The Dragon king's captive bride

Chapter 7: The Knock

The day passed slowly.

I spent most of it in the library, not reading this time, just thinking. I'd pulled a chair close to the window and sat with my feet tucked under me, watching the sky do nothing in particular while my mind worked through everything Petra had said and hadn't said.

Someone has to be here who remembers.

I'd turned that sentence over so many times it had started to lose its shape, the way a word does when you repeat it too often until it stops sounding like a word at all. What was she remembering? For whom? And what exactly had it cost the people who'd gotten close to this before me?

That last question was the one I kept coming back to.

Not because it frightened me, though it probably should have. But because it told me something important. It told me this wasn't just old history, wasn't just a dusty argument about something that had happened before I was born and didn't matter anymore. Whatever was buried here was still dangerous. Still worth protecting. Which meant someone was still protecting it.

I wanted to know who.

By late afternoon my thoughts had started going in circles and I gave up on the library and walked the east wing instead, slowly, the way I used to walk the corridors back home when I needed to think without sitting still. The castle was quieter in the afternoon than in the mornings, the servants moving less, the sounds more distant, and I walked without a destination and tried to pay attention to things I hadn't noticed yet.

The east wing had seven doors that I could see. Three of them opened onto rooms like mine, guest quarters with the same dark wood and cold hearths. Two opened onto linen closets and a storage room that smelled of dried herbs. One was a bathroom, large and unnecessarily grand with a copper tub that could have fit four people.

The seventh door was locked.

I tried the handle twice to make sure, then stood in front of it for a moment, looking at it. It was different from the other doors in the wing. Heavier, darker wood, no keyhole on the outside that I could find. The kind of door that wasn't just closed but sealed, like whatever was behind it wasn't meant to be accessed from this side at all.

I pressed my palm flat against the wood the way you press your hand to someone's chest to feel if their heart is still beating.

The wood was warm.

Not the ambient warmth of a heated room on the other side. Something more than that, a warmth that seemed to come from the door itself, or from whatever was behind it, deep and steady and alive in a way that made the fine hairs on my arm stand up inside my sleeve.

I stood there for a long moment with my hand on the warm wood and the quiet of the corridor around me.

Then I heard footsteps and stepped back from the door quickly, feeling inexplicably like I'd been caught doing something wrong.

It was just a servant, carrying a bundle of folded cloth, who glanced at me and glanced away again in that particular way all the servants here seemed to have perfected, the one that said I see you and I'm not going to comment on it. I watched her until she disappeared around the corner and then looked back at the locked door.

It would have to wait.

I went back to my room and sat with the book again and read the same pages I'd already read, looking for anything I might have missed, until the light from the window faded to the deep grey of early evening and someone left a tray outside my door that I brought in and ate without paying much attention to.

Wren visited after dinner, sitting on the edge of my bed and telling me small things about the castle, the names of servants she'd met, the layout of the kitchens, the fact that the cook apparently made a bread so good that two of the guards had once argued over the last loaf. She had a gift for finding the human texture of a place, the small warm details that made it feel less like enemy territory and more like somewhere people actually lived.

I listened and was grateful for it.

After she left I sat by the window for a while watching the dark garden, half expecting to see Ronan there again, but the garden stayed empty. The silver flowers stayed closed. The mountain was very quiet.

I was just considering giving up on the day entirely and going to bed when the knock came.

Two of them. Deliberate and unhurried, the knock of someone who wasn't worried about whether you'd answer.

I knew before I opened the door.

Ronan stood in the corridor with no coat, sleeves pushed up, looking the way he always seemed to look in the evenings like the daytime version of him that wore the full armor of his own composure had quietly stepped aside for something slightly less defended. He was holding a small glass lamp that threw warm gold light up across the angles of his face and made him look, for just a moment, like something from a painting rather than a person.

He looked at me. I looked at him.

"You went to the locked door," he said.

I blinked. "How did you know that?"

"Because everyone does eventually." Something moved in his expression, not quite amusement but adjacent to it. "And because Mira saw you standing in front of it and mentioned it."

"Mira with the folded cloth."

"Mira with the folded cloth."

I leaned against the door frame and crossed my arms. "Is that how it works here? The servants report back to you?"

"Not report," he said. "They're careful people. They notice things. Sometimes they mention them." He paused. "They mentioned you talked to Petra this morning as well."

"Am I not allowed to talk to people?"

"You're allowed to do whatever you want." He said it simply, without edge. "I'm not your keeper, Seraphina. I told you that on the first night."

"You told me not to leave my room."

"And you left it immediately."

"And you gave me a book full of missing pages."

He almost smiled at that. That same almost, the one that arrived and then thought better of itself. He looked at me for a moment in that particular way of his, the one that felt less like being looked at and more like being read.

"What did Petra say to you?" he asked.

"Not much. Enough." I watched his face. "She said people who've gotten close to the truth of this war have paid for it. She said she stays because someone has to remember." I paused. "She was frightened. She hid it well but it was there."

Something shifted in his expression at that. Something that looked, briefly, like guilt.

"Petra has been in this castle longer than most," he said quietly. "She's seen things that were not easy to see."

"What things?"

He was quiet for a moment, his eyes dropping briefly to the book I was still holding, the one he'd given me, which I'd brought to the door without realising.

"Walk with me," he said.

"You said that last time and then disappeared for three days."

"I know." He held my gaze. "I'm not disappearing tonight."

I looked at him standing in the corridor with his lamp and his pushed up sleeves and his expression that was always doing two things at once, always saying something and holding something back at the same time, and I thought about Petra's face that morning and the warm locked door and the missing pages and all the questions I'd been turning over all day without anywhere to put them.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

He considered for a moment, like he was deciding how much to say before we got there.

"Somewhere that will answer one of your questions," he said. "Not all of them. Just one."

"Which one?"

"The locked door."

I looked at him for a long moment. Then I set the book on the table by the door, pulled my shawl from the hook on the wall, and stepped out into the corridor.

"Alright," I said. "Show me."

He turned and walked and I fell into step beside him, the lamp between us throwing our shadows long and uneven against the stone walls, and the castle settled into quiet around us as we went deeper into the part of it I hadn't seen yet.