The Borrowed Crown

CHAPTER 2: What a Face Is Worth

Wren

I didn't say yes.

So I looked at the man in the chair. And I knew who he was now. My daughter. Only one man in Eldemoor could say that and mean it as an order. I was sitting three feet from the King, with my own blood drying on my sleeve, and I said it again, slower.

"No."

One of the soldiers by the wall finally moved but the King lifted two fingers and the man went still.

"No," the King said. And it wasn't a question this time.

"Not for that." I nodded at the strongbox. "You showed me the money first. And I know that's a cheat's trick. You dazzle them with the coin so they sign the rest of the page without reading it. I've used this strategy on better marks than me." My heart was pounding, but I kept my voice flat. "You don't need a girl who'll take your money. You could literally throw money at anyone. What you need is a girl who can walk into a palace full of people who knew your daughter her whole life and not get caught in the first hour. That girl is rare and she's sitting in front of you, bleeding on your chair. So we're not going to talk about what I'll take... we're going to talk about what I'm worth."

He was quiet for a moment. Then one corner of his mouth moved. "Go on," he said.

"Half the box, today. Not to me... to a man I'll name, who keeps it no matter what happens to me. If your soldiers put me in the ground the day this is over, it still goes where I say it goes." I held up a second finger before he could speak. "The other half when I walk away from this alive and free. Not hidden, not protected. Free. Your word and your seal that nobody in your kingdom comes looking for the girl I used to be, once I stop being useful because I know how this ends for people like me. We both know the secret's only safe while I'm wearing it and the day I take it off makes me the loose end. I've been the loose end my whole life. Just once, I'd like to be the one holding the knife."

He said nothing for a while and I knew the rest of my life was sitting behind his eyes, waiting on whatever he decided.

"You're cleverer than she was," he said finally, quiet. And there was nothing warm in it. No pride, no grief. Nothing a father should feel about a daughter four days dead. "That will help you but It might also get you killed. Make sure it's the first one."

"Is that a yes?" I asked.

"It's a yes." He closed the lid of the box. "And here's mine, since we're trading terms. You have to do exactly what you're told, in everything, no questions asked, for as long as you wear her face. You don't survive the court on cleverness alone because It has spent a thousand years learning how to take people apart. You also need to trust the people I give you and nobody else. You go nowhere you're not led and whatever you see in that palace... whatever you hear, whatever doesn't match the story I've told you... you keep your questions to yourself." His eyes hardened. "My daughter forgot that and that's why there's a hole in the road where her carriage used to be."

I should have left it there. But being told not to ask only tells me where to look.

"You said she was murdered on the road," I said. "By people you haven't caught."

"I did."

"That's not how you said it though. You said you hadn't had the pleasure of killing them yet." I watched his hands. "A man who doesn't know who killed his daughter talks about finding out, he doesn't talk about pleasure. You know who did it. Don't you."

For half a second, something crossed his face. I still can't put a name to it. Then it was gone, and his face was blank again.

"Eleven days," he said, and stood. "Learn fast."

They taught me to be a dead woman.

There was a woman for it. She was sharp, silver-haired, no name but "Madam." She had a switch she used on the back of my hand when my street accent slipped into my vowels. She taught me to walk like royals. To hold a fork like it was beneath me and a teacup like it was beneath the fork. To copy Aurelia's handwriting until my fingers ached and the letters stopped looking like mine. To answer to a name that wasn't mine, until the day I turned to it without thinking and felt something in my chest go quiet... and couldn't tell if I should be proud or sick.

They dressed me in the dead girl's clothes and that was the part I hated. Silk that still held the shape of someone else's shoulders. A faint smell in the collars that wasn't mine and never would be. A whole life, hanging in a wardrobe, waiting for someone the right size to fill it and I was the right size that turned out to be the only thing anyone had ever wanted from me.

And in the long hours of drilling, Madam let things slip. Or wanted to.

"She wasn't always like the stories," she said once, not looking up from the needlework I was ruining. "The running, the wildness. That was only the last year. Before that she was quiet, watchful... like you." A pause. "Something scared her, those last months. She started locking her door, started asking questions a clever girl knows not to ask out loud. And then she just started running and then she didn't come back." Madam looked at me, and her eyes weren't unkind, which somehow made it worse. "Be the first kind of Aurelia, child. The quiet kind... not the kind that asks questions."

I thought about the King's face while she said it and I kept it to myself.

On the eleventh day they put me in a carriage. Same smooth ride, same smell of money, except my hands were free this time and there was no hood. When we came over the last hill, I saw it.

The palace sat above the city like it had been built to watch over it. White stone, gone gold in the low sun. Towers. A wall wide enough to march along the top of. And somewhere inside was a bed I was supposed to sleep in, a father I was supposed to love, and a court full of strangers who'd smile at me with all their teeth. Somewhere inside was a locked door and a dead girl's last question.

I'm not someone who prays. The Warrens cure you of that early but I came close in that carriage, watching the gates open to let me in.

The carriage rolled into a courtyard lined on both sides with the King's guard. Two rows of them, still as stone, faces forward. A wall of guards, lined up to welcome a princess home.

Not one of them looked at me. That's the discipline. You don't look at royalty... you become part of the wall.

Except one did.

He stood near the end of the line, taller than the men beside him. As my carriage passed, his eyes came up and found mine through the glass, and held. Half a second. Then a full one... long enough that it stopped being a glance.

And I watched the color drain out of his face. He didn't jump, he didn't move at all... he just went still.