A Crown of Broken Vows - The Rookhaven Covenant - Book One

The dying woman entered my shop at twelve minutes past midnight, trailing rainwater, rose petals, and somebody else’s shadow. I noticed the shadow because I was trying not to think about my mother. This was not unusual. I tried not to think about my mother most nights. On this particular night, I was failing because the watch on my bench had belonged to a man who promised his wife he would always come home before midnight. He had kept that promise for forty-two years, then died at eleven fifty-eight on a wet Tuesday in March. His widow did not want the watch to tell the right time. She only wanted it to tick again. I had explained that these were different repairs. She had patted my hand and said, “I know, dear,” in the manner of someone forgiving a child for being slow. So I was hunched beneath my green-shaded lamp, hungry enough to resent the dead Mr. Larkin personally, when the bell over the door gave one startled note. The woman came in first. Her shadow followed two heartbeats later. It slid over the threshold like spilled ink, though the streetlamp behind her should have thrown it toward the door. While she staggered against a cabinet of music boxes, it crawled sideways beneath the glass display case and lay there, too narrow for her body and utterly still. I set down my tweezers. “Lock it,” the woman said. Then she folded onto the Turkish runner Ione insisted made the shop look respectable. Blood ruined respectability quickly. I came around the counter fast enough to catch my hip on a drawer pull. The blow would bruise, but I barely felt it. Rain glazed the stranger’s black coat. Wet silver-blond hair hid most of her face. Rose petals clung to her hem although it was November and no rose in Rookhaven had any honest reason to be blooming. One petal came loose and landed by my boot. Its scent reached me before I could step away: roses, face powder, and the faint smoke of blown-out candles. My mother had smelled like that when she kissed me good night. I had been eleven the last time she did it. “The door,” the woman said again. Her voice had the careful sharpness of someone cutting each word free from pain. “Please.” There were several sensible things I could have done. I could have left the door open and called the city watch. I could have pushed her back into the rain. I could have gone upstairs for Ione, who owned a crossbow, three illegal passage charms, and better instincts about bleeding strangers. Instead I turned the lock. I left the key in it. In Rookhaven, a locked threshold could mean sanctuary, imprisonment, consent, or debt, depending on who had asked and whether anyone was foolish enough to answer aloud. Leaving the key in the door made my intention plain: the lock kept danger out. It did not keep the woman in. She watched me do it. “Elowen taught you well.” My hand stayed on the key. Rain rattled the front windows. Behind me, seven repaired clocks ticked out of step. The eighth—the tall regulator clock my father had built—had been silent for twenty years. “You have mistaken me for someone who knows an Elowen,” I said. The woman laughed once. It became a cough. Blood marked her lower lip. “She said you would lie badly whenever the truth mattered.” “Then she didn’t know me very well.” That hurt more to say than it should have. I crossed to her and knelt. Up close, she was unmistakably fae. Her cheekbones were a little too precise, the tips of her ears fine as new leaves. Power moved beneath her skin in pale green flickers. Not a street-bred glamour peddler or one of the dockside half-bloods who passed for human if no one looked twice. This woman belonged to a court. Court fae did not collapse in little repair shops by accident. “Where are you hurt?” “Everywhere by now.” “Try to be specific.” “Left side. Under the ribs.” I opened her coat. Her dress had once been deep green. Blood had made the silk black from her breast to her hip. “I’m calling a healer.” Her hand closed around my wrist. Small white flowers pushed out beside her fingernails, opened, and withered against my skin. “No official channels,” she said. “They will be listening.” “You are dying on my carpet.” “Yes.” She glanced down. “I apologize to the carpet.” I liked her then, which was inconvenient. I reached behind the counter for the first-aid case. It was a wooden thing with a brass latch, well stocked because customers who brought cursed jewelry also brought poor judgment. I cut through the side seam of her dress and pressed folded linen to the wound. The wound was not a stab. Five thin cuts met in a star below her ribs, too even to have been made by a shaking hand. Black grit filled each cut. The flesh around them had gone gray. And beneath it all, bright as lettering held to a flame, ran a vow. Most people never saw the words their promises left behind. I did. A promise made with enough conviction and enough to lose became writing beneath the skin. I repaired the small ones for a living: wedding vows stretched thin by illness, protective charms whose makers had died, promises tied to watches and rings and nursery spoons. The dangerous ones I pretended not to see. This vow had been carved around the woman’s heart in hard red strokes. I, MARA ELLERY, WILLINGLY TAKE THE LIFE OF YSABET RHYNE. THE DEBT IS MINE. LET HER DEATH BE WITNESS. Below the words was a blood-mark. Mine. I sat back on my heels. The woman’s fingers tightened around my wrist. “You can see it.” I looked at her face. “Who are you?” “The answer is written there.” “I want to hear you say it.” “Lady Ysabet Rhyne. Verdant envoy to the Covenant Assembly. Occasional disappointment to my family.” Her mouth tilted. “At present, an inconvenience to you.” I knew the name. Everyone in Rookhaven did. Ysabet Rhyne had ended the Briar Quarrel by seating two blood-soaked princes at the same supper table and refusing to let either leave until they agreed which one of them had started it. According to the scandal sheets I kept beneath the counter strictly for professional research, she had once made a Night Court ambassador vomit bees. The woman bleeding onto my knees looked less legendary. Her lips were losing color. “I did not write this vow,” I said. “I know.” “That is my mark.” “I know that too.” “No one else knows it.” “Someone does.” I hated answers that opened more doors than they closed. I had used that blood-mark four times: on my apprenticeship license, on the deed to Ellery & Bell, and on two private records kept in a locked iron box beneath my bed. It was not merely a copy of my handwriting. A blood-mark carried the tiny irregularities of pulse, intent, and memory. Faking one was supposed to be impossible. Then again, so was seeing vows without a lens. So was cutting them without dying. My life contained too many impossible things for me to put much faith in the word. “Why come here?” I asked. “Because the vow needed me to.” Cold settled between my shoulder blades. “It drove you to me?” “It tried. I was already coming.” She lifted her bloody hand and fumbled at the neckline of her dress. “Your mother said you would need this if she failed to return.” She drew out a narrow brass key on a green cord. It was an ordinary winding key, the kind made for a longcase clock. One side had been filed flat. On the other, almost worn away by years of handling, was a tiny stamped E inside a circle. My father’s maker’s mark. For a moment I was back in his workshop, small enough that my chin barely cleared the bench. I remembered curls of brass under my elbows and his hand closing over mine to keep me from touching the soldering iron. I remembered that he had laughed. I could not remember the sound. The absence had been there for years. That did not stop me from reaching for the missing piece each time, like a tongue worrying the space where a tooth used to be. “Where did you get this?” “Elowen.” “When?” “The night she left you.” Anger came so fast it steadied me. “My mother did not leave me a key. She left me an empty wardrobe and a father who checked the harbor every morning for six years.” “She left more than you were given.” “That sounds like a polite way to blame someone else.” “It is not polite at all.” Ysabet pushed the key into my palm. “Your mother trusted the wrong people. So did I.” The metal was warm from her body. I wanted to throw it across the room. I wanted to close my hand so tightly it became part of me. I did the second thing and despised myself a little for the speed of it. “Who put my mark on you?” Fear changed her face. Not pain. Not regret. Fear. Her gaze went to the display case behind me. The wrong shadow was no longer underneath it. “Mara,” she whispered. “Get down.” Something struck me between the shoulder blades. I hit the floor hard enough to bite my tongue. The key flew from my hand and skittered beneath the counter. Cold weight poured over me. My own shadow stretched black across the runner, then rose at the edges like a blanket caught by wind. The intruder had climbed inside it. My right hand jerked toward the workbench. I fought it. My fingers still closed around the steel awl beside Mr. Larkin’s open watch. Red words burned along the darkness wrapped around my arm. TAKE THE KEY. SILENCE THE WOMEN. An order given shape. Nothing more mystical than that, and nothing less dangerous. My hand turned the awl toward Ysabet. She was trying to rise. Blood ran between the fingers pressed to her side. “Don’t,” I said. “Excellent advice.” She put her free palm flat against the floor. Roots burst through my carpet. They were thin and black, wet with soil that had not been beneath the floorboards a moment before. They twisted around my wrist, caught the shadow, and pulled. The thing shrieked without a mouth. My hand stopped six inches from Ysabet’s throat. The awl shook between us. “I cannot hold it,” she said. “I gathered that.” I twisted onto my side. The third drawer of the workbench stood half open. Inside lay a silver seam knife, no longer than my forefinger. It had belonged to my grandmother, who used it for cutting embroidery thread and, on one memorable occasion, a burglar. I could reach it with my left hand if I stopped holding the shadow back with my right. The awl moved closer to Ysabet. She looked at me over its point. “Do it.” “You don’t know what it costs.” “I know what everything costs tonight.” I let go. My right arm plunged forward. Ysabet turned her face away. I snatched the seam knife and cut across the red order wrapped around my wrist. The blade met no flesh. It found the promise beneath. The shop rang like a struck bell. The shadow convulsed. For a second it wore a dozen bodies: a child, a stooped old woman, a man with antlers, a soldier in a gray coat. Then all of them folded inward, dragged through the narrow silver cut. An order could be broken. Its cost could not. That was the first rule my mother taught me and the only one she had never softened with a story. The price came looking for a place to land. I tried to force it into the floorboards. They bucked beneath me and refused. I tried the brass lamp. Its bulb burst. The nearest object strong enough to carry the loss was Mr. Larkin’s watch, with forty-two years of coming home wound into its mainspring. I covered the watch with my body. “Not that,” I said. The magic took me instead. A memory tore loose. My father stood at his bench in shirtsleeves, tapping a screwdriver against a jammed gear. He looked younger than I had any right to remember him. A smear of oil crossed his cheek. He began to whistle the tune he always used when a repair fought back. I knew I loved that tune. Then there was only his moving mouth and silence. “No.” I grabbed at the memory. My hands closed on air. The shadow burst apart beneath me. Black water spattered the carpet and hissed away. The awl dropped from my fingers. For several seconds I lay with my forehead pressed to the floor, trying to call the tune back. I could remember my father whistling. I could remember teasing him for missing the same note each time. But the melody itself was gone, scraped cleanly out of me. Ysabet touched my hair. “I am sorry.” “Don’t be.” My voice came out raw. “You’ll make me angry.” “You are already angry.” “Then don’t make me worse.” Her hand slipped away. I pushed myself upright. The roots had shriveled. Ysabet lay on her back, her silver hair spread across the ruined carpet. The red vow around her heart had grown brighter. My forged mark pulsed with each thinning beat. I pressed fresh linen against the wound. “Stay awake.” “Bossy,” she murmured. “I have been told.” “By Elowen?” “Not for twenty years.” Her eyes opened. They changed from green to gold and stopped there. “Listen to me. When the Court charges you, the old treaty gives you seven midnights before judgment. They will make it sound like mercy.” Her breath hitched. “It is not. Use the time.” “To do what?” “Find who made you a murderer.” “You could make that easier by not dying.” “I have been trying.” There was no self-pity in it. That frightened me more than panic would have. I looked toward the stairs and shouted, “Ione!” No floorboard creaked above us. No sleepy curse answered. A faint gray film covered the ceiling, a hush laid over the upper floor. The shadow had silenced more than the room. “I’ll get her.” Ysabet caught two of my fingers. She no longer had the strength for my wrist. “The key first.” “It went under the counter.” “Keep it from the Crown.” “What does it open?” Her lips moved. I had to bend close enough that the wet ends of her hair brushed my cheek. “The part of your life they hid from you.” I wanted to tell her that was not an answer. I wanted to shake another one out of her. Instead I said, “Ysabet, look at me.” She did. “Did my mother abandon us?” It was the wrong question. I knew that as soon as I asked. It was also the question I had carried for twenty years, and dying women make cowards honest. Ysabet’s face softened. “She chose to go,” she said. “That is not the same as choosing to leave you.” The distinction hurt too much to understand. Her fingers loosened. The vow beneath her skin flashed once. My blood-mark turned black. Lady Ysabet Rhyne exhaled, and the room became a place she was no longer in. I stayed bent over her. One hand still pressed uselessly to the linen at her side. The other held her two cold fingers. I did not know her. I had known her for perhaps twelve minutes. Even so, grief rose sharp and unreasonable behind my ribs. She had brought me proof that my mother’s absence had an explanation. Then she had become another dead woman who could not give it. The bell over the front door chimed. I looked up. The lock was still turned. The key remained in it. The door opened anyway. A tall man in a black coat stepped out of the rain. He took in the broken shop, the silver knife by my knee, and the blood on my hands. Then he saw Ysabet. For one unguarded instant, his face broke. He crossed the room and stopped beside her body. “Take your hands off her,” he said. The words were quiet. That made them worse. I let go of Ysabet and stood. Black writing moved beneath the stranger’s skin, disappearing under his cuffs and climbing the strong line of his throat. I had never seen so many commands bound into one living body. His eyes settled on me. Gray, cold, and exhausted. “Mara Ellery.” It was not a question. “Who wants to know?” “Kieran Voss.” The name turned every childhood warning about the Night Court into a man standing six feet away. The Black Hound. The Crown’s investigator. The prince who found people after they had burned their names, changed their faces, and crossed oceans. His gaze dropped to the blackened vow around Ysabet’s heart. To my blood-mark. When he looked at me again, grief had vanished behind something harder. “By command of the Night Crown,” he said, “you are under arrest for her murder.”