The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 34

The first word I got was my own name, in Cassian's voice.

The second was the rest of the sentence.

"I told you to stay away from her."

"You don't get to decide that."

I have said that sentence. I said it in this man's bed with my arms around my knees, seven days ago, and here it was coming back out of his brother's mouth in a room I was not in.

"She has not been down to breakfast. She did not come down to dinner. In one day."

"And that is mine, is it?"

"Who else would it be?"

"You, perhaps."

Something went over in there. A cup set down harder than it needed to be.

"Don't be stupid."

"You carried her up those stairs. You had her in your rooms until morning, and you have not said one word about it since, to me or to anybody. I do not know what happened in that room. Nobody does. And I am the one who has to stay away from her."

"Mind how you say that."

"Which part?"

"You know which part."

I stood in that passage with a candle in my hand and did not move.

I should say that I was ashamed of myself. I was not. I have a mother who told me to eat. I had done it. And a week of being talked about had come to a head on the other side of a door two feet from my face.

Then the voices stopped.

"Julian."

"No, go on. Finish it."

"Be quiet a moment."

"I will not be quiet, that is the whole-"

"Where are you going?"

The door came open.

I had a piece of cheese in my mouth. I had a loaf under one arm, an apple in that hand, a candle in the other. My hair was down. I was in the thing I sleep in with a shawl over it.

Cassian stood in the doorway and looked at me.

I looked back at him and went on chewing, because there was nothing else to do with it.

Behind him, from further inside the room, Julian said something under his breath that I did not catch.

I swallowed.

"Is there nothing else in this place to talk about?"

Neither of them said anything.

"You have a whole country. There must be something in it worth mentioning behind those doors other than me."

I did not know what I was saying. Words stopped meaning anything once the adrenaline rushed through me.

"Keep your voice down."

"Why would I? If you have a problem with me, talk to me. Why would you talk behind my back?"

I was caught. Red handed.

"Because it is the middle of the night and every door on this floor is somebody's."

I believe the embarrassment from it clouded any judgment I had.

"Let them listen. Everyone else has."

He took me by the arm above the elbow, the way his brother did in the winter garden, and had me through the door before I had finished the sentence.

The door shut behind me.

The loaf went out from under my arm and onto the floor.

I watched it go. It rolled once and stopped against the leg of a chair.

That was my bread.

I had gone down four flights of stairs in the dark for that bread.

Julian got up out of his chair.

He had been drinking. Not much. He had the look men get when they have been sitting with a thing for hours.

"Aurelia."

"Your Highness." I curtsied.

He came halfway across the room and stopped, as though there was a line on the floor.

"I did not know. I want you to hear it from me. I have gone over it and over it. There was a point in it where I should have known. I did not know. I did not stop."

I have seen men take things badly. I have never seen one take it like that in front of his brother.

He was standing there ruining himself over something that was mine.

Because it was mine. I was the one who came out of that hall. I was the one who put my hands on him. He had a girl come at him out of the dark. He behaved the way he had with any other girl who stepped into this palace. And he was standing in the middle of his own room trying to convince me to believe him, and there was nothing in it for him to be sorry for.

I kept my face where it was.

"Sit down," Cassian said. "Both of you."

I did not sit down.

I looked at Cassian. Cassian was already looking at me. Whatever I had just done with my face, I had not done it well enough.

"You are waiting for me to say something," he said.

"No."

"You have been standing there waiting for an answer since you came through that door."

"I don't want to know."

"That was not what I was going to ask you."

"Then don't ask it."

"I was not going to."

Nobody said anything. The fire moved.

"I am now."

I put the apple down on the table because my hand had started to hurt from holding it.

"How much do you remember?"

I did not answer.

"Of that night. How much of it."

"In pieces."

"Then give me the pieces."

"That is what I said. Pieces. I have the wall. I have the cold." I stopped. "I have some of it."

"Do you remember Julian?"

Yes.

I had a hand under my knees and a hand across my back. I had a shirt gone damp where I was against it. I had a thumb near my temple with a ridge of hard skin on it. A vein down the inside of a forearm. A smell I could not put a name on until I was in the room it came from.

None of that was Julian.

I stood there in front of both of them with all of that going through me and had to put my hand on the back of the chair.

"Aurelia."

"Yes. I remember Julian."

"What do you remember?"

"I don't know."

It came out fast. Too fast, and on the wrong breath. I heard it go out of me at the speed it always goes. So did he.

Cassian sat down on the arm of the chair opposite so that his face was level with mine.

"Start again," he said. "From the beginning of that day."

"Which beginning?"

"All of it."

So I told him.

The Queen had us in one at a time and asked us questions we had not been warned about. I came out of that room and went upstairs.

I got the cloak from under my bed and gave it back in the corridor. I did not say that part out loud. I looked at Julian while I did not say it. He looked back. Neither of us said anything about a cloak.

Then dinner.

"Eliza was on my left. She talked about her sisters. Then about Julian telling her he would come and find her before the end of the week. She was pleased about it, and I sat there and-"

"Never mind the gossip," Cassian said. "What did you eat?"

"Soup. The chicken one. Bread, cheese. There was fruit at the end of it. Wine."

"How did it taste?" Julian said.

"Good. It always does. You spend enough on it."

"I am not joking with you," Cassian said.

"Neither am I."

"Was there anything about it that was not right? Anything at all."

I went back through it. It was not difficult. I could tell you what I have eaten on any day of my life, and I could tell you the temperature of it.

"No," I said. "There was nothing wrong with the food."

He waited.

"Your wine did not come that night," I said. "The dry one. I thought it had run out."

Cassian's head came up.

"It has not run out."

"Well, it did not come."

"It cannot have run out. I put the order in again myself, twelve days ago, for exactly that reason."

We looked at each other.

"The first glass was the usual one," I said slowly. "The second one was not."

"What was the second one?"

"Sweet. Very sweet. Dark, nearly black in the glass. Thick. It sat on the back of my tongue." I could taste it saying it.

"There was something like flowers underneath. I have never had anything like it. I thought it was a southern one. I thought somebody had made a mistake with the jug."

Cassian did not move at all.

"There is nothing like that in the cellars," he said.

"Then it came from the kitchens."

"There is nothing like that in this palace."

He turned his head, and Julian was already looking at him.

Neither of them said one word.

I stood there in my shawl with my bread on the floor.

Four minutes ago, those two had been shouting at each other over me. Now they were looking at each other, and neither of them was anybody's brother at all.