The Beggar with the Dragon’s Seal. Summoned by the King’s Decree. Book 2: The Price of a Winter Vow

“Keys,” I said.

He blinked.

“The key to the room. To the shutters. And to the kitchen archive.”

“The kitchen archive,” he repeated, and I watched the muscle in his jaw work. “Guests are not given a key to the archive.”

“Guests aren’t,” I agreed. “But the keeper of the seal for the winter cycle is. I can summon Erwin and ask him to read you the relevant passage.”

He stared at me for a long moment. Then he reached into his pocket, drew out a ring of keys, slid two from it, and set them on the tray. The keys were copper, old, stamped with the sigil of House Northern Fire — the dragon curled into a ring that I had once worn at my belt and that Judge Lissa had removed from me when she pronounced the divorce.

I took the keys. They were warm. I could have sworn they were warm from more than his hand.

Behind me, footsteps — heavy, uneven, the kind that come from a man who is counting his steps and losing count. I did not turn. I knew whose they were. I knew it not by the sound but by the way the keys in my palm grew hotter, and by the way the scar beneath my sleeve drew tight, and by the way Erwin at my back suddenly stopped breathing.

“Astrid,” he said.

I turned. He stood at the far end of the corridor, in his dark coat, no cloak, face heavy with sleeplessness, and his hands were empty, and that was the worst of it, because his hands had always been occupied — a glove, a lead, a scroll, a blade — and now they hung at his sides like a man who had forgotten what he came for.

“Lord Darven,” I said.

He flinched. Barely, but I saw it. I saw him swallow, the working of his throat, the muscle that leapt along his jaw, the way his gaze dropped from my face to my hands, to the keys I held, and how something shifted beneath his cuff on the same wrist as mine.

“The keys,” he said.

“The keys,” I agreed. “Mine.”

I turned and walked down the corridor. Past him. By half a pace. I felt his warmth through that half a pace, his breath, the smell of his clothes — the one I had not been able to forget in three years and hated myself for every morning beneath the bridge. He did not step forward. He did not step across my path. He simply stood, and I walked, and at one point our sleeves — mine black and borrowed, his dark and of his house — almost brushed.

I reached the turn and stopped. I did not look back. I laid my palm against the wall, where the stone was warm, and I felt something beneath my hand, beneath the skin, beneath the scar, beneath the dragon’s mark, slowly waking that I had counted as dead for three years.

Behind me, silence. No footsteps, no breath, no voice. Only the warm stone under my palm and the keys in my fist, and somewhere at the end of the corridor, a man standing, watching me go, and I knew it, and he knew I knew, and that was the first thing between us in three years that had been said aloud.

The corridor past the turn stood empty, and that too was worse than if someone had been in it. News traveled through the castle faster than any messenger, and by the time I reached the kitchen, every servant knew, every stable hand, every laundress at the well, and each of them knew precisely enough to look at me as though I had come back from the dead and had not yet decided whether to stay.

The kitchen smelled of cabbage and smoke. The cauldrons stood where they always had, and the table at which I had once cut bread for twenty stood where it always had, only now Tobin sat at it, a bowl in front of him, eating as though he had not eaten in three days, and I understood that he probably had not eaten in three days.

“Guest with the seal,” he said without looking up. “Already heard. Got the key to the archive. Heard that too.”

I stopped in the doorway and looked at him. He was thinner than he had been under the bridge, and dirtier, and his eyes were red — whether from the wind or from three nights of cheap beer and waiting to be paid for the seal, I could not tell. He did not raise his head. He knew I was watching, and he did not want me to see his face, and that was perhaps the only honest thing he had done in a day.

“I have it,” I said. “And the key to the shutters. And the room.”

“Mm.”

“And the right to sit in council. And the right to call witnesses. And the right to block any of the lord’s dealings without my signature.”

He stopped chewing. He raised his head. He looked at me the way one looks at a person who has just said aloud what both of them were thinking, and at which both of them were suddenly afraid.

“So that means,” he said slowly, “you’re with the castle now.”

“I’m with the seal,” I said. “The seal is with the castle. The castle is with the lord. The lord is with me, until I decide otherwise.”

Tobin set down the spoon. He looked at the bowl, at me, at the door behind which a floorboard had just creaked, and I knew he was counting who might have been listening, and I knew he was counting correctly.

“Pay me,” he said quietly. “For the return. We had a deal.”

“We had a deal that you would return the seal through the court,” I said. “You returned it. The court sat. The cycle was extended. The payment is not mine to give. The payment is the Crown’s. If you want a place in the kitchen, go to the lord and ask. Only think first about what you will say to him when he asks why you sold me my own seal for the silver you drank last night.”

He went white. Not red — white, so that even his lips turned gray, and for the first time in two days I thought that Tobin might not be as simple as he was pretending, and that his fear of me was not the fear of a beggar before a former mistress but the fear of a man who knew he had been caught at two ends, not one.

I went to the table, set the key to the archive on the edge of his bowl, and made for the back door. At the door a voice caught me — not Tobin’s, another, quiet, cracked.

“Astrid.”

I turned. A woman stood in the kitchen doorway. A stranger. No — not a stranger. Pregnant, her hands folded over her belly, in an expensive but rumpled dress, with a face that wore everything at once: weariness, fear, anger, and something else I had no name for, because I had never seen that expression on the face of a woman who had walked into my house.

“Inara,” I said.

“Of the Winter Branch,” she corrected, and her voice faltered. “A guest. Lord Darven promised — ”

“Lord Darven,” I said, “can promise whatever he likes. The room by the kitchen is mine. The key is mine. The right of entry is mine. The child is not mine. As for the rest,” I looked her in the eye, and she looked away first, “welcome to a house that is expecting you less than you think.”

I went out. Behind me Inara began to weep — quietly, the way women weep who have long since unlearned weeping aloud. I did not turn. I walked to my room, unlocked the door, went in, closed it, and turned the key. Through the wall I heard footsteps — those same uneven ones — and I sat on the bed, and laid my palm against the warm stone, and the seal beneath my sleeve answered, and for the first time I thought that perhaps I had come back for a reason.

The footsteps beyond the wall did not stop. Heavy, uneven, with pauses — as though a man were counting to ten and losing the count. I knew that rhythm. I had known it once, when we shared a bed and I woke to him rising in the night to pace along the window, unable to sleep, unwilling to say why. Now there was a wall between us, and a door with my lock, and a key in my fist, and that was supposed to mean it was over. The footsteps were not over.

I rose from the bed, went to the wall, and laid my palm against the stone. It was warm. Not from the stove — the stove in my room had not been lit. Warm from the other side, from his. Beneath my palm the scar on my wrist twitched, alive, and I felt something hot roll slowly under the skin, as though someone had drawn the tip of a blade along an old burn, not to wound but to remind. The seal of House Northern Fire. Mine. His. Ours — like a scar that cannot be cut in two, only acknowledged.

Beyond the wall a floorboard creaked closer to the door. Then silence. Then his voice, low, not to me, to someone in the corridor — perhaps Martha, perhaps the errand boy.

“The stove in her room — has it been lit?”

“No, my lord.”

“Why not.”

“The steward said there was little firewood, and the guest did not ask.”

Silence. I heard him exhale — not through his nose, through his mouth, the way a man breathes when he is teaching himself not to raise his voice. Then his voice again, level, with that small crack on the last word he had never noticed and I had always noticed.

“Bring wood. And light it. Now.”

The footsteps on the other side moved toward the door. I lifted my palm from the stone and sat back on the bed, and the cloak — his, dark, bearing the crest he had stripped from his shoulders in front of me at the threshold — lay beside me, on my shoulder, and smelled of smoke and cold, and I hated myself for how precisely I recognized it. Behind the door other footsteps came, hurried, and a minute later someone knocked with careful restraint.

“Guest,” said Martha’s voice. “I’ve brought wood. May I?”

“You may.”

She came in, an armful of logs — old birch, smelling the way a house smells where children live. I stepped back without meaning to. Martha was small, silver-haired, a ring of keys at her belt, and she did not look at me but at my wrist, at the place beneath the black, borrowed sleeve where something had moved, and I saw that she had seen it, and that she would say nothing, and that she would remember everything.

She lit the stove in four strokes — deftly, the way someone does it who has done it a thousand times. The fire caught at once. The stone under my palm grew warmer. Martha stood, brushed her hands, and looked at me.

“The lord commanded it.”

“I heard.”

“He did not go to bed,” she said, and her voice held something I had not expected. Not sympathy. Weariness. The weariness of a woman who has served in this house for thirty years and knows that her master does not sleep when his conscience does not sleep.

“Neither did I,” I said.

She nodded and left. I closed the door, turned the key, and went to the stove. I crouched and held out my hands. The warmth came from below, from the fire, and from the wall, and from the stone under my hand, and for the first time in three days I felt that I had a place I could sit in, and that the place was mine. That he had not given it to me. That the court had. That the difference between those two things was the price he would now pay, whether he wished to or not.

The footsteps on the other side of the wall returned. This time they did not stop. They moved evenly, as though the man had at last stopped counting and was simply walking, simply being in the same night as I, and between us there was only stone, and a lock, and the seal that lay warm as a coin beneath my sleeve and waited. I pulled off one boot, set the other beside it, and lay down without undressing, on top of the blanket. I put the cloak under my head. The smell of his smoke was the last thing I breathed in, and I thought that in the morning I would return it, and that he knew I would return it, and that we would both pretend it meant nothing, and that it meant everything.

Morning came early, with that gray light that in the castle settles on stone before it settles on snow. I woke because it had gone quiet on the other side of the wall. The footsteps had stopped. No steps, no breath, no creak of a board — nothing, and that silence was worse than the footsteps, because it meant he had either gone or was standing at the wall and not moving, and I did not know which was worse.

I rose, washed with the cold water from the pitcher, pulled on the borrowed black dress — the one I had come in, from someone else’s shoulders, tight under the arms — and went to the door. The cloak lay on the bed where I had folded it the night before. I picked it up, shook it out, and slung it over my shoulders. The cloth smelled of smoke and cold and something else I refused to name. The lock on the door clicked, the key went into my pocket, and I stepped into the corridor.

He was standing at his own door. Not mine — his, three paces of stone away, in the very shirt he had worn through the night, no cloak, his hair fallen over his forehead, and the face of a man who had not slept. In his hand was a cup, and it smelled not of wine but of hot water with a drop of something bitter — I knew the smell, it was what the quarry workers used to blunt sleeplessness, and Darven had never drunk that muck in his life, and now he did, and I thought that three years was long enough to learn to drink what once you would have poured into the fire.

He saw me. I saw him. Between us lay three paces of stone and three years of silence. The cloak on my shoulders was his. The shirt on his shoulders was his. The seal beneath my sleeve was ours, and it twitched, alive, the moment he drew breath, and I felt the hot ring beneath the skin tighten, and I knew he had felt it too, because the fingers around his cup went white.

“The cloak,” I said, and I did not move.

He looked at me. Not at the cloak — at me, at my face, at my hands, at the place where his seal lived beneath the black, borrowed sleeve, and I saw his gaze linger there, saw him swallow, saw his throat move, and for the first time I thought that he did not know what to do with his hands, and that was new, because once he had always known.

“Keep it,” he said.

I did not move.

“I’ll return it,” I said.

“I said — keep it.”

It was his voice, the commanding one, the one he had used to give orders, and I waited for him to hear it himself, to hear the voice give way, to hear the last word fall into a plea, and he heard it, I saw it in the way he looked away and raised the cup to his mouth, and his hand was shaking. I stood and watched him drink, and the cloak warmed my shoulders, and I did not give it back, and he did not ask again, and between us in the corridor hung that silence which belongs to people who were once one thing and now do not know how to be two.

“Inara arrived,” he said, not looking at me. “Last evening. From the Winter Branch. She is pregnant, and she is in your old room, and I did not have time to move her elsewhere, and I — ”

He stopped. I saw him search for a word, and not find it, and not invent one, and that was worse than anything he could have said.

“I know,” I said. “I saw her. In the kitchen.”

I finished the porridge, wiped the bowl with my finger, and set it on the edge of the table. Brinn snatched it up at once, and I saw his fingers tremble — not from the weight, from my gaze. He was staring at my sleeve, at the place where the seal lay warm as a coin beneath the black fabric, and I knew that by midday he would have carried it through the lower kitchen, that the seal was alive, that it answered to the lord, and that this was perhaps the most important piece of news of the winter.

The steward appeared as I was rising from the table. I knew his walk by the creak in his knee — he had always favored the right leg after that business on the hunt that no one in the castle spoke of aloud but everyone remembered. He came into the kitchen not as a master — as a man who had been given an order and did not know how to carry it out, and for the first time I thought that perhaps he was not cruel, only tired, and that those were different things.

“My lady,” he said, and caught himself, because the word *my lady* no longer fit me, and *guest* he could not say, because a guest does not demand an accounting, and I now could. I saw him run through every option in his head and find none.

“Lord Darven asked me to tell you,” he corrected himself, and his voice steadied, “that a room by the kitchen will be made ready for you. There is no spare bedchamber in the castle. The room is next to his quarters, through the wall. Separate,” he added, and looked me in the eye, and I understood that he had added that word not for me but for himself, so that I would see that he remembered what *separate* meant, and that once, in this house, it had meant something else.

“Show me,” I said.

He led me down a corridor I had once known by heart, every flagstone beneath my feet, every window, every torch bracket, and I followed him and did not recognize the castle, and it was the same, and I was different. He opened the door, and I saw a bed, and a stove, and a basin of water, and a chair, and a wardrobe, and a window set deep in the wall, through which a slice of courtyard and a slice of sky were visible, and I understood that this was the very room I had once refused to live in, because it had been too small for a lady of the house, and was now large enough for a beggar with a seal.

“A lock on the door,” I said, and it was not a request, and the steward heard it, because he looked at me the way one looks at a man who has just discovered he has a knife, and who has just turned his back.

“It is not customary,” he said carefully.

“It is now,” I said. “The seal gives me the right to come and go alone. The lock will be on my side of the door. Not on both. I will have it today, or tomorrow I will go to Clerk Erwin and ask him to enter in the register that the Lord of Northern Fire refused the bearer of the seal her right to a private entry. It will cost him a vote in the Council of Houses, and you know that better than I.”

He was silent. I saw him count — not coins, not days, losses: whose voice in the Council, whose supper, whose sleep, whose lock, whose door. Then he nodded and left, and within the hour a key was brought to me — small, copper, stamped with the sigil I had once worn at my belt and then lost, and which had come back to me after three years, through a court, through a stranger’s ruling. I took it in my hand, and the metal was warm, and I thought that perhaps dozens of hands had held it before mine, and that this, perhaps, was the price he would now pay — not in gold, not in blood, but in the warmth of strangers’ hands on my skin.

The key slipped into the cloak’s pocket. The cloak was his. The key was mine. I went to the wall, laid my palm against it, and felt — not warmth, but the absence of cold, and those were different things, and for the first time in three days I understood that I was in a house that was bound to maintain me, and that it was neither a kindness, nor a command, nor forgiveness, but the law, and that the law, unlike the man on the other side of the wall, did not know how to break off mid-sentence, and that this, perhaps, was the only thing I could rely on today.

“She will get nothing,” he said, and it was no longer about the bedchamber, and we both knew it.

I turned and went toward the stairs. Halfway down the corridor I stopped, because my legs would no longer hold me, and I leaned my shoulder against the wall, and the cloak slipped, and I pulled it back into place, and behind me it was quiet, and I knew he was standing and watching, and that he would not approach, and that I would not turn, and that this was the first time in three years that we were both silent about what needed to be said aloud.

I went on. The kitchen smelled of cabbage and smoke, and Brinn, the errand boy, flushed and set a bowl before me without meeting my eyes, and I knew the news had already reached the lower town, and that by midday it would reach the market, and that by evening the whole city would know that the former wife had come back, and that the lord had given her his cloak, and that the guest from the Winter Branch stood in the corridor with her hands on her belly, and that the seal beneath my sleeve had woken, and that the lord had not slept all night, and that this, perhaps, was a beginning, and perhaps — an end.

Chapter 3. Pregnant at the Threshold

The footsteps in the corridor were not his. Not heavy, the way Tobin’s were, not even, the way Martha’s were — cautious, with pauses on every other floorboard, as though the person had grown used to silence and no longer knew whether they were allowed to break it. I stood at the door of my room, the one on the other side of the wall from his chambers, and listened as the sound drew closer, and thought: if it’s Martha with the keys, I’ll ask about the lock; if it’s Brynn with a note, I’ll throw it away unread; if it’s Darven, I won’t open it.

It wasn’t Martha. Inara came around the corner.

She was paler than I remembered. Her hair pulled back carelessly, a cloak thrown over her shoulders, beneath it a traveling dress of thin wool, and beneath that dress, if you looked, you could already see the belly. Not large. Only a hint that something was there, that it would be here soon, and that the whole castle already knew about it, everyone but me, because I wasn’t supposed to be the first to know.

She stopped three paces away. She didn’t greet me. She didn’t look at the door behind me, though that was where she’d been heading; I could tell from the way her gaze slid over the handle and pulled back.

“I thought you were still in the city,” she said. Her voice was quiet, level, but at the very end of *city* something wavered. Not the word — the air around it.

I didn’t answer right away. I needed the time to count her face and convince myself I wasn’t inventing what I saw. There were shadows under her eyes that hadn’t been there in winter, when we stood on opposite sides of the fireplace in his study. Then she’d smiled at me, and I smiled back, and we both knew it wasn’t a smile. Now there was no smile. There was exhaustion, and something like fear — but the fear wasn’t for her. It was for the one under her heart.

“You weren’t expected back this early,” I said. It was true. They’d told me in the kitchen she wouldn’t return until evening, which meant she’d come sooner, and someone had brought her, and someone had met her, and someone had walked her past the guards without stopping.

She lowered her eyes. Her fingers tightened on the lapel of the cloak, and I noticed that on her ring finger there was no ring. *That* ring. The one they’d promised her. The one they’d promised me, back when I still believed promises meant something.

“I had to come back,” she said. “This is my home.”

*My home.* The corridor was narrow, stone, smelling of damp and old wood, and this house had once been mine, and his bedroom had been mine, and his bed had been mine, and his child was supposed to have been mine, and none of it had happened. She said *my home* the way you test a word aloud, and the way it sounded made me believe it: she didn’t believe it either.

“In there,” I said, and nodded toward the door behind me. “Your room. The same one as in winter. No one’s taken it.”

She flinched. Not at the words — at the fact that I’d said them calmly. She’d expected something else. She’d expected me to grab the handle, or block the door, or remind her who had been there first, and she’d been ready for it; I could see it in the way her shoulders were braced for a blow, and in the way she didn’t step back, though she wanted to.

I stepped away from the door. Not for her — because I needed to get to the kitchen, and because I had no intention of standing in the corridor waiting for her to decide whether to thank me or hate me for stepping aside.

“Astrid,” she said after me. I stopped, but didn’t turn. “I didn’t know they’d return the seal so soon. I thought I had time.”

I stood and listened to her breathing. It was catching, and not from climbing the stairs. It was from the fact that she’d said *I didn’t know*, and now she was waiting to see if I’d accept it, and I hadn’t accepted it, and I hadn’t refused it, and that made it worse for her.

“Time,” I said. “You had three years.”

And I walked down the corridor, not looking back. Behind me I heard the door open, heard her go in, heard it close, and after that there was silence, and in that silence I thought for the first time that she was afraid too. Not of me. Of what would happen when the child was born, and when the seal stayed with me, and when the castle remained mine by right and hers only by a promise no one had written down.