Volume Two: Rules of the Cage
Kael's hands were red to the wrist when he carried her through the corridor, and later Isolde would remember almost nothing of that run except the sound he made when her head lolled against his shoulder, a low, broken sound that had no business belonging to a man built the way he was built.
Isolde, he said, and it was the first time he had used her given name instead of her title, said it like a man saying a prayer he did not believe would be answered. Stay with me. Do you hear me. Stay.
That was near midnight. It began, as most disasters in Ravenhold seemed to, at breakfast.
She had woken that morning determined to give the house nothing to talk about. A hostage who wept was a hostage who could be broken, and Isolde Vaskara did not intend to be broken by black stone and blue fire and a man whose hand still seemed to burn against her throat in memory, however many hours had passed since the corridor. She dressed in Vaskara colors deliberately, gold thread at the cuffs where the Draven servants would be sure to see it, and went down to the hall to eat among wolves as though she had been doing it her whole life.
Kael was already at the head of the table when she arrived, a stack of correspondence at his elbow that he read while he ate, the picture of a man who trusted nothing enough to let it wait. He looked up once, marked her presence with the smallest inclination of his head, and returned to his letters. It should have relieved her. It did not.
She had lain awake most of the night turning over the words he had spoken in the corridor, the way his thumb had rested against her pulse as though he had every right to measure it, and had woken furious with herself for the number of hours she had spent doing so instead of sleeping. It changed nothing. He was still the house that had, in her mind at least, ordered her brother's death. She could admire the shape of a blade and still know it was meant to kill her.
"There are rules," he said, without preamble, halfway through the meal. "You will not leave the east wing without an escort. You will not correspond with anyone outside these walls without my seal on the letter. You will not, under any circumstance, accept food or drink that has not passed first through my own household staff, the ones I have known since childhood, not the new hires my uncle has been so generous in providing this past year."
"You make Ravenhold sound like it eats its own children."
"It has, on occasion." He did not say it as a joke, and something in the flatness of his voice told her he was not exaggerating for effect. "I would rather you found that absurd than found it true. Unfortunately I cannot promise you which it will be."
Roran arrived before she could answer, trailing two of his own retainers, and settled into a chair at the table's far end with the unhurried comfort of a man who considered the entire keep, head of house or not, to be his by right. "Lady Vaskara. You look well rested. I confess I worried, after such a long journey."
"Your concern is noted, my lord."
"It is more than concern." He smiled, and the smile did not reach anywhere near his eyes. "I have arranged a small gathering this evening, in your honor. A gesture of goodwill between our houses, so that the staff and the lesser families see with their own eyes that the Accord holds. I do hope you will attend."
Isolde felt Kael go still beside her in that particular coiled way she was already beginning to recognize, the stillness that meant he disagreed with something and had decided, for reasons of his own, not to say so aloud. "That is generous, uncle. Unusually so."
"I contain multitudes, nephew." Roran rose, inclined his head to Isolde with courtly precision, and left as unhurriedly as he had come.
He wants an audience, Isolde thought, watching the doorway long after Roran had passed through it. Whatever he intends tonight, he wants witnesses.
She said as much to Kael once the hall had emptied, and for a moment he studied her with an expression she was coming to recognize as reluctant respect. "You are not wrong. My uncle does nothing without an audience. It is, I regret to say, the one trait we share."
"Then cancel the gathering."
"I cannot. Not without insulting him publicly, which would do exactly what he wants, only faster." Kael's jaw tightened. "We will attend. You will eat nothing and drink nothing that does not come to you through my hand directly. Can you manage that, Lady Vaskara, or will your pride insist on proving something to a room full of people who already hate you?"
"My pride," she said, "has kept me alive longer than your caution has kept you honest, Lord Draven. I will manage."
The gathering that evening filled the great hall with a hundred candles and twice that many watchful eyes, Draven nobility in black and silver, murmuring behind painted fans and raised cups as Isolde entered on Kael's arm, a formality neither of them had wanted and both understood was necessary. She held herself the way her mother had taught her, spine straight, chin level, a Vaskara heir in a den of wolves who would not give them the satisfaction of seeing her flinch.
Kael was true to his word. Every cup that reached her hand passed first through his own, a small unbroken ritual performed so smoothly across the evening that only someone watching closely would have noticed it at all. Isolde noticed, and something in her chest she refused to name loosened slightly each time his fingers brushed the stem of the glass before hers.
It was Roran, in the end, who broke the pattern, arriving at her elbow with a cup already poured, pressed into her hand before Kael, deep in conversation with an elder across the hall, could intervene. "A toast, Lady Vaskara. To peace that outlives us both."
She should have refused it. She would spend the rest of the night furious with herself for not refusing it, for the half second of social cowardice that made her lift the cup rather than cause a scene in front of a hundred watching Dravens. The wine was sweet and faintly bitter beneath the sweetness, and she had swallowed twice before the wrongness of the taste registered at all, by which point the room had already begun, very slowly, to tilt.
She remembered Kael's face across the hall, the exact moment his expression changed from polite distance to something violent and absolute. She remembered the cup shattering on the stone floor, though she did not remember dropping it. She remembered his arms, and the sound he made, and very little else until she woke hours later in an unfamiliar room with the taste of ash still on her tongue and Kael seated at her bedside, elbows on his knees, head bowed, looking like a man who had not slept and did not intend to.
"You are awake." He did not move from where he sat, but something in his voice cracked open, just slightly, before he caught it and shut it again. "The healer says you will live. That the poison was old, weakened, meant to sicken rather than kill outright. A warning, not an execution."
"Your uncle's warning."
"I do not know." And that, more than anything else that had happened since the gates of Ravenhold first opened for her, frightened her, because she could hear in his voice that he genuinely did not know, that the not knowing was eating him alive from the inside. "I have my suspicions. I have no proof. And there is something else you should know before the healer tells you and you hear it wrong from someone else's mouth."
"Tell me."
"The poison in that cup was not Draven work." He looked up at last, and the exhaustion in his face was raw enough that she forgot, for a moment, to be afraid of him. "It was Vaskara make. A sleeping draught your own healers use in the Skylands, altered and turned toxic by someone who understood both houses' medicine well enough to disguise one as the other."
Isolde went very still. "That is not possible."
"It is not impossible. Which is worse." He rose, paced two steps toward the shuttered window, and stopped there with his back to her, shoulders set in a line she recognized now as the shape he wore when he was trying not to feel something too large to contain. "Someone wanted this to look like your own people trying to kill you, or wanted a weapon no one would think to trace to Ravenhold. Either answer means there is someone inside these walls, or connected to them, who understands your house as intimately as they understand mine. That is not my uncle's usual talent. My uncle is cruel, Lady Vaskara. He is not, as far as I have ever known him, clever in quite this particular way."
"Then who?"
He turned back to face her, and for a long moment neither of them spoke, the shadow fire outside the window burning low and blue against the dark. "I do not know," he said again, quieter this time. "But I intend to find out, and I would rather have you alive and furious with me than dead and correct about how dangerous this house truly is."
She should have found the words cold comfort. Instead, lying in an unfamiliar bed in the heart of enemy territory with her pulse still unsteady from a poison meant to look like her own house's hand, she found herself believing him, and did not know what frightened her more, the poison or that belief.
This is not what I came here to feel, she thought, watching the rigid line of his shoulders and the way his hands, still faintly stained at the knuckles despite the healer's scrubbing, hung useless at his sides as though he did not know what to do with them now that there was no wound left to press closed. She had come to Ravenhold prepared to hate a monster. She had not prepared herself for a man who sat vigil at a bedside until his voice broke, who counted a cup of wine before it reached her lips as though her life were a ledger he intended, personally, to balance.
"You should sleep," she said finally, because it was easier than saying anything true. "Whatever this house intends for me tomorrow, it will not wait for either of us to be rested."
"I will sleep when I know which of my own people I can no longer trust." He did not move from the window. "Rest, Lady Vaskara. I will be within call if the healer's draught fails you again."
He did not leave the room until dawn began to grey the shutters, and Isolde, drifting in and out of an uneasy sleep, was almost certain, though she could never afterward prove it even to herself, that at some point in the deepest part of the night his hand had found hers atop the coverlet and stayed there a long while before he thought better of it and drew away.