HE GAVE ME AWAY, NOW HE BEGS ME
Chapter 3: The Road to Rivergate
Later, Wren would remember the ridge above Rivergate mostly for the silence of it, the way the wind off the Ashen River carried no birdsong at all this close to the Hollow's edge, and for the sight of Cassian standing at the treeline with blood on his knuckles and something close to pride in his eyes as he watched her set a dead branch alight with nothing but her own outstretched hand. She would remember thinking that a week ago she had been a woman whose only power was knowing which fork to use at a formal dinner, and now she was learning to burn things on command in a forest that bordered the end of the world.
That understanding came four days after the chapel. First, there was the leaving of the city, and the lie that made it possible.
Lady Seraphine's hunting party had searched the chapel undercroft for the better part of an hour before giving up, and Wren still did not know, precisely, how Cassian had gotten her past them, only that it had involved a second hidden passage, a great deal of silence, and his hand clamped firm over her mouth for four unbearable minutes while boots passed directly overhead. By dawn they were three miles outside the city walls on a farm cart borrowed, or possibly stolen, from a sympathetic miller who owed Cassian a debt he refused to explain. By the second day they had reached the outskirts of Rivergate, the last real town before the land gave way to the marshes that marked the Hollow's official boundary, and Cassian had traded his Night Guard cloak for a plain wool coat and told her, without apology, that for the length of their stay she was to answer to the name Nell.
"I am not going to remember to answer to Nell," Wren had said.
"You will," Cassian had told her, "because the alternative is answering to your own name in front of someone who reports to the Dowager Queen for coin, and I would rather you learn a new habit than a permanent one."
He had not been wrong. She had learned it within a day, the same quiet, grinding speed with which she was learning everything else Cassian insisted on teaching her, how to bank the heat in her chest until it stopped showing in her eyes, how to read a room for the particular stillness of a paid watcher, how to hold a blade properly even though her hands shook the first three times he put one in them. Training with Cassian was nothing like the languid riding lessons and dancing masters of her childhood. He corrected her stance with two words at a time, never praised her, and yet Wren found herself working harder for his silences than she had ever worked for Kastian's easy compliments, because Cassian's silence, when she finally got something right, had a weight to it that felt more honest than anything the crown prince had ever said to her.
There had been one afternoon, the third day, when she had lost her temper entirely, exhausted and raw and furious at the size of the secret that had apparently been hers all along without her consent, and had flung her open palm toward a fence post with more feeling than technique. The post had not merely caught fire. It had gone up in a single violent column of flame that startled a flock of marsh birds into the sky half a mile off, and Wren had stood there shaking, more frightened of herself in that moment than she had been of anything Kastian's court had done to her. Cassian had not stepped back from her. He had walked forward, put both hands on her shoulders, and told her, in the flattest voice he owned, that fear given nowhere to go always came out sideways, and that the fire had not been too much, it had simply had no instructions. After that he taught her to breathe into it instead of away from it, to treat the heat under her scar like a held note rather than a scream, and by the fourth day she could call a small flame to her palm and let it die again without singeing so much as her own sleeve. She was, she thought, starting to trust her own hands in a way three years of being someone's intended bride had never once required of her.
It was on the fourth evening, on the ridge above Rivergate with the sun bleeding orange into the marsh mist, that he finally let her read the rest.
"Your mother's journal," he said, producing it from inside his coat where he had carried it against his own ribs for four days, as though he trusted no hiding place in the world more than his own body. "I've read the parts that don't concern you directly. I think it's past time you read all of it."
Wren sat on a cold stone with the journal open on her knees and read, in her mother's small, urgent hand, the last weeks of a woman who had known she was in danger and had not known from which direction it would come. Aveline had written of a council session where the topic of succession had turned unexpectedly hostile, of a physician's report on the young queen's health that did not match what the young queen herself had said she felt, of a name written once and then scratched out so thoroughly the page beneath it had torn, leaving only the ghost of an initial. I, the entry read. I am almost certain now. I have asked for a private audience tomorrow to say what I suspect aloud, to the one person in this palace who has never once lied to me. If I am wrong about her, I will have made an enemy of the only ally I have left. If I am right, I do not know how either of us survives what happens next.
"Her," Wren said quietly. "She thought it was a woman."
"The Dowager Queen was not yet Dowager when your mother died," Cassian said. "She was still a young queen herself, married in, ambitious, and universally liked at court, which is precisely the kind of woman no one ever thinks to investigate." His jaw was tight in the dying light. "Your mother requested a private audience the day before she died. The official record says that audience never took place because the queen was unwell that day. I have never once believed that record."
"You think she confided in the Dowager and the Dowager killed her for it."
"I think your mother suspected someone, and made the mistake of trusting the wrong person with that suspicion before she had proof, and I think that mistake cost her everything, including you." Cassian's voice had gone low and rough in the way it did whenever he spoke about that night, a man carrying a decade of guilt so carefully he had forgotten how to set any of it down. "I was standing at the outer door that night. I let her walk into that private audience alone because it was the queen's own household, because I had no reason to suspect the queen, because eighteen year old guardsmen are not in the habit of questioning royalty. She never came out. By the time anyone thought to look for her, it was made to look as though bandits had gotten past the wall, and the story held because no one wanted very badly to look closer."
Wren closed the journal against the pain in his voice, and for a moment neither of them spoke, the marsh wind moving cold and directionless around them, the distant howl of something in the Hollow rising and falling like a tide.
"You've spent twenty years hunting for me and eleven building a case against a woman you can't yet prove anything against," Wren said finally. "That's not guilt, Cassian. That's a life sentence you handed yourself over something that was never your failure to carry alone."
"Say that again in a week," Cassian said, "when it's your life the sentence is protecting."
It was meant, she thought, to close the conversation, but instead of letting it, Wren rose, crossed the short distance between them, and rested her palm flat against his chest the way she had rested it against the shrine's cold altar, testing whether the warmth beneath her scar answered to more than stone. It did. Cassian went very still under her hand, his own breath catching audibly, and for one long unguarded second Wren watched something in his carefully controlled face come loose entirely, want and fear and eleven years of discipline all fighting for the same square inch of his expression.
He caught her wrist before she could pull away, not to stop her, she realized, but simply to keep the contact a moment longer, his thumb tracing once, slow and deliberate, over the faint scar that had started this entire unraveling.
"We should get back before the light goes," he said, and did not move.
"You said that a minute ago."
"I did." His eyes did not leave hers. "I find I'm having some difficulty acting on it."
Whatever might have happened next on that ridge dissolved the instant a horn sounded from the direction of Rivergate, three short blasts that Cassian's whole body recognized before his mind seemed to catch up, his hand dropping her wrist to close instead around his sword hilt.
"That's not a town alarm," he said, already moving. "That's a Hollow breach signal."
Wren followed him down through the treeline at a dead run, her heart hammering with something that was equal parts terror and the strange electric aftertaste of the moment they had just left unfinished, and as they broke from the trees into sight of Rivergate's low wall, she saw exactly what the horn had meant. A section of the town's boundary wards, the old iron and salt lines meant to hold the marsh's worst back from ordinary folk, had gone dark, every rune along a twenty foot stretch extinguished at once, and through the gap something vast and wrong was already dragging itself up out of the mud, shapeless in the failing light except for the two points of cold white fire where its eyes should have been.
"Veil's thinning faster than anyone in the palace is telling the court," Cassian said grimly, sword already bare in his hand. "Stay behind me, Nell, and if I tell you to run, you run."
Wren looked at the thing rising out of the marsh, felt the scar at her wrist catch fire in answer to a threat older than the crown that had cast her out, and did not, for the first time in four days, feel afraid of what was happening inside her own skin.
"No," she said. "I don't think I will."
She felt Cassian's glance flick sideways at her, startled and something close to fierce with approval even in the middle of danger, and then there was no more time for words at all. The thing from the marsh let out a sound that was not quite a roar and not quite a wail, a noise that seemed to come from several directions inside her own skull at once, and townsfolk were already scattering behind them toward the center square with the particular controlled panic of people who had drilled for exactly this and hoped never to need the drill. Cassian moved to meet the creature at the gap in the wards, his blade catching the last orange light, and Wren understood without being told that a sword alone would not be enough to close a twenty foot breach in the dark.
She ran forward instead of back.
Heat climbed her arm the way it had on the ridge, controlled now, shaped by four days of Cassian's patient, unsmiling teaching, and when she thrust both hands toward the broken stretch of wall the flame that answered her was not the wild, frightened column that had startled the birds on the third day. It came in a long, deliberate arc, hot enough to sear the mud where the creature's forelimb had planted itself, and the thing recoiled with a shriek that rattled the shutters of the nearest houses. Cassian used the opening without hesitation, driving forward under its guard, and between his blade and her fire the breach held long enough for the town's own ward-keeper to come stumbling from his tower with a fresh rune stone already glowing in his shaking hands.
By the time the wards flared back to life and sealed the gap, the creature had retreated into the marsh mist rather than press an attack it was no longer certain of winning, and Wren stood in the mud outside Rivergate's wall with her palms still faintly smoking, her whole body trembling with an exhaustion unlike any she had known, and Cassian's hand closing hard around her shoulder as though to make certain she was still solidly there.
"That," he said, breathing hard, "was not nothing."
"No," Wren agreed, and found, beneath the shaking, that she was smiling. "I don't think it was."
The ward-keeper had gone very still at the edge of the torchlight, his rune stone still lifted in one hand, staring at Wren with an expression that was not quite fear and not quite worship, and had settled uneasily into something in between. He was an old man, Rivergate born, the kind who would remember old stories better than court chronicles bothered to record them, and when he finally spoke his voice shook worse than his hands had.
"Ember eyes," he said, to no one in particular, to the whole gathering crowd behind him. "I haven't seen ember eyes since I was a boy. The old Sovereign's blood runs true again."
Cassian's hand tightened on Wren's shoulder, and she felt, more than saw, every head in that crowd turn toward her at once, felt the first ripple of a truth about to outrun their ability to contain it, three days and four hundred miles too soon.