The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 22

Julian had been winning that particular game since before I arrived, and he lost it standing up, in a doorway, to a girl from the north with no title.

I let go of his collar.

Then I smoothed it flat. It took about two seconds.

"Goodnight, Your Highness."

I went past him into the corridor. He did not say anything. I did not look back, because looking back would have undone the whole thing, and because I was not certain my face was doing what I wanted it to do.

I got about forty paces before I had to stop and put my hand flat on the wall.

⸻

In my room I sat on the end of the bed with my shoes still on.

I had seen that expression exactly once before. A neighbor of ours put his hand into a grain sack in the dark and found something living in it. He came out of that barn with the same face. He stood in the yard for a while. Then he went back in, because the grain still had to be moved.

Julian's was better, because Julian's had nowhere to go. He could not laugh at it. He could not walk away from it first, which was his whole method. He had to stand in a doorway with his collar crooked and work out what had just happened to him.

I laughed out loud, alone, in an empty room, at close to one in the morning.

Then I stopped, because it occurred to me what I had actually done.

He dealt the cards. He taught me the rules himself, out loud, in a room full of people, because he thought it was funnier that way. It had not once occurred to him that I might learn them.

That was what happened. That was all that happened.

I did not want Julian. I wanted to win.

Which was a very convenient thing to be able to say about yourself. I noticed how fast I had said it. I noticed how much better it made me feel. I had learned to be careful of anything that did that.

⸻

He was late to breakfast, which was normal.

He talked to Rosalie, which was normal. He said something to his sister that made her put down her cup, which was normal.

He did not look at me once, which was not.

Twenty days I had been catching him at it. Yesterday he waited until I looked back. This morning he ate his breakfast like a man with a great deal on his mind.

When he left, he went out of the far door, and it took me until the middle of the history lesson to work out that he had gone the long way round to avoid passing my chair.

I sat in that lesson with the instructor talking about grain levies and I could not make my face behave.

Celeste noticed something, though not what. She had begun looking at me the way you look at a fence you thought you had already measured.

Eliza sat next to me at the lesson and asked to borrow my ink. I gave it to her, she said, Thank you, she used it, she gave it back.

That was the whole of it, and I wrote it down that night because I needed to look at it properly.

She did not know. Nobody in this palace knew. There was nothing to know. Nothing happened. I let go of his collar, said goodnight, left. I would have told anybody who asked exactly that.

Except she would have asked. That was the part. Three weeks ago she would have taken one look at my face at breakfast and had it out of me by the second course.

She did not look at my face at breakfast.

I had been telling myself that what I did last night was about winning a game, and I had been telling myself it very fluently.

The thing I had not been saying was this.

Eliza was trying to keep four children fed through the winter. She had one route to that. She had been walking it since the night of the ball, telling herself it meant something because it had to mean something.

I was playing cards.

Whatever it was that I was doing, she could not afford to be doing it. I could. That difference was not to my credit.

⸻

I finished the book that afternoon.

It took me eleven days, which was slower than I read, because I kept going back over the accord sections to see what had been left out of them.

I found him in the small council room off the map corridor with the door open, alone, writing something. He did not look surprised to see me, but then he never did.

"I've finished it."

"Keep it."

"It isn't mine."

"It has been off that shelf for days." He put the pen down. "Nobody has noticed. Nobody is going to."

I put the book on the corner of the table anyway, because it was an excuse and not the reason. I had never in my life owned a book that somebody handed me.

He looked at it. Then at me.

"You came to say something else."

"Yes."

"Go on, then."

"You touch your wrist."

He did not move at all, which was itself an answer.

"The left one. Just under the cuff." I could hear my own voice going faster and let it.

"You do it when somebody asks you something you haven't decided yet. You did it at the table when your father asked about the western levies. You did it twice in the game room last night. You did it just now when I came through the door."

The room was very quiet.

"How long have you been watching my hands?"

"I wasn't. I do the same thing." I turned my left forearm over where the knife scar sat, thin and white and older than most of my opinions.

"Mine's here. I go for it when I'm about to say something I'm not sure of. My mother used to slap my hand away from it at the table."

He looked at the scar. He looked at his own cuff.

Then he did something I had not seen him do, which was nothing at all. No answer. No small correct sentence to close the subject.

He simply sat there with his hand half lifted and worked out that it was true.

"Nobody's looking."

"My mother is always looking."

"Your mother is looking at what you say."

Cassian sat back in his chair.

"Yes," he said. "She is."

I left before either of us had to decide what came after that. At the door I glanced back, because I was not made of iron.

He had both hands flat on the table, holding them there on purpose, the way you hold a door shut in the wind.

⸻

There was a note on my desk when I got back to my room.

Small, folded twice, no seal, put down square in the middle where I could not fail to see it. My window was shut. My fire had been made up. Whoever brought it had been and gone.

Ten words, in handwriting. Somebody wanted me at the east door after the bells. I could think of six people in that palace who might, and I had decided to go before I finished counting them.

The east door, after the bells. If you want to.