At dawn, three days from now, Draven's magistrate would read a warrant aloud in the town square, and Sera would stand in the crowd unable to hear a single word of the charge being made against her own name. First, though, there was the morning she lost her mother's voice.
It happened without warning, the way Ashgrave had told her it would, except knowing it was coming had done nothing at all to prepare her for the shape of the loss.
She was standing over the washbasin, going through the small, ordinary motions of a morning, when she reached for the memory she kept folded away for hard days, the sound of her mother humming while she ground herbs, low and off-key and utterly hers. Sera had used that memory the way other people used a warm coat. She reached for it now and found, where the sound should have been, only a smooth, seamless blank, as though a page had been cut clean out of a book and the binding sewn shut over the gap so neatly there was no evidence anything had ever been there at all.
She knew, with the particular horror of losing something and simultaneously forgetting exactly what it had been, that the memory was gone. She could recall the fact of her mother humming. She could not, no matter how hard she reached, recall the sound of it.
This is the second entry, she thought, gripping the edge of the basin until her knuckles went white. He warned me. He warned me and it still feels like theft.
Callan found her there some time later, her hands still damp, her face wet in a way that had nothing to do with washing, and though she could not hear the question in his voice, she saw it plainly enough in his face. She shook her head, mouthing I'm fine, and hated how easily the lie came now, when a month ago she would have told him everything.
He cannot know what this costs. Not while Draven is already circling for a reason to take him from me a second time.
There was no time to grieve properly. Maren arrived within the hour, breathless, her usual cheerful chatter replaced by something tight and frightened, gesturing urgently toward the town square before Sera had even finished lacing her boots.
What waited in the square was worse than she'd braced for. A magistrate's cart stood at its center, and nailed to the post beside it was a proclamation bearing the crown's seal, and beneath it, displayed for every passerby to see, a small clay vial that Sera recognized with a jolt of nausea, one of her own healing tinctures from the apothecary shelf, its stopper replaced with a wax seal she had never used.
He planted it. The realization arrived cold and absolute. He took one of my own bottles and dressed it up as poison, or worse, as proof of something darker.
Draven stood beside the cart, addressing the gathering crowd with the easy, sorrowful authority of a man reluctantly doing his duty, and though Sera could not hear a word, she could read enough in the faces around her, the way neighbors who had known her since childhood now looked at her sideways, to understand the shape of what he was accusing her of. Forbidden magic. Congress with the dead. A danger to every child in Ashmere.
He is not just protecting himself anymore, she thought, watching him gesture toward the apothecary with theatrical grief. He is building a case the whole town will cheer for.
Draven's gaze found hers across the square, and for one unguarded instant, before he smoothed his expression back into public sorrow, she saw something almost like triumph there, the look of a man who believed he had already won.
He knows I cannot easily defend myself with half my hearing gone and every witness already primed against me. She forced herself to meet his eyes without flinching, though her pulse hammered loud enough in her own skull to make her feel briefly, dizzily deaf all over again. He is counting on that.
She did not see Ashgrave again until nightfall, and when he came, it was not to the stillroom but to her directly, appearing at the edge of the square as the crowd finally dispersed, his presence enough to make the lingering onlookers suddenly remember urgent errands elsewhere.
You lost the second entry today, he said, and there was no question in it, only a quiet, careful watching of her face, as though he were checking a wound he could not touch to heal. Your mother.
"How do you know that." He shouldn't be able to know which piece was taken. Unless he feels it too, somehow.
The ledger does not hide its collections from its keeper. I felt the entry close. A pause, and something in his expression, that same rare crack from three nights before, deepened briefly before he mastered it again. I am sorry it was that one.
"Sorry doesn't put it back." She hadn't meant it to come out so sharp, and she watched him absorb it without flinching, the way a man absorbs a blow he believes he has earned.
No, he agreed. It doesn't.
She told him then about the square, about the vial, about the crowd's faces, and watched something shift in him as she spoke, the stillness that usually surrounded him drawing tighter, colder, more deliberate, the way ice thickens right before it becomes dangerous to stand on.
He means to have you tried and executed before the ledger even finishes collecting its price, Ashgrave said finally. A tidy solution, from his point of view. He silences the witness who could still expose his crime against your brother, and he does it under the crown's own law, so no one thinks to ask further questions.
"Then what do I do?"
You survive long enough for the truth about your brother's poisoning to outweigh the lie about your bargain. He said it simply, as though it were an easy thing to arrange, though the careful way he watched her told her he understood exactly how far from easy it truly was. I cannot appear at your trial. A god intervening in a mortal court would draw attention neither of us can afford, from Draven or from those above me who already frown on how close I have let myself come to you.
Those above him. The words snagged, unfamiliar and unwelcome. "There's someone above you?"
There is always someone above everyone, in every ledger. He did not elaborate, and something in the flat, final way he said it told her not to push, not tonight, when they already had enough danger crowding the room between them.
That night, unable to sleep, Sera sat with Callan's hand in hers, watching him breathe easy and even in the dark, and tried to convince herself that whatever came at dawn, at least this piece of the bargain had held.
She was still awake, sometime near first light, when she felt rather than heard the tramp of boots gathering outside the apothecary again, more of them this time, and looked up to see torchlight flaring gold against the shutters, and understood, with a plummeting certainty, that Draven had not waited for a trial after all.
He had come to arrest her himself, at dawn, exactly as he'd promised the crowd he would, and this time there was no god standing at her back to stop him before the door came down.