The King's Second Heart

Festival Eve (2)

Elowen looked at the cup of wine he had pushed across the desk to her. She looked at the soft grey shirt unlaced at his collar. She looked at the warm careful smile on his mouth.

She thought: I gave you four years of my life. I gave you my whole sixteen-year-old heart. I lay in this house in the dark and I waited for you to come and be kind to me, and you never came, and I never said a single word against you to a single living soul, and I let you call me sickly and dramatic and delicate and fevered while you made me into the ghost you needed me to be. And now you have invited a woman into my house and you have put her in the east-wing chambers and you have told the household she is going to wear my chair out of me, and you are sitting across from me and asking me to nod.

I am not going to nod.

But she did not say any of that. She said it inside her head, very carefully, the way she had been saying things inside her head for four years, and the saying of it inside her head was the small private thing she did not give him.

What she said out loud was very quiet.

"I understand you perfectly, my lord."

The smile on his mouth widened in relief.

"I knew you would."

"I trust you will explain everything to my father in your own time."

"Of course. I shall write to him personally."

"How kind."

She rose from the chair.

"Was there anything else, my lord?"

"No. No, my dear, that was all. Please — drink some of the wine, at least, before you go. You look so very tired."

"I shall drink it in my chamber."

She did not pick up the cup. She walked to the door of the study with the slow steady steps of a Luna walking out of a room she had walked in and out of for four years and was never going to walk into again, and she put her hand on the door, and she paused.

"Doran."

"Yes, my dear?"

"How long has she been writing to you?"

There was a small silence.

"I do not know what you mean."

"The woman in the red gown. Selene. How long has she been writing to you?"

He did not answer.

She did not look back at him. She opened the door of his study and walked out and closed it behind her, very gently, and she walked the length of the long east corridor in the cold afternoon light with her face perfectly composed and her hands perfectly steady at her sides, and she made it all the way back to her own chamber in the west wing before she allowed herself anything at all.

She bolted the door behind her.

She walked to the bed.

She lay face down across the coverlet with her dress still on and her shoes still on and her hair still pinned, and she pressed her face into the pillow, and she finally — finally — allowed herself to weep.

She wept for the sixteen-year-old who had walked into Ironbough in a green gown with white flowers in her hair. She wept for the second-year wife who had stopped suggesting things to the senior steward. She wept for the third-year wife who had stopped going down to the great hall except when summoned. She wept for the fourth-year wife with seven bruises she had not been struck for and a face on her ceiling at midnight and a husband who had just told her, in the soft careful voice of a man calming a sick animal, that he was going to put her down with kindness in front of the whole pack tomorrow morning at the festival.

She wept until she could not weep any more, and then she lay very still on the coverlet in the dim chamber and listened to the small distant sounds of Ironbough preparing for its festival.

When at last she lifted her head and dragged herself upright on the edge of the bed, the autumn afternoon outside the window had turned to autumn evening, and the chamber was full of long blue shadows, and the candle on her writing desk had not been lit, and she could barely see her own hands in front of her face.

She turned to look at the writing desk.

There was something on it that had not been there this morning.

A single thin grey ribbon. Frayed at one end. Old. Soft with the kind of softness fabric only takes on after many years of being held in someone's hands.

The ribbon was lying across the centre of the writing desk in a small careful loop, exactly as if someone had set it down there with the deliberate care of a person leaving a message.

Nobody had been in her chamber.

She had bolted the door from the inside the moment she came in.

Elowen rose very slowly from the edge of the bed. She walked across the chamber to the writing desk on legs that did not feel like her own legs. She reached out one hand. She picked up the grey ribbon between two fingers.

It was warm.

It was warm the way a thing is warm when it has just been held, for a long time, against a beating heart.