A QUEEN RAISED BY DRAGONS

THE KING'S BLADE ARRIVES

I saw him again before supper, standing at the edge of the village square like a man taking inventory of a place he already suspected was lying to him.

I hadn't planned to speak to him. After the shelf, after Maeve's quiet closed-door voice, after a day that had already handed me more secrets than I knew what to do with, the last thing I wanted was another conversation with the one person in Caldenmere who seemed to be collecting the same secrets from a different direction. But he turned before I could decide whether to walk past him, and there was no pretending I hadn't already seen him seeing me.

"Record keeper." He said it like a title, not a name, though he knew my name by now — he'd used it that morning, deliberately, the way he seemed to do everything.

"Blade." I matched his tone, mostly to see what it would do to his face. It did nothing. His face gave away exactly as much as he wanted it to, which today was nothing at all.

"You found something in the archive," he said. Not a question. He had a habit, I was noticing, of turning statements into accusations simply by the flatness with which he delivered them.

"I found several things in the archive. It's an archive. That's rather the point of it."

"You found something you weren't looking for, and it frightened you, and then Maeve came in and you put it back before she saw it."

I went very still.

"How would you know that."

"Because I was standing outside the door," he said, without a flicker of shame, "and because your face does a very particular thing when you're hiding something, record keeper. You go still, the way you're doing right now, and you look at whoever you're speaking to about one degree too directly, as if looking away would confirm whatever it is you're trying not to confirm."

"That's an incredibly invasive thing to have noticed about a stranger."

"I notice everything about everyone. It's the entire function of my appointment." He said it without arrogance, which was somehow worse than if he'd said it with plenty — a simple statement of fact, the way I might say I catalogue documents. "What was in the ledger?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Ember."

It was the first time he'd used my actual name, and something about the way he said it — not gently, not the way Ronan says it, not the way Maeve says it like a hand on a swinging door, but carefully, like a man setting down something he wasn't sure wouldn't shatter — made me answer before I'd decided to.

"Names," I said. "A list of names. A heading I didn't recognize."

"What heading."

I hesitated. Something in me — the same instinct that had made me shove the ledger back onto the shelf the moment I heard the door, the same instinct that had kept me quiet through Maeve's careful evasions all day — told me not to say it out loud. Not to him. Not yet.

"I don't remember," I lied.

He looked at me for a long moment, and I understood, watching his face, that he knew exactly what I'd just done, and that he was choosing — deliberately, for reasons of his own — not to push.

"All right," he said.

"That's it? All right?"

"For now." He turned to go, and then stopped, half-turned back toward me, something crossing his face that looked almost like the beginning of honesty before he visibly decided against it. "You should know that I am not here to hurt anyone in this village."

"You haven't told me why you're here at all."

"No," he agreed. "I haven't."

"Are you going to?"

"When I'm certain," he said again — the same answer he'd given me in the archive, the same careful non-answer, and I was beginning to understand that this was simply how he moved through the world, giving away exactly as much truth as necessary and not one word more, the way a man handles something he knows could burn if it's mishandled.

He left me standing in the square as the light went gold and then grey, and I stood there long after he'd gone, turning over the one thing he'd said that hadn't been careful at all — I am not here to hurt anyone in this village — and the fact that a man who chose his words as precisely as Caspian did had chosen, out of everything he could have said, to say that one thing plainly.

Which meant, I realized with a slow cold understanding, that somebody in this village had reason to think he was.

And for the first time since he'd ridden through the gate, I found myself wondering whether that somebody might be me.