The Winterhall townhouse in Crownhaven. The morning after the name day.
Emilia learned of it at breakfast, between a slice of bread and a cup of hot milk, and no one at the table thought it necessary to lower their voice.
“Ravenmoor is dead.”
Her father said it the way he said everything. Calmly. Smoothly. Without raising his eyes from the letter a messenger had brought him a few minutes before. As if he had said that it was raining outside.
Emilia’s mother set down her cup. A fine, bright clink, porcelain on porcelain.
“When?”
“Last night. Letters were found in his chambers. To the dwarf king. He was planning an alliance against the crown.” Her father folded the letter and laid it beside his plate. “When the king’s guards came to arrest him, he resisted.”
“And Evelyn?”
“Likewise.”
The Duchess Cordelia Winterhall was silent for a moment. Then she picked up her cup again. “How regrettable.” She drank.
Emilia had stopped chewing. The bread in her mouth suddenly felt like sand.
She thought of the fountain. Of the ice that had grown under her hands, of the moment she had turned round, so proud she had nearly burst. Of the boy with the black hair who had stared at her as if he had never seen anything so astonishing. And then of the slip, of the cold, wet feeling as she landed on the ice, and of the hand he had held out to her.
By chance. Because I’m bored.
“And the boy?”
Her voice sounded thinner than she wanted it to. Her mother looked at her with the look that meant children spoke at the table only when spoken to. But her father raised his head, and for a moment, just one tiny moment, Emilia thought she saw something in his face. A twitch, barely visible, like a crack in a sheet of ice.
Then it was gone.
“He fled. With the captain of the bodyguard. They are being searched for.”
“Why? He’s only …” A boy. An impudent, cheeky boy who held out his hand to me. “He hasn’t done anything.”
“He is the son of a traitor, Emilia.”
“But he himself …”
Emilia lowered her eyes to her plate and ate her breakfast. Every bite. She did not drop a single crumb.
She did not cry at breakfast.
Nor did she cry when her maid combed her hair and talked without pause about the terrible night, about the fire that could be seen all the way to the river, about the bells, about the guards who had marched through the streets. She did not cry when her mother called her into the drawing room in the afternoon to receive visitors, ladies in silk gowns who drank tea and said in lowered voices that one had always suspected it, that this Ravenmoor had always been so strange, so close to the common people, so loud.
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She sat bolt upright and smiled when it was expected of her.
A Winterhall shows no weakness. Her mother had taught her that since she could walk. A Winterhall does not cry. A Winterhall needs no one.
I’m a Winterhall. I don’t need help.
She had said it to him last night. At the fountain. And he had held out his hand anyway.
Only in the evening, when the visitors had gone and the maid had put out the candles and the house grew still, did Emilia pull the blanket over her head, press her face into the pillow so that no one would hear, and cry.
She did not know exactly why. She had hardly known him. She had only exchanged a few sentences with him, and most of them had been mean. She did not even like him. He had been impudent and a know-it-all and had acted as if she were a silly little girl.
But he had said the fountain was impressive.
And no one, truly no one, ever said to Emilia Winterhall that something she had done was impressive. Her tutors said adequate. Her mother said appropriate. Her father said nothing at all.
He had been the first.
And now he was on the run, somewhere out there in the dark, and men with swords were looking for him.
Three nights later.
Emilia could not sleep. That happened more often lately.
She sat on the wide windowsill of her room on the second floor, knees drawn up to her chest, a blanket around her shoulders, and looked down into the courtyard. It was a cold night. The moon hung low over the roofs, and her breath painted little white clouds on the windowpane, which she wiped away with her finger.
Down in the courtyard something moved.
A rider came through the gate. He dismounted before his horse had quite come to a stop, threw the reins to a stable boy and walked with quick steps towards the house. He was tall and wore dark clothes, and as he passed the lantern above the door, Emilia saw his face.
A scar. Right across the nose, as if someone had tried to split his face in two with a blade.
She did not know him. But she had the feeling she had seen him once before. In the shadows at the edge of the courtyard, on the evening they had set out for the name day.
Emilia held her breath. Her father never went outside at this hour. He received visitors in his study, with wine and candles and closed doors, as was proper. But now he stood in the moonlight, without a coat, and waited until the man with the scar stood before him.
They talked. Emilia could not hear what they said. She only saw the man with the scar pull something out of a saddlebag. A bundle of cloth, dark and wet, that glistened in the moonlight.
He unfolded it.
It was a surcoat. Black, torn, with dark stains. And on the breast, just visible in the light of the lantern, a silver bird with outspread wings.
A raven.
Her father took the surcoat. He looked at it for a long time. Then he said something to the man with the scar, and the man nodded, bowed and went back to his horse.
Her father remained standing in the courtyard for a moment longer, the wet surcoat over his arm.
And then he raised his head and looked up. At the windows. At her window.
Emilia slid off the windowsill, so fast that she banged her knee on the floor, and pressed herself against the wall beneath the window. Her heart was pounding so loudly that she was sure it could be heard down in the courtyard.
She waited. Counted to a hundred. Then to two hundred.
When at last she dared to peer over the windowsill again, the courtyard was empty. Only the lantern still burned above the door, and on the cobbles, where her father had stood, a few dark drops of water glistened in the moonlight.
The next morning at breakfast her father said, without looking up from his letter: “The captain of Ravenmoor and the boy are dead. Drowned in the Calder, while fleeing. Their clothes have been found.”
Emilia’s mother said: “How regrettable.”
Emilia said nothing.
She thought of the surcoat in the moonlight. Wet and torn, with a silver raven on its breast. She thought of how her father had taken it, quite calmly, as if he had expected it. And of how he had looked up. At her window.
She did not know what it meant. She was ten years old, and there was much she did not know.
But she knew that she would not ask her father about it.
And she knew that she would not forget it.
Ever.