Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Twelve: The Thread I Wasn't Meant to Find

POV: Elara Voss

Kael gave Draven three days to find the traitor before he intended to start questioning the household himself, and I understood, watching him say it, that his patience wasn't mercy, it was strategy. A man who knows he's being hunted grows careful. A man who thinks he's still safe stays careless a little longer.

I wasn't supposed to be involved in the search at all. Kael had made that clear, gently but without room for argument, the morning after the attack, I was to stay close to the castle's heart, away from the guard rotations, away from anywhere a nervous traitor might decide a witness was worth silencing. I understood his reasoning. I even agreed with it, in principle.

I did it anyway, because principle has never once stopped me from noticing something wrong once I've noticed it, and three days after the attack, mending a torn hem in the laundry room because Bex had run out of other ways to keep me occupied and out of trouble, I noticed something wrong.

It was a scrap of cloth, caught on a nail behind the drying racks, easy to miss unless you'd spent your whole life learning fabric by touch the way I had, mending Thistlewood's clothes for coin before I ever crossed Ashgrave's gate. Gray-blue thread, fine-woven, court quality, nothing any castle servant would own, and nothing any castle servant would be caught anywhere near, if they had a shred of sense.

I recognized it instantly. Renata's colors. The same thread I'd watched woven into an envoy's sleeve at a dinner three weeks ago, close enough to catalog without ever meaning to.

I should have taken it straight to Kael. I know that now, have turned the choice over more times than I can count since. Instead I did something considerably less wise, I asked Bex, quietly, who had access to the laundry room besides the household staff, and watched her face do something complicated and frightened before she answered.

"Guards use it sometimes," she said, "coming off a long watch, if their own quarters are locked for cleaning. Garrick's been in twice this week that I know of."

Garrick. The scarred soldier who'd marched me through the gate my very first hour in this castle, who'd delivered me to Draven with the flat efficiency of a man handling cargo. I hadn't thought of him once in the three weeks since hadn't had reason to, one soldier among dozens, unremarkable in every way that mattered.

Which was, I understood, standing there with a scrap of Veyloth thread pinched between my fingers, exactly the kind of man nobody would think to watch closely.

I told myself I would find Draven immediately. I told myself that all the way down the corridor, all the way past the kitchens, all the way to the narrow servants' stair that cut down toward the guard barracks and I was still telling myself that when a hand closed over my mouth from behind and a voice, low and utterly without the panic I expected from a man about to be caught, said directly against my ear:

"You should have left it on the nail, sacrifice."

Garrick.

He didn't drag me far just far enough, into a disused storeroom off the barracks corridor, door shut and barred before I'd finished fighting the shock enough to properly struggle. He released my mouth once the door was closed, though his grip on my arm didn't loosen, and in the thin light from a single high window I finally saw him clearly for the first time since that first hour at the gate, the same flat, professional face, except now there was nothing professional left in it at all, only the cold calculation of a man who'd already decided what needed to happen next.

"How long," I said, keeping my voice steadier than I felt, because I'd learned, three weeks into this castle, that fear shown too plainly only ever invited more of it.

"Longer than you'd guess. Renata's court pays considerably better than a King who's spent ten years bleeding his treasury dry on wards nobody in Duskmoor even remembers the purpose of." He said it without shame, almost bored, the tone of a man reciting arithmetic. "It was meant to be simple. Feed information, collect payment, watch a cursed line finally choke on its own history without lifting a finger to help it along. Then you crossed that gate, and everything got complicated."

"Because of the wolf recognizing me."

Something sharpened in his face surprise, quickly buried. "You know what you are, then. Good. Saves me the trouble of explaining it to Renata's letter myself." His grip tightened, and I understood, with a cold lurch, that whatever came next in this conversation, he had no intention of letting me leave this room to repeat it. "Witch's blood, walked right through our gate wearing a tithe girl's face. Renata's going to want you considerably more than she wanted a failed raid on a warded castle. A curse-breaker's worth more to Veyloth alive than every soldier we lost in that yard."

"You're going to hand me over."

"I'm going to sell you over, which is a rather more honest way to put it." He reached for something at his belt rope, I registered dimly, coiled and ready, and understood he'd planned this far longer than the last five minutes. "Struggle if you like. It changes nothing except how much it hurts."

I did struggle, I want that on record, because I have never once, in this whole account, let fear stop my hands from doing whatever they could manage and it earned me exactly as little as he'd promised, his grip iron-hard around wrists gone slick with panic, the rope already closing around one before I found, at last, the thing my fingers had been searching for the whole time without my mind fully understanding why.

The wooden wolf. My father's careful carving, worn smooth from years in my pocket, and I drove its blunt point into the side of Garrick's throat with every ounce of strength panic could lend a girl half his size.

It wasn't a weapon built for killing. It didn't need to be. It bought me one staggered, startled half-second, his grip loosening, his breath catching wrong and I used it, wrenching free, throwing myself against the barred door hard enough to bruise, screaming Kael's name into a corridor I could only pray wasn't as empty as this storeroom had been.

Garrick recovered fast. Too fast. His hand closed around my hair before I'd gotten the bar half-lifted, wrenching me backward, and the last thing I saw before the world tipped sideways was the door I hadn't managed to open, and the last thing I heard, muffled and enormous through the wood, was the sound of running feet finally, finally answering my voice.