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

The kitchen met me with steam and voices. Three cooks stood at the table and, with me there, fell silent — not at once, but with that half-word delay that is worse than any silence. I went to my place at the far wall, to the stool they’d set out for me yesterday, and sat. The stool was low, with a leg that wasn’t its own, and a wood chip had been wedged under it so it wouldn’t wobble. Someone had wedged it, and I didn’t know who, and that got to me more than I’d expected.

The head cook — the one who had come as a girl in Darven’s time — set a bowl in front of me. Not the kind they carried out to servants — an earthenware one, with a rim, the kind they served at table in the hall. I looked at the bowl, then at her. She looked away. Not from shame — from the fact that shame wasn’t part of her job, and she didn’t want to show it in front of the others.

“Shchi,” she said shortly. “Eat, my lady.”

*My lady.* The word fell into the bowl like a stone. I didn’t correct her. I knew that if I did, it would get worse, because the correction would mean I’d taken it seriously, and I couldn’t take it seriously: I was in a stranger’s dress, with a stranger’s name on my arm, sitting on a stool with a chip wedged under it.

I ate. The shchi was hot, and it smelled of cabbage and bay leaf, and it was the same smell as in my own kitchen three years ago, when I was the one who decided how much bay to put in, or whether to put any in at all. I finished. I left the bowl at the edge of the table, and the head cook took it without a word, and I noticed she took it with the rim, the way you handle the masters’ crockery.

“Inara’s back,” said the second cook, the young one, the one who always said too much in my presence. “With the babe.”

She said *with the babe* as if the babe were already in a cradle, and not under a heart. I stood. The stool creaked beneath me, and the sound was louder than I’d wanted.

“Where is she now?” I asked.

“In her room,” the head cook answered. “The lord doesn’t know yet. Or he knows, but he hasn’t come down.”

I nodded and left. The corridor was colder than the kitchen, damp soaked into the stone, and I walked thinking that *the lord doesn’t know yet* wasn’t true, because in this castle the lord always knew first; he simply kept quiet longer than the rest. I walked toward the stairs, and at the turn I saw Brynn.

He stood against the wall, shoulder pressed to it, his hands in his pockets, looking as if someone had just struck him — not hard, just enough to make him understand they could. He saw me and flushed. His ears went red first, then his neck, then the place where a boy’s chest begins.

“My lady,” he said.

“What?” I said.

He pulled a folded note from his pocket. Held it out, not looking. I took it. The paper was thin, the kind used for travel, with a strange seal — not the palace’s, not the castle’s, but the kind they burn at waystations when they’re economizing on good wax. I unfolded it.

“Lady Astrid. The seal is confirmed. The cycle has been extended by royal decree until the first spring. Your status is guest with seal, neither wife nor servant. You are permitted to enter the council and the archive. You are permitted to go down to the lower city without an escort. Scribe Ervin.”

I read it twice. My mouth went dry. The cycle extended. Until the first spring. That meant the whole winter, and a stretch of spring besides, and in that time a child could be born, and raised, and announced, and everything they meant to do with my name could be done in time.

“Who gave it to you?” I asked.

“It came with the morning supply train,” Brynn answered. “They said — into your own hands.”

I folded the note. Held it. The paper was faintly warm from his pocket, and that warmth was someone else’s, and I tucked it against my chest, under my clothes, to where the scar throbbed beneath my sleeve.

“Brynn,” I said. “Did you know she was coming back?”

He nodded. Then shook his head. Then nodded again, and I understood that he had known, and that he’d been told to keep quiet, and that he hadn’t been able to bear it and had told me, because saying it was easier than not saying it, and because nothing would happen to him if he did, and something would if he didn’t, and he already understood that.

“Go,” I said. “And if anyone asks — don’t say you gave it to me.”

He left. I stayed in the corridor alone, the note in my hand, the scar aching at my wrist, and somewhere beyond the wall, in the room that had been mine, sat a woman with my ring on a half-promise and my child on a half-term, and I knew that by evening I would have to go to Darven, and that I wouldn’t go, and that he wouldn’t come, and that we would both pretend I didn’t know, and he didn’t know, and that it didn’t count either.

I stopped at the turn and pressed my palm to the wall. The stone was icy, and under my skin the scar answered, as if someone had drawn a fingernail along it from the inside. The note lay against my chest, and its warmth — someone else’s, a boy’s — was burning the skin beneath my ribs.

The door to the former bedroom was ajar. Not wide — a hand’s width, just enough that I could see a strip of light and hear someone breathing inside. Evenly, with a whistle on the exhale, the way women breathe in the last months, when the child has already pushed up against the lungs. I knew that whistle. I’d heard it in women in labor in the lower city, and in Gareth’s wife, and in three women I’d delivered in a ditch under a bridge, when one’s waters had broken too early and there was no one there but me.

I pushed the door. Inara was sitting on the bed — *my* bed, the one where I’d spent my wedding night, and from which I’d been carried out in a single shift three years ago. Her dress was traveling gray, taken in at someone else’s shoulders — not mine; she was broader in the bone, and the cloth hung on her like a sack, and that made her look not pregnant but simply gone soft. Her hair was tucked under a kerchief. Her hands on her belly, over the fabric, fingers laced so tight the knuckles had gone white.

She raised her head. Her eyes were dry and red, and it wasn’t the redness of crying for show; it was the redness of having nothing left to weep, of sitting and staring at a wall, and the wall not answering.

“You came,” she said. Her voice was steady, without a tremor, and that was worse than if she’d been shaking. “I thought you wouldn’t.”

I didn’t answer. I was looking at her hands, at the white knuckles, at the way she held her belly — carefully and afraid — and I understood that she wasn’t holding Darven’s child. She was holding a child she had nowhere to put, because the castle wasn’t her home, and his kin weren’t her kin, and no one had given her any vows, and there was only this — a stone room, a stranger’s bed, and my scar at her door.

“You need a maid,” I said. “And water. And clean linens.”

She blinked. Then she closed her eyes and laughed, very quietly, and the laugh was the kind that made me look away.

“You came to ask whose it is,” she said. “They all come to ask.”

“No,” I said. “I came to tell you there’s hot water in the kitchen, and that if you give birth in this room alone, I’ll be the one who delivers you. And I won’t send for the lord. I’ll send for Hella.”

She opened her eyes. She looked at me, and for the first time I saw in her gaze not fear and not triumph, but a weariness so old and so deep that my own throat closed.

“You hate me,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “And you hate me. And right now that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re sitting in my bedroom with my ring in the chest of drawers, and your water will break in a month, maybe two, and you have no one. And I won’t be that no one. But I’ll send for the one who will.”

I went to the table, took the pitcher, sniffed. The water had gone stale, with a taste of stone. I poured it out the window, set the pitcher back. Inara watched my hands, and I could see her counting every movement, and that it hurt her, the way I did it — calmly, from habit, the way I had done it in this room a thousand times, when I still had the right.

“The ring,” I said. “Where.”

She nodded silently toward the chest. I went over, opened the top drawer. The ring was there — mine, thin, silver, with a carved serpent I’d chosen myself. I took it, turned it in my fingers. It was cold.

I put it back.

“Keep it,” I said. “It’s yours, for as long as you’re here. We’ll sort it out later.”

I went to the door. I stopped on the threshold.

“Inara,” I said, without turning. “If you tell me now that you love him, I’ll leave. And there won’t be any hot water.”

The silence was long. Then she said:

“I’m afraid.”

And I left. And I walked down the corridor, and under my arm the scar throbbed, and the note against my chest was warm, and I thought that there were now three women in the castle who were afraid, and one of them was me, and one of them was her, and the third was the one who wasn’t born yet, who was only meant to be born, and that for her too I had nothing, only my hand, and a vow I had given no one, but which, for some reason, I was already keeping.

At the turn I stopped. Behind me, at the end of the corridor, I heard footsteps. Heavy, uneven, stumbling every third step. I didn’t turn. I knew who it was, and I knew he knew I knew, and that we would both pretend we didn’t hear each other, and that wouldn’t count either.

But the scar under my sleeve burned as if someone had called me by name.

The footsteps drew closer. I could hear the way he set his feet down — heavily, as if the soles weren’t stone but iron, and every flagstone of the corridor answered his weight as though he were dragging something I couldn’t see but that he had been carrying for three years and couldn’t put down. Then the footsteps stopped.

“You were with her,” he said.

His voice sounded like that of people who have been silent a long time, and then open their mouths and forget why. I didn’t turn. I was looking at the wall, and on the wall there was a slanting seam between the stones, and in that seam a dried spiderweb, and I was thinking that no one had cleared the web since the day they’d carried me out of there in a single shift, and that the maids should have cleared it, and that the maids hadn’t, and that that meant the order not to clean this room had come from someone with the authority to give an order, and that I now knew exactly who.

“I was with her,” I said. “And I brought her water.”

“She didn’t ask for it.”

“She won’t ask. She’s sitting on my bed waiting for someone to come in and give her permission to breathe.”

The silence behind me was such that I could hear the wick crackling in the wall sconce, and somewhere below, in the kitchen, a door thud. Then he said:

“She came back from the Branch early. She was brought in during the night. I wasn’t told right away.”

I turned. Slowly, the whole of me, because my neck had gone stiff from holding it so straight, and because I needed to see his face, not his voice at my back. He stood three paces from me, in the half-dark of the corridor, and there were shadows under his eyes, and his cloak was thrown over one shoulder, and his right boot was buckled with the wrong clasp, and it was such a small thing, such a human thing, that my jaw clenched.

“You weren’t told,” I repeated. “Or you didn’t ask.”

He didn’t answer. That was the answer. I saw the muscle jump in his cheek, and saw him lower his hand, and saw his fingers curl into a fist and then uncurl at once, and saw him look past me, toward the half-open door of her room, and I understood — he was afraid to go in. Not because Inara was in there. Because the bed was in there, the one where he’d spent his first night with me, and now another woman sat on it, and under her heart there was a child, and he didn’t know whether he had the right to ask whose.

“She didn’t call for you,” I said. “And she didn’t call for me. She’s sitting and waiting, and the water in her pitcher tastes of stone, and no one has changed her linens in three days, and if you go in to her now she’ll think you’ve come for an answer, and she doesn’t have one. So don’t go in.”

He looked at me. For the first time that whole winter he looked at me as if I were not a guest with a seal, not a former wife, not a beggar in a borrowed dress, but a person who knew something he didn’t, and was ready to say it — but only if he asked the right way.

“What did you say to her,” he asked, and his voice caught on the last word, and I heard him choke on that caught voice, and heard him cough to hide it.

“That there’s hot water in the kitchen,” I answered. “And that I won’t send for you when she gives birth. I’ll send for Hella. And I also said that the ring in the chest of drawers is hers, for as long as she’s here. We’ll sort it out later.”

He nodded. Slowly, heavily, the way people nod when they’ve been handed a sentence, and they already knew it, but heard it for the first time all the same. Then he said:

“I didn’t know she was coming.”

“And I didn’t know you didn’t know,” I said. “And now we both know more than we wanted to.”

I went to my room. Past him, close to the wall, so my cloak wouldn’t brush his, and he didn’t move, and we passed each other the way people pass who were once one thing, and who now each have their own corridor, and their own door, and their own castle, and their own woman behind a wall, whom he is afraid to question, and I am afraid to pity.

At the turn I stopped and pressed my palm to the wall. The stone was icy, and under my skin the scar answered, as if someone had drawn a fingernail along it from the inside. The note lay against my chest, and its warmth — someone else’s, a boy’s — was burning the skin beneath my ribs. Somewhere behind me, at the end of the corridor, footsteps sounded again. This time even, slow, and I knew he was walking toward her door.

Below, in the kitchen, it smelled of cabbage and smoke, and one of the kitchen boys had left a bowl of porridge on the table, and the porridge was still warm, and I realized I hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning. I sat on the bench, drew the bowl toward me, and ate slowly, with a spoon, watching the porridge cool, and I couldn’t taste it. The hand under my sleeve pulsed in a steady rhythm, and the pulse wasn’t mine — too heavy, too low, as if a second heart were beating under my skin, a man’s, and I knew whose, and the knowledge made the spoon slide in my fingers.

Martha passed by, not looking. She set another pot on the stove, took off her apron, hung it on a peg. She stopped at the door.

“More?” she asked, and her voice was even, and her eyes were cleverer than her words, and I understood that she already knew who was in the room upstairs, and that the child had been brought in during the night, and that I had been there, and that I had come out, and that I hadn’t cried, and that that told her something too.

“No,” I said. “Martha.”

She turned. I set down the spoon. The porridge in the bowl had set, with a furrow across it, and I thought I should have finished it, because I’d need the strength, and that the strength I had now wasn’t meat or bread but someone else’s scar under my skin, and someone else’s pulse, and someone else’s child behind a wall.

“When they brought her in,” I said, “did you see?”

Martha nodded. Once, short, the way people nod who stopped counting other people’s secrets long ago.

“In a carriage with no arms on it,” she said. “The driver wore a gray cloak, someone else’s. Two men brought her in. She wasn’t leaning on them, but she walked slowly, and they led her as if she were made of glass.”

“She isn’t made of glass,” I said. “She’s simply afraid.”

Martha looked at me for a long moment, and in her gaze there was something I couldn’t read, and then she turned back to the stove, and I knew she wouldn’t say any more, and that it was enough.

Up above the kitchen, a door creaked. I didn’t look up. From the sound I knew it was her door, and that she had stepped out, and that she was standing on the threshold, and that there was a mug of milk in her hand, and that she was looking down into the well of the stair, and that I was sitting below, my back to her, and that she could see my neck, and the scar beneath my collar, and the bowl of porridge, and the spoon I had set down.

I didn’t turn. I finished the porridge. I laid the spoon in the bowl, and pushed the bowl away, and wiped my hands on a cloth, and the cloth was cold, and my hands were cold, and I thought I ought to get up and leave, and that if I got up, she’d see me get up, and that if I didn’t, she’d see me sit, and either way it would count.

“Astrid,” she said from above.

Her voice was quiet, and the crack in it ran not down the middle but along the edge, and I knew she wasn’t acting, and that she really hurt, and that the mug in her hand was shaking, and that the milk was spilling over onto her fingers, and that she was cold, and that she didn’t know who to call.

I stood. The bench creaked. I turned. She was on the top step, and her dress was dark, and beneath the dress there was her belly, and the belly was visible, and she wasn’t hiding it, and I understood that she wasn’t hiding it on purpose, and that that counted too.

“The milk will go cold,” I said.

She nodded. I climbed three steps, stopped one below her, so that our eyes were level. Something sour came off her, and I understood that she was sick in the mornings, and that she hadn’t told anyone, and that the smell wasn’t illness but fear, and that her fear was under her heart too.

“No one sent for me,” she said.

“No one sent for me either,” I answered. “I came on my own. I carried the water on my own. I asked for the linens on my own. The milk Martha brought. I didn’t go to her.”

“I know,” she said. “I heard.”

“Then you know the rest of it,” I said. “That I won’t tell anyone, and that you won’t tell anyone, and that we both know, and that it isn’t friendship, and isn’t peace, and isn’t a treaty. It’s just a pause.”

She drank from the mug. The milk ran down her chin, and she didn’t wipe it, and I didn’t offer my kerchief, and I had a kerchief, and I knew she knew, and we both pretended there was no kerchief.

“Astrid,” she said again, and this time her voice broke all the way, and I saw her lips tremble, and saw her press her palm to her belly, and saw her belly jerk, and I understood that the child in there, inside, was already answering her voice, and that this was the most terrible thing I had seen in three years, and that I wasn’t allowed to feel sorry for her, and that I did.

“Not now,” I said. “Finish the milk. Lie down. I’ll send Hella to you. Not me. Hella. Because I don’t know how to deliver a child, and because you don’t want me beside you when it hurts, and because I don’t want to be there either.”

She looked at me, and her eyes were wet, and in them I could see the reflection of the stair, and my own reflection in hers, and I thought it was like mirrors in mirrors, and that somewhere at the very end of that endless stair there stood a woman deciding which of us would stay, and that the woman was not her, and not me, and not him, but the seal under my sleeve, and that the seal was silent, and that its silence was the price.

I turned and went down. Halfway down the flight I stopped, didn’t turn.

“The ring in the chest of drawers is yours, for as long as you’re here,” I repeated. “We’ll sort it out later.”

And I left. And the kitchen door swung shut behind me, and in the kitchen it smelled of cabbage, and Martha was washing the pot, and she didn’t look at me, and I was grateful to her for it, and the note against my chest burned against my ribs, and I thought the pause was over, and that in the morning it would all start again, and that I was ready for it, and that it was a lie, and that I was ready all the same.

I stood and listened as he approached, and as he stopped, and as he stood, and as he didn’t knock, and as he turned back, and as his footsteps faded around the corner, and as the corridor went quiet again, and as in that quiet I heard, in her room, behind the half-open door, someone crying softly.

I didn’t go back. I stood a moment longer, and then went down to the kitchen, and asked Martha for hot water and clean linens, and a towel, and a mug of milk with honey, and Martha gave me all of it without asking for whom, and I carried it up, and set it at the threshold, and knocked once, quietly, and left, without waiting for her to open.

The scar under my sleeve burned steadily, and for the first time I thought that the seal was not only the law, and not only the price, and not only a leash. It was also the thing that hurt me when the one behind the door felt her belly hurt. And that was, I supposed, the most terrible part of the contract, and what I was supposed to do with it, I didn’t know.

Chapter 4. The Council in a Borrowed Dress

The dress bit under my arms. I felt it the moment Brynn fastened the last hook — the fabric was borrowed, cut for someone else’s shoulders, and it sat on me as if it had been tailored for a woman a full head shorter. The sleeves barely reached my elbows, which made it look as if my arms were too long, or I was too thin after three years beneath the bridge, or both at once. Brynn went still behind my back and exhaled, as if he wanted to say something, but I shook my head, and he pressed his lips tight and stepped away.

The great hall smelled of tallow, soot, and tanned leather. The elders were already seated — Torven Stone at the head of the table, two of his kinsmen flanking him, the scribe Ervin with quill poised, and Lissa of the House of Grey Water, whom I had only ever seen at the gates, now settled to the right of the empty chair. The empty one. The lord’s chair.

I stepped inside, and the doors shut behind me. Someone coughed down the line of seats. Someone set down a cup. I did not look at faces. I looked straight ahead, at the long table, at the wax of the royal seal, at the quill in Ervin’s hand, and at the sleeves — at my sleeves, from beneath which a bandage showed, wound from wrist almost to the bone. Inara had tried. She had sent a dress cut precisely to measure — just not mine — and I knew she had done it on purpose, because the note about the council had reached her before it reached me.

Torven rose, without waiting for Darven.

“Child,” he began, and I stopped mid-aisle. “The Crown Court has extended the winter cycle. You know this.”

I knew. I nodded, and the scar beneath the bandage twitched, a hot, pulling ache.

“I know.”

“Then you also know the kindred has the right to ask on what grounds you enter this hall.”

I did not answer at once. I waited until Ervin finished his word, and said:

“On the grounds of the seal.”

Lissa smiled, the soft smile one gives a child who has set the block down in the wrong place.

“The seal,” she repeated. “And where might it be?”

I did not argue. I unwound the bandage from my right arm with my teeth — slowly, because the cloth had stuck to the scar, and beneath it the skin was red, swollen, and the seal lay on my wrist like a stranger’s mark, alive, pulsing. The hall gasped. Someone stood. Torven raised a hand, and silence fell.

“The seal,” I said. “As you can see.”

Ervin wrote on, eyes down, but I saw how quickly he dipped his quill, racing to keep up with my voice.

“Sit,” Torven said, and I sat on the first chair against the wall — the place for witnesses, not guests. I noticed it. Lissa noticed too.

The door at the far end of the hall opened, and Darven came in. He walked quickly, his cloak bunched on one shoulder, the sleeve of his shirt dark and damp, as if he had just torn it away from something hot. He did not look at me. He went to the chair, sat, and only then raised his eyes.