Chapter 2
THE TEA PRINCESS
I had the crown under the blanket before the second click of the lock.
It took less time than a lie. The cold hit my forearms at once, climbing toward the elbow, and I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands pressed flat to my knees like a girl waiting to be scolded.
Hold on, Seraphine said, very quietly, from somewhere beneath the wool. I am not going anywhere.
The door swung inward.
It was not Hask. It was not Rooke. It was Princess Elowen, alone, in a plain gray cloak with the hood pulled up, carrying a covered tray in both hands. Behind her the corridor guard stared straight ahead at nothing, his face arranged into the blankness of a man who has been told what he did not see.
“Healer Vale.” She stepped in and shut the door with her hip. The lock turned behind her. “I brought supper. You’ve eaten nothing since they took you out of that place. Rooke told me.”
“Rooke tells you things?”
“Rooke tells me whatever he’s ordered not to.” She set the tray on the table by the window. Bread. A wedge of hard yellow cheese. A small clay pot with a lid, steam curling from the spout. “He’s very bad at his job. It’s my favorite thing about him.”
I should have stood. There is a protocol for princesses, and I had known it once. But my legs had other ideas, and Elowen only waved a hand as if she had seen this before.
“Don’t. Please. I spent the whole afternoon being bowed at.” She pulled her hood back. Without it, she looked younger than nineteen, and worse. Shadows sat under her eyes like thumbprints. Her left thumbnail was a raw crescent of pink. “I wanted to say thank you. Properly. Without two hundred people watching me do it.”
“You don’t owe me thanks, Highness. I bought you three days. That’s all.”
“That’s three more than anyone else gave me.” She looked at the bed. At the lump under the blanket, barely there, barely glowing at the edges. Her gaze stayed a moment too long. “Is it quiet?”
Careful.
“It’s resting,” I said.
“Do you hear it?”
Something in the way she asked made the hair rise along my arms. Not do you feel it. Not what does it do. Do you hear it.
“Why would you ask that?”
Elowen pulled out the second chair and sat, neatly, with her ankles crossed, the way a girl sits when she has been taught how to take up less room. She poured the contents of the clay pot into a cup and pushed it across the table toward me.
“Because I do,” she said. “Some nights. When I’m falling asleep, just before I go under. Somebody humming. A woman. I thought it was a dream. Then I heard the same tune in the Hall of Bells today, right when you put your hands on it.”
Under the blanket, the warmth went still.
I did not know that one, Seraphine whispered. Wren. Careful. I did not know that she could.
I made my face stay where it was. It took everything. “Highness, I think you’ve had a long day.”
“I have had a long life.” The smile came and went. It was Hask’s smile, I realized, borrowed and worn thin, the only one she had been shown. “You don’t have to tell me. I only wanted you to know that I’m not stupid, and I’m not as frightened as I look. Drink your tea.”
“It’s yours.”
“It’s yours. I made it myself. Well, I stood over the cook until she made it right.” She nodded at the cup. “Please. It’s valerian and honey. It’s the only thing that has ever let me sleep.”
The steam rose between us. I lifted the cup, because a healer’s hands do such things before the healer’s mind has decided anything. I breathed in.
Valerian, yes. Honey, yes. The thick green smell of a kitchen garden in August.
And underneath it, so faint I almost called it imagination, something thin and sweet and wrong. Like a pressed flower left too long in a book.
I set the cup down very gently.
“Highness. Who prepares this for you?”
“The cook. I told you.”
“Who tells the cook what goes in?”
A pause. Elowen’s hands settled in her lap, one thumb finding the other.
“It’s a household recipe. I’ve had it every night since I was fifteen. For my nerves.” The words came slowly, like she was picking her way across ice. “The Chancellor prescribed it after my mother’s funeral. He said a girl in my position can’t afford to lie awake.”
My pulse started up. I did not count it. I did not need to.
I know the smell, Seraphine said. Her voice had gone flat, the way a voice goes when it is holding something heavy very still. Wren. Smell it again.
I picked the cup up. I put my tongue to the rim, the barest touch, the oldest test my mother ever taught me. It left a numbness on the tip like a pin pressed lightly into the flesh, and a taste I knew down to the root of my skull.
Widow’s thimble. Foxglove’s ugly cousin, the grey-leafed kind that grows on the north side of walls. In a large dose it stops a heart. In a small one, given daily, it does something far more patient. It makes the body tired, and then it makes the body warm, and then, one cold month, it makes the body burn.
Fever, they had said. After.
I remembered the basin. I remembered my own hands holding it. I remembered the smell that had come up out of it, thin and sweet, like a flower pressed too long in a book, and the way I had told myself, nine years old, that it was only sickness.
My hand began to shake.
“Healer?” Elowen half rose. “What is it? You’ve gone white.”
“Sit down, Highness.”
“What’s wrong with the tea?”
I could have lied. It would have been kinder. But she was nineteen, and she had been drinking this for four years, and every lie I could think of would have put another cup in her hand tonight.
“There’s a herb in it that doesn’t belong,” I said. “In small amounts it feels like exhaustion. Like melancholy. A girl who drinks it thinks she’s simply sad.” I held her eyes. “Over time it weakens the heart. And then something small, a chill, a bad winter, finishes it.”
Elowen did not scream. She did not faint or throw the cup. She looked at it for a long, long moment, and then she did the one thing I had not expected.
She laughed. Short, cracked, almost soundless.
“Seven queens,” she said. “And everyone lit a candle and said how fragile they were.”
“Highness.”
“No, it’s all right. It’s actually a relief.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, and the gesture was so childish, so entirely a girl’s gesture, that I wanted to cross the room and take her by the shoulders. “I thought I was going mad. I thought something was wrong with me. That I was weak like they were weak. Do you know what that is like, to be told every day that you are delicate, and to start believing it?”
I did. God help me, I did.
“My mother drank it too,” she said. “She started the year before she was crowned. Hask brought it to her himself, every evening, in the same blue cup. I used to sit on her bed while she drank.” Her voice thinned. “She called it her little kindness. She said Oren was the only person in the castle who still remembered she was tired.”
“The Chancellor brings it to you himself?”
“No.” She frowned, and her eyes went distant, and I watched her reach for a memory she had never examined. “Not me. He stopped when I was sixteen. After that, it’s always been...”
The pause went on a heartbeat too long.
Wren, said Seraphine, so softly it was almost a breath against my ear. Listen to her thumbs.
Elowen’s thumbs had stopped moving. She sat very still, as still as I had seen anyone sit since the cell, and I knew that look. It was the stillness of someone who has just seen the shape of a thing in the dark and prays she is wrong.
“Highness.” I leaned forward. “Who brings it to you now?”
She turned her head and looked at the door.
“I don’t want to say it.”
“I know.”
“He taught me to ride. He carried me out of a fire when I was eleven. He tells me jokes in the corridors when I cry.” Her voice broke on the last word and she did not try to fix it. “He’s the only person in this castle who has never once looked at me like I was about to die.”
I thought of a thumb pressing a scarred knuckle. I thought of a key warm from a closed fist. I thought of a man saying it’s an omission, and turning for the stairs before I could see his face.
I thought, he looked me in the eye today. That was the first wrong thing.
“Say it,” I whispered. “Please.”
Elowen drew a breath that shook all the way down.
“Captain Rooke,” she said. “Every night. At nine bells. He sets it on my table himself and he waits until I’ve finished the cup.”
The cold under the blanket flared, one hard pulse of it, and then Seraphine’s voice came very quiet in my skull.
Wren. Nine bells is ringing.
Far off, through the stone, the first bronze note sounded. Then the second. Then the third, and the lock, as if answering, began to turn.
The door opened. Captain Dain Rooke stood in the frame with a blue cup steaming in his hand, and his eyes went from the princess, to the clay pot, to the cup in front of me, and every drop of color left his face.
“Highness,” he said. His thumb found the scar. “You shouldn’t be here.”