The Crown We Forgot: Ashes of Aldenwyck

The morning came grey and cold, the kind of cold that settled into the bones of the ruined chapel and refused to leave. Frost clung to the broken panes of the eastern window, and through the gaps in the roof, a thin snow sifted down to dust the pews with white. Coraline Ashworth stood near the back, her breath a pale ghost before her face, and watched the congregation gather.

They came in their blacks and greys, the court of Aldenwyck in mourning. Velvet hoods drawn, gloved hands clasped, the women moved like shadows through the ruined nave. The men kept their hats low, their gazes fixed on the flagstones. Incense smoke curled from a thurible near the altar, thick and sweet, masking the smell of damp stone and old ash. Somewhere beyond the walls, a bell tolled, low and funereal, the sound rolling across the rooftops of the palace and the town beyond.

Coraline had not been to court in three years. She had kept to her family's holdings in the north since the first reports of the King's illness, and she had sent her regrets when the summons came for the prince's wedding. The King's death, and the prince's, had changed things. One did not refuse a memorial. One did not refuse the Regent.

She found her place among the minor ladies, near a pillar where the plaster had fallen away to reveal the old stone beneath. Her gown was plain black wool, trimmed with the narrow silver braid that marked her as a daughter of a fallen house. No jewels. No lace. The Ashworths had little enough to display, and what remained she would not squander on a public grief.

The chapel had been a cathedral once, before the burning. The fire had taken the crossing and the great transept, and what remained was a single long nave with a patched roof and a temporary altar set beneath the surviving arch of the choir. Banners hung there, the crimson and gold of the Aldenwyck lion, freshly made, their tassels still stiff with new gilt. They moved in the drafts, slow and solemn, as though the air itself were keeping vigil.

She had been watching the Regent for several minutes before she admitted it to herself. Cristoph Halden stood at the head of the aisle, flanked by two men-at-arms in the household livery. He was dressed in the deep mourning of a sovereign's brother, black velvet and a white linen collar, his dark hair cropped close and a short beard trimmed with care. His face was composed, the mouth set, the eyes downcast. He held a psalter open in one hand, and his lips moved in silent recitation as the priests finished their preparations at the altar.

He was not yet forty, and the court had not stopped whispering about it. The King had been older when he wed, and older still when Prince Adrian was born. Cristoph had been the spare, the soldier-prince, the one sent to the borders to fight the Blechweid incursions while his elder brother managed the treasury and produced an heir. Now the heir was dead, and the spare was Regent, and every lady in the chapel was studying the line of his jaw.

Coraline studied him too, but for different reasons. She watched the set of his shoulders, the way his weight shifted from one foot to the other when the thurifer swung the censer too close. She watched his eyes, and the careful blankness he kept there. He was a man who had learned to govern his face. She wondered what he was hiding.

The priests began the Introit. The voices rose, plainchant in the old mode, the words Latin and familiar. Coraline let the sound wash over her, the cadences rising and falling, the sopranos a thin bright line above the deeper tones. She did not sing. Her own voice was small and she had no wish to draw attention.

A rustle of silk at her elbow. A woman slid into the space beside her, her gown of black brocade whispering against the stone. Lady Marguerite Devereaux wore her mourning like armour, the collar high, the sleeves tight to the wrist. Her veil was pinned with a single brooch of onyx and silver, the Devereaux device. She did not look at Coraline. She looked at the Regent.

"He carries it well," Lady Marguerite murmured, her voice barely above the chant. "The grief, I mean. One would almost think he mourned."

Coraline said nothing. She kept her gaze on the altar.

"He was close to the boy," Lady Marguerite continued, as though Coraline had invited the observation. "Closer than the King was, in the end. The King was always busy with the treasury. Cristoph rode with Adrian. Taught him to sit a horse. Held his hand at the funeral of the old queen."

"It is a public grief, my lady," Coraline said, quietly. "We are all called to share it."

Lady Marguerite's mouth curved, a small, cold motion. "We are called to witness it. That is not the same." She turned her head, just slightly, and her eyes met Coraline's. They were the pale grey of river ice, and they missed nothing. "You are the Ashworth girl. The last of them."

"I am."

"I knew your mother. Before the reduction. She had a fine hand for embroidery, and a finer head for accounts." Lady Marguerite's gaze returned to the Regent. "A pity about the entail. The Ashworth lands would have been useful, once."

"Once," Coraline agreed.

The singing swelled. The Gospel was read, a passage from the Book of the Shepherd, the voice of the deacon rising and falling in the ritual cadence. Coraline let her attention drift, the Latin half-heard, the incense heavy in her throat. She thought of her mother's hands, the long fingers stained with dye, the small stitches that had mended the household linens when there was no money for new. She thought of the letters folded in the brass-bound box beneath her bed, the ones she had not yet dared to read.

The Regent moved. He ascended the three steps to the altar, genuflected, and took his place at the sedilia. The priests offered him the censer, and he bowed his head over the incense. The light from the high windows caught the line of his cheekbone, the dark fall of his hair. He looked, for a moment, very young. Then he straightened, and the mask was back.

The court ladies were watching. Coraline could feel their attention, a kind of pressure at the edges of the space. Lady Marguerite was not the only one with a daughter, or a niece, or a carefully managed hope. The Regent was unmarried. The succession was uncertain. The whisper of a new queen ran through the chapel like a draught.

Coraline turned her face away. She had no part in that particular game. The Ashworth name carried no weight now, and she had no lands to offer, no alliances to trade. She was here because the Regent had sent a personal summons, sealed with the Halden cipher, and she had been too proud to refuse and too cautious to disobey.

The sermon began. A lean priest in a faded cope mounted the pulpit and opened his book. He spoke of the prince's virtues, his piety, his courage in the border skirmishes. He spoke of the King's long reign, and the grief of the realm. He spoke of the need for steadfastness, and prayer, and the comfort of the saints. His voice was thin and reedy, and the drafts in the chapel snatched at his words.

Coraline listened with half an ear. She was watching the Regent again. He sat very still, his hands folded on the psalter, his eyes lowered. He did not weep. He did not sigh. He was a statue of black velvet and white linen, and the only movement was the slight rise and fall of his chest.

Then the priest said something that made the Regent's jaw tighten. It was a small motion, a flicker, gone in an instant. Coraline caught it. She had been looking for cracks, and there, at the edge of his mouth, was one.

The priest had invoked the name of the prince's mother, the old queen, dead these ten years. He had spoken of her piety, and her son, and the sorrow of a mother who had gone before her child. A commonplace enough observation. And yet Cristoph's hand had closed on the psalter, the knuckles whitening for a moment before he forced them to relax.

Lady Marguerite saw it too. Her eyes narrowed, a fraction. She said nothing, but the corner of her mouth twitched.

The sermon ended. The prayers for the dead began, the responses rising and falling, the names read out in a long, sorrowful list. The King's name. The prince's name. The names of the household, the guards, the servants who had died in the fire that had taken the prince. Coraline murmured the responses, her lips moving, her mind elsewhere.

She was thinking of the letters. The brass-bound box held more than the Ashworth correspondence. There was a bundle, wrapped in oilcloth, that she had found in her father's desk after his death. The seal on the outer wrapping was not the Ashworth device. It was the Halden cipher. She had not opened it. She had been afraid to open it. The fear had kept her from it for three years, and the fear was still there, a cold weight in her stomach.

The Regent's name was spoken in the prayers. The deacon asked that the Lord would guide him in his governance, and protect him in his grief, and grant him wisdom. Cristoph bowed his head, and the congregation bowed with him.

When the rite ended, the congregation began to file out. The great doors had been blocked with timber after the fire, so the people exited through a narrow door in the south transept, one by one, into the courtyard. Coraline waited. She was in no hurry to be jostled, and she had no wish to join the press of the great ladies near the altar.

Lady Marguerite had already gone, swept forward by the current of silk and velvet, her veil streaming behind her. Coraline watched her go, the straight back, the set shoulders, the way she moved as though the crowd were a sea she parted by will.

The Regent descended from the sedilia. He stood for a moment at the foot of the altar, his hand resting on the stone, his head bowed. Then he turned, and his gaze swept the nave. It passed over the priests, the altar boys, the household officers, the last of the departing ladies. It found Coraline.

He looked at her. She looked back. The space between them was the length of the ruined nave, thirty paces of cracked flagstones and scattered straw. His face was calm. His eyes were not.

He inclined his head, a fraction, the motion of a man acknowledging a presence. Then he turned, and his officers closed around him, and he passed through the south door and was gone.

Coraline let out a breath she had not known she was holding. The chapel was nearly empty now. A priest was snuffing the candles at the altar, one by one. The incense smoke hung in the air, thinning slowly. The snow had stopped, but the light through the broken roof was still grey and cold.

She gathered her cloak around her shoulders and walked toward the door. At the threshold, she paused. She looked back, once, at the empty nave, the patched roof, the banners stirring in the draft. The chapel smelled of damp stone and old ash, and beneath that, faintly, of the lavender her mother had used to keep the linens sweet.

She stepped out into the courtyard, and the cold struck her face like a hand.

The afternoon light was already failing when Coraline stepped out into the courtyard. The snow had stopped, but the cold had settled into the stones, and the sky to the west was the color of old pewter. She pulled her cloak tighter, feeling the weight of the damp wool across her shoulders, and made her way toward the lodging that had been assigned to her in the guest wing of the keep.

The castle of Aldenwyck was a sprawling, half-ruined thing, built in an age when men feared sieges more than weather. Its courtyards were open to the sky where roofs had fallen in, and its staircases often ended in midair, giving onto nothing but a view of the courtyard three floors below. Coraline had been warned, on her first morning, to mind her step. She had learned to walk close to the walls, to test every flagstone, to keep one hand on the stone whenever the stairs were uncertain.

She was crossing the lesser courtyard, near the old chapel, when she heard footsteps behind her, quick and deliberate, the click of a heel on stone. She did not turn. She had learned, in her years of wandering, that turning too quickly marked a woman as prey.

"Madame Ashworth."

The voice was cool, precise, faintly French, the kind of voice that expected to be obeyed. Coraline stopped. She turned, slowly, and found herself face to face with a woman she had not seen before.

Lady Marguerite Devereaux stood in the falling snow, a tall, slender figure in a gown of dark green velvet, trimmed with silver. Her hair was dressed high, powdered lightly with grey, and her face was the long, austere face of her brother, the Regent, though the eyes were a different color, a pale, watchful grey. She was perhaps fifty, perhaps older, but she held herself with the stillness of a woman who had never been questioned in her own house.

"Your servant, Madame," Coraline said, and curtsied, the formal curtsy of her father's house, which she had not been required to give since she was a girl.

Lady Marguerite did not return it. She looked at Coraline the way one might look at a piece of embroidery whose thread was beginning to fray, with a slight narrowing of the eyes, a tilt of the head.

"You are the niece of Lord Ashworth of Dunmore," Lady Marguerite said. It was not a question.

"I am," Coraline said. "His only daughter."

"I knew your mother." Lady Marguerite's voice was cool, but there was a flicker of something beneath it, not warmth exactly, but recognition. "Marguerite Halden, before she was Ashworth. She was at court with me, in my first season. She was considered a beauty."

Coraline said nothing. She had heard this before. She had heard it from her aunt, from old servants, from her father, in those rare moments when he spoke of his wife at all. The repetition had not softened it.

Lady Marguerite studied her. "You have her coloring," she said. "The same dark hair, the same mouth. But you have your father's eyes."

"My father's eyes," Coraline said, "are in the ground at Dunmore."

"Yes." Lady Marguerite inclined her head, a fraction. "I had heard. It was a sad business. The fire at the east wing. They say the roof fell in before anyone could reach him."

"They say that," Coraline said. Her voice was steady. She had trained it to be steady. "It is what the records will say."

Lady Marguerite's gaze sharpened. "You are careful," she said. "That is well. A woman in your position must be careful. The name Ashworth is not a name that opens doors easily in this court. There are those here who lost friends at Dunmore. There are those here who lost gold."

"I am aware of it, Madame."

"I am sure you are." Lady Marguerite paused. She looked past Coraline, toward the chapel, where the last of the priests was emerging, shaking snow from his robes. "You have no protector at court. You have no family of any standing. You have come here, alone, at a time when the court is... unsettled. You understand what that means."

"I understand it very well."

"Then you will not mind if I offer you a place." Lady Marguerite's voice was cool, almost offhand, as though she were offering a seat at a table rather than a roof over a head. "My aunt, Madame de Rochemure, is with me for the season. She is old, and she finds the court exhausting. She requires a companion, a woman of gentle birth, who can read to her, who can sit with her when the music is too much for her. I had thought of one of the Halden cousins, but she is lately confined. You will do."

Coraline was silent. The offer was a snare, and she knew it. To enter the household of Lady Marguerite was to enter the household of the Regent, to be a guest in the house of the man who had signed the order that had left her father to die in a burning wing. It was to be a fly in the web, dressed in silk, invited to dinner.

But it was also a door. The door she had come here to find.

She curtsied again, a little lower this time. "Madame is very kind," she said. "I am at Madame's service."

"Good." Lady Marguerite did not smile. "You will come to my apartments this evening, after the supper hour. My aunt will want to see you. Bring no maid. I will send one of my own."

She turned, then, without waiting for a reply, and walked away across the courtyard, her green velvet skirts sweeping the snow, her back as straight as a blade. Coraline watched her go.

She stood there for a long moment, the snow falling softly around her, the light failing, the cold settling into her bones. She thought of her mother, who had been a beauty in a first season, who had married a lord she did not love, who had died of a winter cough in a drafty house. She thought of her father, who had read the letters in the locked drawer, who had written back, who had been careful, and not careful enough.

She thought of the heirloom, the brooch of twisted silver, which lay against her breast, beneath her chemise, warming slowly against her skin.

She gathered her cloak and went on to her lodging.

The room she had been given was small, but it had a fireplace, and a bed with clean linens, and a window that looked out over the inner ward, where the snow was beginning to lie. She sent the maid away, on the pretext of wishing to rest, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

She took the brooch from her breast. It lay in her palm, the silver darkened with age, the design almost invisible in the failing light. She knew it by touch, every curve, every twist. She had worn it since she was a girl, since her father had pressed it into her hand and told her to keep it safe, to tell no one.

She had kept it safe. She had told no one.

She put it back against her skin, and she sat for a long time, listening to the wind in the ruined towers, watching the snow fall, and waiting for the hour of the supper.

When the bell rang, she rose, and she dressed herself, carefully, in the only gown she had brought that was fit for a lady's apartment, a gown of dark blue wool, high-necked, long-sleeved, the color of a winter dusk. She pinned her hair simply, in the style of her mother's house, and she went down the stairs.

The apartments of Lady Marguerite were in the west wing, in the older part of the keep, where the ceilings were lower and the walls were thicker. A footman met her at the stair, and led her through a series of corridors, past doors of dark oak, past tapestries that were faded almost to grey. The air was warm, and smelled of beeswax and of wood smoke, and beneath that, faintly, of lavender.

The footman stopped at a door, and knocked, and a voice within said, "Enter."

He opened the door, and stood aside, and Coraline went in.

The room was a sitting room, not large, but well-proportioned, with a fire on the hearth and candles in branched holders. The furniture was old, of dark wood, and the chairs were upholstered in a tapestry of faded roses. There was a woman sitting by the fire, in a chair with a high back, a woman of perhaps eighty, very small, very still, wrapped in a shawl of black wool. Her hair was white, and her face was a network of fine lines, and her eyes were closed.

Lady Marguerite stood by the window, looking out at the snow. She turned, when Coraline entered, and her face was the same cool mask it had been in the courtyard.

"Madame de Rochemure," she said, "may I present to you Madame Ashworth, the daughter of Lord Ashworth of Dunmore. She has agreed to sit with you for an hour or two in the evenings, when the music is too much."

The old woman opened her eyes. They were pale blue, almost grey, and they were sharp, sharper than one would have thought. She looked at Coraline for a long moment, and Coraline looked back, and felt a flicker of something, a recognition that was not quite recognition, a sense that this old woman saw more than she said.

"Ashworth," the old woman said, in a voice that was thin but clear. "I knew an Ashworth, once. A girl, with dark hair. She married a man she did not love."

"That was my mother, Madame."

"Your mother." The old woman nodded, slowly. "She had a brooch. Silver, twisted. She wore it always."

Coraline's hand went, involuntarily, to her breast. She forced it down.

"It was in the family," she said. "It was hers."

"Yes," the old woman said. "It was hers." She looked at Coraline, and her eyes were very bright, and there was something in them that Coraline could not read. "Sit down, child. You will take the chair by the fire. You will read to me, if you can read. I am tired of the dark."

Coraline sat. Lady Marguerite did not sit. She stood by the window, watching them both, her face unreadable.

The old woman reached out, and took Coraline's hand, and her fingers were cold, and very thin, but the grip was surprisingly firm. She held Coraline's hand for a moment, and then she let it go, and she settled back against the cushions, and closed her eyes.

"Read," she said. "There is a book on the table. The one with the green cover. Read me something quiet. I do not wish to hear of battles."

Coraline took the book. It was a small volume, bound in green leather, the pages soft with use. She opened it, and she read, in a low, steady voice, a chapter from the life of a saint, a woman who had tended a fire that would not go out.

Lady Marguerite stood by the window, and did not speak, and the fire burned low, and the snow fell softly outside, and the hour passed.

When the bell rang for the end of the supper hour, Lady Margette turned from the window.

"That will be enough for tonight," she said. "You will come again tomorrow, at the same hour. You will bring no gossip, and you will repeat nothing of what passes here. My aunt is old, and she tires easily, and she says things that do not always make sense. You will pay no heed to them."

"I will pay no heed, Madame," Coraline said.

"Good." Lady Margette inclined her head, a fraction. "You may go."

Coraline rose, and curtsied, and went out. The footman was waiting, and he led her back through the corridors, and she went up the stairs to her own room, and she closed the door, and she sat down on the edge of the bed, and she took the brooch from her breast, and she held it in the palm of her hand.

The old woman had known her mother. The old woman had known the brooch. The old woman had looked at her with eyes that were sharp, and bright, and had said, "It was hers."

Coraline sat for a long time, in the dark, listening to the wind in the towers, and the snow against the window, and the distant sound of a door, somewhere below, opening and closing.

She did not undress. She lay down on the bed, fully clothed, the brooch against her skin, and she closed her eyes, and she slept, or she tried to sleep, and the hours passed, and the snow fell, and the castle of Aldenwyck settled into the long, cold night.

The letter arrived with the thaw.

Coraline found it tucked beneath the chapel door at dawn, when the snow had ceased and the sky was the color of old pewter. No hand had placed it there that she could see. The novices were still at matins, and the corridors held only the echo of their singing, and the candle she carried threw a wavering light across the stone.

The seal was unfamiliar. A moth, pressed in black wax, wings spread.

She broke it standing. Her fingers trembled, though she told herself they did not.

Inside, in handwriting she had not seen in six years, were these words:

"My sister writes that you are given sanctuary. She writes that you are unwell. I am summoned to the capital, and I cannot come north, but I am sending a man I trust to bring you home, if you will permit it. His name is Lucien, and he is my husband's brother, and he will know you by the brooch. Burn this when you have read it. E."

Coraline stood for a long moment, the paper in her hand, the candle guttering. E. Her sister, who had not written in two years, who had married into the house that held the regency, who had been lost to her as surely as if she had been buried.

She read the letter again. Then she held the corner to the flame.

The paper caught, and curled, and blackened, and she let the ash fall into the brass dish by the chapel door, and she watched it cool, and she did not weep, though something in her chest felt as though a bone had been set wrong.

Lucien.

She knew it. She had known of Lucien, years ago, in the old house, when her sister had first begun to write to her from the capital. She had spoken of him in her early letters. The younger brother. The scholar. The one who had refused a post at court and gone to the universities in the south, and then returned, and then been sent away again, no one knew precisely where.

The one her sister had said, in a single unguarded line, was the only honest man in the family.

Coraline gathered the ash in her palm and went to find Sister Marguerite.

She found her in the infirmary, binding the wrist of a novice who had fallen on the ice. The sister glanced up, and her eyes moved from Coraline's face to her cupped hand, and she said nothing, and finished her binding, and sent the novice away, and then she turned, and she drew Coraline into the small room behind the infirmary where the simples were kept, and she closed the door.

"You have had word," Sister Marguerite said.

"Yes."

"And?"

Coraline opened her hand. The ash stirred in the draft from the window, and a small breath of grey rose and was gone.

"My sister has sent her brother-in-law to fetch me."

Sister Marguerite's face did not change. She was, Coraline thought, the most still woman she had ever known. The lines about her mouth deepened slightly, that was all.

"The younger Devereaux," the sister said.

"Yes."

"And you have burned the letter."

"Yes."

"Good." Sister Marguerite moved to the shelf and took down a jar of honey and a length of clean linen, and she began to wrap the honey in the linen, and her hands moved with the quiet certainty they always moved with. "You understand what this means."

"It means I must decide."

"It means more than that." The sister looked up. "It means the capital knows where you are. It means someone in this house is writing to someone in the capital. It means, my dear, that the safety you have been given is no longer what it was."

Coraline's mouth went dry. She had thought of this, but she had not let herself think of it fully.

"The priest," she said. "Does he know?"

"I have not told him." Sister Marguerite folded the linen over the honey and tied it with a thread. "I will tell him today. He will wish to speak with you."

"Yes."

Sister Marguerite set the wrapped honey on the shelf, and turned, and looked at Coraline fully for the first time.

"You must choose," she said. "You may go with this man, if he comes. You may remain here, and we will do our best to keep you, though I do not know how long that best will be. You may take the road yourself, and trust to God, and to your own wits. Those are your three roads."

"And the fourth?"

"There is no fourth."

"There is always a fourth."

Sister Marguerite was silent for a moment. Then she said, "There is the road your mother took. You know what that road is."

Coraline knew.

She left the infirmary, and went up to her room, and she sat at the window, and she watched the thaw move across the hills, and the snow slide from the eaves in slow, soft sheets, and the sky lighten from pewter to a pale, washed blue.

In three days, the messenger would come. Perhaps in two, if the roads had cleared. She knew nothing of Lucien Devereaux, except that he was her sister's brother-in-law, and that her sister had trusted him, and that the brooch would be known to him. She knew nothing of his face, or his voice, or whether he would be the kind of man who could be trusted with a woman fleeing a charge of treason.

She knew only that her sister had written, after two years of silence. And that the moth in the wax had been her sister's seal, and that the moth had wings spread, as though in flight.

She sat, and she waited, and the thaw deepened, and the days passed.

He came on the second evening, when the light was failing and the convent had begun the hour of silence. Coraline heard the bell at the gate, and she heard the prioress's voice, and then she heard a man's voice, low and even, answering, and her hands went cold where they lay in her lap.

She did not go down at once. She sat, and she listened, and she tried to still the beating of her heart, and after a time Sister Marguerite came to her door, and knocked, and said, "He is here. He asks to see you. He is in the garden."

Coraline rose, and smoothed her dress, and took the brooch from the table where she had laid it, and pinned it at her throat.

She went down the stone steps, and through the corridor, and into the garden that lay behind the convent, where the apple trees stood bare and the paths were rinsed with the last of the melt, and the air smelled of wet earth and of cold, green moss.

He was standing at the far end, by the wall, where the sundial stood grey and unmoving. He was taller than she had imagined. He wore a dark coat, and a sword he did not seem to know how to wear comfortably, and his face was lean, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who had been reading by candlelight for a great many years.

He turned when he heard her step on the gravel, and he looked at her, and she looked at him, and neither of them spoke for a moment.

Then he inclined his head, a fraction, and said, "My lady. I am Lucien Devereaux."

She stopped three paces from him. The light was going fast. The apple trees stood like thin shadows against the sky.

"You know me by the brooch," she said.

"Yes." He did not look at the brooch. His eyes stayed on her face. "Elise described it to me. A moth, with a pearl caught in its wings."

"And my sister?"

"She is well. As well as may be." A pause. "She could not come herself. The Regent watches her closely. She has not been out of the capital in two years."

Coraline's breath caught. She had not let herself hope, and now the hope was there, and she set it aside, as one sets down a cup that is too full.

"Why has she sent you?"

"Because I am the only one she trusts." He said it simply, without pride. "And because I am the only one who could come without it being noted. My mother does not watch me. She has given me up as a lost cause."

"You are the younger son."

"I am the younger son." The ghost of a smile crossed his face, and was gone. "I read books. I have no taste for the regency. My mother finds this unfathomable, and has ceased to try to mend it."

Coraline looked at him. The light was almost gone. The sundial threw a long shadow across the path.

"You know what charge lies against me," she said.

"Yes."

"You know I am accused of treason."

"Yes."

"And you have come to take me south."

"Yes."

She waited. He did not speak. The silence stretched, and the first star came out above the wall, very faint, very cold.

"And if I will not go," she said at last.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Then I will go back, and tell my sister that you would not come, and she will grieve, and the matter will be at an end, as far as I am concerned."

"You will not turn me in."

"No."

"Why?"

He looked at her then, fully, and she saw that his eyes were not unkind, and that the weariness in them was very old.

"Because my sister asked me not to," he said. "And because I do not believe the charge. And because," he added, more quietly, "I have served the Regent for six years, and I will not serve him in this."

Coraline drew a breath that shook, and she let it out, and she clasped her hands before her to still them.

"I will go with you," she said.

He inclined his head again, the fraction of an inch. "We will leave at first light. Dress warmly. The roads are bad, but they will be worse if we wait."

She nodded.

He turned, as though to go, and then he stopped, and stood for a moment with his back to her, and she saw his head bow, very slightly, and she could not tell if it was to her or to the dark.

"My lady," he said, without turning, "your mother was a friend to my father, once. He spoke of her. I thought you should know."

Then he went, along the path, and through the gate, and the gate closed behind him, and she stood in the garden, in the last of the light, and the brooch was warm against her throat, and the stars were coming out, one by one, and her hands had ceased to tremble.

She went in. She went up to her room. She took the small bundle she had kept ready from the shelf, and she set it on the bed, and she undressed, and she washed in the cold water, and she lay down, and she slept.

In the morning, she would go south.

She did not know what she would find. She did not know if her sister would be allowed to see her. She did not know if the road would end in a cell, or in a hearing, or in some quiet room where the brooch would be laid upon a table and examined by eyes she had never met.

She knew only that she was not alone, and that the moth had wings spread, and that the thaw had come, and that somewhere in the south a man who loved books and did not love the regency had walked into the night to keep a promise to a sister he could not save by any other road.

She slept.

And the snow ceased, and the stars turned, and the long winter of Aldenwyck drew towards its close.