Chapter 6: Petra
1295 Words
The next morning arrived grey and quiet, the way all mornings seemed to arrive on this mountain, like the sky hadn't fully committed to the day yet.
I'd slept badly and woken early, lying in the dark for a while listening to the castle settle around me before giving up entirely and sitting at the window with the book in my lap. I didn't open it. I just held it, thinking about missing pages and portraits in great halls and a father who'd put me in a carriage without quite meeting my eyes at the end.
When the knock came at my door I was already dressed.
Petra entered the way she always did, efficiently and without fuss, the morning tray balanced in both hands, eyes already moving to the fireplace to check if it needed building up. She was the kind of woman who noticed everything and commented on nothing, who moved through a room like she'd memorized it and was simply confirming her memory was still correct.
She set the tray down, straightened, and turned to go.
"Petra."
She stopped. Not quickly, not like someone startled. More like someone who had been expecting to be called back and had simply been waiting for it to happen.
"My lady."
"Sit down."
A pause. Brief, but there. "I have other trays to—"
"They can wait." I kept my voice even, the same tone I used when I needed something from someone who didn't want to give it. "Please."
She turned around. Looked at me with those careful eyes that had spent a lifetime watching things and deciding what to do about them. Then, slowly, she pulled out the chair at the small table by the window and sat down, folding her hands in her lap with the particular stillness of someone who has decided to be patient.
I sat across from her and set the book on the table between us.
She looked at it. Something moved across her face, gone before I could fully read it, but there, unmistakably there. Recognition. And underneath it, something that might have been unease.
"Do you know what this is?" I asked.
"It's a book, my lady."
"Petra."
She looked up at me. I held her gaze and waited, the way my old tutor had taught me without meaning to, just by doing it to me often enough that I'd learned the value of silence in a conversation.
Petra was quiet for a long moment. Outside the window the silver garden sat still and colourless in the morning light, the flowers closed against the grey of the sky.
"Where did you get it?" she asked finally.
"Ronan gave it to me."
Something shifted in her expression, subtle, the way a current shifts underwater when something moves below the surface. She looked back down at the book.
"Then he must have had a reason," she said carefully.
"He did. He told me to start there if I wanted the truth." I paused. "There are pages missing. Someone removed them, a long time ago. I want to know what was on them."
Petra's hands tightened slightly in her lap. Just slightly. I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been looking for it.
"I wouldn't know anything about missing pages, my lady."
"You recognised this book the moment I put it on the table."
"I've worked in this castle for thirty years. I've seen a great many books."
"Not like this one." I leaned forward slightly. "Petra, I'm not trying to get anyone into trouble. I'm trying to understand what I've walked into. I've been sent here as a peace offering for a war that this book is telling me didn't start the way anyone told me it did. I think I have a right to know what's true."
Petra was quiet for a long time after that. Long enough that I thought she'd made her decision and it wasn't going to go my way. She looked out the window, at the closed silver flowers, at the grey sky pressing down over the mountain. Her face in profile was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the morning.
"There are things in this castle," she said finally, slowly, like she was choosing each word the way you choose your footing on uneven ground, "that have been buried for a very long time. By people with very strong reasons for keeping them buried." She paused. "Asking questions about those things has a cost. It has always had a cost."
"For who?"
She looked at me then, and for just a moment the careful professional distance dropped and I saw something underneath it. Not fear exactly. Something older than fear. The particular weariness of someone who had already paid a price once and was not eager to pay it again.
"For everyone who has ever gotten close to the truth of how this war began," she said quietly. "Including people in this castle. Including people I knew."
The room felt different after she said that. Smaller. The morning sounds of the castle outside my door, footsteps and distant voices and the clatter of something being carried down a corridor, seemed further away than they had a moment ago.
"What happened to them?" I asked.
Petra stood up. The professional distance came back like a curtain being drawn, smooth and practiced, and she moved to the door with the same efficient unhurried steps she'd arrived with.
"Eat your breakfast, my lady," she said. "The food here is better than the kitchens back in Valdris, from what I'm told. It would be a shame to let it go cold."
She had her hand on the door when I said, "You've been here thirty years. You've watched things happen. You've watched people get close to this and pay for it." I paused. "Why are you still here?"
She stopped. Didn't turn around.
"Because someone has to be," she said, very quietly. "Someone has to be here who remembers."
Then she was gone, the door closing softly behind her, and I was alone with the cold tray and the book and the particular silence she'd left behind, which felt heavier than any silence I'd sat in since arriving on this mountain.
I pulled the tray toward me slowly and looked at the food without seeing it.
Someone has to be here who remembers.
Remembers what, she hadn't said. But I had the distinct and unsettling feeling that she'd wanted to. That the only thing stopping her was something I didn't yet have enough pieces to understand.
I ate without tasting anything, the book sitting open beside my plate, the ragged edges of the missing pages catching the grey morning light every time I glanced at it.
Whatever those pages had contained, someone had wanted them gone badly enough to remove them carefully and hope nobody looked too closely.
Petra had looked. I was almost certain of it now. And whatever she'd found had kept her on this mountain for thirty years, watching and waiting and remembering for reasons she wasn't ready to give me yet.
I closed the book and pushed it to the edge of the table and looked out at the silver garden.
The flowers were still closed. They hadn't opened once since I'd arrived, not in the mornings, not in the afternoons, not even when the clouds thinned enough to let through something resembling light. I didn't know what kind of flowers only bloomed in the dark, but I was starting to think that this mountain had a way of keeping its most interesting things hidden until it decided you were ready to see them.
I was going to have to find a way to make it decide faster.
- Writer
