BLOOD,CURSE&CROWN

What the Crown Forgot

The birthday had been, by her own accounting, a reasonable day. Not the day she'd wanted, which would have included the freedom to leave the palace walls and the beginning of something that actually moved toward a solution, but better than she'd feared, which had involved the kind of suffocating management of her circumstances that her father sometimes defaulted to when the fear got loud enough to override his better instincts. He'd given her I'll consider it, which was not nothing. He'd heard the rogue territories named directly and had not immediately shut the conversation down, which was also not nothing. It was a place to continue from. She thought about the four names in her journal. Caelan. Riven. Soren. Zephyr. Four men the kingdom had decided it didn't want. Four men whose specific abilities had made them useful until those abilities had made them frightening, and frightened kingdoms did what frightened kingdoms did — expelled the thing they didn't understand how to manage and called it justice. She'd spent two years building a picture of each of them from the fragments available in the records, and the picture was incomplete in every case, full of gaps where the official story had been deliberately made opaque, but what she had was enough to suspect that whatever the crown had charged them with, the real reason for each expulsion was something else: the specific discomfort of an institution confronted with people who didn't fit its established categories. She'd been confronted with her own version of that discomfort her entire life. She understood it, in a specific and personal way, that she suspected would be legible to the four of them if she ever got the chance to say it. That was the plan. That had always been the plan, in the two years since she'd first started assembling the pieces. Find them. Speak to them. Determine whether the theory she'd built from the fragments was accurate, and if it was, find out what the Binding's terms actually required and whether those terms could be met. Simple enough, stated plainly. The only obstacles were her father's reluctance, the court's surveillance, the fact that she was a princess who had never once in her nineteen years been permitted to leave the palace grounds without a formal escort, and the approaching deadline of the Mark spreading toward her heart. She'd faced worse problems. She'd faced this one, in various forms, since she was twelve years old and had first understood clearly what the Ashen Mark was going to do to her. She was not afraid. She was something better than afraid. She reached for the journal, wrote the same thing she wrote at the end of every day that had moved her closer to the thing she was actually trying to do: a single line, a record, a refusal to let the days blur into each other without being marked. Day one of year nineteen. The Mark moved. Father said I'll consider it. Morrow surprised me. The library gave nothing new but I read closer to the edge of what's damaged and I think there's more there than I've gotten to yet. Tomorrow: the eastern wing archives, the pre-kingdom section Prentiss won't ask about. She closed the journal and lay back in the dark and let the Ashen Mark do its patient, ancient work while she planned everything she intended to do in spite of it. One year. She intended to use every single day of it. The window of her chambers faced east, which meant she would see the dawn before most of the palace did. She'd always considered this a small, private advantage — the first light belonging to her before it belonged to anyone else, the day beginning in her room before it began in the great hall, before it began for her father or Lord Vane or any of the court machinery that would wake with its own agenda and proceed to deploy that agenda in her direction. She watched the dark outside the window for a long time, thinking. The rogue territories were three days' ride from the palace, if you rode without ceremony and used the eastern trade roads rather than the royal roads, which were slower and more visible. She'd mapped the route twice, once from the palace records and once from a merchant's travel account she'd found in the library's commercial section, cross-referenced until she was fairly certain the two versions were describing the same geography. She knew where she was going. She'd known for eight months. What she'd been waiting for was the right combination of circumstances — her father's concession, or the absence of it, and her own patience running out. Her patience, she acknowledged, pressing her fingertips lightly to the Ashen Mark's warmth at her shoulder, was running out. I'll consider it was not permission. She hadn't expected permission. She'd expected exactly what she'd received: a door left slightly more open than it had been before, movement in the direction of possibility, a man who loved her trying to find the shape of a yes he could live with. She would give him the time it took to find it. She was not unreasonable. She understood that asking her father to admit that the crown's four-generation approach to the Mark had been comprehensively wrong was asking him to hold a very heavy thing, and heavy things took time to put down properly. She would give him a week. Perhaps two. And if he hadn't found his yes by then, she would find her own way forward, as she'd always found her own way forward — not through defiance for its own sake, but through the specific, patient, inevitable momentum of a woman who had a deadline and a theory and the particular stubbornness of someone who'd decided, somewhere around her twelfth year, that dying quietly was simply not a category she was willing to occupy. The first light appeared at the edge of the sky, a thin grey line that would take an hour to become gold. Princess Seraphine Valdris watched it arrive and thought about wolves. She thought about what the fragments said — the Mark cannot be turned without the Four — and what it meant that four men existed in the world who were somehow, by the logic of an ancient pact she was still piecing together, tied to her survival. She thought about what it meant that the crown had expelled all four of them, one by one, across the span of a decade, and whether that was coincidence or whether someone in the court had understood something about the Binding that they'd decided to suppress rather than pursue. She thought about Lord Hadden Crest and his interest in the eastern borderlands, which bordered the rogue territories, and whether that interest was as uncomplicated as it presented itself. She thought about Caelan and the strategy instinct the records described — perceiving patterns in conflict before they fully materialized — and wondered what pattern he'd perceived that had cost him his position in the king's army. She thought about Riven and the borderlands he'd come from, the edge of the kingdom that had always existed at the margins of the court's attention, and what it meant to be powerful in a way that made the people meant to command you afraid. She thought about Soren and the healing that had been declared impossible, and the specific courage it must have taken to do it anyway, knowing what the court would decide it meant. She thought about Zephyr, whose record barely existed, who had been so thoroughly excised from the official documentation that his absence was its own kind of presence, the shape of something the court had decided it was safer not to name. Four men. One woman. A curse as old as the kingdom. She was going to find them. She was going to find out if the theory held, if the ancient pact was real, if the four wolves the fragments described were the four men the kingdom had expelled. And if they were, she was going to convince them — somehow, through whatever combination of honesty and stubbornness and the particular argument of a woman who had one year left and intended to spend it solving the problem she'd been given — to help her do what four generations of Valdris queens had failed to do. She was going to break the Ashen Mark. Or she was going to die trying, which was, she supposed, also a way of not dying quietly. The sky lightened further, grey becoming the first suggestion of gold. Seraphine Valdris watched the dawn come in and felt, alongside the fear she wouldn't pretend wasn't present, the particular fierce readiness of someone who has been waiting for a long time to finally begin. The year started today. She intended to make every day of it count. She dressed before the palace stirred, pulling on riding clothes rather than court dress, not because she was leaving today — she wasn't, not yet — but because she'd found, over the years, that the clothing you wore shaped the quality of your thinking, and she needed to think like someone in motion rather than someone on display. She braided her hair herself, the way she'd learned to do it when she was fourteen and had decided that depending on the ladies of the chamber for something as fundamental as her own hair was a form of helplessness she didn't need. The journal went into the small leather satchel she kept for the purpose — the one that held the translation grammar, the fragments she'd copied in her own hand so they'd be with her rather than dependent on her access to the library's specific shelf, the notes she'd been accumulating for two years. She added the route map she'd drawn from memory, the merchant's travel account she'd copied three months ago, the list of names she'd been building of people in the eastern territories who might serve as contacts — people who existed at the edge of the kingdom's official reach and might therefore know things the official reach had decided not to record. She was a woman who planned. She was a woman who had been planning this particular move for eight months and had simply been waiting for the moment to become inevitable. She thought it was getting close. She put the satchel back in the chest she kept locked — not because the lock would stop anyone truly determined, but because it filtered out the casually curious, which was most of the palace most of the time — and straightened up and looked out at the growing morning light. One year. Possibly less.