The Dragon's Blood Bride

Chapter 5

"She said what?" Bastian's hand went still on his sword belt, halfway through checking the buckle for the third time since I'd found him in the training yard.

"That I wasn't the first bride she's met before a wedding. The last one cried too, and it didn't help her." I kept my voice low, even though the yard was empty except for the two of us and a groundskeeper too far away to hear. "Bastian, she said it like it was nothing. Like brides come and go here the way seasons do."

"Maybe they do. Maybe Cassian's been betrothed before and it fell through." His jaw was tight enough that I could tell he didn't believe his own excuse any more than I did. "Or maybe we ask someone who's been in this palace longer than a fourteen year old girl with too much time on her hands."

"Who?"

"There's a woman in the laundry house. Mira. She's been mending Draven linens since before Cassian was born, according to one of the stable hands. If anyone's seen enough weddings come and go to know what happened to the last bride, it's her."

"And you trust a stable hand's gossip enough to build a plan around it?"

"I trust that nobody in that throne hall has given us a straight answer since we crossed the border, and a servant who's spent thirty years scrubbing this family's linens has less reason to lie to us than any of them do." He was already moving toward the servants' passage as he spoke. "Are you coming, or would you rather keep waiting for Cassian to tell you the truth on his own?"

I fell into step beside him without answering, because we both already knew what my answer was.

We found her exactly where Bastian said we would, hands deep in a basin of grey water, humming something tuneless to herself until she noticed us in the doorway and the humming stopped like a candle snuffed out.

"Lady Liora." She dipped a shallow curtsy, wet hands and all. "Is there something you need mended?"

"I need information." I stepped further into the room, and I watched her whole body go rigid at the word. "About the last bride who lived in the chamber I've been given. Sabine mentioned her. She wouldn't say more."

"Princess Sabine talks too much for a girl her age." Mira's eyes flicked past me to the doorway, checking it was still empty. "It isn't my place to discuss the royal family's business, my lady."

"I'm not asking about the royal family. I'm asking about a girl. A bride, like I am. Someone who was probably as frightened as I am right now and had no one willing to tell her the truth either."

Something in Mira's face cracked, just slightly, the professional blankness slipping to show the woman underneath it. "Her name was Rosalind. From a coastal kingdom, I don't recall which. Sweet girl. Kind to the staff, which not all of them are." She glanced at the door again. "She married Prince Cassian on a bright spring morning, and three days later she went up the mountain for the blessing rite, same as every Draven bride does."

"And?"

"And she never came back down." Mira's hands had stopped moving entirely in the grey water. "The court was told she'd taken ill on the journey home to visit her family. Nobody who worked in this palace believed that story, my lady, but nobody who worked in this palace was fool enough to say so out loud either."

"Why not? If a girl vanished from a royal wedding, surely someone would have demanded answers."

"Some did, at first. A few of the older guards asked questions they shouldn't have." Mira's voice dropped lower still, until I had to lean in to catch it over the drip of water from her wrists. "Those guards don't work in this palace anymore, my lady. I couldn't tell you where they went. I never asked."

"How long ago?"

"Two years."

Two years. Not decades. Not a story faded soft with retelling. A girl who had stood exactly where I was standing, mended by this same woman's hands, married in the same chapel I would be married in within the week, gone into the mountain and never seen again.

"Mira, please. Anything else you remember. Anything at all."

Her mouth opened, and for one breathless moment I thought she might actually tell me, and then the door behind us creaked, and whatever courage she'd found dried up entirely.

"I've said too much already," she whispered. "Please, my lady. Don't come back here. For your sake and mine."

I did not push her further. Bastian and I left the laundry house in silence, and neither of us spoke again until we'd put half the palace between ourselves and Mira's frightened eyes.

"Two years," Bastian said finally. "Liora, that's not tradition. That's a pattern."

"I know."

"So what do we do with it?"

I did not have an answer, not one I trusted enough to say aloud, and we parted at the corridor that split toward my chamber and his quarters with nothing settled between us except a shared, wordless dread.

My room was dark when I reached it, the fire burned down to embers, and I lit a single candle rather than call for a servant, too unsettled to want company even for a moment. It was the candlelight that caught the wardrobe door left slightly open, a sliver of pale fabric visible inside that I did not remember hanging there that morning.

A wedding gown. Not the plain traveling dress I had arrived in, but something new, cream silk and delicate lace, clearly tailored, clearly meant for me, clearly already finished though no one had taken my measurements since I arrived.

I lifted it from the wardrobe with hands that had gone unsteady, and it was only when I turned it toward the light to admire the stitching at the hem that I saw it wasn't lace at all threaded through the fabric there. It was a name, embroidered in careful, looping script along the inside seam, the kind of detail no one was ever meant to notice unless they were searching for it the way I now was.

Rosalind.

Crossed through with a single line of black thread, and beneath it, freshly stitched in the exact same careful hand, not yet crossed out at all.

Liora.