The King's Second Heart

Three Days of Quiet

"Will you read to me again, Ysolde?"

It was the morning of the second day in the blue chambers and Elowen had asked the question without quite meaning to. Her own voice had become a small steady thing in this room, and the small steady voice had spoken before the small careful part of her brain had checked whether it was allowed to ask for things.

Ysolde looked up from her chair by the window with the small bright surprised face of a young woman who had not yet been asked, in two days, for any small thing other than water.

"Of course, my lady. What would you like me to read?"

"The pack-songs again. The one — the one about the small grey wolf who finds the lost child in the snow."

"Of course."

Ysolde rose and crossed to the bedside table and picked up the small leather book of pack-songs from where she had set it the previous afternoon, and she sat back down in the chair by the window and opened the book to the small careful place she had marked with a thin grey ribbon, and she began to read.

She read in the small soft voice she used for reading. The pack-song was an old one in the Lycan tongue Elowen had learned as a child at her father's house, and the small old words were the small old words of every western Lycan child who had ever been put to bed by a nurse who knew the song. The small grey wolf in the song went out into the snow at the full moon to find a child who had wandered from the village, and the small grey wolf carried the child home on her own back through the long cold dark of the winter night, and the village in the morning awoke to find the child asleep on the doorstep of its own mother's house, and the grey wolf had vanished back into the snow, and nobody in the village had ever seen the wolf again but the village had remembered her, and in the small careful spring of the next year the village had left a small careful gift of milk and bread on a flat stone at the edge of the woods for the grey wolf to find, and the gift had been gone in the morning, and the village had left a gift on the same stone every spring after that, for many years, and the grey wolf had taken every gift, and the village had been blessed.

It was a song for children. Elowen had been put to bed with it many times when she had been small. She had not heard it sung in fourteen years.

When Ysolde reached the small last verse — the small grey wolf goes home, the small grey wolf is loved, the small grey wolf will come again when she is needed — Elowen, in the soft impossible bed, was asleep.

She slept through most of the morning.

The three days in the blue chambers became a small steady rhythm. She slept, and woke, and ate small soft bites of whatever the kitchens sent up, and slept again, and woke again, and was washed by Ysolde with a soft warm cloth and clean water from the silver basin, and was given the small bitter tonics Wenna sent up twice a day in small clay pots with careful written instructions, and was helped to use the small private chamber off the side of her own bedchamber for her body's small private needs, and was tucked back into the soft impossible bed.

Wenna came twice a day. She did not ask any more careful questions about the second heartbeat. She listened to Elowen's chest with her ear pressed to the front of the linen shift, and she counted the wrist pulse, and she looked into Elowen's eyes, and she examined the bruises one at a time and made small careful notes in a small leather book she carried in the pocket of her grey robes.

On the morning of the second day, she said, "The bruise on your forearm is fading. The one on your hip is fading. Two of the small ones on your upper arms are gone. I think the worst of the binding has begun to wear off. Your body has been working very hard these past four days to clean itself out. It is going to keep working hard for a few weeks. Eat. Sleep. Drink the tonics. Do not try to do anything else."

"Yes, Wenna."

That was the morning a small package arrived at the door of the chamber.

Ysolde answered the door. There was a small low exchange of words. Ysolde came back across the chamber to the bed with a small flat parcel in her hands wrapped in a square of clean white linen tied with a piece of pale brown twine. There was no note. There was no name.

"For me?" Elowen said.

"Yes, my lady."

"Who from?"

"The serving girl who brought it would not say."

Elowen took the small parcel between her hands. It was very light. She untied the small piece of pale brown twine and unfolded the clean white linen.

Inside was a single white flower.

It had been pressed flat between two pieces of thin parchment, the way a careful child presses a flower at the end of summer to keep through the winter. It was small. It had perhaps eight petals. It was the colour of fresh cream and the very centre of it was the soft yellow of pollen. It was the kind of flower that grew in the small careful corners of an old garden in the late summer of any year, and Elowen, who had walked the half-wild garden of Ironbough at every dawn for four years, had never been able to grow this particular flower in the cold western soil of Doran's manor, and had once, in her second year of marriage, told a kitchen girl that she had loved this flower at her father's house when she was a child, and the kitchen girl had nodded politely and forgotten the conversation by the next morning the way the kitchen girls always forgot the small things the Luna of Ironbough said.

Elowen turned the small pressed flower over in her thin fingers in the soft afternoon light from the tall windows of the blue chambers.

She did not know who had sent it.

She did not know how anyone in this palace could possibly have known that this particular small flower had been the small private flower of her childhood at Vayne Hold.

She looked up at Ysolde in the chair by the window.