The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 12

The book Cassian had given me was heavier than it looked.

I found that out at breakfast when I tried to read it under the table.

It wasn't that I was bored. Breakfast was simply the only time nobody seemed to care whether I was reading, provided I wasn't reading something that required turning pages too loudly.

Eliza noticed on the third page.

“You're reading at breakfast.”

“I'm eating.”

“You're doing both.”

“Then I don't see the problem.”

I was beginning to understand that meals were less about eating and more about being watched while doing it.

Cassian was already seated across the table. He had barely touched his breakfast, listening to Celeste explain something about the southern provinces.

He didn't interrupt her.

He rarely interrupted anyone.

But when she finished, he asked one short question that made her pause before answering.

I noticed that he did that often. He let people talk until they reached the part they hadn't planned on saying.

I wasn't sure whether that was a skill or a habit.

Julian arrived late, as usual.

He smiled at the Queen as though punctuality were an optional feature of palace life, then took his seat beside Rosalie.

Rosalie was across from me, one place up, talking to Clara about a horse she'd apparently ridden in her father's stables.

Under the table, Julian's hand was resting high on her thigh.

It was not resting there innocently.

Rosalie didn't look at him. She didn't even pause in the middle of her sentence.

“And then he refused the jump,” she was saying, calmly explaining something about the horse as though nothing else was happening.

“He simply stood there and looked at me.”

Clara laughed.

Rosalie smiled.

Only her fingers gave her away.

They moved once beneath the table, slow and deliberate, settling over Julian's wrist before guiding his hand slightly higher.

Either he thought nobody could see what he was doing, or he had never once considered the question.

In the village, a man had once been made to stand in front of everyone for putting his hand on a woman's waist during a harvest dance. She'd been made to stand beside him.

I was eleven.

I remember thinking the standing up was worse than whatever the hand had been.

Nothing was going to happen to either of these two.

That was the part I couldn't get around.

I ate. I did not look up again for a while.

When I finally did, Julian was already looking at me.

His expression was almost amused.

I lowered my eyes back to my book.

Apparently, this was normal here.

I wasn't sure which was more unsettling, the fact that he did it, or the fact that everyone else seemed to know exactly how to behave while he did.

⸻

The lessons began that morning, in a room on the second floor that had not been built for us.

There were four desks. They were small and low and made for children, because that is what they had been made for. Somebody had carved a crooked star into the corner of mine years ago and then tried to sand it out.

Eight of us. Four desks. We worked it out the way you do.

The instructor turned out to be the same man whose book I had criticized at dinner.

I felt blood rushing to my cheeks when he introduced himself, and from the way his expression flickered when he saw me, he recognized me too.

“Miss Vale.”

“Your Grace.”

I still had no idea what his actual title was. Nobody had corrected me, so I'd simply kept using it.

He cleared his throat and addressed the room instead.

“Today we will discuss the founding of the kingdom, and the treaties that shaped its current borders.”

I opened the notebook someone had given me on the first day and had barely used since.

The lesson ran long. Wars, marriages, famines, the slow negotiation of land between families who no longer existed except as names carved into old documents.

Most of the other candidates looked politely bored.

Rosalie kept glancing toward the door, as though attendance alone should have been sufficient effort. Celeste took notes with the careful, decorative handwriting of someone who had been taught penmanship before she'd been taught to read.

I found myself actually listening.

There was something satisfying about understanding why a border sat where it did, why one province paid different taxes than another, why old grudges between noble families still shaped who sat where at royal dinners.

“Why did King Aldren agree to the Northern Treaty?” the instructor asked, not really expecting an answer from anyone.

I raised my hand before I could think better of it.

He looked, if anything, slightly resigned.

“Miss Vale.”

“To keep the northern provinces from joining the rebellion.”

“And why did that matter?”

“Because losing the north would have cut off access to the mountain passes.”

I paused.

“And because a rebellion that starts in a place the Crown has already neglected tends to spread faster than one that starts anywhere else.”

That last part hadn't been in his book.

He looked at me for a moment longer than the answer required, something between irritation and reluctant interest.

“Correct,” he said, and moved on.

I looked back down at my notes.

For the first time since arriving at the palace, I wondered whether being good at something here might actually matter.