The knife slipped from his fingers before the final cut.
Prince Edmund Thornwood stared at the half-peeled apple in his palm, its pale flesh browning at the edges. His hands would not stop shaking. He had learned to shave wood at seven years old, had stitched his own torn cloak at twelve after a hunting accident his brothers never let him forget, but tonight his fingers had turned to water.
The fire crackled low in the hearth of his private chambers, casting wavering shadows across silk hangings embroidered with the Thornwood roses. Edmund set the apple aside and pressed his palms flat against his thighs. The fabric of his sleeping robe clung damp to his skin. Something was wrong. Something had been wrong since the banquet, since he had raised the crystal goblet to his lips and felt the first strange warmth bloom behind his sternum.
He reached for the goblet now, still sitting on his nightstand where he had left it. Half-full. The wine had tasted of plums and something darker, something that coated his tongue like oil. He had drunk it anyway because Queen Margarethe had smiled at him when she offered it, and he could never refuse his mother when she smiled.
The memory made his stomach clench. He pressed his hand to his chest and felt his own heartbeat, rapid and wrong, fluttering beneath his ribs like a trapped bird.
A soft knock broke the silence.
Edmund flinched so hard he nearly toppled from the chair. The knock came again, three measured raps against the oak door, and a voice followed, low and rough.
"Edmund. It's Reed. Open the door."
He scrambled upright, his bare feet tangling in the hem of his robe. He crossed the cold flagstones and fumbled with the latch. The door swung inward, and his brother stood framed in the corridor's dim torchlight, still dressed in his leathers from the evening patrol, a fur-lined cloak thrown back over one shoulder.
Reed Thornwood looked exactly as Edmund remembered from childhood: too serious, too sharp, with their father's jaw and their mother's dark eyes. Only now those eyes held something Edmund could not name. Reed's gaze swept the room once, cataloguing the fire, the goblet, the abandoned apple, and finally settled on Edmund's face.
"You look terrible," Reed said.
Edmund let out a breath that almost became a laugh. "I feel terrible."
His brother stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The latch clicked with a finality that made Edmund's skin prickle. Reed moved to the hearth and crouched, feeding another log to the embers with the practiced ease of someone who had spent years sleeping under canvas. Sparks rose and fell like dying stars.
"Tell me," Reed said without turning around.
Edmund hovered near the foot of his bed, uncertain. He had not seen Reed alone since before the northern campaign, since the summer festival two years past when they had sparred with wooden swords in the training yard and Reed had let Edmund win the final bout. Tonight his brother radiated a stillness that felt like the moment before a storm breaks.
"The wine," Edmund managed. "At the banquet. Mother gave me wine, and I drank it, and now I cannot breathe properly, and my heart will not slow down."
Reed rose slowly from the hearth. The new flames painted his face in amber and shadow. He crossed the room in three long strides and took Edmund by the shoulders, his grip firm through the thin silk.
"Look at me."
Edmund looked.
"When did you first feel it?"
"After the third course. Perhaps the fourth. I thought it was the heat of the hall. There were so many candles."
"The candles were the same as every banquet."
"I know." Edmund's voice cracked. "I know something is wrong. Reed, I think I have been poisoned."
The word hung between them, ugly and impossible. Reed's expression did not change, but something shifted behind his eyes, a calculation so swift Edmund almost missed it.
"Sit down," Reed ordered, guiding him toward the chair by the fire. Edmund sank into it gratefully. His legs had begun to feel like water. "I am going to fetch someone."
"Who?"
"Someone I trust."
Reed moved toward the door, but Edmund caught his wrist. His fingers barely closed around the leather bracer his sibling wore.
"Do not leave me," he whispered.
Reed's jaw tightened. For a moment he looked less like a prince and more like the soldier he had trained himself to become. Then he crouched beside the chair so their faces were level.
"I will be quick," Reed said. "And I will return. Do you understand? I am not abandoning you here."
Edmund nodded because he could not speak. Reed rose, hesitated, and then did something he had not done since they were boys. He pressed his hand briefly to the top of Edmund's head, a clumsy benediction, and then he was gone.
The door closed. Edmund sat alone with the fire and the half-peeled apple and the goblet full of poison. He stared at the goblet until his eyes watered, and then he bowed his head and waited.
The corridor outside Edmund's chambers wound through the oldest part of the palace, where stone gave way to older stone and torchlight thinned to almost nothing. Reed Thornwood moved through the gloom with the sure-footed silence of a man who had learned to cross battlefields without disturbing the dead.
He had not told Edmund the full truth. He had suspected poison from the moment his youngest brother failed to appear for the closing toast. Edmund never missed a closing toast. He loved the ritual of it, the raising of crystal, the brief silence while the court held its breath.
Reed found Cordelia Ashworth in the library anteroom, where she often worked late by candlelight. She sat surrounded by open folios, a quill tucked behind one ear, ink staining her left index finger to the second knuckle. She looked up when the door opened, and her expression shifted from scholarly absorption to sharp attention in the space of a breath.
"Sir Reed." She rose, dropping a hasty curtsy. "It is past midnight."
"I need your help." He did not soften the words. There was no time. "Edmund has been poisoned."
Cordelia went very still. The quill slid from behind her ear and fell to the carpet. She did not pick it up.
"How certain are you?"
"He told me himself. His heart races. He struggles to breathe. It began during the banquet."
"What did he consume?"
"Wine. From a goblet the queen presented to him."
Cordelia's face underwent a subtle transformation. Reed watched the intelligence behind her eyes rearrange the pieces of a puzzle she had not known she was solving. She had served at court long enough to read between the lines of a sentence, and what she heard now made her shoulders tighten beneath the linen of her gown.
"The queen," she repeated carefully.
"Yes."
Cordelia crossed the room in three swift steps and seized a worn leather satchel from a hook by the door. She began pulling items from the shelves as she moved: dried herbs in paper twists, small glass vials, a mortar and pestle. Her hands were steady where Edmund's had trembled.
"There is a passage behind the tapestry in the eastern corridor," she said, her voice clipped and focused. "It leads to a disused stairway. From there one can reach the prince's quarters without passing the guards at the main staircase."
Reed raised an eyebrow. "You know the secret ways of this palace?"
"I know the secret ways of every room I have ever been forced to occupy for too long." She met his gaze without flinching. "Court taught me that doors are lies and walls have ears."
Something shifted in Reed's assessment of her. He had known Cordelia Ashworth as Edmund's companion, the scholarly third daughter who read treaties for pleasure and could quote obscure precedent until listeners begged for mercy. He had not known she carried a blade of her own, honed sharper than most.
"Lead the way," he said.
They slipped from the library into the darkened corridor. Cordelia moved with the confidence of long familiarity, her hand trailing along the stone to guide her around a loose flag. Reed kept two paces behind her, one hand resting on the pommel of his sword. The palace breathed around them, settling into its ancient bones, and somewhere distant a clock chimed the half-hour.
The tapestry Cordelia sought depicted the founding of the Thornwood dynasty, a massive weaving so faded the figures were barely distinguishable. She pressed her palm against a stone carved with the family crest and pushed. A section of wall groaned inward, exhaling the stale air of centuries.
"This way," she whispered.
They descended. The stairway was narrow and treacherous, the steps worn into shallow bowls by generations of feet. Reed counted them as they went, a habit from the borderlands where every escape route had to be memorized. Thirty-four. Forty-one. Fifty-two. The passage turned twice and opened onto a landing barely wide enough for two.
Cordelia paused with her hand on the next door. In the faint light filtering from above, her face looked carved from ivory.
"The poison," she said quietly. "If it came from the queen, it will not be anything crude. She is too intelligent for that."
"You suspect she poisoned her own son?"
"I suspect nothing. I observe." Cordelia's voice carried a brittle edge. "There are only a handful of slow-acting poisons that produce these symptoms. Most kill within hours. If Edmund still lives and his heart still beats, we may have time."
"How much time?"
"Unknown. Possibly days. Possibly less."
Reed absorbed this without expression. His hands had curled into fists at his sides. Somewhere above them, in silk hangings and candlelight, a mother had handed her youngest son a goblet and watched him drink.
"Open the door," he said.
Cordelia complied. The passage beyond was short and ended at a panel disguised as oak wainscoting. Reed pushed through first, sword half-drawn, and found himself in a small antechamber adjacent to Edmund's rooms. A fire burned low in a secondary hearth. The air smelled of beeswax and the faint green scent of the apple someone had begun to peel.
He sheathed his blade. Cordelia followed him through, her satchel clutched against her chest, and together they approached the inner door.
"Edmund," Reed called softly. "It is Reed. I have brought Cordelia."
A pause. Then the lock turned, and the door swung inward to reveal his brother swaying in the doorway, one hand braced against the jamb. Edmund's face had gone the color of tallow. Sweat darkened the collar of his robe.
"Cordelia," he breathed, and something in his expression shifted toward relief. "You came."
"I came." She moved past Reed and guided Edmund back toward the chair by the fire with the brisk tenderness of someone accustomed to managing crises. "Sit. Breathe slowly. Tell me everything you feel, and do not leave anything out."
Edmund sat. Cordelia knelt before him, pressing two fingers to the inside of his wrist while her other hand rested against his chest. Her eyes had gone distant, calculating, reading the racing pulse and the shallow breath the way a sailor reads the sky before a storm.
Reed watched from the doorway, his hand still resting on his sword. He had brought her here because she was clever and because Edmund trusted her, but trust could be a liability. He studied the line of her spine, the careful way she held her hands, the slight furrow between her brows. Whatever her loyalties, her focus now was entirely on the boy in the chair.
"Your pulse is too fast," Cordelia said calmly. "But it is steady. That is a good sign."
"What poison is it?" Reed asked.
Cordelia did not look up. "I cannot say for certain without testing the wine. But based on his symptoms, I believe it is something called stillshade. It acts slowly, over days rather than hours, paralyzing the heart by degrees."
"Can it be cured?"
"There is an antidote." She rose and moved to her satchel, pulling out a small leather-bound journal that she opened to a marked page. Reed saw columns of handwriting, sketches of plants, diagrams of roots and stems. "But the ingredients are rare. The most important is the essence of moonflower, which must be cultivated fresh and prepared within hours of harvest."
"Moonflower," Edmund repeated weakly. "I have seen those in the queen's gardens."
Cordelia and Reed exchanged a glance. The queen's gardens sprawled behind the west wing, a place of controlled beauty where nothing grew without permission and every bloom served a purpose known only to the women who tended them.
"Then we will need to find them elsewhere," Cordelia said carefully. "There are moonflowers that grow wild in the lower city, in certain temple gardens, and along the river banks south of the bridge. But they only bloom at night, and they must be harvested under a specific phase of the moon."
Reed crossed his arms. "How specific?"
"Very. We have perhaps four nights before the window closes."
"And if we miss it?"
Cordelia's composure cracked, just for a moment. She looked at Edmund, who had begun to shiver despite the fire, and then she looked at Reed.
"Then we will have failed," she said, "and Prince Edmund will not see the spring."
The summons came at the ninth bell, delivered by a steward whose face held the particular blankness of a man carrying dangerous messages. Reed was still damp from the washbasin, his shirt unlaced at the collar, when the man bowed and extended a folded card bearing the queen's personal seal, a crescent moon entwined with thorns.
"The queen requests your presence in her solar, Your Highness. At once."
Reed broke the wax. The note inside contained three words in Margarethe's cramped hand: Come. Now. Alone.
He dressed without hurry, because hurrying was a concession he refused to make to her summons. Black wool, a high-collared doublet, his sword left behind because the queen's solar was the one room in the palace where weapons felt like insults. He caught his reflection in the polished bronze by the door and saw a man who looked older than his years, the lines around his mouth deeper than they had been when he'd ridden north three seasons ago.
The corridors of the west wing were quiet at this hour. Servants moved along the edges like shadows, their footsteps muffled by carpets that swallowed sound. Reed passed a window and saw the courtyard below lit by torches, the fountain frozen mid-spray, the stone cherub's face half in shadow. Somewhere a dog was barking, the sound thin and distant.
The queen's solar occupied the corner tower, a circular room with windows on three sides. Reed had not been inside since he was a boy, when his mother had used it as a schoolroom for Edmund and occasionally for him, though she had quickly decided that Reed's temperament did not suit needlework and deportment. He remembered the room as warm and cluttered, smelling of lavender water and the beeswax candles his mother favored. Now the door stood open and a fire burned in the grate, and the scent that greeted him was different, sharper, the green bite of crushed herbs.
Queen Margarethe sat in a high-backed chair beside the fire, her hands folded in her lap. She wore deep blue, almost black, and her hair was dressed high with silver pins that caught the light. The scar on her throat, a thin white line that disappeared beneath her collar, was the only mark of the attempt that had nearly killed her six years ago. Reed sometimes wondered if she kept her hair high to show it, or to hide it, or simply because she knew that both readings served her.
"Sit," she said without preamble.
Reed bowed and took the chair opposite her. Between them a small table held a tray with wine, two cups, and a plate of figs heaped with no particular artistry. The queen did not offer him food. She studied him with the patient attention of a woman who had learned to read faces the way scholars read books.
"You have been with Edmund," she said.
"Yes."
"He is unwell."
"Yes."
"And you have not seen fit to inform me."
It was not a question. Reed held her gaze. "I have been occupied with ensuring his comfort. He was sleeping."
Margarethe's mouth moved a fraction, the ghost of something that was not quite a smile. "You were always a poor liar, Reed. Even as a child. You would redden and stare at your shoes and believe that no one could see the truth crawling across your face." She lifted a cup but did not drink. "Who is treating him?"
"A physician by the name of Hawthorne."
"A woman."
"A physician," Reed repeated. "She has been trained in the old methods."
"The old methods." Margarethe set the cup down with a soft click. "And what do these old methods tell you?"
Reed considered how much to reveal. Cordelia's warning echoed in him, the caution about walls, about servants, about the way news traveled in this palace. But Margarethe was Edmund's mother. Whatever else she was, she was that.
"She believes he has been poisoned," Reed said. "With something called stillshade."
The fire popped. Sparks rose and died. Margarethe's expression did not change, but something shifted behind her eyes, a calculation completed, a piece of a puzzle slid into place.
"I see," she said softly. "Stillshade. That is a name I have not heard in some years."
Reed's attention sharpened. "You know it."
"I know of it. A paralytic, if I remember correctly. Slow acting. Difficult to detect because it mimics so many ordinary complaints." She paused. "And difficult to acquire, which means either someone went to considerable trouble, or someone had access to particular stores."
The implication hung between them, unspoken but audible. Reed watched his mother and waited.
"Does this physician of yours know who administered it?" Margarethe asked.
"No. She is still investigating."
"Then she is either very discreet or very cautious. Possibly both." Margarethe rose and moved to the window, her silhouette sharp against the dark glass. Beyond, the palace grounds fell away into shadow, the gardens invisible, the river a smear of dull silver in the distance. "Reed, I did not summon you to discuss Edmund's health. Edmund's health is in the hands of the physicians and the gods, and I have learned not to interfere with either."
"You summoned me to discuss my marriage."
She turned. The firelight caught the silver in her hair and made her look, for an instant, like the portrait that hung in the gallery, the one painted after Aldric's coronation when she had still been young enough to believe in happy endings.
"Yes," she said. "I did."
"I have already refused."
"You refused a suggestion made by your father in a crowded hall. I am making a different kind of suggestion, in a different kind of room." She returned to her chair and sat, arranging her skirts with the care of a woman settling in for a long negotiation. "Princess Isadora of Valdmir is not the stranger you imagine. She has been in this court since she was a child. She speaks our language, she knows our customs, she has been educated alongside Edmund, and she has been groomed for a throne since before she could walk."
"She has also been educated in espionage," Reed said. "I am aware of her background."
"Good. Then you understand that she is not a naive girl being shuffled across a border to secure an alliance. She is a woman who knows exactly what she is worth, and she has chosen to position herself here rather than accept any of the offers her father made on her behalf from abroad." Margarethe's voice was steady, each word placed like a stone in a wall. "She is twenty-three, she is intelligent, and she is very tired of waiting."
"For what?"
"For someone worth waiting for." Margarethe allowed herself a thin smile. "Do not look at me like that, Reed. I am not a romantic. I am a pragmatist, and I am telling you that the princess has indicated, through channels I will not disclose to you, that she would accept a match with the second prince if it were offered. She has refused three other suits this year alone. She is not being forced into this. She is choosing it."
Reed said nothing for a long moment. The fire had burned low, and a servant moved silently to add another log, the fresh wood hissing as it caught. He watched the flames crawl along the bark and thought of Edmund's face, pale and still beneath the blankets, of Cordelia's hands as she mixed the tincture, of the moonlight that would need to find the riverbanks in four nights.
"Edmund is ill," he said finally.
"Yes."
"He may die."
The word landed between them with the weight of stone. Margarethe did not flinch, but her hands, folded in her lap, tightened just enough that the knuckles showed white.
"Your father does not know yet," she said. "Hawthorne has told no one but you?"
"And you, now."
"And me." Margarethe inclined her head a fraction. "And if Edmund dies, Reed, you are the only son standing between this kingdom and a succession crisis that would tear it apart within a season. There are seven claimants with better blood claims than yours, and four of them are already assembling their factions. Do you understand what that means?"
"It means I would have to fight."
"It means you would have to marry. Quickly. And with a partner who brings legitimacy, wealth, and a foreign army behind her claim." Margarethe leaned forward, and for the first time her composure cracked, just slightly, revealing something underneath that Reed had not seen since he was a boy and had come to her bleeding from a fall. "I am not asking you to do this because I wish to control your life, Reed. I am asking you because your brother may not survive the spring, and because if he does not, I will not be able to protect you from what follows. The court will tear you apart. The northern lords will not accept a knight-prince with no alliances to bolster his claim. Isadora brings Valdmir's remaining treasury and the loyalty of the eastern provinces. Without her, you are a man with a sword and no friends."
Reed's throat was dry. He reached for the wine and poured a cup, drinking without tasting. "You speak as though Edmund's death is already certain."
"I speak as though it is possible. And possible is enough to require preparation." Margarethe's voice dropped, losing its clipped precision, becoming something lower and rougher, the voice she used when the doors were closed and the listening walls could not reach her. "Reed, I have survived four attempts on my life. I have watched your father age into a man I barely recognize. I have buried two children you never knew about, daughters born dead between my legs in rooms that smelled of blood and lye. I have learned that hope is a luxury, and planning is the only prayer I trust."
He set the cup down. The figs on the plate looked obscene in their abundance, glossy and perfect, while his brother lay upstairs with something eating him from the inside.
"Give me time," he said. "Four days. If we can find what Hawthorne needs, Edmund may recover."
"And if he does not?"
"Then I will consider your proposal. But not before."
Margarethe studied him for a long moment. The fire crackled. Outside, the wind had risen, and somewhere a shutter banged against a wall. At last she nodded, a single dip of the chin, a concession so small it would have been invisible to anyone who did not know her.
"Four days," she said. "But I will tell Isadora that you are considering the match. She will need to prepare, and she will need to be managed, and I would rather manage her than have her manage herself. Do you understand?"
"I understand."
"Good. Go back to your brother. And Reed." She paused, and for an instant her mask slipped entirely, and Reed saw his mother, just his mother, tired and frightened and holding herself together with the same iron will that had kept her alive through fire and blade. "I love Edmund more than I have ever loved anything in this world. More than your father. More than this crown. Do not let him die."
Reed rose and bowed, low and formal, the bow of a son to a queen. When he straightened, Margarethe had turned back to the window, her reflection floating in the dark glass like a ghost already half-formed.
He left without another word, and the door closed behind him with a sound like a held breath finally released.
The corridor stretched before him, long and empty, lit at intervals by guttering candles that threw pools of gold against the stone. Reed walked slowly, his boots quiet on the carpet, his mind turning over what his mother had said and what she had not said. She knew about stillshade. She had known the name without hesitation, without the pause of someone learning something new. That meant either she had encountered it before, or she had known it was a possibility. The second thought was a door he did not want to open. Not yet. Not until he had more pieces to fit into the pattern.
At the end of the corridor, a figure waited in the shadows. Reed's hand went to his hip before he remembered he had come unarmed.
The figure stepped forward into the light. It was Princess Isadora of Valdmir, wrapped in a dark cloak, her dark hair loose over her shoulders.
"Your Highness," she said, and her voice was low and melodic, with the faint lilt he had not heard in her speech since childhood. "I thought I might find you here."
"Your Highness," she said, and her voice was low and melodic, with the faint lilt he had not heard in her speech since childhood. "I thought I might find you here."
Reed stopped an arm's length from her. The candle nearest them guttered in some unseen draft, and for a moment her face was all shadow and the glint of dark eyes.
"Princess Isadora." He kept his voice even. "You should not be wandering the corridors at this hour."
"I could say the same of you." She tilted her head, the movement deliberate, studied. "You have been to see your mother. I saw you leave her chambers."
Reed said nothing. The silence between them stretched, filled with the distant sound of wind against stone.
"I know what you are looking for," Isadora said, and now the theatrical warmth was gone from her voice, replaced by something flatter, colder, almost clinical. "I know what you suspect. I have known for longer than you have."
"Then tell me."
"Not here. Not in a corridor where any passing servant might hear." She glanced toward the stairwell behind him. "Your brother's chambers are close. He is dying, they say. Is it true?"
"Yes."
"And your betrothed sits with him." The word betrothed landed with the weight of a struck bell. "Cordelia Ashworth. The scholar's daughter. The woman your mother despises."
"My mother's opinions are her own."
"Your mother's opinions are policy." Isadora stepped closer, and the faint scent of jasmine reached him, cloying in the overheated air. "I have spent my whole life in courts, Reed Thornwood. I know what it looks like when a queen wants someone dead."
"And who, in your expert opinion, does my mother want dead?"
Isadora's lips curved, a smile that held no warmth. "Everyone. But tonight, specifically? Your brother, I think. Or the girl beside him."
Reed studied her face, searching for the lie beneath the truth, the angle beneath the apparent candor. "You were betrothed to Edmund since you were children. Why would you warn me?"
"Because I am tired of being a piece moved across a board I did not design." For a moment the mask slipped, and something raw showed beneath. "Because I would rather be useful than decorative. And because, whatever else I am, I am not a fool."
She reached into her cloak and withdrew a small leather pouch, which she pressed into his hand. "Stillshade. I took it from Edmund's food before the cook could serve it. It was meant to look like rosemary in the sauce."
Reed opened the pouch. Inside, dark leaves crumbled to dust at his touch, releasing a smell like dead lilies and bitter almonds. His jaw tightened.
"Where is the cook now?"
"Gone. Slipped through the kitchen gate an hour ago. Your mother's people, I think, though I cannot prove it." Isadora's voice dropped. "Reed. Whoever did this will try again. And they will not use poison twice."
"You think blade next?"
"I think whoever is doing this wants the death to look natural until it cannot be helped. A fall from a window. A tragic riding accident." She paused. "A fever that will not break."
The last word landed between them like a blade.
"Go," Reed said. "Go back to your rooms. If anyone asks, you have been asleep all night."
"And you?"
"I am going to sit with my brother."
Isadora nodded once, and turned, her cloak swirling, and was gone into the shadows as if she had never been. The candle guttered again and steadied, and the corridor felt colder for her absence.
Reed closed his hand around the pouch and walked toward Edmund's chambers.
The door to Edmund's room stood ajar, and from within came the soft sound of singing. Reed paused in the doorway, hidden by the angle of the frame, and did not announce himself.
Cordelia sat beside Edmund's bed, her back straight, her hand resting on his forehead. A basin of water steamed on the side table, and cloths lay folded beside it. The fire had burned low, and the room was lit mostly by a single candle on the windowsill, its flame steady in the still air.
She was singing.
The melody was unfamiliar to him, old and slow, with a cadence that belonged to farmhouses and village greens rather than noble halls. The words were older still, half-lost, fragments of something about moonlight and water and the patience of stone. Cordelia's voice, usually so measured, so carefully controlled, had gone soft and unguarded, and she sang as if she had forgotten anyone else existed.
Edmund stirred beneath her hand, and she paused mid-phrase to murmur something he could not hear, and Edmund settled again, and she resumed the song from the beginning as if the interruption had not occurred.
Reed stood in the doorway and did not move.
The melody was one he had heard before. Long ago. Before the northern wars, before the first assassination attempt on his mother, before he had learned what it meant to keep watch while you slept. A nurse had sung it to him when he was small and fevered, in a house in the borderlands, while snow piled against the shutters and the fire threw shapes on the wall.
The nurse had been called Maren. She had died of the same fever she had nursed him through, and he had been six years old, and he had never told anyone how her face had looked in the mornings when she thought he was still asleep. He had never told anyone how her absence had been the first true grief of his life.
He had not thought of Maren in fifteen years.
Now, standing in the doorway of his dying brother's room, listening to a woman he barely knew sing a song he had not heard since childhood, he remembered. He remembered the smell of the herb tea she had brewed, and the weight of her hand on his forehead, and the way she had looked at him, not as a prince, but as a child who was frightened.
Cordelia's voice caught on a phrase, and she hummed through it instead, and Edmund's breathing eased, and Reed felt something crack open in his chest that he had believed was stone.
He did not enter the room.
He stood in the doorway and let the song wash over him, and he did not move until the last note had faded into the silence of the room and Cordelia had bent to replace the cloth on Edmund's brow. Only then did he step back, quietly, into the corridor, and walk to the chair against the far wall, where he sat down to keep watch until morning.
He did not sleep. He did not need to. The song stayed with him, a small bright thread in the long dark of the night, and somewhere in the small hours, when the candles guttered and Edmund's fever climbed again, Cordelia began to sing it once more, and Reed closed his eyes and let himself remember a kindness he had thought forgotten.
Dawn came grey and cold, light filtering through the high windows in thin pale shafts. Edmund's fever had broken sometime in the last hour, and he lay sleeping now with the easy breath of the convalescent, his color returning, his hand curled loosely in Cordelia's.
Cordelia had fallen asleep in her chair, her head tilted at an angle that would pain her when she woke, her hand still resting on Edmund's. Reed rose quietly and crossed the room. He took the worn blanket from the foot of Edmund's bed and draped it over Cordelia's shoulders, moving with the care of someone accustomed to handling fragile things.
She stirred but did not wake. Reed stood over her for a moment, watching the faint shadows under her eyes, the stubborn set of her jaw even in sleep, and felt again the crack in his chest, wider now, admitting light.
He turned and walked out of the room without looking back, and the door closed behind him with a sound like a held breath finally released.