BLOOD,CURSE&CROWN

Before the Dawn

One year to find four wolves in the rogue territories and convince them that the ancient pact that bound them to her bloodline was real, that the Binding was what she thought it was, that the answer to the Ashen Mark was something that had been waiting, all along, in the direction the crown had been most reluctant to look. She would need to be clever. She would need to be patient, when patience was the right tool. She would need to be stubborn, which had never been her problem. And she would need to begin. Soon, she thought, looking out at the morning. Very soon. The day continued. The palace woke around her. And Princess Seraphine Valdris, who had nineteen years and one year left and the particular, uncompromising certainty of someone who had decided that dying quietly was not an option she was going to accept, moved through the morning with her plans already in motion and the Ashen Mark warm on her skin like the memory of a promise someone else had made and she intended to unmake. Soon. She would begin soon. The wolves were waiting, even if they didn't know it yet. --- The afternoon brought her back to the library, as it always did on days when the reception had drained her of the particular energy required for performing normalcy. She found Scholar Prentiss at his desk in the reading room, surrounded by the comfortable clutter of a man whose relationship with order was more personal than institutional — books he'd pulled for cross-referencing arranged in stacks she suspected made perfect sense to him and no one else, a cup of tea gone cold at his elbow, a pair of reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead in a position that suggested he'd forgotten they were there. He looked up when she entered, and his expression did the small, careful adjustment it always did — not surprise exactly, since she came often enough that surprise would be disproportionate, but the particular alert attention of a man who understood that her visits were not always as casual as they appeared. "Your Highness," he said. "I hope the reception went well." "Well enough," she said. "I've been reading in the pre-kingdom section again." "The western acquisitions or the eastern?" "Eastern," she said. "The Valdris provenance materials." Something moved in his expression, brief and quickly managed. "That section is quite fragmentary," he said. "The condition of the materials—" "I know," she said. "I've been working with the damaged sections. There's a document in the fourth sub-shelf, the one stored horizontally rather than upright — I think there may be more legible text in the interior pages than the exterior condition suggests. Would it be possible to have it examined by someone with the relevant conservation skills? Without making a formal record of the examination?" He looked at her for a long moment, the particular look of a man deciding something. "Conservation work is routinely conducted on materials of that age," he said, finally. "Without specific documentation of the content examined, as a general matter of institutional practice." "That's what I thought," she said. "Thank you, Scholar Prentiss." She left him to it and crossed to the eastern wing, to the shelf she'd been working through, and pulled the next document in the sequence. Outside the library's high windows, the afternoon light moved slowly across the stone of the courtyard below, the day continuing its ordinary business while she sat in the oldest room in the palace and worked her way, page by careful page, toward the answer she needed. Somewhere in these records was the complete text of the Binding. She intended to find it before her year ran out. She opened the document and began to read, and the Ashen Mark glowed faintly warm at her shoulder, and the countdown continued, and she was not afraid. She was ready. And she was just getting started. She worked through the afternoon and into the early evening, pausing only when the light through the windows grew too dim for reliable reading and Scholar Prentiss quietly provided a lamp without being asked, setting it beside her with the wordless efficiency of a man who understood that the work she was doing was more important than the question of whether it was technically within the scope of what she was supposed to be doing in the library. The document she'd pulled contained nothing directly about the Binding — but it contained, in its marginal notes, three references to a ceremony conducted in the early years of the kingdom that the main text had been designed to document and had, apparently, been deliberately vague about. The ceremony was described as a sealing — a word she'd seen before in the fragments, always in the context of the relationship between the Valdris bloodline and something older. The marginal note, in a different hand from the main text, read simply: the sealing is not complete. The terms require the Mark's bearer and the Four, and both must come willingly. It cannot be forced and cannot be inherited. It must be chosen. She read the marginal note four times, sitting very still while the lamp threw its small circle of warmth across the page and the library settled into its evening quiet around her. It must be chosen. The Mark was on her whether she chose it or not. But whatever came next — whatever the Binding required, whatever the four wolves had to offer, whatever the sealing meant in its full form — required consent. Required the bearer to choose it, and the Four to choose it, and neither could be compelled. That was why the crown's approach had failed, she realized, with the particular electric clarity of a theory suddenly confirmed. The crown had never tried to find the Four. The crown had expelled the Four, one by one, over the course of a decade, and called it policy, and sent physicians instead. And the physicians had been looking for a disease where what they actually had was a contract with unfulfilled terms, and the contract had run to its natural conclusion, generation after generation, because the terms required the Four and the Four had been banished and so the terms could never be met. It wasn't inevitable. It had never been inevitable. It had simply been a problem no one in the kingdom had been willing to understand correctly. She set the document down and sat in the lamplight for a long moment, feeling the specific, quiet vertigo of someone who has just confirmed something they'd hoped was true and now has to figure out what to do about it. Then she opened her journal to the day's entry and added three words beneath what she'd already written. The terms require choice. She closed the journal, returned the document carefully to its place, thanked Scholar Prentiss, and walked back through the corridors of the palace to her chambers with the Ashen Mark warm on her skin and her mind working through the shape of what came next. She needed the Four. She needed to find them and speak to them and give them the information they presumably didn't have — that they were bound to her bloodline by a pact older than the kingdom, that the Mark's completion was not inevitable, that there was a way forward that required all of them and none of them could get there alone. And she needed to do all of that within the constraints of a palace that watched her movements, a father who was almost ready to give her permission but hadn't quite gotten there yet, and a countdown that was indifferent to the difficulty of the logistics. She was not afraid. She was, if she was honest, slightly overwhelmed. She permitted herself approximately ten minutes of feeling that, sitting at the window of her chambers watching the evening settle over the palace and the city beyond it, the lights coming on in the distant streets like small assertions of ordinary life continuing regardless. Then she set the overwhelm aside, the way she set most things aside when they weren't immediately useful, and picked up the journal again. Plan, she wrote, at the top of a new page. And then, below it, she began to write what she knew, what she needed, and what she intended to do about it. The year had started this morning. It was time to begin. She wrote for an hour. When she was done, the page held the most complete version of her plan that she'd yet committed to paper — the route to the rogue territories, the sequence she intended to approach the Four, the arguments she planned to make to each of them based on what she understood of who they were. She'd written it in her compressed script, the private one that would take anyone unfamiliar with it significant time and effort to decode, and she'd be taking it with her rather than leaving it in the palace when she finally left. Because she was leaving. She'd understood that fully, sitting in the library with the lamp and the marginal note and the particular quiet revelation of it must be chosen. She'd been planning a departure for eight months and had been waiting for permission or circumstance to make it possible, and she'd just received something better than either: confirmation that the plan was right. That the direction was correct. That the only way forward was through the rogue territories and the Four and whatever the Binding's terms actually required when met by willing parties rather than reluctant kingdoms. Her father had said I'll consider it. She would give him a week. Possibly less. And then she would begin. She set the journal down, crossed to the window one final time, and looked out at the city that was hers, in the abstract sense that any princess's kingdom was hers — present in her bloodline, written in her skin in the dark script of the Ashen Mark, inherited alongside everything else that came with being born Valdris. The city didn't know her. The city had its own concerns, its own ordinary life, its markets and its families and its debates about the price of grain and the quality of the roads. The city existed whether she survived or didn't, whether the Mark ran its course or was broken, whether this particular princess managed the impossible thing she'd decided to attempt. She was going to attempt it anyway. Not for the city. Not entirely for the kingdom. Partly for her father, who loved her in the shape of fear and deserved to love her in the shape of something else. Partly for her mother, who'd died before Sera was old enough to remember her as a person rather than a portrait and a silence and a grief that lived in her father's eyes. Mostly for herself. Because she was nineteen years old and she intended to be twenty, and thirty, and older than that, and the Ashen Mark was not going to have the last word on the subject if she had anything to say about it.