Candles burned in iron cradles along the corridor walls, their flames leaning as Aviva passed, though the air held no wind she could feel. Each sconce had been carved into the shape of an open hand, fingers splayed wide, and the wax that dripped from them pooled in the stone palms below like something offered or perhaps collected. The light it cast was the color of old honey, thick and amber, and it made the shadows behind each column seem to breathe.
Cael Ravenscar walked three paces ahead of her. He had not offered his arm, and she had not asked for it. His boots struck the flagstones with a rhythm that never faltered, a metronome tick of authority dressed in black leather. The sound of her own steps seemed wrong beside his, too soft, too uncertain, and she pressed her weight harder into each stride until the sound evened out.
"You are quiet," he said without turning.
"I am listening."
"To what?"
She studied the corridor ahead. The walls were not walls. They were ribs. Long pale arches of bone rose from the floor and curved overhead, lashed together with bands of tarnished silver. Between the bones, panels of parchment had been stretched like drum-skin, and on those panels someone had painted scenes in pigments that had not faded in what looked like centuries. A coronation. A murder. A child crowned in thorns. The paint smelled faintly of iron and something sweeter beneath, a note she recognized but could not yet name.
"To the palace," Aviva said. "It speaks in its own way."
Cael Ravenscar turned his head just enough that she saw the hard line of his jaw, the thin scar that ran from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. The scar was old, silvered, and it moved when he spoke as though it had its own opinions.
"The palace does not speak," he said. "It listens. Keep that distinction in mind, and you may live through the fortnight."
They passed through a vaulted chamber where the ceiling had been grown rather than built. Roots descended from somewhere far above and plunged into the floor, so thick and pale they might have been the limbs of a buried giant. Small pale flowers dotted the living wood, each one closing as the two of them approached, then opening again in their wake as though tasting the air. The smell here was green and wet, loam and rain, and under it a faint sweetness that made the back of her throat tighten. Aviva recognized the species. Nightshade. The ornamental kind, bred for its perfume, though the roots below would tell a different tale to anyone who dug.
She had to dig sometimes. Her trade had taught her that.
"Tell me again," she said, "why I am not to be announced."
"Because your husband's name will open every door you do not wish opened." His voice was a low rasp that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his chest. "And because I have spent six years cultivating the assumption that the Lady Crowhurst died in the fire. Tonight we test how deeply that lie has rooted."
Aviva felt the heat of the funeral pyre behind her eyes, a phantom warmth she had thought she had banked. The smell of it returned, pine resin and burning silk, and beneath that the sharper note of a human body giving itself to flame. She had not looked back. She had been told not to look back, and she had obeyed, and the obedience had cost her something she could not yet afford to grieve.
"Watch the vines," Cael Ravenscar said.
The corridor had narrowed. Living runners of some pale creeper had climbed the bone walls and now crossed the ceiling in lazy arcs, dipping low enough to brush the crown of her head. Their leaves were the color of old milk and they moved in a slow, deliberate way that was not wind. Aviva lifted a hand and let one of the runners pass across her knuckles. The underside of the leaf was warm and slightly damp, and the stem pulsed faintly against her skin. She thought of her father's hands in the operating theatre, how steady they had been, how warm. She thought of them colder, much colder, and folded her fingers shut.
"You knew him," she said. "My father."
"I did."
"Tell me something true about him, then. Something no one else would know."
Cael Ravenscar did not slow his pace. The corridor curved, and the bone ribs leaned inward as though the building itself were listening. At last, when she had begun to think he would not answer, he said, "He sang when he worked. Old northern songs. The kind a man only sings when he thinks no one is listening."
"He never sang at home."
"No," Cael Ravenscar said. "He would not have."
She did not ask anything else for a long time. They passed through three more chambers, each more strange than the last. One held a floor of polished obsidian that reflected their faces back at them, distorted and older. Another was hung with silver masks, each one bearing the features of a different ruler, and the light that passed through the eye-holes fell in pale columns on the floor like the ghosts of the people who had once worn them. A third had been built around a single enormous tree that had grown up through the stone, and its roots had swallowed three chairs and a writing desk without complaint, and its branches pressed against the glass dome above as though trying to remember the sky.
At every junction, Cael Ravenscar chose the corridor she would not have chosen. At every door, he paused, listened, and decided. He did not explain his choices, and she did not ask. Somewhere far ahead, she could hear music, a single viol playing a phrase that resolved and began again, the same five notes over and over, patient and strange.
"Where are we?" Aviva asked at last.
"Between wings. The palace was built in seventeen campaigns, and the bones of those campaigns were never cleared away. The kings of Eldermarsh prefer the discomfort. It reminds them of what was paid."
"And the silver masks?"
"The Hall of Seventeen Crowns lies beyond them. Each mask is a ruler, not a sovereign. Some wore crowns and some did not. The masks were made during their lifetimes and fitted to their faces while they slept. A courtesy, in its way."
The viol stopped. The silence that followed was so complete that Aviva could hear her own blood in her ears, a small persistent sea.
"They will not fit a mask to me," she said.
Cael Ravenscar turned then, fully, and looked at her for the first time since they had begun this passage. His eyes were the color of river stone, and in the candlelight they held no warmth at all.
"That," he said, "depends entirely on what you do next."
He turned back, and the corridor opened before them into a darker air, an air that smelled faintly of beeswax and iron and the green decay of a garden kept too long in shadow.
The throne room of Eldermarsh had been built to make a supplicant feel small. Aviva knew this, had read it in the dusty pages of a treatise on architecture she had once stolen from her master's shop, and she had dismissed it then as the kind of knowledge no one needed. Now she understood. The ceiling climbed so high that the banners hung in a kind of dim grey weather, their lions and wyrms dissolving into shadow long before they reached the stone. The floor was a single unbroken slab of pale granite, and her boots made no sound upon it, which made her feel, absurdly, as though she were not walking at all but being carried.
Cael Ravenscar stopped at the foot of the dais and bowed, not deeply, which would have been servile, but with the precise inclination of a man who had once deserved a bow and had not quite forgotten the angle.
"Your Majesty," he said.
Queen Seraphine sat upon the throne with the stillness of a figure in a painted window. She was smaller than Aviva had expected, and older, though not in the way that women in the outer provinces grew old, with sun and children and too much work. She had aged in the manner of courts, in the careful creases about the eyes and the small downturn at the corners of a mouth that had learned to hold its shape against the weather of thirty years of marriage. Her gown was the deep arterial red of the Aldric line, and her hair had been dressed with white enamel pins in the shape of inverted swords. She did not smile.
"Leave us," she said to the guards at the far doors. Her voice was a bell struck in a cold room, perfectly tuned, without warmth. "The spymaster as well."
Cael Ravenscar's face did not change, but something at the corner of his mouth tightened, a small contraction that might have been amusement or warning. He bowed again, the same angle, and walked backward three paces before turning. As he passed Aviva, he did not look at her, but she heard him breathe one word, so low it was almost not a word at all.
"Listen."
Then the doors closed, and Aviva was alone with the queen of Eldermarsh, and the sound of her own heart became a thing she could not ignore.
The queen regarded her for a long moment in silence. Aviva held the gaze. She had been told, as a child, that this was rude, that a properly raised girl would lower her eyes, that deference was the oil that kept the world's hinges from creaking. She had also been told, by the same voices, that her mother had been a woman of remarkable composure, and Aviva had decided, on the whole, to take after her mother.
"You look like her," Queen Seraphine said at last. "Around the mouth. My mother had that same trick of stillness, as though she were waiting for the world to admit it had made a mistake."
Aviva said nothing. She did not know to whom the queen referred, and the not knowing made her skin prickle along the forearms, a warning she had learned not to ignore.
"You do not know," the queen said. "Of course you do not know. They were very thorough, my husband's people, when they did what they did. Three generations of silence, and the world forgets. The world is so eager to forget."
She lifted one hand, and in the palm was a small disc of beaten gold, no larger than a thumbnail, hung on a black cord. She turned it so the light caught it. Aviva saw, etched into the metal, a bird in flight, wings spread, and beneath it three words in the old script.
"Do you know what this is?" the queen asked.
"It is a Vael token," Aviva heard herself say, and she did not know how she knew, except that her father, in the years before he died, had kept one in a locked box beneath a false floorboard, and she had found it at seven, and held it to the candle, and been told, with a look she had not understood, to put it back.
The queen's mouth tightened. "So. Some of it survived."
She descended the steps of the dais with the slow precision of a woman who has learned that haste is read as fear. She stopped an arm's length from Aviva. The beeswax and iron smell was stronger here, and beneath it something else, something floral and dried, like roses kept in a drawer for a year.
"Your mother," the queen said, "was Maricel Vael, the youngest daughter of the last legitimate prince of the Vael line. She was three years old when the purge came. She was smuggled out in a chest of altar linens by a priest who had been bribed, and then passed from hand to hand until she reached the outer provinces, where she met your father, and took his name, and became no one."
Aviva's mouth had gone dry. "My mother was Elspeth Crowhurst. She was a midwife in the village of Thornmere, and she died of a fever when I was nine."
"Your mother," the queen said, "was a princess of the deposed blood, and her death was not a fever, and the man you called your father was not your father, though he loved her and you well enough. The man who sired you was a court physician named Aldous Vael, my half-brother by my mother's first marriage, who was murdered in the corridor outside this very room on the night of the winter solstice, twenty-three years ago."
The words came in like cold water through a cracked hull. Aviva felt the floor tilt, though it did not, and she understood, with a clarity that felt almost like violence, why Cael had told her to listen, because this was a story she would need to hear twice, and the first time she would need only to let it pass through her.
"I do not believe you," she said, and her voice held, which surprised her.
"No," the queen said. "You would not. You have his jaw, my half-brother, and his trick of disbelief, which he wore like armor until the day they cut him down. I was seventeen. I saw it from a window. I did nothing." Her voice did not waver, but something behind it did, a small seismic shift, like a crack in stone. "I have spent twenty-three years doing nothing, and I find, at last, that the doing of it has become a weight I can no longer carry."
She held out the gold disc on its cord. Aviva did not take it.
"Why tell me this?" Aviva asked. "Why now?"
"Because my husband intends to take a new wife, and the woman he has chosen is the daughter of the man who ordered the purge of your house, and the union will seal an old compact between two families that should never have been permitted to breathe the same air, and when it is done, the last trace of the Vael line, which is you, will be hunted down as a loose end, and the world will be made tidy in the way that powerful men prefer."
Aviva thought of Tomas, of the way he had looked at her across the kitchen table that morning, the way his hand had reached for hers and stopped, as though he had been afraid she would vanish. She thought of the herb she had been grinding when the summons came, the blue stain on her fingers, the smell of camphor.
"And what do you want of me?" she asked.
The queen's gaze was steady, and for the first time Aviva saw, beneath the enamel and the red gown and the pins like inverted swords, the face of a woman who had been, once, a girl at a window watching a man die.
"I want you to survive," Queen Seraphine said. "I want you to take this token and wear it where none can see, and I want you to go back to your husband and your shop and your quiet life, and I want you to wait, because the time is coming when the blood of the Vael will be the only currency that will purchase what must be purchased, and I would have you alive to spend it."
"And if I refuse?"
The queen's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Then you are your father's daughter in more than the jaw, and I shall have wasted what remains of my conscience on a woman too stubborn to use it." She stepped back. "The doors will open when I ring. You may go forward into the hall, or you may go back through them, but you will not, I think, be permitted to remain as you were."
Aviva looked at the gold disc. She thought of the false floorboard, and the way her father's hand had closed over hers when she tried to ask, and the particular silence that had settled over their house in the weeks before he died, a silence that smelled of beeswax and iron.
She reached out and took the token. It was warm from the queen's palm. The cord slid over her head and settled against her collarbone with a small weight, a heartbeat's worth of gold.
"I will wait," Aviva said. "But I will not be quiet about it."
The queen rang a small bell on the table beside the throne, and the doors opened, and the sound of the world rushed back in, and Aviva walked forward, because forward was the only direction she had been given, and the hall of seventeen crowns lay ahead, where the silver masks waited in their alcoves, and beyond them, somewhere, a door she had not yet earned the right to open.
The hall of seventeen crowns was larger than it had any right to be, a cavern of pale stone and higher arches, the air tasting of dust and something faintly sweet, like dried rose petals left too long in an attic. Seventeen alcoves lined the far wall, each one containing a mask of beaten silver, each mask different. The first was a fox. The second, a hare. The third, a stoat with teeth bared in a grin that stopped short of humor. The fourth, an owl. The fifth, a deer. The sixth, a heron. The seventh, a crow. The eighth, a wolf. The ninth, a boar. The tenth, a serpent coiled around its own jaw. The eleventh, a stag with antlers that branched into the stone of the alcove behind it. The twelfth, a mouse, so small it was easy to miss. The thirteenth, a raven, beak open, mid-caw. The fourteenth, a hound. The fifteenth, a fish with scales that caught the torchlight and threw it back. The sixteenth, a swan, neck arched. The seventeenth, at the very end, was a face. Not an animal. A human face, smooth and unfinished, the silver dimpled where eyes should have been, mouth slightly open, as if it had been about to speak and the silversmith had stopped.
Aviva counted them. It was the kind of habit her father had tried to beat out of her, the way he tried to beat the rest of the world into something that could be counted and named and so made safe. She had not managed to learn the lesson then. She doubted she would learn it now.
A man stood waiting at the center of the hall, where the flags of seventeen houses had been worked into the floor in stone and tarnished thread. He was slight, and pale, and dressed in the grey of the palace, which was the grey of waiting. He bowed when she approached, not deeply. He had the kind of face that was made for not being remembered, all planes and no punctuation.
"Lady Crowhurst," he said, and his voice was the same grey as his coat, a voice that could have belonged to anyone and so belonged to the room.
"Aviva," she said. "Lady Crowhurst is buried in the chapel yard. I am what is left."
Something moved behind his eyes. It might have been amusement. It might have been the beginning of a flinch. "Aviva, then. I am Mercer. I am to present the options the crown has seen fit to extend to you, and then to escort you to whichever one you choose, or to whichever one chooses you, if it comes to that."
"How reassuring."
"It is meant to be." He gestured toward the alcoves, though his hand barely moved. "The masks are not relevant. They are the regalia of the houses that swore to the crown in the time of the first Aldric. The hall is where oaths are taken. You will not be taking one today, I think."
"You think a great deal for a man in a grey coat."
He inclined his head, which was as close to a concession as his face seemed to allow. "There are three courses open to you, and I am instructed to lay them out plainly, because the queen believes you will respond better to plainness than to flourish, and the king, though he is not here, has said the same, in his way, which is always a way that takes longer to arrive at the same conclusion."
Aviva folded her hands in front of her. The gold disc pressed against her sternum. She could feel her own pulse against it, a small, insistent drum. "Then lay them out, Mercer. I have had a long walk through a long corridor, and the day is not getting any younger."
"The first," Mercer said, "is that you swear fealty to the crown, here, in this hall, before the masks and the flags and the relevant officers of the court. In exchange, you will be granted a minor lordship, a holding in the north, in the marches, where the borders are thin and the winters are long. The title would be yours in your own right, not your husband's, though it would be entailed to any children of your body. You would be expected to govern, to maintain a household, to keep the king's peace in a region that has not known the king's peace in some considerable time. The revenues would be modest. The risks would not be."
He paused. She said nothing. He went on.
"The second is that you enter into a marriage alliance with a noble house of the queen's choosing. The house has not yet been named. The bride price would be substantial. Your husband, whoever he is, would receive a command in the border levies, and a seat on the council, and the not inconsiderable favour of the crown, which is a thing that tends to attract both friends and the kind of people who would very much like to be your friends and are not to be trusted with the position. You would be moved from this palace to a house of your new husband's, and your old life would be, in the polite phrase, set down."
"And the impolite phrase?"
"Erased."
"And the third?"
Mercer's mouth did something that, on a face that was designed to forget itself, was almost a tell. "The third is that you remain in the palace. Indefinitely. For your protection. You would be given rooms in the east wing, which are comfortable, and you would be permitted to walk in the gardens at certain hours, and you would be attended by a household of the crown's choosing, and you would not, in any meaningful sense, leave."
Aviva let the silence fill the hall. Somewhere, water was dripping. Somewhere, a torch guttered and recovered. The silver masks watched her with their dozen different kinds of seeing.
"You may take time to consider," Mercer said, and he sounded as though he meant it, which was either a kindness or a cruelty of a more sophisticated kind.
"I do not need time," Aviva said. "I need a name."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The queen said I was to be given a choice, and I am to be grateful for it, and I am, in a way, because a choice is a thing I have not been given in some while. But choices that have no name attached to them are not choices. They are cages with better upholstery. So I will not choose a house I have not been told. I will not choose a holding I have not seen. And I will not choose to remain in a palace that I have only just entered, with people I do not know, in a city that I have never been permitted to visit, on the say-so of a queen I have not met, a king I have only heard of, and a man in a grey coat who tells me the relevant officers of the court are relevant without explaining what it is they are relevant to."
Mercer's face did the thing again. "Lady, I am not at liberty to name the house."
"Then I am not at liberty to choose the marriage."
He inclined his head, acknowledging the symmetry of it. "And the holding?"
"Is the holding where my father was born?" Aviva asked. "Is it the holding he was driven from? Is it the holding where my mother lived, before she lived in our house, where she died, where I was taught to set bones and bleed fevers and keep my mouth shut about where the knowledge came from? Is it that holding, Mercer, or is it some other, some clean one with no inconvenient history in the soil?"
"I am not at liberty to say."
"Then I am not at liberty to choose it, either."
A longer pause. Water dripped. A mask caught the light. The crow, she noticed, had a single eye that had been punched through, long ago, so that it looked at the world through a hole, which was a kind of honesty she had not expected from a piece of regalia.
"And the third option," Aviva said, "the one where I remain here, in the palace, for my protection, behind doors that lock from the outside, attended by people of the crown's choosing, who will choose, in time, what I am to be told, and what I am to be told of, and what I am to be permitted to remember, and what I am to be permitted to forget, and which of my dead I am to be permitted to grieve, and in what order, and for how long, and with what degree of noise, that option, Mercer, I reject. I reject it on my own behalf. I reject it on behalf of my husband, who did not survive to be consulted. I reject it on behalf of my father, who would have found it so funny he would have laughed until he wept, and then he would have wept until he laughed, and then he would have sat me down and explained to me, in the patient voice he used when I was being stupid, why no one with a drop of Crowhurst blood in their veins has ever consented to be kept in a room, for any reason, for any length of time, however gilded the bars."
She was aware that she was breathing harder than she ought to have been. She was aware that the gold disc was warm against her skin. She was aware that Mercer was watching her with the kind of attention that was not, in itself, a kindness.
"There is also," she said, and she made herself slow, "the question of who framed my father. You have not asked it. The queen has not asked it. The king, in his way, has not asked it, because his way, I am told, is the way of taking longer to arrive at the same conclusion. But it is the question. It has been the question since they dragged him out of our house with his hands bound and his face already set in the expression of a man who had known, for some time, that this was how it would end. It is the question now. It will be the question tomorrow. And until someone in this palace answers it, in plain words, in a voice I can hear, I will not be swearing any oaths, in any hall, before any set of masks, however many crowns they have on their walls."
Mercer was silent for a long time. The torchlight moved. The water dripped. The masks did not move at all, because they were silver, and silver, unlike the rest of the world, did not have to pretend to be alive.
"I am not at liberty to answer that question," he said, at last, and his voice was not grey, anymore. It was the colour of a thing that has been moved from one pocket to another, and is not sure, yet, where it will be set down. "But I am at liberty to tell you that the question has been heard. In this hall, which is where questions are heard, and where they are, sometimes, by the offices of the relevant officers, turned into the kind of answers that can be lived with. I am at liberty to tell you that the queen did not expect you to choose. She told me, before I came in, that you would not, and that the choosing was not the point. The point was to see how you refused, and whether the refusal was of the kind that could be built upon, or the kind that could only be set on fire."
"And which kind was it?"
"The first," he said. "She was very specific."
Aviva looked at him. He looked back, and for the first time, the grey of his face shifted, and there was something under it, the ghost of a man who had once, perhaps, refused something himself, and remembered what it cost.
"Then tell her," Aviva said, "that I will wait, as I promised. Tell her I will be quiet, as I did not promise. Tell her I will not be moved into a room, or onto a holding, or into a marriage I have not been shown, until the man who framed my father has a name, and the name has a face, and the face is brought into a room I am in, so that I may look at it, and so that the looking may be the beginning of whatever comes next."
"And if what comes next is not to your liking?"
"Then what comes next will be the next thing," Aviva said, "and I will be in it, and I will have refused to be elsewhere, which is, I have come to understand, the only kind of choosing that has ever done me any good."
Mercer bowed. This time, it was deeper.
"The doors behind me," he said, "lead to a corridor that leads to the east wing. There are rooms there that are not the rooms you have been offered. They are smaller. They are colder. They have windows that look onto the kitchens, and a yard, and, if you stand at the right angle, a sliver of the city wall, and the smoke of the city beyond. They are not the rooms of a guest. They are the rooms of a person who is here, and intends to remain here, and has not yet been told why."
"I will take them," Aviva said.
"You have not asked who occupied them before."
"No."
"You have not asked why they are empty."
"No."
"That is, perhaps, the wisest thing you have said all day, and you have said several wise things, which is itself a kind of warning."
Aviva took the gold disc in her hand, and felt the warmth of it, and the weight of it, and the small, insistent drum of her own pulse against it, and she thought of her father, and of the false floorboard, and of the particular silence that smelled of beeswax and iron, and she walked toward the door, because forward was the only direction she had been given, and the corridor beyond was narrow, and the light was not kind, and the rooms were smaller and colder than the ones she had been offered, and the windows looked out onto a sliver of wall and a column of smoke, and she stood at the window, and she watched the smoke, and she did not weep, because weeping was a thing she would do later, in private, when the gold disc was off her neck, and the door was closed, and the only eyes in the room were her own, and the eyes of the seventeen silver masks, which she had left behind her in the hall, and which would wait, as she would wait, for the name she had demanded, and the face that would go with it, and the answer that had not yet been given, but which had, at last, been heard.