never investigated as anything but accidents." His jaw tightened. "I found Ashdown Hold four years ago. I found a girl of eighteen with your mother's eyes and a scar in the right place and no memory of ever being anyone but a minor lord's ward. I did not act on it, because acting on it would have gotten you killed faster than staying hidden ever could. I have watched you from a distance for four years, Lady Ashdown, and said nothing, and let the crown put a ring on your hand meant for someone else's daughter, because it was the safest lie available."
The weight of that landed on her slowly, in pieces. Four years. He had known for four years and let her walk toward a wedding to a man who was, she was beginning to understand, exactly the kind of man who would set her aside the moment the political winds shifted, because the winds had always mattered more to him than she had.
"And the woman who killed her," Wren said. "Twenty years and no one has answered for it."
"Someone has been protected very carefully," Cassian said. "I have suspicions. I do not yet have proof strong enough to survive being said aloud inside that palace." He looked at her directly, the lamp light catching the old scar through his eyebrow. "What I have, as of tonight, is a woman with the mark waking up in front of four hundred witnesses at the exact hour the crown tried to bury her a second time. That is either the worst possible night for you to exist, or the best possible night for the truth to finally start moving."
Wren rose and crossed to the altar, drawn by something she couldn't name, and rested her palm flat against the cold stone the way she imagined a hundred women before her had done at moments of their own reckoning. The scar at her wrist answered instantly, heat blooming up her arm, and for one unbroken second the entire chamber filled with warm amber light that had no source but her own skin.
Cassian did not flinch back from it. He watched her the way a man watches a fire finally catch after a long cold night, something like relief moving across his face before he caught it and smoothed it away again.
"There is a chest under the altar," he said, low. "Sealed the night she died, by her own hand, meant only to open for blood of her blood. If it's ever going to open for anyone, it will open for you."
Wren knelt, and found the iron chest exactly where he'd said, its lock a twin to the flame-and-circle carving on the door. She pressed her palm to it without needing to be told, and the lock gave with a soft, final click, as though it had been waiting twenty years for precisely this hand.
Inside lay a folded letter sealed in wax gone brittle with age, a slim journal bound in dark leather, and a ring set with a single dull stone that caught no light at all until Wren's fingers closed around it, at which point it woke into a deep, banked red, like an ember that had been waiting patiently to be found.
"That's the Sovereign's seal," Cassian said, and his voice had gone rough in a way she hadn't heard from him yet. "Aveline never took it off. Whoever killed her either couldn't get it free of her hand, or didn't dare try."
Wren opened the journal to its final entry with hands that were not entirely steady, and read her mother's handwriting for the first time in her life, a short, urgent passage naming no names but describing a betrayal moving toward her from inside the palace's own walls, someone close enough to the throne to arrange silence afterward, someone the court would never think to suspect. The entry ended mid sentence.
Before Wren could ask what came next, a sound reached them from above, boots on stone, more than one set, moving with the unhurried confidence of men who believed they had all the time in the world, and Cassian was on his feet with his sword half drawn before she'd finished registering what she was hearing.
"That's not the Night Guard's tread," he said quietly. "Someone followed us."
"Followed us how? No one saw us leave the gate."
"Someone always sees," Cassian said, already moving to douse the lamp, already reaching to pull her back behind the altar into the shrine's deeper shadow, his body angled between her and the door in a way that told her exactly how many times he had done this before, protected someone with his own frame between them and whatever came through a doorway. "Which means either the Dowager's people have had eyes on the Night Guard barracks longer than I've accounted for, or someone in your own household at Ashdown Hold sold word of your face the moment it started glowing in front of four hundred witnesses."
Wren pressed her back to the cold stone of the altar and made herself breathe slowly, the way she had once been taught to breathe through the endless small humiliations of court life, a curtsy held a beat too long, a comment about her plain lineage dressed up as a compliment, three years of small cuts that she had told herself did not matter because she was going to be queen and queens were not permitted to bleed in public. None of that training had prepared her for this, for crouching in the dark clutching her dead mother's ring while the woman who had stood in her place not four hours earlier came hunting her through a tunnel that officially did not exist. She thought, with a clarity that startled her, that Kastian did not know his own betrothed's replacement was down here in the tunnels beneath the city with a hunting party at midnight. Or perhaps he did know, and simply had not thought it worth telling her, which was in its own way no better.
The journal was still open in her lap to its unfinished final line. Wren closed it gently and pressed it flat against her chest, over the scar that had not stopped its low simmering heat since the Hall of Vows, as though she could shield twenty years of her mother's careful secrecy with nothing but her own body. The ring on her finger burned warm rather than hot, a banked and patient thing, and she understood without being told that it recognized the danger overhead as surely as she did.
The boots reached the top of the cellar stairs and stopped.
"Lady Ashdown." A woman's voice, pleasant, cultured, and utterly without warmth, drifted down into the dark, and Wren's stomach dropped at the sound of it, because she recognized it even before the woman continued. "I know you're down there. Do come out. Lady Seraphine only wants to talk."
Cassian's hand found Wren's in the dark, and closed around it hard enough to hurt, a silent order to stay exactly where she was, and Wren, gripping her mother's ring so tightly the metal bit into her palm, realized with a cold, clear certainty that whatever answer she gave in the next few minutes would decide whether she lived to read the rest of the journal at all.