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Chapter Thirteen: The Book of Peace

The fire wall had died down to a low, flickering line of embers along the floorboards by the time the tavern found its nerve again — not friendly, exactly, but no longer looking for a reason to break anyone's kneecaps, which Wren was choosing to count as significant progress.

"So," said the woman who'd spoken up about the grain levy, arms still crossed but her voice steadier now, curiosity winning out over lingering fury. "What is it you two are actually doing in Ravensmere? Princes don't usually travel with fire-throwing servants unless something's gone properly wrong."

"We're on a quest," Wren said smoothly, sliding back into the easy, unbothered cadence of a woman who'd talked her way out of far worse rooms than this one. "Looking for something. That's really all I can say."

"Looking for what?"

"That," Wren said, with a small, closed-lip smile, "would rather defeat the purpose of calling it a *secret*, wouldn't it?"

A few people chuckled despite themselves. The tension in the room, thick as smoke a moment ago, had started, very slowly, to thin.

"Come on," pressed the hedge-bearded arm wrestler, apparently willing to let bygones lie in exchange for gossip. "Just a hint. What's worth dragging a prince into a tavern brawl for?"

"A hint," Wren said, "would still be telling you, and I am, if nothing else, a woman of remarkable discretion." She caught Alaric's eye across the room, a silent, pointed look that said, as clearly as she could manage without actual words, *say absolutely nothing.*

Alaric, three ales deep and apparently still operating on whatever reckless honesty had gotten them into this mess in the first place, smiled at the room with the easy, oblivious warmth of a man who had genuinely not received the message.

"We're searching for the Book of Peace," he announced, raising his cup slightly as if toasting the very concept of secrecy itself. "Ancient thing. Supposed to be somewhere near Kelthorne. Whole reason we're out here, really, other than the excellent ale."

The room went very quiet again, though this time with interest instead of hostility, a dozen heads turning at once, someone near the back audibly whispering the word *peace* like it meant something significant to people who lived out here on the edge of a kingdom that had clearly seen very little of it.

Wren closed her eyes, slowly, and pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose like she was trying to physically hold her own skull together through sheer force of will.

"What," she said, each word arriving with the weight and precision of a woman setting down individual bricks, "part of the word *secret*, Your Highness, do you not understand?"

"They asked nicely."

"They asked because they were being *nosy*, which is an entirely different thing from deserving an answer! That is the *entire concept* of a secret! You don't just — hand it out because someone smiled at you and bought you a drink!"

"I didn't think it would matter that much."

"It is *called* the Book of Peace, and we are looking for it in a *kingdom that just tried to lynch you ten minutes ago* — how did you imagine that particular detail *wouldn't* matter?"

Alaric, to his credit, at least had the decency to look mildly sheepish about it, ducking his head over his cup in a way that suggested some small, ale-slowed part of his brain had only just caught up to the scale of what he'd done.

"In my defense," he said again, which Wren was rapidly coming to understand was simply the sentence he reached for whenever he'd done something indefensible, "it's not as though I gave them a map."

"You gave them a *name*, which in my professional experience is usually worse, because now every person in this room with half a wit and an empty coin purse is going to spend the rest of the night wondering exactly how much a book called 'Peace' might be worth to whoever finds it first."

As if summoned by the very accusation, a thin, sharp-eyed man near the door — who had been conspicuously quiet through the entire arm-wrestling spectacle and subsequent near-riot — rose smoothly from his seat, dropped a few coins on the table, and slipped out into the night without so much as a backward glance.

Wren watched him go with the particular, weary dread of a woman who had spent a decade reading exactly that kind of exit for exactly what it meant.

"Wonderful," she said flatly. "Wonderful. That man is absolutely going to sell what he just heard to the first interested party he can find before sunrise, and do you know what that means, Your Highness?"

"That we should probably leave Ravensmere sooner than planned?"

"That we should probably leave Ravensmere *immediately*," Wren said, already rising, already reaching for her cloak with the brisk, no-nonsense efficiency of a woman abandoning a con that had just gone spectacularly sideways, "before whatever competition you just personally invited to this treasure hunt decides to get there first."

"I really am sorry."

"You're going to be a great deal sorrier," Wren said, hauling him up by the sleeve, "if we get to Kelthorne and find out someone else already dug up our book because you couldn't resist showing off in front of a room full of strangers holding grudges."

Behind them, as they pushed out into the cold night air, the tavern erupted once more into noise — not hostility this time, but eager, excited chatter, a dozen voices already speculating wildly about peace and books and princes and fire, and Wren didn't need to look back to know that whatever quiet, careful version of this quest she'd been hoping for had just been thoroughly, irreversibly ruined.