The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter17

I shut the door.

I am still not entirely sure why. It would have been easier to apologize and go, except that going meant walking back the way I had come, which meant the winter garden, which meant Celeste.

Julian set another soldier down on the eastern border.

"You look like you've been shouted at."

"Nobody shouted."

"No," he considered me. "They wouldn't, would they."

The room was long and low and smelled of dust and pipe smoke. Maps covered three walls. The fourth had a window with the curtain half drawn, which explained why nobody had noticed a prince in here from the courtyard.

"Why are you in here?"

"Nobody looks for me in here."

"Why is anyone looking for you?"

He lined up two more soldiers before he answered,

"There's a council sitting. I'm expected in the room." A pause, very slight.

"I'm not expected to say anything in it."

I did not have a reply that wouldn't have been an insult or a kindness, so I gave him neither.

Then I looked properly at the table, and forgot about him for a while.

The map was painted straight onto the wood. Borders. Rivers. Mountain passes. Trade routes were drawn in a redder ink than the rest, so that the south looked like something with a pulse.

I found the river. I found Ashfell, where the crown road ends, marked with the little double circle they use for a garrison town.

North of that, almost nothing. Trees, drawn in by somebody with time on their hands. A mountain range that stops halfway across as though the man drawing it had been called away.

"What are you looking for?"

"My village."

"Where is it?"

I put a finger down on the bare wood, four inches above Ashfell. "Here. Give or take."

He came around the table.

He is a great deal taller close up than he is across a room. I had never been so aware of a person simply standing beside me, and I knew exactly why, which made it worse. Last night, I had lain in the dark for three hours listening to him.

I kept my eyes on the map.

"There's nothing there," he said.

"I know."

"No. I mean there's nothing on the map. How many people?"

"Six hundred. About."

"And Ashfell?"

"Two thousand. More now."

"There's no road."

"There's a road. It just isn't on there." I traced where it should have been.

"It's mud from the first frost until spring, so the carts stop coming in November. That's why the merchant only came twice a year."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then I found the pass.

It sat where the mountains broke, north and west of the double circle, unmarked except for the line of it.

"Why isn't this fortified?"

"It is."

"Not enough."

"How would you know that?"

I put my finger on the road below it.

"Because if somebody holds this, they're inside three settlements before anyone at Ashfell has finished saddling."

"You can't know how long that takes."

"Two weeks," I said. "That's how long it took."

He looked up from the map.

I did not explain it. He did not ask. I have wondered since whether he simply didn't want to, or whether it genuinely did not occur to him that I was describing something I had stood in.

He looked back down at the pass for a while.

"You're right."

"It's obvious."

"To you," he said without any of the lightness he usually keeps in his voice. "Our commanders know that road."

"Then why is nothing there?"

"Now you're asking political questions."

"Is there a difference?"

"Usually." He looked at me then, properly. "Not a good one."

Then he reached across the table, took a pen from the tray they keep there for the council, and wrote on the map.

A dot. Small, in the blank space where my finger had been. Beside it, in handwriting considerably worse than I expected from a prince, Vale.

"That's a royal map."

"It's a very inaccurate royal map."

"Your father will see it."

"My father hasn't looked at the north on this table in nine years."

He put the pen back in the tray, squared to the edge, exactly where he had found it.

"Somebody should."

The door opened a moment later, and a young servant stepped inside, stopping just far enough from the table to bow.

"Your Highness. The Crown Prince requests your presence."

Julian didn't move.

"Of course he does."

The servant straightened.

"Shall I tell him you're on your way?"

"No."

A beat.

"Tell him I'll be there when I feel like being there."

The servant hesitated, clearly unsure whether that was an answer he was permitted to carry back.

Julian looked at him.

"Go."

The servant bowed again and left, closing the door behind him.

I waited a moment.

"I should probably go too."

Julian looked at me.

I made it as far as the door.

"Aurelia."

I stopped.

He hadn't gone back to the soldiers. He was leaning against the table with his arms folded, watching me the way he had watched me across the table at that first dinner.

"Your room is next to Eliza's."

The floor did not open. I checked.

"Yes."

"I thought so."

His head tilted slightly.

"Did you sleep well?"

I looked at him.

There was nothing in his expression. Nothing I could use.

For a second, I thought about answering.

Instead, I gave him a small nod that wasn't really an answer and reached for the door.

His eyes stayed on me.

I opened the door and slipped through before he could say anything else.

No, I thought. I didn't.