Volume Five: Borrowed Things
Kael's hand closed around Silas Emberlyn's wrist so fast that the wine goblet never finished falling, and the sound of the two men's chairs scraping back from the table cut through the feast hall louder than any of the string music that had, a moment before, filled the silence between houses that hated each other and were pretending, tonight, not to.
Touch her again, Kael said, quiet enough that only the nearest tables heard it, and quieter still for how much violence sat coiled beneath the calm, and I will forget every reason I have for keeping this peace.
That was near the feast's second hour. It began, as it seemed everything now began, with Roran's summons at midday.
He had not, in the end, produced the missing ledger page in his study that morning, and Isolde had spent every hour since turning that absence over in her mind, uncertain whether it meant he did not yet have it or meant only that he was saving it for a more useful moment. Instead he had spoken, with maddening pleasantness, of household security and wandering staff and the wisdom of confining a hostage more strictly to her rooms, a conversation that had accomplished nothing except to confirm, in Isolde's estimation, that he knew far more than he was saying and intended to let the not-knowing itself become a kind of torment.
The Vaskara envoy arrived that same evening, three days ahead of the schedule anyone had expected, and with them came a face Isolde had hoped never to see again inside Ravenhold's walls. Lord Silas Emberlyn, second son of an allied Skylands house, had courted her for the better part of a year before her brother's death had ended every conversation of marriage between their families, and he arrived now at the head of the envoy's party with the particular confidence of a man who believed absence had only sharpened her regard for him.
"You look thin," he told her, in the receiving hall, before he had so much as bowed to his host. "They are not feeding you properly. I told the council this arrangement was a mistake, that no daughter of Vaskara belonged under a Draven roof regardless of what the old Accord demanded, and here is the proof of it standing before me."
"I am well, Lord Emberlyn. Truly."
"You would say so regardless." He took her hand before she could withdraw it, pressed it with a familiarity two years and a broken courtship should have erased, and it was only the arrival of the envoy's senior negotiator, a stern woman named Dessa Corrin, that spared Isolde from having to extract herself alone.
Dessa's business was brisker and colder than Silas's affection. The council, she informed both houses over a private audience that evening, required proof within seven days that the hostage arrangement remained safe and the Accord secure, or the Vaskara delegation would recommend withdrawal, an outcome that both women in that room understood plainly enough meant war. "There are rumors reaching the Skylands," Dessa said, her eyes moving deliberately between Isolde and Kael, "of an attack on the border road. Of a poisoning within these very walls. The council does not take kindly to rumors it must chase down itself rather than receive honestly from its own envoys."
"Both incidents are under investigation," Kael said. "I would rather deliver you the truth in seven days than a comforting lie tonight."
"Seven days, Lord Draven. Not a day more."
Dessa's gaze lingered on Isolde a moment longer before she gathered her papers and withdrew, and in the quiet that followed Isolde found herself studying Kael's face for some crack in the composure he had shown the envoy, some sign of the fear she knew must be sitting beneath it. She found none. That, more than any visible panic could have, frightened her most of all, the understanding that he had learned, long before she ever arrived at his gates, how to carry catastrophe without letting it show on his face.
"Seven days is not enough time to prove anything," she said, once they were alone. "Not with a missing ledger page and a dead trail and your uncle controlling half the evidence we would need."
"Seven days is what we have. I intend to make it enough." He did not look at her as he said it, his attention fixed instead on some middle distance she suspected held nothing but his own calculations. "I have sent word to my father's oldest ally on the council, a woman named Thessaly who owes my house a debt from before I was born. If anyone can buy us more time without revealing why we need it, it is her. Until then, we survive tonight's feast, and we give my uncle nothing new to use against us."
He is holding this house together with nothing but his own word, Isolde thought, watching him absorb the deadline without so much as a flicker of the fear she knew he must feel. And Roran is counting on exactly that word breaking before the seven days are through.
The feast that followed, staged with the same deliberate audience Roran seemed to require for every cruelty he intended, was where Silas made his second attempt, cornering her near the musicians with a hand at her waist that lingered a beat too long, a voice pitched to carry to the watching tables that spoke of renewing old understandings once her year of captivity ended, as though her return to the Skylands were already a settled thing, as though the past weeks had rearranged nothing in her at all.
It was Kael who ended it, crossing the hall in a handful of strides and closing his hand around Silas's wrist before the other man's fingers could tighten further, the goblet Silas had been holding forgotten and falling, wine spreading dark across the stone floor like a small, contained violence standing in for the larger one both men were plainly considering.
"Lord Draven." Silas recovered his composure faster than his dignity. "I was merely renewing an old acquaintance."
"Renew it with words, or not at all, while she remains a guest under my protection." Kael released him, and the room's held breath exhaled slowly around them, servants already moving to blot the spilled wine as though nothing at all had happened. "The Lady Vaskara answers to no one's claims but her own, Lord Emberlyn. I would advise you remember that for the remainder of your stay."
Roran's laugh, low and delighted, carried from the head table before anyone else could speak. "How chivalrous, nephew. One might almost mistake your concern for something more than diplomatic obligation." His eyes found Isolde's across the hall, and something in them made her stomach turn cold despite the fire blazing in every hearth. "Though I imagine Lady Vaskara understands, better than most, how quickly a Draven's protection can become a Draven's leverage."
Isolde found her alone an hour later, in the corridor outside her rooms, waiting with the particular patience of a man who had never once in his life needed to hurry. "A word, Lady Vaskara, before the night grows too late for honesty."
"I did not realize honesty was among your talents, my lord."
"It is my only talent worth mentioning, when it suits me." He stepped closer, close enough that she caught the faint scent of ink and old paper clinging to him, the smell of a man who spent his hours among ledgers and correspondence rather than blades. "I have, in my possession, an account of a certain visit to the archive beneath the west tower. Two figures, one night, considerably longer than the search for a missing invoice ought to have taken. I wonder what the Vaskara envoy would make of such an account, delivered at exactly the wrong moment in their deliberations. I wonder, too, what it would do to my nephew's standing among a council already suspicious of where his loyalties truly lie."
"Is this a threat, or an invitation to beg."
"Neither. It is a warning, freely given, that borrowed things are returned in the end to whoever truly owns them, and that whatever you believe you have found with my nephew belongs, ultimately, to a house that will not survive the scandal of it becoming known before the peace is secured." His smile did not waver. "I would hate to see either of you ruined over something so easily kept quiet, Lady Vaskara. Cooperation costs so much less than pride."
He left her standing alone in the corridor, and Isolde spent a long while afterward simply breathing, furious and frightened in equal measure, before she went to find the one servant she trusted absolutely in this house, a quiet, sharp-eyed girl named Mira who had tended her since the first night and had, three days before, agreed in whispers to help search for whoever had taken the ledger page from her room.
She found Mira's chamber door standing ajar, the lamp within burned down to nothing, and the girl herself lying still and silent on the floor beside an overturned basin of water, a stillness Isolde understood, the instant she saw it, would never again be broken by any word Isolde could offer.
Somewhere above her, through the stone, she heard the wolf begin to howl again, the same sound that had greeted her on her first night in Ravenhold, and understood at last that Roran's warning in the corridor had not been the threat. It had been a mercy she had failed, in her fear, to accept in time.
Her scream brought guards before it brought Kael, though he arrived only moments behind them, and the sight of his face as he took in the scene, the overturned basin, the stillness that would never again be broken, told her he understood exactly as quickly as she had that this was no accident, no unfortunate mishap of a servant alone too late at night. Mira had helped them search. Mira had known too much, or been suspected of knowing too much, and someone had decided that knowledge was worth more silenced than left to wander loose through a household already fracturing under the weight of its own secrets.
"She was helping us find the page," Isolde said, kneeling beside the girl despite the guards' attempts to draw her back, her voice raw with a grief that startled her with its size, grief for a servant she had known only a handful of weeks and yet had trusted more completely, in that short time, than she trusted half the court she had grown up among. "This is my doing. I asked her to help. I did not think, I did not once think, that it would cost her anything at all."
"This is not your doing." Kael's hand found her shoulder, steady even as his own voice shook with a fury he was visibly fighting to keep leashed. "This is my uncle's doing, and I promise you, before this house and whatever gods still watch over it, that he will answer for it. Every part of it."
He gave the order for the girl's body to be tended with full honors, for the household to be searched room by room before dawn, and for every one of Roran's personal guard to be confined to quarters until questioned, and in the flurry of activity that followed Isolde understood, watching him move through the chaos with a cold and total authority she had not yet seen him wield, that whatever gentleness had grown between them in the dark of the archive had not softened the man capable of commanding a house at war with itself. It had only given that authority somewhere new to be spent, in her defense rather than against her, and for the first time since the gates of Ravenhold first closed behind her, she was glad, fiercely and without reservation, that it was his hand and not another's holding the reins of this house tonight.