A Crown of Thorns and Vow: Tongues of Silver

The wine caught the torchlight wrong.

Caelen Vryne watched a servant refill a crystal goblet three tables down and thought, with the precise detachment that had become his only reliable companion over the past year, that the man would spill it. He could see the pitcher's tremor. He could see the goblet's rim angling away from level as the servant's wrist locked with the effort of steadying himself. He could not make himself care enough to warn anyone.

"Caelen." Soren's voice came from his left, warm and slightly too loud for the acoustics of the great hall. "You're brooding again. It's unbecoming in a man who just won a skirmish."

"I didn't win anything." The words came out flatter than he'd intended. He took a sip of his own wine to soften the edge. It tasted of iron and something floral he could not name. "I survived a skirmish. Those are different things."

"They're not." Soren leaned closer, and the scent of him, sandalwood and cedar, cut clean through the fug of tallow smoke and overheated bodies. "You're alive. The men who tried to kill you are not. By every accounting I know, that's winning."

Caelen turned his head and found Soren's mouth very near his shoulder. For an instant the prince's profile was sharp against the chandeliers: the high cheekbone, the soft mouth that seemed always on the verge of saying something foolish and kind. Then Soren pulled back, grinning, and the spell fractured.

"You rehearsed that," Caelen said.

"Extensively." Soren reached across him for the bread. "The Lady Vrell tried to corner me near the sideboard and I needed something prepared. You should be flattered."

"I am." He wasn't. He was tired in a place deeper than muscle, a weariness that lived behind his eyes and made the candles seem to multiply each time he blinked. The great hall of Ashborne Keep stretched before them in a long, glittering wound: thirty tables, four hundred guests, a string quartet playing something in a minor key that made the gilt on the rafters look like cooling blood. He had counted the exits when they entered. Seven. Two were blocked by decorative screens. One by a sideboard. He had not stopped counting.

"Smile," Soren murmured, and touched his elbow. The touch was light, conspiratorial, the kind of contact that would mean nothing to anyone watching and everything to anyone who knew to look. "Lord Marrow is about to make a toast and we need to look like we enjoy his company."

Caelen forced the muscles of his mouth into something approximating warmth. The smile felt like a crack in plaster. Across the hall, Calder Marrow stood at the high table with a goblet raised, his silver beard catching the light, his black eyes moving across the room with the slow patience of a man who believed he had already won whatever game was being played. He was smiling too. His smile was worse.

Caelen hated him. The hatred was clean and useful, like a blade kept sharp.

"My lords and ladies," Marrow began, and the hall fell silent with the efficient obedience of people who had learned to fear him. "We gather in a season of trial. The border raids have cost us sons and daughters, harvests and hope. And yet we are here. We are feasting. We are, by the grace of the old gods and the new, alive."

Caelen felt Soren's hand tighten, very slightly, on his arm. A warning. He kept his face still.

Marrow's gaze swept the room and found them. Found Caelen. "And we are honored by the presence of the young Lord Vryne, whose house has paid so dearly for the peace we now enjoy. Lord Vryne, we salute your steadfastness."

The room turned. Four hundred faces, masks of curiosity and calculation. Caelen lifted his goblet and inclined his head a fraction of an inch. He did not trust his voice. If he spoke, something would come out that he could not take back, and the careful work of the past three months would unravel like rotten thread.

"Steadfast," Soren said softly, once the room's attention had moved on. "He means stubborn. He means you're still standing when he expected you to kneel."

"I know what he means."

"And you let him."

Caelen set down his goblet. The stem clicked against the wood harder than he'd meant. "I'm not here to duel him with toasts, Soren."

"No. You're here to let him think he's won." Soren's voice was still warm, but there was a new weight in it. "I've watched you do it for an hour now. You're very good at it. I only wonder how long you can keep the blade sheathed before your hand cramps."

Before Caelen could answer, a figure slid into the chair on his right. Ilyana, in a gown of deep green that made her pale hair look almost silver, her mouth set in the line he knew too well. She did not look at him. She looked at Marrow.

"He's been watching you since you walked in," she murmured, reaching for the bread without looking. Her fingers were steady. Hers were always steady. "Every time you turn your head, his eyes follow. It's not friendly."

"It's not unfriendly either. It's Marrow. He watches everyone."

"He watches you like a man counting coin." She broke the bread in half and set the larger piece on Caelen's plate without comment. A small, fierce kindness. "I don't like it."

"Join the crowd."

"Caelen." She finally looked at him, and her grey eyes were sharp as new-forged steel. "When this banquet ends and the lords go home with their grievances and their alliances, what then? What have we actually won tonight?"

He opened his mouth. Closed it. The honest answer was nothing. The dishonest answer was the one he gave to Soren, to Ilyana, to himself in the small hours when sleep refused to come: that survival was victory, that presence was power, that every day he remained standing was a day his father's sins did not go unanswered.

"We have bought time," he said.

"Time for what?"

He did not have an answer for that either.

The string quartet shifted into something brighter. A minor victory. Couples began to move toward the center of the hall where a cleared space gleamed, waxed and treacherous underfoot. Soren rose, offering a hand to Caelen with a flourish that would have looked theatrical from anyone else but on him seemed merely inevitable.

"Dance with me," he said, low enough that only the three of them could hear. "Lord Marrow is bringing his niece to the floor. If we are on the boards when she arrives, he has to choose between cutting us and looking petty."

Ilyana snorted softly. "You two on a dance floor. That's not a political maneuver, that's a public statement."

"Let them take it as one." Soren's eyes met Caelen's, and there was something in them that was not performance, something raw and quick that flickered and was gone. "Caelen. Please."

It was the please that did it. Soren never said please. Caelen took the offered hand and let himself be drawn to his feet. The hall seemed to brighten and sharpen around him as they moved into the press of bodies, the noise rising like a tide.

"You're not going to like this," Soren said against his ear as they took their positions.

"I never like this."

"Then why are you smiling?"

Caelen realized he was. It surprised him into stillness for a half-beat, and in that half-beat Soren's hand settled at his waist, warm through the fabric, and the music took them.

They moved together with the ease of long practice, the kind of intimacy that looked romantic and felt, to Caelen, like holding a live coal. Soren led well. Soren always led well. He had the kind of grace that came from being loved as a child and told he was beautiful, and he deployed it now with a precision that was almost cruel.

"You know," Soren murmured, turning them past a knot of minor lords, "when I was twelve I used to dream about dancing with you at a real court function. I had the whole thing choreographed."

"And now?"

"And now it's happening and I'm too sober to enjoy it." His smile widened, but his grip at Caelen's waist tightened. "There's Lady Vrell. Three o'clock. She's about to make her move on the king."

"Let her."

"Caelen. She's going to ask about the border taxes. If he agrees to her proposal, your house loses the subsidy that keeps the garrison fed through winter."

The music swirled. Caelen's mouth found the shape of a smile for a passing baroness while his mind worked the problem sideways, through channels Soren had taught him to see. Lady Vrell. The border taxes. The garrison. The subsidy. His father, dead in his study with a cup of poisoned wine in his hand, had understood these levers. His father had understood all of them and pulled them anyway, and the realm had bled.

"I know," Caelen said. "I have a counter."

"Of course you do." Soren laughed, and it sounded almost real. "You always do. You just never tell me until the last moment so I can panic appropriately."

"Strategy," Caelen said.

"Cruelty," Soren corrected, but his eyes were fond.

They turned again, and across the polished floor Caelen saw Ilyana standing at the edge of the crowd, not dancing, watching. Her green gown made her look like a figure from an older story, something from the ballads his mother used to sing when the candles burned low. She met his gaze and raised one brow. A question. An accusation. An offer.

He gave a tiny nod. She slipped away toward the sideboard, toward the knot of scribes and stewards who even at a banquet kept the machinery of the realm turning in their quiet, ink-stained way.

"She's going to find the subsidy ledger," Soren said.

"She's going to find out who signed the last disbursement and whether Lord Marrow's name appears on it."

"And if it does?"

"Then we have something to trade that isn't a dance."

Soren was quiet for a turn of the music. Then: "You know what frightens me about you?"

"No."

"It's that you say that as if trading is the same thing as winning." His hand shifted at Caelen's waist, and for an instant their bodies were very close. "Sometimes I think you forgot the difference."

"Soren."

"I know." He pulled back, smiling the public smile again. "Not here. Not now."

They finished the dance in a silence that felt like the edge of a blade. When the music stopped, the hall erupted into polite applause, and Soren bowed to him with a flourish that four hundred people watched and a dozen interpreted in ways Caelen would have to spend the next week managing.

He bowed back. His face ached from smiling.

At the edge of the floor, Calder Marrow was watching them still.

The applause faded into the susurrus of silk and murmured ambition, and Caelen slipped from the floor the way a man slips out of a noose, one knot at a time. He collected a cup of wine he had no intention of drinking, nodded to a steward whose name he could not recall, and turned his route toward the scriptorium annex where Ilyana would be working her quiet sorcery on the ledgers.

He did not get there.

A hand caught his elbow, firm and deliberate. The grip of a woman who had once held a sword and never quite forgotten how.

Lord Vryne turned. The face before him was not young and not old, marked by a long scar that ran from her left temple to the corner of her mouth, a souvenir from the skirmish at Wren's Crossing in the third year of the war. Ilyana's hair was pulled back in a severe knot, her gown a deep burgundy that swallowed what little candlelight reached the alcove, and her expression carried the particular frost she reserved for occasions she had decided in advance to find offensive.

"A turn about the room," she said. It was not a request.

He let her draw him away from the press of the crowd, into a shallow alcove where a pillar screened them from the worst of the noise and the curious. The stone at his back was cool through the thin silk of his doublet. He could smell her perfume, something green and bitter, rosemary cut with something darker.

"You were radiant," Ilyana said. "Both of you. Very moving. The whole court will be composing ballads by morning about the way Prince Soren looked at you in the third measure."

"Ilyana."

"Do not Ilyana me." Her fingers tightened on his arm, then released as if she had touched something hot. "You know what I saw, my lord? I saw the Ashborne heir with his hand on your hip and his mouth at your ear, and I saw Lord Vryne's heir smiling back at him like a girl at her first country dance."

"It was a dance."

"It was always a dance. It is always a dance with him." She stepped back and folded her arms beneath her breasts, the posture of a woman defending a position she had long since fortified. "And then I saw Marrow watching. Watching you. Watching you the way a man watches a thing he intends to swallow."

"Marrow watches everything."

"Marrow watches you." The words came out low and certain, and for a moment she was not his steward and scribe, not the woman who had learned to read in three languages and write in two; she was the girl he had found in the wreckage of her family's holding, clutching a book of household accounts while the smoke rose behind her. "Have you thought, my lord, what would happen if the prince's father decided that the heir to House Vryne was an embarrassment he would rather not have at his son's side?"

"He would not."

"You are sure of that."

"Soren would not allow it."

Something moved across her face, a quick contraction around the eyes, the flinch of a woman who has heard a name she had tried to forget.

"Soren," she repeated. "Yes. Soren would not allow it. Sainted Soren. Charming Soren. The prince who made me feel, when I was young and foolish enough to feel such things, that I had at last found a person in this court who could see me as something other than a useful ledger and a war orphan." Her voice had gone very even, very quiet, the way a blade goes quiet when it has been sharpened past the need for sound. "I wonder, my lord, if you know how much of him there is to love. I wonder if you have considered how much there is to hate."

He said nothing. The silence between them was the length of a held breath, then two.

"You think I do not know," she said. "You think I have put away such follies. I am twenty-six years old and I have buried three men I might have loved and two I was fool enough to try. I know precisely what is buried in me." She leaned a little closer, and the green-bitter scent of her was stronger now, rosemary and the dark undertone of something medicinal. "But I am telling you, my lord, that the man you are dancing with has a longer shadow than you think, and there are women in this court who have stood in that shadow and felt the cold of it for years."

"Ilyana. What are you telling me?"

She drew a breath that seemed to cost her something.

"There was a woman," she said. "At court, in the Ashborne household, before the worst of the war began. A knight of the queen's own guard. Ilyana by name, since that is what we are sharing this evening. She had served the old queen for nine years and would have died for the new king without a moment's thought. She was, by any honest accounting, in love with the prince. In the foolish, absolute way of a young woman who has been given the first kind attention she has known since childhood."

He did not move. The pillar at his back had become a thing he was holding onto.

"He was kind to her. That is the part that makes it worse, my lord. He was always kind. He would seek her out in the gallery when she had finished her watch and walk with her in the rain-shadow of the cloister, and he would listen to her with his whole self, the way he listens to you. And then, one spring, he stopped. Not cruelly. Soren is never cruel. He simply stopped, as a river stops when it meets a stone, and went around her, and after a while she understood that she had been, in his mind, a sweet chapter in a longer book, and the book had moved on to a different shelf."

The hall's music had become a distant thing, muffled by stone and by the sudden roaring in his ears.

"He married her off," Ilyana said. "Politely. To a lord in the eastern marches who needed a wife of good family and indifferent prospects. She went. What else was there to do. And the next time she saw the prince, she bowed as she had been taught to bow, and the prince smiled at her as he smiles at everyone, and the world turned, and no one noticed that a woman had been quietly broken and set aside like a cup that had cracked along the seam."

"You think she bears a grudge."

"I think she bears a reckoning." Ilyana's eyes were very bright in the candlelight, bright as a blade freshly whetted. "And I think, my lord, that you have given her a new target. A man instead of a woman this time, which is only fair, since Soren's taste has changed, but no less dangerous. She has nothing left to lose. That is the kind of creature I would watch most carefully in a court full of people who have everything to lose."

He thought of Ilyana the knight, the one he had never met, walking the gallery in the rain-shadow, listening to a prince who listened to everyone, and he felt something shift in the architecture of his certainties, a load-bearing wall developing its first fine crack.

"Where is she now," he said. "This Ilyana."

"She is here tonight. As a matter of fact." His steward's mouth twisted. "She requested service in the capital last Michaelmas, and the queen-mother, who has no idea of the history, was pleased to grant it. She has been attached to the princess Maren's household since Candlemas. She wears her hair shorter now and her armor under her court dress, and she bows to no one unless she must, and she has been watching you, my lord, all evening, from behind a pillar very much like this one."

He glanced past Ilyana's shoulder, into the deeper shadows of the alcove opposite. Someone was standing very still among the stone columns, a tall figure in dove-grey, her cropped hair pale as winter rye. She was not looking at him. She was looking at the dance floor, where Soren had just taken a new partner, the daughter of some count or other, and the prince's smile was doing its work again, bright and warm and terribly generous.

The woman in grey did not look away.

"Come," Ilyana said, and took his arm again, more gently this time, the way one takes the arm of a man who has just been told something that will take a while to settle into the bone. "Walk with me. I have not yet shown you the discrepancy I found in the subsidy ledger, and you will want to see it before the council sits tomorrow. Also, you will want to keep moving, my lord, because if you stand still much longer in that alcove looking like a man who has just been handed a small, sharp knife, half the court will notice and the other half will imagine."

He let her lead him. The music swelled again as they stepped out of the alcove into the brighter air of the hall, and he felt the world reassemble itself around him in layers, the warmth of candles, the rustle of silk, the particular perfume of a court in its own gossip, and somewhere in the middle of it all, the steady pressure of Ilyana's hand on his arm, guiding him away from the place where a woman in grey had been standing.

The alcove, when he risked one glance back, was empty.

The subsidy ledger could wait until morning. Ilyana seemed to understand this without being told, because her hand on his arm did not steer him toward the scribe's anteroom but toward the long gallery that ran along the western face of the keep, where tall windows stood open to the night and the smell of the river came in cold and green. They walked for a while in silence, and the sounds of the feast faded behind them until there was only the soft clack of their boots on the flagstones and the distant complaint of an owl in the lower woods.

Ilyana let go of his arm when they reached the second window. She leaned her forearms on the sill and looked out at the black country beyond the walls, and he came to stand beside her because it seemed easier than standing apart, and because the stone there still held the day's warmth, and because her presence was one of the few in the world that did not require him to perform.

"She has been in the keep three days," Ilyana said at last, without turning her head. "She arrived with the Thornhold retinue on the second evening. She has eaten nothing in the great hall. She has spoken to no one above a bow and to several below, including one of the scullery girls who cried afterward and would not say why."

"Stop."

"I will not. You asked me to look, and I looked. The woman calls herself Maren, but the name sits on her the way a borrowed coat sits on a child, too short in the sleeves and tight across the shoulders. The scullery girl thought her hands were wrong. I thought so too, when I saw her pour her own wine. The fingers moved like a person's who has spent years with a pen or a pestle, and she held the stem of the goblet as if it were the only thing in the room she trusted."

He thought about the pale cropped hair and the way she had stood absolutely still among the columns, the stillness of someone who has learned to make herself small in rooms full of people who might harm her. He thought about how Soren had taken her hand without hesitation, the way he took every offered hand, the easy princely reflex that had served him well in a hundred courts and might, once, be the thing that undid him.

"Could be nothing," he said, and knew as he said it that it was not nothing, that Ilyana would not have spoken if it were nothing, that she kept a great many things to herself out of a longstanding and ill-advised sense of what he could bear to hear.

"Could be a spy," she agreed. "Could be a refugee. Could be a daughter of someone your father ruined, sent here under safe conduct to see the inside of the walls before the army comes. Could be a very good actress with a small part to play, in which case we will never find her out by standing in galleries and feeling bleak at each other. That is not why I brought you here, my lord."

He blinked. "I thought you brought me here to keep me from looking like a man with a small, sharp knife."

"I brought you here because there is something in the well."

The night went very quiet.

"I have been looking at the well," she said, still not turning. "I do not know why I started. The water has smelled strange to me for days, a mineral note, like wet iron, like the bottom of a copper pot that has been left too long on the fire. I told myself it was the new cistern piping. I told myself it was the weather. Then last night I could not sleep, and I went down to the courtyard in my shift, and I sat on the lip of the well, and I listened."

"And?"

"And the water made a sound." She did not look at him. "A small sound. As if something were breathing under it. As if it were learning to."

The owl called again from the woods, and a bat flicked past the window so close that the draught of its wings stirred the fine hair at his temple. He stayed very still, because he remembered the rule about moving when something small and winged passed your face in the dark, and because he needed a moment to hear the thing Ilyana had just said settle into his chest the way her words always did, not like a blow but like a key turning.

"I want to see it," he said.

"No."

"I want to see it, Ilyana."

"My lord." Her voice had gone careful in the way that meant she was about to say something he would not like. "You have had a great deal of news tonight, and the feast is not yet over, and there are at least three people in the great hall who will read your face if you walk through it. I would like you to go to your chamber, and take off your boots, and sit with your back against the cold stone of the hearth for a quarter of an hour. Then I would like you to put your boots back on and come down to the courtyard. Not before. I have asked Calder to keep the night watch on the south gallery thin tonight. If anyone asks, he is entertaining a stomach complaint."

"You have asked Calder to rearrange the watch."

"I have asked Calder to rearrange the watch."

He turned and looked at her properly then. The candlelight from the inner hall caught the line of her jaw and the small scar at the corner of her mouth that she had never explained to him and that he had never asked about, because there were so many small wounds among them that the asking would have been its own cruelty. Her eyes in the half-light were the color of river stones, and they held his without flinching, and there was nothing in them that he could call by the name of obedience.

"You are arranging me," he said.

"I am arranging everyone, my lord. It is what I do."

He almost smiled. He had not thought he would smile tonight, and the attempt ached in his face in a way he did not entirely mind. He leaned and kissed her once, very lightly, on the scarred corner of her mouth, and felt the small catch of her breath against his lips, and then he straightened, and walked back toward the warm light of the hall, where the music had shifted into something slower and sweeter, and where the woman called Maren was almost certainly not standing in any alcove at all.

He went to his chamber. He took off his boots. He sat on the hearthstones with his back against the cold iron of the firedog and counted his own breaths the way the old captain at Greenmarch had taught him, in and out, four counts each, until the noise in his head was only the noise in his head and not the noise of the world. He thought about the woman with the cropped hair. He thought about his father's signature on the order that had started the long undoing. He thought about Soren's hand, held out in the golden light. He thought about Ilyana, listening to a well breathe in the dark.

Then he put his boots back on, and went down to the courtyard.

The night was cooler than it had been. A thin mist had come up from the river and lay along the flagstones in pale drifts that moved when he moved, parting around his ankles like slow water. The torches in the courtyard had burned down to sullen orange hearts, and the keep above him was mostly dark, save for a few yellow windows where the more determined revellers still spilled light and laughter into the night.

The well stood in the center of the courtyard, a circle of old stone with a low cap of rusted iron, the winch and bucket set into it like a bone set into a socket. It had been there longer than the keep. It had been there longer than his father's grandfather. The first Vryne to hold this land had drunk from it on the night he took the hall, and every lord since had drunk from it on the night of his own taking, and the water was said to be sweeter than any water for a hundred miles.

Ilyana was sitting on the lip of the well, her cloak pulled close around her, her pale hair loose on her shoulders. She looked up when his boots rang on the flagstones, and she did not speak, but she shifted to make room for him, and he came and sat beside her, their shoulders not quite touching, the stone cold through his breeches.

Above them, on the western battlements, a figure in a pale coat was leaning on the parapet, looking down into the courtyard. Soren. The prince's profile in the torchlight was very young, and very tired, and when he breathed out, his breath did not show, because the night was not quite cold enough. He did not seem to see them. He was looking at something in his own hands.

In his own cupped hands, held out over the well, he held a small dark thing that might have been a clot of shadow, or a fold of cloth made of ink, or a small creature folded into itself. It was hard to look at. It sat in his palms like a held breath, and even from the courtyard below, even through the thickness of the air, Caelen felt something in his own chest answer it, a kind of lean, as if a small hook had been set into him years ago and only now found the line taut.

Soren tilted his hands.

The shadow dropped, and there was no sound as it struck the water, but the water changed. A disc of black spread from the point of entry, racing outward in a perfect ring, and then the whole surface of the well darkened, as if something had been poured into it that was heavier than water and did not mix. The black held for a breath. Then it began to move, slowly, the way oil moves, in long languorous curls, and then faster, the way something with a mind moves, and then it began to hiss.

The hiss was small at first, like steam off a wet road. Then it grew, a thin high sound at the edge of hearing, the sound of something being scalded clean, the sound of a tongue being taught a language it had never spoken. The water lightened by degrees. The black bled upward into the air as a faint dark mist that climbed the stones of the well and was gone, and the surface settled, and the well gave back the moon, round and whole, and the smell of wet iron was suddenly stronger than it had ever been, sharp enough to make his eyes water.

Soren drew a long breath, and let it out, and put his hands flat on the parapet as if he needed the stone to hold him up. He did not look down. He did not see the two of them sitting in the dark below, the lord of the keep and his ward with her sharp tongue and her tired eyes, watching from the well's lip with the moon at their backs.

Caelen sat very still. The stone was cold under him. The smell of iron was in his throat. Above them, on the battlement, his oldest friend in the world leaned on the parapet and breathed, and the water in the well was clear again, and clear was not the right word for it, clear was a word for windows and honest glass, and what lay in the well now was something else, something patient, and learning, and awake.

Ilyana's hand found his in the dark, and held it, and did not let go, and he held her back, and neither of them spoke, and the mist curled around their ankles, and the owl called once more from the woods, and the night went on.