Promised to His Shadow

Chapter Eight

The Man Who Saddled the Horse



Elianne’s POV

His name was Pierre, and he had saddled Adrien’s horse on the morning of the hunt for eleven years running, ever since the prince had been old enough to ride alone, and Elianne found him, after two careful weeks of asking quiet questions in the stables, mucking out a stall at the far end of the yard with the particular intensity of a man who had decided that hard work was the only acceptable substitute for thinking.

"Pierre." She kept her voice low, unhurried, the same register she’d used on Master Aldric. "I wonder if I might ask you a few questions about the morning of the hunt."

He did not look up immediately. His hands kept working the pitchfork through the straw, methodical, deliberate, and she understood, watching him, that he had been waiting for someone to ask, and dreading it in equal measure.

"I’ve already told the steward everything I know, my lady. There’s nothing left to tell."

"I’m not asking as the steward. I’m asking as the woman who was meant to marry him." She let that sit for a moment, watched it land. "I think you saw something that morning that frightened you enough to leave it out of whatever you told the steward. I think it’s been frightening you ever since."

His hands finally stilled. When he looked up, his face had the same hollowed, sleepless look she’d seen on Aldric, the look of a man carrying something heavier than his own conscience could comfortably bear alone.

"I checked the saddle myself that morning," he said, so quietly she had to step closer to hear him over the horses shifting in their stalls. "The way I always do. There was nothing wrong with it. No loose girth, no worn leather, nothing that would explain a horse stumbling badly enough to throw a rider that hard."

"Then what happened?"

He glanced past her, toward the stable door, as though checking they were truly alone before he continued. "His Highness took a flask with him that morning. Small, silver, the kind he always carried for the cold. I filled it myself, the same brandy he always drank before a hunt. But there was another man in the tack room before dawn that day — one of the duke’s own men, my lady, not ours. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Lords’ men wander into stables all the time, looking for their masters’ horses, asking foolish questions. I only remembered him at all because he asked where His Highness kept his hunting flask, and I told him, because why would I not."

The stable seemed, for a moment, to go very quiet around her, the ordinary sounds of horses and straw and morning work fading into something distant and unimportant. "Which duke’s man?"

"I don’t know his name, my lady. I’d never seen him before that morning, and I haven’t seen him since. But he wore Duke Renaud’s colors. I remember that much clearly, because I thought it strange — the duke wasn’t meant to join the hunt that day at all."

* * *

She left the stables with her pulse loud in her own ears, the careful, controlled calm she’d practiced for two weeks of quiet questioning finally cracking under the weight of what she’d just heard. Duke Renaud’s man, asking after the flask, on a morning the duke himself wasn’t meant to attend. It fit, horribly, with the unease she’d watched flicker across Gabriel’s face every time his uncle’s name came up, an unease he’d been careful never to put into words.

She did not go to Gabriel immediately. She made herself walk the long way back to the palace first, through the kitchen gardens rather than the direct path, giving herself time to think rather than simply react. Pierre’s account was not proof. A man in Renaud’s colors was not the same as Renaud himself, and palace servants borrowed liveries, ran errands for masters who never set foot in the stables personally, a dozen times a week without any sinister purpose at all. She had learned enough from her father to know the difference between a strong suspicion and an accusation that could survive scrutiny, and what she had right now was only the former.

But it was no longer only Aldric’s puncture wound and a foreign ambassador’s pointed questions. It was a pattern now, three threads pulling in the same direction, and patterns, her father always said, were what eventually convicted men who were clever enough to leave no single piece of evidence behind.

* * *

She found Pierre again the following morning, before dawn, intending only to thank him properly for his honesty and to ask, gently, whether he’d be willing to repeat what he’d told her if it ever became necessary. She found instead an empty stall where he should have been working, and a stable hand who told her, with visible unease, that Pierre had left in the night — sent away suddenly, the boy said, on orders from someone he didn’t recognize, to attend to horses at one of the distant border estates.

No one could tell her which estate. No one had thought to ask, because orders delivered with enough confidence rarely invited questions from men who knew their place.

She stood in the empty stall for a long moment, the cold morning air doing nothing to settle the dread pooling in her chest, and understood, with a clarity that felt almost physical, that someone had been listening closely enough to know exactly what Pierre had told her, and had moved to silence him before she’d even finished thanking him for his courage.

Whoever was behind this, she thought, walking quickly back toward the palace, was not only patient. They were watching her as closely as she was watching them.

* * *

She told Gabriel everything that same morning, in the small council chamber that had become, over the past weeks, the only room in the palace where she felt entirely free to speak plainly. He listened without interrupting, his face settling into the same hard, controlled stillness she’d seen the day she told him about Aldric’s puncture wound, and when she finished, he was quiet for a long moment before he spoke.

"A man in my uncle’s colors. Sent away before you could ask him to say it twice." His voice was very even, the particular evenness she’d learned meant he was holding something back by considerable force of will. "Elianne, I need you to tell me honestly. Do you think my uncle did this?"

"I think someone close to your uncle did this, or did it on his behalf, or did it and borrowed his name to muddy the trail if anyone came looking. I don’t have enough to say more than that, and I won’t pretend otherwise just to give you a cleaner answer." She watched the muscle work in his jaw, watched him absorb it the way he absorbed every hard thing, by holding very still until the worst of it passed. "I’m sorry. I know what it costs you to even consider it."

"It costs me considerably less than continuing to pretend the possibility isn’t there." He looked up at her, and something raw moved behind his eyes, grief and anger and a kind of weary resolve all tangled together. "My father asked me, weeks ago, whether I trusted Renaud. I told him I had no reason not to. I think I’ve been lying to both of us since."

"What do we do now?"

"Now we find Pierre before whoever sent him away decides a stable hand who knows too much is a loose thread worth cutting entirely, rather than simply moving." Gabriel was already on his feet, already reaching for the bell that would summon his most trusted guard captain, the careful stillness giving way to something sharper and more urgent. "And we do it quietly, Elianne. If my uncle is watching you closely enough to silence a stable hand within a day of your speaking to him, he is watching everything else just as closely. We cannot afford to let him see how much we already suspect."

She nodded, matching his urgency with her own, and felt, beneath the fear, something that had become familiar enough now to recognize without flinching from it — the strange, steadying comfort of facing something terrible alongside a man who had stopped, weeks ago now, being merely a treaty she’d been handed, and had become instead the one person in this entire palace she trusted without having to remind herself to.

It was not safety, exactly, what she felt standing there while he gave quiet, urgent instructions to a guard captain who looked as unsettled by the request as she’d been by Pierre’s empty stall. Safety implied an absence of danger, and there was nothing absent about the danger circling them now, closer with every thread they pulled. But it was something adjacent to safety, something she hadn’t expected to find inside a marriage built on treaties and grief, and she found she wasn’t willing to examine too closely why losing it now felt like it would cost her considerably more than the alliance ever could.

* * *

End of Chapter Eight