The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 23

The east door was the one nobody used, which I suppose was the point.

I had been in colder places than that corridor at that hour. I had been dressed for them. I stood there in a cloak over my nightdress and told myself I had come out to find out who it was, which was true in the way most of what I tell myself was true.

He came up the passage without hurrying.

"You came."

"You left a note."

"Did I?"

He looked at me for a second longer than needed.

"I wanted to see if you would."

⸻

He took me out past the kitchen wall and through a gap in the hedge I would have walked past a hundred times.

There was a path under the roses. Somebody had cut the canes back on both sides, recently enough that the ends were still pale where the knife had gone through. I did not say anything about it, because I wanted to see whether he would.

The clearing had a fountain in it, older than the one by the west lawn, with names cut around the base.

"Who are they?"

"The ones who were chosen."

I crouched down. Some of them had worn back into the stone until they were a shape rather than a word.

"That one married my great-grandfather," he said. "She was here four years. Then consumption."

"And that one?"

"My great-uncle's."

"What happened to her?"

"They said she had been unfaithful."

"They said."

"That is all of it," Julian said. "A line in a household book about the cost of moving her out to the coast, and her name on this fountain. Nothing in between."

The water was still moving. It had been moving the whole time we stood there, which meant somebody kept the channel clear.

"Somebody looks after this place," he said.

"Yes."

"Who do you think it is?"

"I've never found out."

He was not doing any of the things he does. Nothing to lean on, nothing to be clever at. He looked at the stone the way you look at a list you already know.

"My family carved those names," he said. "We are very good at doing the right things afterward. The stone, the service, the right amount of sorrow. Nobody has ever been any good at the before."

"Is that a warning?"

"It's a fountain."

I waited. I have waited out worse than a prince, in worse weather, for less.

He turned his head.

"Not everyone here wants you to stay," he said. "You don't need their names. You need to stop reading a smile as anything except a smile."

"Does that include you?"

He did not answer.

I know the difference between somebody choosing not to speak and somebody with nothing to reach for. It went on long enough that I heard the water again.

"That's for you to decide," he said.

Which was the first thing he had ever handed me without an angle on it.

I was cold. I had been cold since the corridor without registering it. It came back all at once, and my hands went to my sleeves before I could stop them.

He saw it.

"You're shaking."

"It's freezing out here."

My voice went faster than usual, and he heard that too.

He did not say anything about it. He unfastened his own cloak instead, took the two steps, and put it round my shoulders.

It was still warm from him. That was the part I was not ready for. It had the smell of cold wool and of woodsmoke from whatever room he had been sitting in before the bells.

He drew the front of it closed at my throat. He did not let go of it.

Then he used it to pull me in, slowly, giving me the whole distance to object.

I did not.

He was warm through two layers of cloth. He had spent three weeks leaving a gap for me and calling it manners. He closed it himself.

His hands came up and found my jaw.

Then he stopped there. Close enough that I could see my own reflection in his eyes, close enough for me to feel his hot breath against my lips, close enough that he could have kissed me without moving much.

He was waiting again, and it was not the doorway kind.

Whatever he had been holding onto crumbled.

And there he was, pressing his lips against mine.

I had spent a week refusing to think about a sound Eliza made against a garden wall. It turns out there is nothing to think about.

Nothing you learn from the outside.

His hand went into the back of my hair. My lips parted instinctively. The stone edge of the fountain came up against my back, cold, and I did not care, which is how I knew how far out I had gone.

He said something against my mouth that I did not catch. I have thought about that since more than the rest of it.

When we came apart, I could not get my breathing to behave, and neither could he, and I noticed his before I noticed mine.

He had never once done that. The doorway, the game room, the sideboard, every time, the last inch had been mine to spend, so that whatever happened next was a thing I had done and not a thing he had. He gave it up in a dead garden at one in the morning with nobody watching, which meant nobody would ever know he had, which meant it cost him something.

He was still holding the back of my head, our foreheads pressed together. He looked like he was going to say something again, out loud, where I could hear it.

Then he went still, in a way that had nothing to do with doorways. His head came up. His whole face closed like a hand.

"Quiet," he said, before I had said anything at all.

He was looking past me, at the far side of the clearing where the path came in. I turned. There was the dark, the water, nothing.

Then a sound in the leaves. Small, low down. It could have been a fox. It was not moving off like one.

"You should get going."

He stepped back fast and turned me toward the gap in the hedge.

"Go back the way we came. Don't take the east door twice."

I did. My legs started moving before my mind could catch what was going on.

He was still watching the hedge.

"Aurelia," he said without looking in my direction.

"Don't tell anyone I brought you here."

"Why?"

"Because there are things in this palace people would rather keep forgotten," he said, "and I have just put you standing on top of one."