A QUEEN RAISED BY DRAGONS

BE CAREFUL

Maeve found him before he found what he was looking for.

I wasn't in the room when it happened — I'd stepped out to bring back the midday post, which meant I only had Caspian's version of it afterward, delivered flat and without embellishment, the way he seemed to deliver everything that actually mattered to him. But I could picture it well enough. Maeve, appearing in the archive doorway the way she always did, as if she'd simply willed herself into existence exactly where she was needed. Caspian, three ledgers deep into the section she'd steered me away from twice now, close enough to the truth that she couldn't afford to be gentle about stopping him.

"She asked me what I thought I'd find," he told me later, "and then she told me, before I could answer, that whatever it was, I wouldn't find it in a dead woman's filing system. She said it the way you'd tell someone the well's run dry. Final. No room to argue with it."

"What did you say?"

"I said I'd keep looking anyway." A pause. "She didn't seem surprised."

I didn't ask him what he'd found before Maeve stopped him, because I already suspected the answer, and some part of me — the part that had spent two days filing away every strange silence in this village without examining a single one of them too closely — wasn't ready to hear it confirmed out loud.

Maeve came to me that night instead, which was its own kind of unusual. She rarely came to my house after dark; our conversations happened in the elder hall, across a desk, with the particular formality of two people who loved each other but had never quite learned to do it without a surface between them. Tonight she sat across from me at my own small table, in the chair that had been my mother's once, though I only knew that because she'd told me so years ago in an unguarded moment she'd never repeated since.

"I want you to be careful around him," she said, without preamble.

"You've said that already."

"I'm saying it again because you didn't listen the first time." Her hands were folded on the table, the same too-tight fold I'd noticed in the elder hall, knuckles pale. "Ember. Whatever he tells you about why he's here — whatever reasonable, official, crown-shaped explanation he offers you — I need you to remember that it will not be the whole truth. Men like him are not sent to quiet villages to check grain ledgers."

"Then what are they sent for?"

She was quiet for long enough that I thought, again, that she wasn't going to answer — the same silence I'd been living inside for two days now, from her, from Ronan, from Caspian himself, everyone in my life suddenly fluent in the art of almost-saying-something.

"To find things," she said finally. "Things the crown would rather stayed buried. And when they find them, they are not always kind about what happens next."

"Am I one of the things he's looking for?"

The question came out of me before I'd fully decided to ask it, and the moment it did, I watched something move behind Maeve's eyes — not surprise, which was its own kind of answer, a confirmation dressed up as the absence of one.

"Why would you ask that," she said, too carefully.

"Because you've been looking at me strangely for two days. Because you keep steering me away from a shelf full of names with no filing codes. Because a crown official rode into this village and started reading genealogy records instead of grain reports, and everyone who claims to love me has spent the last two days telling me to be careful without once telling me what I'm supposed to be careful of."

Maeve reached across the table and took my hand, and her fingers were cold, and for one long moment she looked at me the way you look at someone you are about to lose, or have already lost, or have spent twenty-two years bracing yourself to lose eventually.

"He is not here for the reasons he's told you," she said quietly. "That's all I can say tonight. Please, Ember — be careful. Not of him, necessarily. Of everything. Of what's coming. I don't yet know how much time we have before it arrives, and I would very much like it to be more than none."

She left before I could ask her anything else, the way she always did, closing doors behind her with a gentleness that somehow made them feel more shut than if she'd slammed them.

I sat alone at my table for a long time afterward, my mother's chair across from me empty again, and thought about the word she'd chosen — arrives — as if whatever was coming wasn't a decision or a danger or a person at all, but a weather system. Something with its own momentum. Something that didn't ask permission before it came.

I didn't sleep well that night either. I was starting to understand that I might not sleep well again for a long time.