003- The Things I cannot Unknow
697 Words
Zara
I locked the archive at noon and sat on the floor between the stacks for twenty minutes.
This was not part of my system. My system did not include sitting on archive floors. My system was forward momentum, controlled response, practical action.
My system had not been designed for the discovery that I was the hidden great-great-great-granddaughter of an Ashenveil Lycan King, my bloodline deliberately erased from royal record four generations ago by an ancestor of the woman who had spent three years using my partner to spy on me.
I sat on the floor and breathed and let myself feel the full shape of it.
Then I got up, unlocked the door, and went to find the one person I trusted completely.
***
Seris opened her door, took one look at my face, and stepped aside without a word.
I came in. I sat down. I told her everything.
She listened without interrupting, which was one of her best qualities. When I finished she was quiet for a long moment, her eyes moving over some middle distance while she processed.
"So Lady Voss's family removed your bloodline from the records," she said finally. "And she has been monitoring your work ever since to ensure you didn't rediscover it."
"Yes."
"Because if you're a descendant of the Ashenveil bloodline—"
"Then I might be the king's fated mate," I finished. "Or at least a candidate. Someone whose existence the curse-detection rituals would respond to." I pressed my fingers to my mouth briefly. "She's been hiding me. All this time. She's been keeping me invisible so the search never reaches me."
Seris looked at me steadily. "What are you going to do?"
I thought about the assembly. About Caelan standing at the front of the great court saying “someone in this room has been ensuring that search fails.”
I thought about Dorian's cold side of the bed. About the ribbon placed in the center of my desk like a warning.
I thought about twenty six years of living quietly in the back of rooms.
"I'm going to the king," I said.
Seris stared at me. "You're going to walk up to the Lycan King and tell him his fated mate might be hiding in his archive."
"I'm going to walk up to the Lycan King and tell him someone has been hiding evidence from his bloodline search for at least three years." I stood up. "What he does with that information is his business."
"Zara—"
"I'm the palace archivist," I said. "I found an irregularity in the royal records. Reporting it is literally my job."
Seris looked at me for a long moment.
"You're terrified," she said.
"Yes."
"You're going anyway."
"Obviously."
She stood up. "I'm coming with you."
"You don't have to—"
"I know." She picked up her jacket. "I'm coming anyway. Obviously."
***
We got as far as the outer corridor of the king's administrative wing before someone stopped us.
Not a guard, though there were guards, and they had watched us approach with the careful attention of people trained to assess threat levels.
The someone who stopped us was a young man approximately my age, with the kind of face that was easy to like on first sight — open and warm, with sharp eyes underneath the warmth that suggested the ease was real but not simple.
"Archivist Zara," he said. Not a question.
I stopped. "Yes."
"I'm Ren." He smiled slightly. "The king's brother." He glanced at the folder in my hands. "What do you have there?"
I looked at him for a moment. Then I held the folder out.
He took it. Opened it. Read for approximately ninety seconds, his expression shifting through several things before settling into something very still and very controlled.
"Where did you find this?" he asked quietly.
"Buried across seven sub-collections in the pre-reformation bloodline archive," I said. "It would only resolve as a pattern if you had the full index. I've been building the index for three years."
Ren looked at me. Then at the last page of the folder. Then at me again.
"Come with me," he said.
- Writer
