THE SILENT SHIELD

CHAPTER 2

The black truck came again that night.

It always comes the same way. First the smell of salt and hot rubber, then my mother laughing, then the bump and the sound of glass, and the edge of the cliff rushing up at us like an open mouth. I reach for her hand every time. I never get there.

I woke up with a scream stuck halfway up my throat and sheets soaked through with sweat. The clock by my bed said 3:12.

My room was dark except for a thin strip of light under the door. I sat up, shaking, and hugged my knees. Then I heard a small creak out in the hall, like someone shifting on a wooden chair.

I pulled on my robe and opened the door.

Torin was sitting on a plain chair against the opposite wall, and I guessed he'd been there all night. He had the same straight back, the same mask. When he saw me, he stood up so fast and so smoothly that the chair didn't make a sound.

He was holding a glass of water.

I stared at it. "How did you know?"

He held it out, and that was his whole answer. I took it because my throat hurt. It was cool and had a slice of lemon floating in it, the way Mom used to make it when I was sick. I don't know if that was an accident. I didn't ask. There was a folded blanket on the floor by the chair too, which meant he'd slept sitting up, if he'd slept at all.

"I had a bad dream," I said. "Don't tell my father."

He nodded once.

"I'm not scared of you," I added, because for some reason it seemed important.

The corner of his eye crinkled a little. Then he looked down at the floor, like he was giving me room to be a person for a minute without anyone watching.

I shut the door before he could see my face fall apart.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time. Here's the thing nobody knows. The whole reason we were on the coast road that day is that I wanted to stay at the market. Mom was tired and ready to go home, and I begged her for ten more minutes because there was one more hat stall I hadn't looked at. Ten minutes. That's why we were out there when the sun went down. That's why the truck found us.

I've never told anyone, not Dad, not my friends. Some things are too heavy to hand to another person.

When it got light, I gave up on sleep, went to my dresser and opened Mom's music box. I do that when I can't breathe right. It's made of dark wood with a tiny silver bird on the lid, and when you lift it, it plays three slow notes and stops, as if it forgot the rest of the song. Inside I keep her ring, a pressed rose, and the ticket from the first play she ever took me to.

That morning I pushed too hard on the velvet lining and it shifted. I'd never noticed before, but one corner at the bottom wasn't glued down.

I peeled it back. Under it was a piece of paper folded as small as a coin.

I knew the handwriting before I'd even opened it, the loops on the l's and the little tail on every y. Mom wrote her grocery lists that way.

It was a page torn out of a diary, with a ragged edge, like somebody had ripped it out in a hurry. At the top was a date, three days before the attack. I read it standing in my bare feet, and I've read it a hundred times since, so I'll copy it down exactly.

"R.B. came to see me again today. He smiled the whole time, which is how I know he's afraid. I won't sign his paper. If anything happens to me or to Liora, it won't be raiders. Don't let them tell you that. I've hidden what Hadrian left behind where only the right person will look. Find the"

That was where it ended, torn off in the middle of a sentence.

I read it again, and then again, and the words started to swim. Mom had known. She'd known somebody was coming for her, and she went to the market with me anyway, laughing about hats, with all of that sitting on her heart.

"R.B.," I said out loud. "Who's R.B.?"

Names crowded into my head. The palace is full of people with those letters. Rufus Bellamy, the Chancellor, who's served my father for twenty years and still pats my head like I'm five. Rosalind Briggs, who runs the laundry. Even old Roland Burke the gardener. It could be anyone.

Someone knocked on my door, three sharp taps, and I jumped so hard the music box nearly slid off the dresser.

"Princess?" It was Lady Cordelia Frost, my etiquette teacher, with a voice like a pin. "The Council meets at nine and you haven't even chosen a dress."

I shoved the page into my robe pocket. "Coming!"

When I opened the door, she was standing there in a grey suit with her hair pulled back so tight it lifted her eyebrows. She looked me up and down, then looked at the chair, then at Torin, and her mouth went thin.

"So this is the new one," she said, and she didn't say it nicely. "Does he know the rules? No man goes into the princess's rooms."

Torin didn't move or look at her. But the hallway seemed to get a few degrees colder.

"He sat out here all night," I said. "That's his job."

"Hmm." She walked around him once, slowly, the way you'd walk around a horse you were thinking of buying. "I've worked in this palace twenty years and I thought I knew every face." She leaned in to study his mask. "Where did the King find you?"

Nothing.

"Where are you from?"

Still nothing.

Lady Cordelia pressed her lips together. "I don't like what I can't read."

"Neither do I," I said, and I meant something different from what she heard.

She gave me a thin smile and swept off down the hall, and I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

Torin was looking at my pocket.

Not at me, at my pocket, where one brown corner of paper stuck out.

I pushed it down fast, with my heart going like a drum. He'd seen it. And he didn't look curious. He looked like somebody who'd spent years hunting for one sentence and had just spotted half of it in my hand.

I should've been scared. Instead there was this odd tug in my chest, like a rope had been tied between us.

"You know something," I whispered.

Nothing, just that grey eye. But his right hand curled slowly into a fist, and it was shaking.

I had a page from my dead mother, and a bodyguard who wouldn't speak, and the feeling that those two things weren't strangers to each other.

I picked a plain grey dress and left my hair down, partly because I was in a hurry and partly to annoy Lady Cordelia, who believes a princess without pins is a princess without manners. Then I went to the Council room with Torin three steps behind me, so quiet I could only tell he was there because I'd started counting his steps. I think I got to four hundred before I noticed I wasn't angry at him anymore. I was just afraid of what he'd tell me if he ever could.