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

What the Command Left

The first thing Ione did after learning I was magically tethered to the Night Court’s executioner was bar the door.

The second was to make tea.

“You cannot make tea now,” I said.

She dragged the iron shutter across the front window. “I can make tea during a flood, a police raid, or the arrival of the Last Judgment. I refuse to meet any of them thirsty.”

Outside, gray-coated officers took positions behind the suspended rain. There were fourteen, not twelve. I counted twice while Ione dropped a brass plate into the slot above the lock and struck it with the heel of her hand.

The shop wards lit blue.

“Licensed hazard containment,” she called through the door. “This premises holds unstable enchanted property. Forced entry before inventory is secured constitutes willful public endangerment under Guild Rule Eighty-Seven.”

Silence answered.

Ione looked at Kieran. “How long will that buy us?”

“Rule Eighty-Seven allows one hour.”

“Forty-nine minutes now,” said the pleasant voice behind the officers. “Your license specifies that notice begins at the first toll, Ms. Bell.”

Kieran’s expression hardened.

“Magistrate Quill,” he said.

The man outside stepped closer to the glass. He was lean, silver-haired, and dry despite the halted storm. Half-moon spectacles softened a face that did not otherwise need softening.

“Prince Kieran,” he replied. “Place your weapons on the floor and move six paces away from Mara Ellery.”

Kieran glanced at me.

Six paces was possible. Seven was not.

Quill could not have known that. Yet.

“I am tending a wound,” Kieran said.

“Then I suggest efficiency.”

Ione pulled a second shutter over the window. Quill disappeared behind iron.

“Forty-eight minutes,” she said. “Sit down before one of you bleeds on something valuable.”

“I am already bleeding on several valuable things,” Kieran said.

“The carpet is not one of them.”

“I heard that,” I said.

“It was intended for you.”

Kieran lowered himself onto the floor beside the workbench. He moved with great care, one hand pressed to the wound in his side. I sat opposite him because the bond allowed no other arrangement. Five feet separated our knees.

Lady Ysabet lay behind us beneath the clean linen Ione had spread over her body.

I tried not to look.

Instead I reached up and rescued Mr. Larkin’s watch from the edge of the bench. Its tiny mechanism ticked against my palm. The crystal was cracked, and one hand still lay beside my tweezers, but the balance wheel moved with a steady beat.

Kieran watched me put it in the breast pocket of my dress.

“Is that important?” he asked.

“It belongs to a customer.”

His gaze traveled over the wrecked shop. “Of course.”

I could not tell whether he was mocking me.

“She has already lost the person attached to it,” I said. “She doesn’t need me losing the watch as well.”

Something in his face eased. “I was not mocking you.”

I disliked that he had read the suspicion so easily. “I didn’t say you were.”

“No.”

He removed his coat. The black shirt beneath was wet with blood.

Ione returned from the back room with a basin, a medical box, and three mugs balanced on a tray. A plate of honey cakes sat between them, burned black around the edges.

Kieran looked at the tray as if it were the least comprehensible object he had faced all night.

“Tea?” Ione asked him.

“No, thank you.”

“That was not a yes-or-no question. Black or mint?”

He hesitated.

Not politeness. Not suspicion. For one strange moment, the man reputed to have hunted armies seemed genuinely troubled by two kinds of tea.

“Which is appropriate?” he asked.

“Whichever you want.”

The pause lasted a fraction too long.

“Black,” he said at last.

“Reckless,” I murmured.

His eyes met mine. “I am pacing myself.”

Ione handed him a mug and pointed to the cakes. “Eat one.”

“I am not hungry.”

“Neither is Mara. That is why she becomes impossible after midnight.”

“I am always like this.”

“You become more concentrated.”

Kieran took a cake.

He bit into the burned edge with the resignation of a man accepting a minor poison. Then he looked down at it.

“Well?” Ione asked.

“Unexpected.”

“That means he likes it,” she told me.

“I know what it means.”

Kieran finished the cake.

The command scars along his forearms looked older without the coat hiding them. Some were thin and faded. Others lay thick as cord beneath his skin. The fresh line I had cut ended in a red-edged break just above his heart.

Ione cut his shirt away from the stab wound.

“This will need stitches.”

“Do it.”

She poured spirits over the wound.

Pain bit into my side.

I hissed and clamped a hand over my own shallower cut.

Kieran looked at me immediately. “You felt that.”

“No, I often make that noise when someone else is being cleaned with brandy.”

“Mara,” Ione warned.

“Yes. I felt it.”

She studied the two wounds, then pricked the pad of Kieran’s thumb with her needle.

A bright point of blood appeared on mine.

We all stared at it.

“Do not do that again,” Kieran said.

“I needed to know.”

“You could have pricked me,” I said.

“You are less polite about it.”

Ione threaded the needle. “A new injury crosses in part. Pain crosses almost entirely. Distance tightens the exchange. I would wager that if either of you dies before this is undone, the other follows.”

I looked at Kieran.

“You seem difficult to keep alive.”

“The feeling is rapidly becoming mutual.”

Ione stitched him. He did not flinch, which meant he had long practice being hurt in front of witnesses. I felt each pull as a dull echo beneath my ribs. By the sixth stitch, sweat had gathered at the back of my neck.

“Why did the price bind us?” I asked.

Kieran answered before Ione could. “A royal command is carried by the person forced to obey it, but its authority belongs to the Crown. You cut the path between us while the command was active. It needed a new path.”

“So it used me.”

“It used both of us.”

“Can you fix it?”

“No.”

Ione tied off the last stitch. “Can the Crown?”

“Yes.”

The room went quiet.

“And what would it demand?” I asked.

“Her surrender. My obedience. Probably our lives once it had both.”

“Then we won’t ask.”

Kieran’s gaze held mine. “You say that as if there is a queue of alternatives.”

“I repair impossible things for a living.”

“No. You repair objects everyone else has abandoned.”

The accuracy of it felt like a hand pressing a bruise.

I looked away first.

My eyes found the brass key beneath the counter.

I had nearly forgotten it in the fight. That realization filled me with a quick, sour panic. I slid off the stool to retrieve it.

At the sixth pace, the band around my wrist tightened.

Kieran stood before I could ask. He moved to the near side of the workbench and let the distance close. The relief was immediate.

“I could have moved back,” I said.

“You were nearer the key.”

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“It is the reason the shadow returned.”

He had noticed more than I wanted him to.

I picked up the key. The brass had gone cold. My father’s E caught the lamplight.

Ione stopped packing the medical box.

“Where did you get that?”

“Ysabet.”

All color left her face.

“She said my mother gave it to her the night she disappeared.”

Ione sat down.

“You knew they knew each other,” I said.

“I knew Elowen had a friend in the Verdant Court. She never told me a name.”

“That is difficult to believe.”

“It was difficult to live through too.”

Her answer did not satisfy me. It did sound true.

Kieran held out his hand. “May I see it?”

I closed my fingers around the key.

He lowered his hand again. No irritation. No insistence.

“The flat side is unusual,” he said. “It may open more than the clockwork.”

“My father made it.”

I turned toward the tall regulator clock against the back wall.

It stood between two crowded shelves, six feet of dark walnut with a moon painted on its face. My father had begun building it the year I was born. He had carved a magpie into the pendulum because he claimed I stole every shiny thing he set down.

The clock had stopped at two seventeen on the morning my mother vanished.

Father tried to mend it until his hands shook. After he died, I tried. I replaced the mainspring, polished the pivots, trued every wheel, and searched half the old clock shops in Rookhaven for a winding key that fit.

Nothing had ever moved the hands.

I crossed the room. Kieran stayed close without being asked.

The brass key slid into the winding hole as if it had been used yesterday.

My hand began to tremble.

“Mara,” Ione said softly.

“I’m fine.”

It was the phrase I used when I wanted people to stop looking at me.

I turned the key.

Once.

Twice.

The spring caught on the third turn.

Inside the case, something clicked.

The clock did not begin ticking. A narrow panel beneath its face pushed forward half an inch.

I stared at it.

For twenty years, I had taken that clock apart piece by piece. I had never found a hidden compartment.

My mother had been a better oathwright than I was. My father had been a better clockmaker. Between them, they had made a secret their daughter could touch every day without seeing.

I opened the panel.

Inside lay a folded sheet of cream paper and a silver photograph curled at the corners.

I knew my mother’s handwriting before I saw my name.

Mara.

Only five letters. The M leaned left, impatient with the rest. She had written grocery lists in that hand. Notes for my school lunch. Once, after I called her unfair, an apology tucked beneath my door.

My knees threatened to fold.

I sat on the floor because I chose to, which was not the same thing.

The paper crackled when I opened it.

My dearest Magpie,

The room blurred.

No one had called me that since my father died.

I wiped my eyes angrily and read on.

If Ysabet has returned this key, then I did not come home in time to explain. I need you to believe two things that may hurt at once: I loved you, and I chose to go. I did not choose a life without you. Staying would have led the Crown to your door.

You may never forgive me. I will not ask you to. Anger is better than the obedience they will want from you.

Ysabet knows where to begin. Kieran Voss knows where I went.

I love you beyond every promise I was allowed to make.

Mama

I read it again.

The words did not improve.

She had loved me. She had left anyway. For twenty years I had arranged those facts as opposites because opposites were easier. One person guilty. One person abandoned. One clean wound I could be angry at without needing to understand it.

My mother had reached across two decades and ruined the arrangement in half a page.

I became aware of Ione kneeling near me.

She did not touch me. She knew I would have mistaken comfort for restraint and fought it.

“Did you know?” I asked.

“No.” Her voice shook. “God, Mara. No.”

I believed her, which did not mean I forgave every other silence.

Kieran stood by the clock. He had gone very still.

The silver photograph remained inside the compartment.

I took it out.

Three people stood on a harbor quay beneath a gas lamp. Ysabet was younger only around the eyes. My mother wore a dark traveling coat, one gloved hand raised against the wind.

The man beside her had Kieran’s face.

His hair was shorter. His expression was not. He wore the same black coat and the same careful distance from everyone in the frame.

On the back, my mother had written an address.

14 Briar Row.

Below it: If the key comes back, search Bet’s house before the Court does.

I held the photograph out to Kieran. “You knew my mother.”

He looked at the image, not me.

“Yes.”

The word entered the room without excuse.

I stood. “You could have mentioned that before you arrested me.”

“I did not know why Ysabet came here.”

“That was not what I said.”

“No.”

Anger steadied my hands. “When was this taken?”

“The night Elowen disappeared.”

“Where were you going?”

He looked toward the shuttered window, as though the correct answer might be waiting outside with Magistrate Quill.

“There is a sealed archive beneath the Night Palace,” he said. “Your mother believed it contained the original record of the Covenant. She thought that record could prove the Crown had broken its own law.”

“You took her there.”

“I escorted her to the entrance.”

“Under whose order?”

Black scars shifted beneath his skin.

“The Crown’s.”

Of course.

For Kieran, obedience was not an excuse pasted over bad choices. It was written into his body. I had felt how violently one command controlled a hand. I had cut it from him myself.

That did not make it easier to look at the man who had taken my mother away.

“Did she go willingly?” I asked.

“Yes.”

The answer hurt worse than a lie would have.

“People agree to terrible things when every other choice has been taken.”

“I know.”

He did not defend himself. It left my anger nowhere clean to land.

“Did you see her come out?”

“No.”

“Did you go back for her?”

Something passed across his face. Shame, quickly buried.

“I tried.”

“What stopped you?”

He glanced down at the command scars on his hands.

“The same thing you cut out of me tonight.”

I wanted to understand. I wanted not to understand at all.

Outside, someone struck the iron shutter. The wards flashed.

“Thirty-one minutes,” Quill called pleasantly.

I put my mother’s note and the photograph into my pocket beside Mr. Larkin’s watch. Proof of one woman’s love pressed against proof of another’s.

“Briar Row is in the old court quarter,” Kieran said. “Ysabet’s house will be sealed at dawn. If she kept evidence there, Quill will reach it first unless we leave now.”

“We?”

“I can identify court seals. I know the palace archives. I know how the Night guard hunts.” He listed each fact without pride, laying his usefulness between us like coins. “You cannot cross the room without me. I cannot cross it without you. Until we break this bond, survival is a shared task.”

“That is not the same as trust.”

“I am not asking for trust.”

He said it too easily.

As if he did not expect anyone to give it. As if being useful were the most he knew how to request.

I hated that I recognized the habit.

Ione rose. “The storm drain beneath the cellar opens behind Briar Row at high tide. You can be out of the containment line in twelve minutes.”

“You’re coming,” I said.

“No.”

The word landed harder than it should have.

Ione saw it happen. She always did.

“I am not leaving you,” she said. “I am staying with the body and the shop. Someone must keep Quill from removing the evidence before you find what he missed.”

“They’ll arrest you.”

“They have done it before.”

“They could hurt you.”

“So could climbing through a storm drain at my age.”

“This is not funny.”

“No.” She stepped closer. “If you ask me to come because you are afraid to leave me, I will come. But do not order me to abandon the best chance of clearing your name and call it protection.”

The answer I wanted to give lodged behind my teeth.

I did not ask people to stay. Asking gave them a chance to say no.

Ione waited.

Kieran turned away, giving me the privacy of not being watched. It was a small kindness. I resented him for noticing I needed it.

“I am afraid to leave you,” I said.

The admission was barely louder than the clocks.

Ione put both hands around my face and kissed my forehead.

“I know, chick.”

For once, I let her hold me.

It lasted three breaths. Then I stepped back before comfort could become dependence and hated myself for doing that too.

Ione pretended not to notice.

She fetched my waterproof coat and pushed a canvas repair bag into my hands. Silver tools, salt, bandages, bread, and a second package of honey cakes weighed it down.

Kieran took the bag from me.

“I can carry my own things.”

“Your side is bleeding because mine is.”

“So is yours.”

“Yes.” He slung the strap over his shoulder. “But I am more accustomed to it.”

There it was again: usefulness offered in place of any request to be kept.

I did not thank him. I also did not take the bag back.

We reached the cellar door before I stopped.

One question remained. I had avoided it because every answer led somewhere I did not want to go.

I turned to Kieran.

“My mother knew you would remember where she went.”

“Apparently.”

“She also knew you might be standing beside me when I found that note.”

His face gave me nothing.

“Did you know I was here?” I asked.

The wards boomed as the officers struck them again. Dust sifted from the ceiling.

Kieran could have blamed the Crown. He could have said he had forgotten, or that finding one human child in Rookhaven had been impossible, or that twenty years meant less to someone who had lived more than a century.

He did not.

“Yes,” he said.

My hand tightened around the cellar latch.

“For how long?”

His gray eyes held mine.

“For all twenty years.”