Chapter 10

No Longer His Prisoner.

He didn’t take the question back. Didn’t soften it once it was out there sitting between us on that table full of papers. Just watched me, waiting, like he needed to see what I’d do with it more than he needed any real answer out of me.

Didn’t have one, if I’m being honest. Not right off. Sat there with the candle guttering low and my whole understanding of this past month rearranging itself piece by piece in front of me, and all I could manage was, “I don’t know what I was meant to be.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “That’s the trouble with it.”

Sat in that quiet a good long while. Long enough the candle burned down another inch, long enough my side had gone from aching sharp to just a dull throb I’d mostly quit noticing by then. He didn’t press me for more. Didn’t go filling the silence up with reassurances he had no business making anyway, seeing as neither one of us knew a single fact worth being reassured over just yet.

“Whatever this is,” he said finally. “Whoever’s behind it. Doesn’t change what you did here. Finding that study evidence. Seeing what nobody else in that whole council chamber saw.” He paused, and there was something careful in how he picked his next words, like he was weighing each one out before he let it go. “Don’t make you a weapon just cause somebody might’ve intended you as one.”

“Doesn’t make me not one, neither,” I said.

He didn’t argue that. Gave me that much credit at least, didn’t try smoothing it over just to make me feel better in the moment, which I appreciated more than I let on.

Sleep didn’t come easy that night, no surprise there. Lay in the dark turning over every piece we’d found, trying to fit it all together into some shape that made sense, and kept snagging on the same question over and over. If somebody wanted me specifically inside this household, what for. Wasn’t a noble-born. Wasn’t gifted with any particular power, wasn’t hiding some secret bloodline under my skin I’d have known, surely, if there was anything like that to know about myself. Was just an Omega who’d spent her whole life scrubbing floors and keeping quiet.

Unless quiet was the whole point of it. Unless being overlooked was exactly what made me useful to whoever set all this in motion same way it’d always kept me safe, it might now be the very thing that made me dangerous, in the right hands. Nobody watches the girl who was never worth watching to begin with. Nobody suspects her of carrying information, or noticing things she wasn’t supposed to notice, or ending up standing in rooms she had no real business standing in.

Maybe that was it. Maybe I’d been chosen exactly because nobody would think to look twice my way.

Didn’t comfort me much, that thought. Made my skin crawl if anything, lying there working out that my greatest weakness how easy I was to dismiss, my whole life long might’ve been exactly what recommended me for this in the first place.

Kaelan came to find me the next morning before I’d even got done dressing, Nessa still fussing with the laces on my sleeve when he knocked at the door.

“There’s someone I want you talking to,” he said, once Nessa had stepped out and left us to it. “One of my father’s old advisors. Retired from council work years back now, but he kept records nobody else bothered keeping proper. If there’s a paper trail showing who first proposed those marriage terms, he’d know where to go looking.”

Rode out together that afternoon, just the two of us and a small guard, to a modest house set at the edge of the territory where this old advisor lived out his years. A man named Corwin, gray-bearded, sharp-eyed despite how old he was, greeted Kaelan with the easy familiarity of somebody who’d known him since he was a boy, and treated me with a courtesy I wasn’t yet used to getting off anybody outside the household walls.

Told him what we knew. Watching his face go from polite interest right on into real concern the further along we got into it.

“A marriage contract drafted before the dispute even started,” he said slowly, once we’d laid the whole of it out for him. “That’s not something that gets arranged by accident, nor by anybody without real standing behind them. Whoever wrote up those terms needed to know things that weren’t public knowledge needed access to negotiations most folks never once lay eyes on.”

“Who’d have that kind of access,” Kaelan asked him.

Corwin sat quite a long moment, stroking at his beard, plainly turning over names he wasn’t really eager to say out loud in front of us. “Council scribes, for one. Anybody sits in on the private sessions before the full council even convenes. Beyond that” He stopped himself. “Beyond that, I’d want to see the document itself before I go naming anybody. Accusations like that aren’t ones I make lightly, not against men I’ve known most of my life now.”

Fair enough, I thought. It wasn’t like I wanted him guessing wrong either, not with so much already uncertain as it was.

But he did hand us one thing worth carrying home with us. Said a scribe named Fenwick had handled most the sensitive council correspondence going on a decade now man Corwin described as competent, quiet, thoroughly unremarkable in every single way that mattered, the kind of fella whose presence in a room nobody thinks twice about cause he’s simply always just been there.

The kind of person, I thought, that fit right into that shape we kept circling around trusted enough to go unquestioned, close enough to have access nobody thought to guard against at all.

Riding back, Kaelan went quite a long stretch, and I found myself watching him instead of the road, the way his jaw stayed set even when nothing in particular seemed to be troubling him just then, the careful, deliberate way he held himself even way out here where there wasn’t nobody left to perform strength for.

“You went distant back there,” I said. “When Corwin brought up the scribes.”

“Fenwick’s served my family longer than I’ve even been alive,” he said. “I knew him as a boy myself. Trusted him with things I wouldn’t hand most of my own council, even now.” His hands tightened up some on the reins. “If it’s him. If it’s been him this whole time”

“You don’t know that it is,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “But I don’t like how well the shape of it fits together, all the same.”

Rode a while longer in that particular kind of quiet that comes off two people thinking about the same thing without either wanting to say it out loud a second time.

“Can I ask you something,” I said, after a bit.

“Go on.”

“Back at the estate. When you said I didn’t have to prove myself to that council.” Kept my eyes on the road ahead of us. “You believe that. That I shouldn’t have to fight for it.”

“I do.”

“But you just took me along to see Corwin. Let me sit in on that whole conversation same as any council member would’ve.” Glanced over at him. “That’s not nothing to you, is it. Having somebody worth bringing along with you.”

Something shifted in his face, not quite a smile, but close enough to its cousin that I noticed it happen. “No,” he said. “It’s not nothing.”
Didn’t say much else the rest of the way back, but I noticed how he angled his horse a little closer to mine on the narrower stretches of road, close enough that if anything came out the trees, he’d be between it and me before either one of us had time to think it through proper. Didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t need to. I noticed it anyway, and it sat differently in me than it would’ve a month back.

Back at the estate, I went looking for Fenwick myself, quiet, not wanting to tip Kaelan’s hand before there was anything solid to hand him. Found the man in a records room off the main hall, exactly where Corwin’s description had promised he’d be unremarkable, gray, hunched over some ledger with the kind of focus that made him near invisible in his own right, same trick I’d spent my whole life perfecting my own self.

Struck up a conversation easy enough, asked him about the archive system, let him go on explaining his work more than I probably needed hearing, and watched him the whole while the way I’d learned to watch people back in Roran’s kitchens not for what they were saying, but for what changed in them the second a subject got too close to something they didn’t want touched.

Mentioned the border attack, casual as I could manage it. Watched his hands go still over that ledger, just for a heartbeat, before he picked the pen back up and kept on writing like nothing happened.

Mentioned the reassigned patrol orders next. Watched him swallow, small, controlled, the kind of reaction a man trained real good at hiding things learns to smother down fast.

Didn’t ask him outright about the marriage contract, mind you. I wasn’t ready to show my whole hand yet, not till I knew for certain what exactly I was holding. But I left that room with something I hadn’t walked in with a feeling, sharp and cold, that Fenwick knew a good deal more than his quiet, careful face was letting on to anybody.

Told Kaelan that evening. He listened closely, didn’t wave it off, didn’t tell me I’d imagined the whole thing either.

“That’s not proof,” he said.

“No,” I agreed. “But it’s a place to go looking harder.”

He studied me for a moment, something considering behind his eyes. “You went looking for him on your own. After what happened to you two nights back.”

“Somebody’s got to,” I said. “And I’m good at watching people who don’t know they’re being watched. Always have been, my whole life.”

“That’s not nothing either,” he said, quiet, echoing my own words right back at me from earlier, and something about hearing them come out his mouth instead of mine loosened up a knot in my chest I hadn’t even realized I was carrying around.

Was late, past the hour most the household had gone off to bed, when a messenger showed up at the gate not one of Kaelan’s own riders, but a stranger, cloaked, who left a sealed letter with the guard and vanished right back into the dark before anybody thought to stop him and ask after his name.

Kaelan opened it in his study, me standing close beside him, both of us still half caught up in the ordinary business of the evening, neither one of us braced for whatever was waiting inside it.

One line. No signature. No mark to say where it’d come from at all.
Ask your Luna what she knows.

Read it twice before the meaning of it fully landed on me, and when it did, my stomach dropped clean through the floor.

Kaelan didn’t say anything at first. Just stood there holding that scrap of paper, and when he finally looked up at me, something had changed behind his eyes. Some door I’d only just started feeling open up between us swinging shut again, quiet and careful and not one bit malicious about it, but shut all the same.

“Kaelan.” The voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. “You can’t think”

“I don’t know what to think.” Set the letter down on the desk between us, and the distance in that small little motion felt bigger somehow than the few inches it actually was. “Everything you’ve found. Everything you’ve noticed, right exactly when it needed noticing. The study. Fenwick. All of it.” Jaw was tight, controlled, but I could hear what it cost him to keep it that way. “Want to believe that’s just who you are. That you’re simply good at seeing what other people miss seeing.”

“It is who I am.”

“I know that’s what I want to believe,” he said. “Isn’t the same thing as knowing it’s true, though.”

Words landed harder than anything he’d said to me since that first night in Roran’s hall, and I stood there in his study with that one damning line still sitting on the desk between us, understanding, with a clarity that turned my whole chest cold, that whoever sent it knew exactly what they were doing when they did.

Hadn’t just planted doubt in Kaelan’s head.

They’d handed him a reason to stop trusting the one person who’d actually been trying to help him find out the truth of all this.