Once upon a Lover

Chapter 7: The Only Stranger

They brought him down between four soldiers, which was three more than he needed and exactly the number a frightened court required.

Orin had not been bound. Isaveth saw that first and was absurdly grateful to whoever had thought of it. He walked into the Court of Lanterns in a clean shirt and a coat he had clearly dressed in on the stairs, with ink on his fingers and mud to the knee. His boots left gritty prints on the flagstones. His eyes went to the body at once. Something in his face closed up very carefully, the way a hand closes around a coin.

“Mr. Halcyre,” said Oake. “You are the Princess's surveyor.”

“Since yesterday, my lord. It's been the most eventful promotion of my life.”

“Where were you between midnight and the hour the bells rang?”

“Below.”

“Below what?”

“Everything.” He said it without a flicker. “I was told to begin with the foundations. I took the instruction seriously.”

A murmur went through the colonnade. Oake did not so much as turn his head. “Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“A rat or two. One of them looked at me with real disapproval.”

“Do you find this amusing?”

“I find it fatal, my lord.” His voice was quiet and entirely steady. “The amusement is a courtesy I extend to myself.”

Isaveth watched him and understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water on the back of the neck, exactly how it would go. The Marshal would not need to prove anything. He would simply ask the questions in the right order, and the answers would arrange themselves. A stranger. No alibi. A bell struck wrong. Mud on his boots from the lower floors where, as everyone knew, the old drains ran beneath the fountain. By noon it would be an accusation. By dusk, a rumor that had already been tried. And she had signed the writ herself, with her own seal, putting him in a position to be hanged.

The Chancellor stood at the colonnade's edge, silent, hands folded. He did not intervene. He had a way of not intervening that was itself a kind of intervention, and she had never before noticed that he used it.

“Marshal,” she said.

She was already stepping forward. She had not decided to. It was the same sensation she had in the Gallery when she had taken three paces toward a stranger she should have been afraid of: her body moving a half second ahead of her good sense.

“Highness.”

“He has an alibi.”

The court stopped breathing. She could hear the masons' scaffold creaking in the wind.

“He was with me.”

Oake's gray brows rose a quarter inch. It was the most expressive thing she had ever seen his face do. “Highness?”

“From the hour he was released from the Blue Room until the bells rang this morning. He was in my study.” She heard her own voice, clear and cool and utterly composed, as though it belonged to someone else, someone far more competent than she was. “All night.”

The sound that went through the colonnade was not a gasp. A gasp would have been manageable. It was a low, swelling ripple, the sound of two hundred people reordering their opinion of the Crown Princess of Ilvareth simultaneously.

Somewhere behind her Caspian made a strangled noise that might have been a laugh or might have been a cough. She did not turn around.

She made the mistake of looking at Orin.

He was staring at her. For perhaps a second and a half the mask had slipped, and what showed beneath it was pure, undiluted astonishment. His lips parted. His eyes went very wide. He looked at her the way a man looks at someone who has just stepped off a roof, and landed on her feet, and begun to walk away.

Then the mask came back down, and she watched him decide.

“The Princess,” said Orin gravely, “is exacting company.”

She wanted to kill him.

“We were drawing the east wing, my lord,” he went on, in the tone of a man being scrupulously honest about something mildly tedious. “She insisted on the corner towers. I'd never been so thoroughly corrected on the placement of a stair.”

The ripple broke. There was a thin, relieved sound that was not quite laughter. The east wing, a stair, a drawing; it was an explanation the court could swallow without choking, and it was a good deal less interesting than what they had been imagining, and they took it gratefully. She would pay for it all the same. Not today. But in a week, in a month, some lady in the Hall of Tides would remember the way the Princess had looked at the mapmaker, and the explanation would unravel at exactly the pace the rumor needed.

“Drawing,” said Oake. “At night.”

“The light is better when it's quiet,” said Orin.

“Her Highness's word,” said Dask, from the colonnade, smoothly, “is surely sufficient.” He had not moved. His voice was warm, grave, perfectly pitched. “I think we can spare Mr. Halcyre the indignity of further questions, Marshal. There will be a proper inquiry. Lord Hesk deserves one.”

Oake looked from the surveyor to the Princess and back again. Nothing moved in his gray face. Then he inclined his head, a shade too precise.

“Of course. I would never doubt Her Highness's word.”

It was the kindest, most civil thing a man had ever said to her, and it felt like a hand closing round the back of her neck.

The soldiers stepped away. The court began, slowly, to remember it had other things to do. Physicians came forward with a litter. Isaveth stood at the dry rim of the fountain and watched them lift Lord Hesk, and water ran off him in silvery threads and sank into the stones as though the ground had been waiting for it.

A shadow fell beside her. Orin had come up, very close, with his eyes front and his voice pitched to a thread that wouldn't carry past her shoulder.

“I wasn't with you last night.”

“I know.”

“Then you know I have nothing to prove I wasn't elsewhere. Which means you've just handed the whole court a reason to look at us both very closely.” A breath. “I'm obliged. I'd just like to be told in advance, next time you do something insane on my behalf.”

“There will not be a next time.”

“Good.” He turned his head, barely, and for the first time that morning he was not joking. His gray-green eyes, so like her own, so strange in a stranger, met hers and held. “Because I wasn't alone down there, Princess. And I think whoever else was walking in the dark last night is the person who killed that man.”