The Last Flame of Veyra

Chapter 9: The Forbidden Wing

She lasted four more days.

Afterward she would tell herself it was the fire that did it, that if he had not laid it every night without fail, warm and waiting when she came up from the library, she might have kept her promise to wait. But that was a lie, and she had made a private rule against lying to herself, so she set it down. It was not the fire. It was her. It had always been going to be her. She had told him so herself, in the square of her own heart, the first night he named the east wing forbidden. She had never once left a closed door closed.

But four days she gave him. That was new. Four days she carried the locked corridor in her inventory and did not go, because a man had told her he might hurt her and had lit her fire anyway, and she found she wanted, absurdly, to be the kind of person who could give him four days.

On the fifth night she could not sleep.

The fire had burned low and good in the grate, his fire, and she lay in its light with her eyes open and the whole cold map of Veyra turning behind them, and every corridor on it led back to the one she had not walked. She thought of the second bride’s words scratched low in the stone. I am still here. She thought of Kaelen’s voice cracking at the edge, it’s the best hour of my day. She thought, most of all, that he had asked her to remember, on the nights he was gentle, that he was the danger. And she understood, lying there, that she was beginning to forget. That the forgetting was the trap she could not see the shape of. That the only way to keep her feet under her was to know the thing he was hiding, so she could weigh it herself, in her own hand, on her own scale.

She rose in the dark and did not light a candle.

The corridors of Veyra at night were a different country. By day they were merely empty; by night they were vast, the dark pooling in the high lost ceilings, the red glow seeping up through the floor grates the only light, staining the black stone the color of a banked coal. She went barefoot, her shoes in her hand, the stone cold enough to ache. She counted turnings out of habit and did not need to. She had known the way to the east wing since her third day. Knowing where a door was and walking to it were only ever separated, for Sera, by time.

The doors of the east wing were tall and old and banded with iron, and they were locked.

She had expected that. She had the hairpin. But when she knelt to the lock she found it was not the kind a hairpin answered, no simple wards to feel past, but a heavy old mechanism sunk deep in the wood, and she crouched over it a long while in the red dark, working and failing and working again, and getting nowhere, and beginning, for the first time, to be afraid of how badly she wanted it open.

It was the small door that saved her, or damned her. She never after decided which.

At the end of the corridor, where the great locked doors met the wall, there was a smaller one, a servant’s door, low and plain, the kind built into every grand house so the people who kept it could move unseen. In a wing no one had entered in years, no one had thought to lock the way the servants came. The latch gave under her hand with a small cold click that was the loudest sound she had ever heard.

She stood a moment on the threshold of the thing she had been forbidden.

Turn back, said the cold clear voice that had kept her alive. You still can. He’ll never know. Give him the year. But the voice that had said no in the square, the one that came from below deciding, was already carrying her forward, over the threshold, into the dark he had built a wall of kindness around.

The east wing was not what she had braced for.

She had braced for horror. For the gouged doors of the western rooms made worse, for chains, for the marks of the thing the stories promised. She had braced, some cold part of her, for bodies. What she found instead, as her eyes learned the red dark, was worse than any of it, because it was gentle.

It was a nursery.

Not a nursery in use. A nursery kept. The way the three rooms were kept, the way the gates were kept quiet, the way the tapestries were mended with thread that didn’t match, someone had held this place against the dust with the same stubborn tenderness that ran under everything in Veyra like a buried warmth. A cradle stood against the wall, small and dark and finely made. There were shelves with a child’s things on them, worn soft with handling. A rocking chair by a cold hearth. And on the walls, where a nursery should have had bright painted animals, there was something else, and Sera crossed to it in the red dark and stood before it and felt the floor of everything tilt the way it had tilted at the breakfast table when he told her the brides were not dead.

The walls were covered in names.

Carved into the black stone, hundreds of them, small and close and careful, row on row, climbing from the floor to higher than she could reach. Women’s names, all of them. Some she did not know. Three of them she did. The first bride. The second. The third, the one who smiled, the one who read to Maerion. And more, so many more, stretching back and back along the wall into the dark, more names than twelve years could hold, more names than a hundred years could hold.

She was still standing there, her fingers on the carved letters of the third bride’s name, her heart going hard and slow, when she heard the step behind her in the doorway.

She turned.

The King stood on the threshold of the room he had forbidden her, and there was no anger in his face at all. That was the thing that stopped her breath. She had braced for fury, and could have met fury. What she saw instead, in the red light, on the face of the man who never lied, was fear. Naked and terrible and old. He was looking at her fingers on the wall of names the way a man looks at someone standing at the edge of a very high place, too far away to reach in time.

“Seraphine,” he said. Very quietly. Very carefully, the way you speak to keep someone from falling. “Come away from the wall.”