The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 20

Eliza came to breakfast the next morning and sat in her usual place and asked me whether I had slept.

"Not much."

"No." She reached for the bread. "It was warm."

That was the whole of it. Neither of us said the word garden. She did not ask what I had been doing out there. I did not ask what she had been doing out there. We ate breakfast like two people who had agreed on something without discussing it.

I have thought since about which of us started that.

I could not stop thinking about the night in the garden.

Him, I could have managed. I want that on the record, and I know how it sounds. It was the thing itself. Her head going back against the stone. The sound she made was not a word. The way a person's hand goes still in somebody's hair when they stop deciding things.

It came back at the worst times. In the middle of a history lesson. Halfway through buttoning a sleeve. Once, while the Queen was speaking directly to me, which I got through by counting the buttons on her cuff.

I have skinned a deer. I have set my own shoulder against a door frame. I did not know a body could do this. I did not know that finding out would feel less like discovering something than like being caught.

And underneath all of it, the part I liked least, which took me until the third night to say properly even to myself.

Through the wall I had no choice. I have leaned on that for a week and it is true. You cannot unhear a room.

In the garden I had a choice. I had four seconds of choice and I spent every one of them.

⸻

On the third afternoon, the lesson finished early and everyone left except Clara, who stayed at her desk with her hands flat on a notebook, and me, who had nowhere to be.

She waited until the door shut.

"Miss Vale."

Clara has said perhaps forty words to me since we arrived. I sat back down.

She pushed the notebook across two desks without looking at me.

The first page was the west stair from underneath, the whole span of it, drawn so carefully you could count the treads. I asked how long it had taken. Four days, she said, and went red.

I turned the page which I do not think she had planned on.

Celeste at the piano, from behind, the whole of her in the back and shoulders.

Vivienne at a window, and half out of the frame a chair with the Queen's shawl over it.

Eleanor three times on one page, arguing with the Master of Horse.

"She practices at six," Clara said, about the first one. "Before anyone."

"Why three of Eleanor?"

"She keeps asking."

There was a small sound out of her that I eventually identified as a laugh.

Then Isabelle. Seated, hands in her lap, and that was all of it. Just the hands, done twice, once loose and once not.

I looked at that page for a while.

"She cries where nobody goes," Clara said. "The linen stairs. She's very good at it. You can only tell from her hands."

I turned one more page and stopped.

It was me, at the archery test, at full draw. She had caught the moment before I let go, which is a moment I did not know had a shape from the outside.

The face was wrong. Or it was not wrong, which was worse. It was a face I have never seen on myself and would not have described that way.

"You looked happy," Clara said, as though apologizing.

I closed the notebook and gave it back. She held it against her chest and went, and neither of us mentioned it again.

There are eight of us in this palace. I have spent three weeks watching all of them.

It had not once occurred to me that the quietest one in the room was doing the same thing, and doing it better.

⸻

Julian is Julian. Rosalie one day, a girl from the kitchen the next, though he was decent enough about that one that nobody made her feel it. He does all of it in front of the whole household. He always has. It is not a secret because he has never once needed it to be.

What he does with me, nobody sees.

At dinner on the second night, he told a story about a Cassarian envoy and a mistranslated toast, and the entire table laughed. While they were laughing he looked at me. It lasted exactly as long as the laugh did. Nobody was going to catch that. Nobody was looking anywhere but at him.

On the fourth day, he passed me in the west corridor with two clerks behind him. He said "Miss Vale" in the flat voice you use for people you barely know, and did not slow down. Then, two steps past me, without turning round: "Still not sleeping?"

The clerks did not hear it. It was not for them.

On the fifth, he reached across me at the sideboard for something he did not want, and took his time about it. I stood still and let him. I have thought about that since. I cannot defend it.

With Rosalie, he performs. With Eliza, he is generous in public, which costs him nothing.

With me, it is quieter, aimed, and I have started to understand that the difference mean anything.

Yesterday he looked at me across the hall and I did not look away.

He raised an eyebrow. That was all. Then Isabelle asked him something and he turned to answer it. I sat there with my heart going and my face doing nothing at all, and worked out that I had just answered a question.

⸻

Eliza and I still have breakfast.

She still asks about my lessons. She still tells me things.

The difference is that her afternoons go somewhere I am not, and she has started telling me things after they happen instead of before, which is a small difference that turns out not to be small.

On the sixth evening she knocked on my door on her way past.

"You've been quiet."

"I'm always quiet."

"Quieter." She had her hair down. She was holding the doorframe rather than coming in.

"Are you all right?"

There it was. She had asked. She had come to my door and asked.

"I'm tired."

"You're always tired."

"Then I'm consistent."

She laughed. It was the real one. For a second we were back in the carriage with the mud roads and a boar I had killed with a knife.

"Aurelia."

"Yes."

She opened her mouth.

Then she looked at something over my shoulder in my room, which was nothing, just the fire, and whatever she had been about to say went back down.

"Nothing. Sleep."

She went. I heard her door.

Then the wall between us did what it does, which is nothing at all when there is nothing to hear. I lay awake for a while anyway, out of habit.