The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 28

The west passage was empty.

The garden door at the far end of it was standing open, and no door in this palace stands open in this weather.

I heard him before I got to it.

The shape of his voice with the laugh sitting underneath it, which he has been using in corridors since he was old enough to be out in them.

Then I was in the doorway.

His back was to me. She was against the wall with one hand up inside his shirt, the other one at the back of his neck. Her shoulders were bare.

He said something against her throat. She answered it. Not with words.

I have spent my whole life closing doors on my brother. It was halfway shut when her face came round into the gap.

Her eyes found me.

Then they went past me, out into the dark over my shoulder.

They came back.

There was nothing behind them at all.

I stopped with my hand on the door and looked at the whole of it again, properly, the way I should have looked the first time.

Her hand was not under his shirt. It was lying in it.

Her head was back against the stone. Her mouth was open. She was not doing anything with any of it.

She had come out into that cold with her shoulders bare and had not once put a hand up to them.

I have sat across a table from that girl every night for three weeks. She answered before you have finished asking. She knew who had been coming into a room behind her without turning her head.

She had looked at a man standing in a lit doorway and it had not reached her.

Drink, I thought, and gave it about as long as it took to think. I have seen every kind of drunk this place produces.

None of them looked at you and failed to arrive.

The realization came without warning, and with it came the understanding of what I was staring at.

I looked at my brother again.

He was still touching her.

She was still looking through me.

I was across the doorway before there was time for anything else.

I only knew that I had to get him away from her.

And I was on him before I could finish thinking.

He hit the far rail with his shoulder and came off it swinging.

For the first part of a second he did not know who I was.

Then he did, and it did not slow him down.

"Get off. Get off me."

I had a fistful of his shirt. He got the heel of his hand into my jaw and I pushed him back, harder than I have pushed anyone anywhere since I was a boy.

"What is the matter with you?" He was breathing hard.

"Cass. What have I done?"

I looked past him at her.

"What did you do to her?" My jaw tightened.

"What?"

She had gone down a little way against the wall.

"She can barely stand." I forced each word out slowly.

"I have not the faintest idea what you are talking about."

I watched her get a hand back onto the stone and push herself up out of it. She got her weight onto her feet. Then she looked for him. Not at me.

"Look at her."

"Cassian."

"Julian. Look at her."

He stopped. Something in how quiet it had gone got through to him.

He looked.

I let go of his shirt. He did not notice that I had.

"Aurelia?"

He said it to her the way you say a name in an empty house.

Then he went toward her. I put my arm across him. He let it stop him, which he had never once done before.

I took her face in my hands and turned it toward the light.

"Miss Vale."

Nothing.

"Aurelia."

Her mouth moved. What came out was not a word.

I put two fingers under her jaw. Her heart was going like something that had been running. Her skin was hot through the sleeves of her dress.

Her hands were cold. I have no idea what that means.

Her head went back against the stone.

"How long have you been out here with her?"

"I don't know. Ten minutes."

I brushed her hair back from her face and looked at her eyes. She tried to look back at me, and I watched her fail a couple of times.

"And in ten minutes it did not occur to you that something was wrong?"

"She came to me," he said, like it meant something. It didn't.

I moved my hand from her cheek to the side of her neck. Her pulse was still too fast.

"She came out here on her own and she had hold of me before I said one word to her."

My hand fell from her skin as I turned to him.

"She left that room holding on to the furniture."

"I didn't see that."

"No."

His breathing was still uneven.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"You had your hand under her skirt and she could not tell you her own name."

He went very still.

For a moment he said nothing.

Then his jaw tightened.

"Say the other thing," he said. "The thing you are actually standing there thinking. Go on."

I did not answer him.

I turned back to her instead and caught her before her knees gave way again.

There was no answer that was going to be any use to either of us.

"You think I did this."

I looked at him over my shoulder.

"I think you were the last person with her."

I steadied her by the shoulder. She swayed almost immediately.

"Cass." He said my name almost quietly.

I kept one hand beneath her arm, feeling her weight shift against me.

"No. No, you think it." He took a few steps back.

"You have thought it since you came through that door."

I said nothing.

"You did not ask me one question out here. You told me. You had it settled before you were through the door, and you have had it settled about me since we were children."

"Keep your voice down."

He gave a short, disbelieving laugh and dragged a hand through his hair.

"Do you know what you have never once done? You have never once asked me anything you did not already know the answer to."

He looked at me.

"Not one time. Not about anything."

Aurelia's head tipped against my shoulder. I adjusted my hold on her and looked down at her face.

"This is not the night for it."

"It is exactly the night for it."

He got closer again.

"You came out here and threw me into a rail. Me. And you would not do that to a stranger. You would ask a stranger. But you have never in your life needed to ask me because you have always known."

"Twenty-four years," I said, keeping my voice low, "and no one has ever refused you anything."

His expression changed, just slightly.

"You have no idea what it sounds like. You would not hear it if she said it."

He looked away for a moment.

Then back at me.

"And you have never wanted a single thing you were not given."

His voice had lost some of its force.

"You think I don't see it. You think nobody sees it."

He glanced toward Aurelia.

"You send wine down that table like it means nothing. You sit there and let it mean nothing."

He looked back at me.

"That is the whole of you."

Then Aurelia made a sound.

It came broken, very small. Almost like a sob.

There was fear underneath it, and no part of her face knew that.

We both stopped.

I turned immediately.

Her fingers had caught in the front of my shirt.

"Cass." Julian said.

His voice was quieter.

"Let me get the physician."

"No."

"She cannot stand up."

I slipped one arm behind her back and the other beneath her knees.

When I lifted her, she turned her face onto my neck.

She was shaking hard enough that I felt it through my shirt.

I carried her through the door.

Behind me, somewhere down the passage, my brother shouted my name.

I did not turn around.