They Sold the Wrong Princess

Chapter 1

Lord Maldon Corvane unrolled the parchment with two pale, ringed fingers and read the terms of Princess Cecily's sale to the court of Valmere.

He did not call it a sale. His voice was gentle, silvered like his hair, carrying cleanly from the dais to the arched galleries of the great hall. He spoke of ancient friendship, of the northern border march, of the crown's gratitude toward Lord Gareth Thorne, Warden of Karhold. Beside him on the high seat, thirteen-year-old King Osric sat slumped in velvet too heavy for his narrow shoulders, his eyelids drooping over dark, sunken hollows. A silver goblet stood by the boy's elbow. Cecily knew the spiced wine inside it smelled of poppy and sweet Valmere honey, because she had bribed the scullion who washed the royal cups.

"Therefore," Corvane read, lifting his gaze to where Cecily stood below the salt, "His Grace bestows the hand of his beloved sister, the Princess Cecily, upon the Lord of Karhold, to be wed before the frost closes the passes."

Behind their embroidered sleeves, the ladies of the court tittered. Near the steps of the dais, the Regent's son, Perrin Corvane, leaned toward a cluster of earls and murmured a word that made three of them laugh into their collars. Everyone in the palace knew what they called Gareth Thorne. Everyone knew the old tale of how his first wife had died in his grey stone keep two years ago.

Cecily kept her hands folded over the plain grey wool of her gown. She looked at the floor until the giggling thinned, then sank into a low, steady curtsy.

"As my lord Regent commands."

Corvane inclined his head, all fond paternal sorrow. "You have your late father's dutiful heart, child. The road north is rough, and Karhold is a spare house. Yet if there is any small comfort of the palace you wish to carry with you, name it."

"Your Grace is generous," Cecily said, her voice soft enough that Perrin had to stop whispering to hear her. "I ask only for the small oak casket in my bedchamber. It holds my late father's old letters to me. I would keep them for remembrance."

Perrin snorted under his breath. Books and dead men's ink were all the meek princess had ever cared for.

Corvane smiled, indulgent and relieved. A princess who did not ask for gold plate, household guards, or her mother's rubies was a bargain cheaply closed. "Granted, my dear. Let no one say Valmere sends its daughter forth without her memories."

When she rose and stepped back into the shadow of the pillars, her maid Wynne was waiting with her cloak. As Wynne's quick fingers fastened the bronze clasp at Cecily's throat, Cecily slid a folded strip of parchment from inside her cuff and pressed it into the girl's palm.

"To the dry-goods chandler by the south gate before Compline," Cecily murmured, her lips barely moving as she smoothed her skirts. "Tell him the grey wool is moth-eaten, and the tailor wants the reckoning from two winters back."

Wynne's knuckles brushed her collarbone in acknowledgment, and the parchment vanished into the girl's apron seam. Within three candle-marks, the scribes and clerks of the Quill would know that the princess was going to Karhold, and that she wanted every scrap of ink regarding the death of Lady Elspeth Thorne.

They left the palace at Prime the next morning with the dowry dray, one baggage cart, two mules, and six mounted guards in the Corvane livery. Cecily rode a knock-kneed palfrey behind the cart, her oak casket strapped tight beneath the canvas beside her trunk. Inside the lining of her cloak hem, a flat strip of horn carried the cipher key she had used for six years; inside the oak casket, twenty-two letters from King Aldous bore the red wax impression of his personal matrix, each one marked by the faint hairline c***k across the lower left quarter that no court forger had ever known existed.

For eleven days the road climbed out of the rich, wet valleys of Valmere into hills of shale and wind-bent pine. The air grew thin and tasted of iron. On the twelfth afternoon, they reached the border bridge—a high arch of black stone spanning a gorge where green water boiled over jagged rocks.

Snow was beginning to fall in hard, dry grains. At the southern end of the bridge, the captain of the Corvane escort reined in his bay horse. Without a word of command, two of his men dismounted, unhitched the pair of draught horses from the heavy dray carrying her dowry, and led the beasts back toward the southern road.

"Wait," Wynne cried, scrambling down from the smaller baggage cart. "You cannot leave the grain wagon in the mud! How are we to pull it?"

The captain looked down from his saddle, his cloak pulled high against the wind. "Our orders end at the water, girl. The north starts on the far side of the arch. Let the Beast haul his own winter oats."

He wheeled his mount. Before the iron shoes of the six horses had ceased ringing against the southern road, they were gone around the bend of the gorge.

Wynne spat into the frozen ruts, her cheeks bright red with cold and fury. "Thieving southern dogs. My lady, what do we do?"

"We count," Cecily said.

She dismounted, hitched her woollen skirts out of the slush, and walked to the abandoned dray. Pulling back the tarred canvas, she counted the coarse hemp sacks stacked in the bed. The marriage contract drafted by Corvane's clerks had promised forty sacks of winter wheat and twenty of clean barley as the bride's household provision. There were thirty-two sacks on the wagon.

Cecily drew the small herb-knife from her belt and slit the stitching on the nearest sack. A sour, damp reek rose into the cold air. She pinched a handful of the grain between her thumb and forefinger; it was barley, clumped with greenish-black mold and crawling with weevils. She slit a second sack, and a third, moving down the length of the cart. Five sacks of passable oats lay on top to fool a hasty eye. Everything beneath was rotted chaff swept from the palace stables.

"He means for them to think Valmere mocked them," Wynne whispered, staring at the spoiled grain. "Or that you stole the difference."

"My uncle never wastes an insult when it can also serve as a blade," Cecily said, wiping her knife clean on the sacking.

The ring of iron hooves sounded from the northern side of the gorge. Four riders came through the falling snow, mounted on heavy, shaggy-coated garrons built for mountain ice. They wore ring-mail oiled dark against the wet and cloaks of coarse grey wool fastened with iron pins.

The lead rider drew rein ten paces from the abandoned dray. He had a weathered face and greying beard, and he looked from the unhitched shafts to the solitary princess standing in the slush.

"Princess Cecily of Valmere?" he asked.

"I am," she said. "And our escort appears to have forgotten the rest of their journey."

The rider swung down from his saddle. "I am Aldwin, outrider to Lord Gareth Thorne. We brought spare trace-horses, my lady. We know how southern escorts keep faith at the water."

He stepped past her to examine the wagon tongue, bending to lift the heavy iron coupling ring. As his grey cloak swung back from his calf, Cecily looked down at his mud-splashed riding boots.

They were not cobbled from the rough, thick-grained cowhide the other three northern riders wore. They were supple calfskin, double-welted at the heel, and stamped just below the outer buckle was a tiny crescent flanking an awl—the private mark of the royal cobbler who worked two streets below the palace at Valmere.