THE SILENT SHIELD

I smacked my hand on my father's desk so hard his pens jumped. "No," I said. "Not this time, Dad." He didn't even look up. He just kept signing papers, one after another, which is what he does when he doesn't want a fight. The study smelled like old books and cold coffee. Rain tapped on the tall windows, and somewhere down the hall a clock ticked like it was counting how much patience I had left. "Liora, sit down." "I'll stand." "Then stand." He put his pen down and rubbed his eyes. My father is King Edric Vance of Marenhall, and everybody in the kingdom bows to him, but that night he looked like any tired man who hasn't slept in a year. I knew the look. I saw it in my own mirror every morning. "I have a driver," I said. "I have walls around the palace and forty guards at the gates. I don't need somebody standing behind me while I brush my teeth." "He won't stand in the bathroom." "Dad!" The corner of his mouth twitched, and then it was gone. "Your birthday is forty days away. You'll be eighteen, and rulers from three kingdoms are coming to Ravensgate Palace to see you. Every eye in that ballroom will be on you." "Let them look. I can handle looking." "It isn't the looking I'm afraid of." Neither of us said anything after that. I knew what he meant. We both did. We just never said it out loud. A year ago, my mother and I were driving home along the coast road with the sun going down behind us. She was laughing about a silly straw hat she'd seen at the market. Then a black truck came out of nowhere and shoved our car toward the cliff. I remember the glass breaking. I remember my mother's arms wrapped around me, her whole body bent over mine like a roof, and a man pulling at our door. She didn't scream. She said, "Take me. Not her." After that there's a hole in my memory. The police told me our guards got there before the men could reach me, and that my mother died holding on to me. They said the attackers were raiders from the hills who rob travelers on lonely roads, and that they'd run off into the rain. Nobody has said her name in this house since the funeral. It's like we're all afraid it'll break something. "You think I'm still a little girl," I said, and my voice shook. I hated that it shook. "I'm not. I can drive. I can outrun half your guards. And you're the one who needs watching, Dad. You haven't finished a meal in months. I see your plate when it comes back to the kitchen." "Liora." "Mom would hate this. She'd hate me being followed around like a puppy." "Your mother," he said slowly, "would have asked for two guards." That shut me up, because he was right. Mom worried about everything. She checked the locks twice every night. Once she made the cook taste my soup in front of her, just because I'd sneezed at breakfast. I thought about the little graveyard on the hill, the one place I still go alone. "And when I visit her?" I asked. My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "He'll wait at the gate." That was the only thing I was going to win, and we both knew it. "I'm not asking, my girl," Dad said. "I've already chosen the man. Come in, Torin." I turned around. I hadn't heard the door open, which was the first thing that bothered me. A man that big should make some noise. He stood just inside the room with his hands clasped behind his back. He was taller than my father by a whole head, with broad shoulders and a spine so straight he could have been standing against a wall. His clothes were plain and dark. Black leather gloves covered his hands. And he wore a mask, nothing fancy like you'd see at a party, just a plain piece of dark leather that covered the left side of his face from forehead to jaw. Only one eye showed, grey as the sea before a storm. "This is Torin Ash," Dad said. "He'll be with you day and night." "Hello," I said, in my coldest voice. He bowed to my father. Then he looked at me, and that was all. No hello, no nod. "Does he talk?" I asked. "No," Dad said. "Not at all?" "Not a word. But he hears everything, and he's the best man I have." "How am I supposed to trust a guard who won't even tell me his own name?" "I told you his name." I walked right up to Torin and stood so close I had to tip my head back to see him. He smelled like soap and woodsmoke. "Can you nod?" I asked. He nodded once. "Can you blink twice if you think my father's being unfair?" His eye didn't blink. But I swear something in it softened, like he was working hard not to laugh. That annoyed me, and I couldn't decide if I was angrier or less angry. "Fine," I said. "Follow me if you have to. But if you step on my shadow, you'll be sorry." I marched out and slammed the heavy door behind me, except it didn't shut all the way. The latch has been loose for years, like a lot of things in this palace nobody bothers to fix. I only meant to walk off and sulk. I got about six steps down the hallway before I heard my father's voice, low and rough, coming through the gap. "Keep her alive, Torin. Whatever it costs you." Nobody answered. A boot shifted on the carpet. "The Council gets louder every week," Dad went on. "Men I've trusted for twenty years look at me like I'm already finished, and I can't tell which of them..." He stopped. I heard him breathe. "I don't know who to trust. That's why it has to be you." My stomach went cold. I'd never heard him sound afraid, not even at the funeral. I should have kept walking, I know that now, but my feet wouldn't move. "She's stubborn," he said. "Like her mother. She'll hate you for a while, so let her. And Torin..." I leaned closer to the door. "She must never find out who you really are." My heart banged against my ribs. Who he really was? What did that even mean? A chair scraped. Footsteps came toward the door, quick and quiet. I spun to run, but my shoe caught the edge of the rug and I stumbled into the wall. The door swung open. Torin filled the whole doorway. His grey eye went to me, to my hand flat against the wall, to the gap in the door I'd been listening through. He didn't look surprised, and he didn't look angry. He looked like somebody who'd waited years for another person to hear him and was scared stiff that I finally had. I opened my mouth to say something clever. Nothing came out. Behind him, in the study, my father called my name. Torin raised one gloved finger to the place where his lips would be and held it there.