The Borrowed Crown

CHAPTER 5: The Queen's Welcome

Wren

I slept badly and woke early, and lay still in the grey light working out where I was before I moved. A dead girl's bed. A dead girl's ceiling. A dead girl's name, waiting for me to put it back on like the green dress.

Mira came in at dawn with a tray and a nervousness she was trying to hide.

"The Queen's asked for you," she said. "This morning. She requested for a private audience." She set the tray down and didn't meet my eyes. "I laid out the grey. The good grey. You'll want to look right, for her."

"What's she like?" I asked. Carefully. A girl wouldn't ask that about her own stepmother, so I made it sound like I was too tired to bother being nice. "Be honest with me."

Mira's hands paused on the laces. "She's the Queen," she said. Then, lower, like it cost her something: "Don't give her anything, miss. Not a feeling. Not a flinch. She keeps whatever you give her, and she uses it later."

I ttook note of that next to Madam's warning. Two people now, both scared, both telling me the same thing about the same woman. And I was starting to look forward to meeting her.

They walked me through half the palace to reach her. The Queen kept the east wing, the bright side, where the morning came in. And in the corridor outside her doors, I saw the first thing that told me what kind of place I'd really come to.

A girl was on her knees on the stone. Young... younger than me, maybe fourteen, in a servant's grey. There was a broken dish in pieces around her, and an older woman standing over her with a ring of keys at her belt, speaking in a low even voice.

"...three years' wages, that piece. You'll pay back every copper, and when you can't, you'll learn what you've cost this house. You know where girls who can't pay their debts get sent. You know exactly where."

The girl knew. I could see that she knew. She had the look I'd worn half my life... the look of someone learning, all over again, that she was worth less than a thing. Less than a dish. That she could be spent, and would be, and nobody in all this gold would think twice about it.

Nobody else in the corridor even slowed. Two courtiers stepped around the broken dish like it was a puddle. The girl was already nothing to them. Already gone.

It was the Warrens. The same law I'd been born under and bled under my whole life... some people matter, and the rest are just things that haven't been used up yet. I'd thought I was leaving it behind when the gates shut. I wasn't.

Something turned over in me, hard. I made myself keep walking, because a princess doesn't stop for a maid and a broken dish, and I couldn't afford to be the kind of Aurelia who would.

But I marked the housekeeper's face. And I marked the girl's and told myself I'd remember them both.

Then the doors opened, and I went in to meet the Queen.

The room was full of light and white flowers and it smelled like a garden, and at the center of it sat the most dangerous person I'd met yet.

She was beautiful in a cold, careful way, like she'd decided exactly what to be a long time ago and never once slipped since. She didn't stand when I came in. She just watched me cross the room, every step of it, with a small still smile, and her eyes did something nobody's had done yet... they took me apart, put me back together, and didn't tell me what they'd found.

"Aurelia," she said. "Sit."

I sat.

She poured the tea herself. Two cups, her own hands, no servants anywhere in the room... which I understood later was its own message.

"You look well," she said, "for a girl who spent eight weeks doing who knows what, in who knows whose company." She handed me a cup. "Your father's relieved. Softer than I've ever seen him, since you came back. It's almost touching." A pause. "I know you better than your father does, though. So let's not pretend, you and I. We never have."

I took the cup and said nothing. It was getting to be the only safe move I had.

"Nothing to say?" Her smile didn't move. "That's new. The Aurelia I knew always had something to say to me. Usually something sharp." She tilted her head, and her eyes went over my face... slow, unhurried, the same search Lucien had made and the guard had made, except she had all the time in the world "You've changed out there. Wherever you were." The pause went a beat too long. "You even look a little different. Did you know that? Something around the eyes. Funny, what running does to a face."

There it was. That look, held too long. Like she was reaching for something just out of sight. For one breath I thought, she knows, and my whole body went still and ready. But then it passed. Her face closed back over whatever it was, and I understood it wasn't her recognising me. It was something underneath it, that even she couldn't name. Something about my face that troubled her, and she didn't know why.

I didn't know why either. Not then.

"Let me tell you how this goes now that you're home," she said, setting down her cup. "You'll marry your Iron King. You'll be a credit to your father and a peace to the kingdom. You'll do it quietly. And you'll stop the wandering, and the questions, and all the trouble you were so fond of before you left. Those days are finished." Her voice never rose. It didn't need to. "Because the last time you went digging into things that weren't yours to dig into, child, you very nearly didn't come back at all. Did you?" She held my eyes. "Let's not find out whether you'd be so lucky a second time."

And I understood three things at once, sitting there with the tea going cold in my hands.

The Queen of Eldemoor had just, in the gentlest voice you ever heard, threatened the life of a girl she believed was her own stepdaughter... and hadn't even blinked.

I said the right things back. I don't even remember them. Something meek. Something about being tired of trouble. Something that made her smile go satisfied, like she'd won. I let her win. Let her think the wild girl had come home broken and easy to handle. It cost me nothing and bought me everything.