The Royal Academy. The night after the Aptitude Trial.
Rosalind of Arvendal liked to listen.
That was the first thing most people misunderstood about her. They thought her shy because she spoke little. Dull because she wore grey. Harmless because she smiled when looked at and lowered her eyes when spoken to. Her mother’s ladies-in-waiting called her the quiet child. Her brother called her Mouse. Her father called her nothing at all. He mostly forgot she was there.
That suited her.
Whoever was forgotten heard more.
The princess’s chambers lay on the top floor of the upper-class residence, at the end of a long corridor with thick carpets, and they were larger than any other room in the year. Three rooms, a fireplace, a window onto the court. Two guards outside the door, who would stand there all night, in purple and gold.
Rosalind sat at the window, the candle beside her on the sill, and listened.
She did not have to try. She never had, not since that night. When it grew quiet, the sounds came to her, one after another, like water dripping into a deep well. She only had to keep still and let them in.
The guards outside the door. One was chewing something, the other breathing through his mouth because he had a cold.
Two rooms further down the corridor: Julian Thorne, explaining to a servant how to fold a shirt properly, in a tone as if he were discussing philosophy.
One floor down: Cedric Valemont. He was not speaking. He was hitting something. Over and over, evenly, with the flat of his hand. A wall, perhaps. Or a table. Dull, heavy blows, and between them a breath that sounded as if he were in pain. Rosalind listened for a while. Then she let the sound go. Cedric Valemont had lost today, in front of half the court, to a commoner. Tomorrow he would do something he regretted. Or someone else would regret it. That was not a question she had to answer tonight.
And in the room right next door, behind a wall of old stone that was thicker than Rosalind’s arm was long:
Emilia Winterhall.
She was not asleep. Rosalind heard her pacing back and forth, with quiet, precise steps. To the window. Back. To the window. Then she stopped. A sound like someone opening a little box. Wood on wood.
Then, very quietly, so quietly that even Rosalind barely caught the words:
“I was bored.”
A pause. A breath that was almost a laugh. Almost.
“Impudent.”
The box closed. The footsteps went to the bed. Then all was still.
Rosalind sat at the window and smiled into the darkness.
She had been ten when she first heard more than she was meant to.
It had been the evening of the name day, her father’s name day, and she had been bored. The speeches, the courses, the bird in the pie. She had slipped away, into the tower, into her grandmother’s old reading room, where no one went any more because it smelled of dust and old books. She had sat down behind the heavy curtain with a book about the old kings, and fallen asleep.
When she woke, it was night. And next door, in her father’s study, two men were talking.
She had not meant to eavesdrop. Truly not. But the door between the rooms was only ajar, and she was ten, and the voices were so quiet and so serious that she had grown curious.
And then she had heard things that cannot be forgotten.
A raven hatches ravens.
Afterwards, letters will be found in his chambers.
Not the father. Not the son. None of them.
She had pressed both hands over her mouth. So hard that her lips had bled afterwards. And while she sat there, behind the curtain, unable to breathe for fear, something had happened. Something in her had opened, like a door she had not known was there.
Suddenly she had heard everything.
Not only the voices next door. The scratch of the quill on her father’s letter. The creak of Duke Winterhall’s boots as he shifted his weight. Her father’s heartbeat, fast and hard, faster than his calm voice suggested. The music from the square, as clearly as if she stood among the dancers. The guards in the corridor. The horses in the stable. The wind in the flags on the roof.
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Everything. All at once. So loud that she thought her head must burst.
She had stayed sitting behind the curtain all night, hands over her ears, and had learned how to close the door inside her again. Slowly. A crack at a time. Until only what she let in came to her.
In the morning she had heard that the House of Ravenmoor was burning.
She had told no one. Not her mother, who talked only of dresses and weddings. Not Edmund, who was too loud to keep a secret even if he had wanted to. And most certainly not her father, whose heart had beaten so fast that night.
Instead she had bought herself a book. A little book with a grey leather binding and blank pages. And on the first page she had written, in the neat, round hand of a ten-year-old:
What I know.
Rosalind took the book from the windowsill and opened it.
It was almost full. Seven years of pages, in a hand that had gone from round to narrow, from neat to terse. Names. Dates. Sentences someone had spoken in a corridor, believing himself alone. Who wrote letters to whom. Who owed whom gold. Who went into which room on which night.
She turned back. Right to the beginning.
What I know.
Beneath it, in the same round child’s hand, three sentences. She had never crossed them out. She had never repeated them. They simply stood there, seven years old, and were still true.
Father ordered it.
Duke Winterhall did it.
The raven did not deserve it.
Rosalind looked at the words for a long time. Then she turned to the last page she had written on and took up her quill.
She wrote down what she had seen today. Tersely. Not one word too many.
Touchstone. R. H., commoner from Eastreach, Fernwick. Fire, three-quarters of the pillar. In the core a thread. Gold. Less than a heartbeat.
Merrow wipes. “Dust.” Merrow lies. His heart beat twice as fast at the word dust.
Mabry saw it. Doesn’t quite believe Merrow. Will say nothing.
Element trial: R. H. misses on purpose. The flame dropped too early, but evenly. Someone who really aims wide trembles.
Duel against C. V.: disarmed with a turn of the wrist. No fire. Greaves knows the turn. Greaves’s heart: fast. Greaves says nothing.
R. H. is always looking around. Behind him. Always.
R. H. holds his left arm when he thinks no one is looking. Leather bracer. Beneath it: ?
E. W. helped him at the market, or he helped her. Both claim the opposite. She talks to herself about him at night.
Rosalind paused. The quill hovered over the paper.
Then she wrote one more line.
Fire has only one sub-element. Only one house has ever reached it.
She looked at the line. For a long time.
Outside in the court a night bird called. The candle flickered.
She thought of a boy with black hair who had stood beside his father before the throne, that evening seven years ago. Who had stuck his tongue out at Edmund, which her brother had not been able to forget for days afterwards. Who had had eyes that were not like his father’s. Grey. An unusual, light grey. You are reading on novelping dot com, the official source.
She thought of a young man with short, tousled hair who had stood in the crowd today, between a boy with a blue feather in his hat and a farmer’s son who was praying. Who had not looked at her as she walked past him. Who had taken great care not to look at her.
Grey eyes.
The Calder gives back nothing it has once taken.
So it said in the report she had stolen from her father’s desk at the age of eleven and put back that same night. The captain and the heir, drowned. The clothes had been found. The bodies had not.
The Calder gave nothing back.
But perhaps, Rosalind thought, the Calder had never been given anything either.
She could have written it down. She could have written the name beneath the last line, with a question mark after it. It would have been the logical next line.
She did not.
Instead she took the knife she used to sharpen her quills and cut the page out. Carefully, close to the spine, so that it could hardly be seen. She held the page into the candle flame and watched the paper curl and blacken and the words on it disappear one after another. Gold. Dust. Greaves. Only one house.
Some things you did not write down.
Some things, if you wrote them down, got people killed.
She let the ash fall into the cold fireplace and blew out the last sparks. Then she closed the book and laid it back on the windowsill.
What she knew was now only in her head. It was safer there. Her father did not read thoughts. Nor did Duke Winterhall. And the man with the scar, who sometimes came into the palace at night through the back door and spoke with her father so quietly that no one heard him but her, could do many things, but not that.
Rosalind stayed sitting at the window a while longer.
Down in the court the torches were burning. A single guard was making his rounds. Above the roofs of the city hung the moon, almost full, and the white towers of the palace shone in the distance, where her father was probably asleep now, or drinking wine with Duke Winterhall, or reading letters he would not answer.
She wondered what she would do.
She could have told her father. One sentence. A single sentence, at breakfast, when after seven years he happened to notice again that she was there. Father, I think a raven has come back. And then the man with the scar would go through a different back door at night, and a boy with grey eyes would lie somewhere in the Calder, for real this time.
She could have told Edmund. But Edmund would bellow it out, by accident, at the next feast, in his fanfare voice.
She could have told Emilia. And then watched what happened to Emilia’s face.
Rosalind smiled. Not because she liked the thought. But because she knew she would do none of it.
Not now.
She had listened for seven years. She had learned that you treated a secret like a coin. You did not spend it just because you had it. You waited until you knew what you could buy with it. And who would buy it from you.
And she wanted to know something before she did anything.
She wanted to know what a boy who had lost his parents in a single night, and his name in a river, wanted at his father’s Academy after seven years. Whether he had come to learn. Or to kill.
And whom.
Rosalind blew out the candle.
In the dark, behind the thick stone wall, she heard Emilia Winterhall sigh in her sleep.
One floor down, Cedric Valemont had stopped hitting the wall.
And somewhere far below, at the foot of the hill, in one of the inns where the commoners slept, so far away that she was not sure whether she really heard it or only imagined it, someone sat at an open window, breathing.
Calmly. Evenly. Awake.
Like someone keeping watch.
Rosalind listened to that breathing for a while. Then she closed the door inside her, a crack at a time, until only the silence was left, and fell asleep.