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

He saw the dress. I saw him see it — by the way his fingers closed on the armrest, and by the way his gaze stopped on my wrist. The seal under the sleeve burned, and I knew he felt it, because the hand resting on the armrest suddenly trembled and curled into a fist.

“Enough,” he said to Torven. “The council will hear her.”

Torven opened his mouth and closed it. Lissa lowered her eyes. I straightened my back, and the fabric under my arms cut in deeper, and I did not lift a brow. Beyond the wall, in the corridor, footsteps sounded — light, quick, a woman’s — and I understood that Inara was standing on the other side of the door, listening, and that Darven understood it too, because his fist uncurled, and he laid his hand back down, and the motion was so slow, as if every bone in him ached.

Torven cleared his throat into his fist, unfolded the sheet before him, and began to speak as though he were reading a list of the dead and not addressing a living woman sitting three paces from him.

“Astrid of the House of Northern Fire, maiden name Keeper, now guest by decree of the court. The kindred has three questions for you. First. How came you by the seal, if by decree of that same court it was taken from your hand three years ago?”

I felt the scar on my wrist twitch again, and knew I had to answer now, before Lissa could slip in her soft word.

“The seal was returned by the witness Tobin, a brickburner from the lower city, through the royal scribe Ervin. I accepted it at the gates. If the elders doubt its authenticity, I ask that Tobin and Ervin be summoned.”

Ervin raised his head from the parchment, nodded, and lowered it again. Torven shot him a look, but said nothing.

“The second question,” he went on in the same flat voice. “By what means do you intend to live in the castle until the end of the cycle, if the kindred’s register, drawn up after the divorce, lists neither dowry nor allowance in your name?”

I straightened my back. The fabric under my arms cut in so hard I lost feeling in my left side, and I grabbed hold of that pain as if it were a door handle.

“The register,” I said. “I have not seen that register. I have seen a different one, from the kitchen, with a debt owed to the castle in my name. I ask the council to order a cross-check.”

A murmur moved through the hall. Lissa raised her hand, and the murmur died as if snuffed out.

“The kitchen register,” she repeated, with her gentle smile. “Honored Astrid, the kitchen register is a record of grains and tallow dips, not of dowries. You are, no doubt, weary from the road and are mixing up your documents.”

I held her gaze and did not look away, and she was the first to drop hers.

“I am not mixing them up,” I said. “I ask for a cross-check.”

Torven rapped his knuckles on the table, and I understood that he was angry, but not at me — at Lissa, for speaking out of turn in council.

“The third question,” he said at last. “Are you prepared, as a guest who bears the seal, to submit to the order of the house that has taken you in?”

Darven shifted in his chair. I did not look at him. I looked at Torven. But I heard the leather of the armrest creak under his fingers.

“I am prepared to submit to the order,” I said, “that does not contradict the royal decree. The rest we will discuss separately.”

Torven leaned back in his chair. One of his kinsmen, a dry old man with yellow eyes, spoke for the first time the entire council.

“Separately,” he repeated, and the word cracked like bone breaking. “We have no ‘separately,’ child. We have a winter cycle, a debt to the Crown, and two hundred hectares of northern land we will lose the moment the Council of Houses doubts the purity of your seal. You sit here not as a guest, you sit here as an accusation we are obliged to disprove. Help us, and we will help you.”

I was silent. I counted the beats of my heart, and they were too loud, and I knew Ervin was recording that silence, that pause, and that by evening he would bring me the sheet, and I would sign it, and it would go into the common file, and one day that sheet would save my life or take it.

Darven rose. The chair creaked, and the sound was like a knife drawn across glass.

“The council has heard,” he said, and his voice was quiet, but the hall sat straighter at once. “The seal is genuine, accepted at the gates in the presence of witnesses. The kitchen register the elder Stone is bound to lay before the council within three days. The question of livelihood is settled by the lord’s order, not by vote. This session is ended.”

He did not say “thank you.” He did not say “you are dismissed.” He said “ended,” and the word settled over the hall like a coffin lid, and everyone understood that no one was to move until he left first.

Torven stood, bowed — shortly, as if it cost him — and went toward the side door. Lissa stayed seated, and I saw her slowly fold the sheet before her, and how her fingers trembled slightly, and how she looked at neither me nor Darven, but at the wax of the royal seal, as if gauging how long it would remain on that table.

Darven came to me. Not to the table, not to Ervin, not to the door — to me, and stopped one step away, and I smelled smoke from his shirt, and beneath it the smell of cold sweat, and beneath it something else, something I had not smelled in three years and had no wish to recognize.

“Stand,” he said softly, so that only I and Ervin could hear.

I stood. The dress split under my arms with a quiet tear, and I felt the cold air of the hall lick the skin beneath the fabric, and felt the scar on my wrist pulse harder in answer, as if the seal had decided that its bearer had finally been seen as she deserved.

Darven took off his cloak. Not the one he had arrived in — a different one, heavy, lined with fur, bearing the crest of Northern Fire on the shoulder, and he laid it over my shoulders without a word. The cloak was heavy, smelled of him, and I had no time to refuse or thank him, because he had already turned and gone to the door, and the hall was silent, and Lissa was silent, and Inara beyond the door was silent too, and I knew that by evening the whole lower city would know of that cloak, and that Inara would weep, and that Torven would note down the gesture in his little book, and that its price would be named later.

I stayed standing in the middle of the hall, in a borrowed torn dress and in his cloak, and Ervin was writing out the last line, and his quill moved slowly, as if he were afraid to finish it.

The cloak lay on my shoulders like a sentence. The fur was soft, too soft for a man I had refused for three years running, and that softness made me want to tear it off myself right there in the hall, while the elders were still filing out and while Lissa was still sitting, pretending to fold her sheet.

I did not. I gathered the fabric at my throat and walked toward the door, and every step echoed in the scar beneath my sleeve, and I knew it was not pain, it was the seal recognizing the scent of its master, and that it did not care that I did not want it to recognize him.

At the door I nearly collided with Inara. She stood behind the jamb, palm pressed to her round belly, and her eyes were wet, and she was not trying to hide it, and that was worse than if she had tried. I stopped. She looked at the cloak, at the crest on my shoulder, and I saw her chin tremble, and saw her bite her lower lip, and saw her release it, as if she had decided not to cry in front of me.

She said not a word. I said none either. Between us there was only her scent — floral, foreign, brought from the Winter Branch — and the scent of his cloak, and I understood that I had lost her that second, because he had gone to the door and she stood at the jamb, and we both knew whom he had gone to.

I passed her, without touching her, but close, and felt the scar beneath my sleeve twitch in her direction, as if it wanted to say something to her on my behalf, and I tightened my grip on the cloak at my throat.

The corridor was colder than the hall. Two servants, unknown to me, new, brought in, plainly, with Inara, stepped back to the wall, and I caught their eyes — quick, identical, sharp. They were looking at the cloak. They were counting the crests. They would tell.

I stopped. I turned to them, and the cloak slipped off one shoulder, and I did not fix it.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

One of them dropped his eyes. The other did not.

“My lady,” he said carefully, and the word sounded like an apology he was not offering me. “Lord Darven ordered us to escort you to your chamber and bring something hot.”

I did not move. I looked at him, and he looked away first, and I understood that he feared not me, but what stood behind me in the shape of a cloak, and that I could not outrun that fear, because the cloak was not me.

“Not now,” I said. “And not from him.”

I let the servants go with a look. They left, and their steps were too quick, and I knew that by evening half the castle would know I had refused his hot food, and the other half would decide I simply had not had time to be hungry.

I made my way to the black stair. Halfway down the landing I stopped and looked down into the dark well, and from below a draft breathed cold, from the kitchen, and smelled of cabbage, and somewhere down there, in the kitchen archive, lay my register, my true document, and I thought that I had to go down before the elders came to their senses and locked the doors.

I took the cloak off only at my own door. I took it off and hung it on the hook, and the hook creaked, and the sound was as if someone in the corridor had stopped to listen. I checked with my hand — nobody. I went inside and turned the lock.

The room was cold. The stove had not been lit since the day before. I looked at the cloak on the hook, at the crest, at the fur, and understood that it hung exactly as a man’s cloak should hang, and that I had no strength to rehang it differently, and that if I left it so, by morning someone would decide I was keeping it, and if I moved it, that I was rejecting it, and both readings would cost me something I did not yet know.

I went to the window. The castle lay below, grey with hoarfrost, and in one window on the second floor a light burned, and I knew it was his window, because only in his study did they light three candles instead of one, and that he was sitting at his desk now, and that in his hand there might be a quill, or might be a cup, and that I could not make it out, and that not knowing made my wrist twitch again, and I pressed it to the stone sill with my palm.

The cold of the sill was good, even, indifferent. The scar beneath answered quietly, without pain, and I understood that it was not angry, it was only listening, and that I had to decide whether I wanted it to hear what I was about to do.

I lifted my hand from the sill, looked at the cloak once more, and went to the door. I had to go down, into the kitchen archive, before Torven sent someone for the register faster than I.

The stair smelled of cold lime and someone else’s smoke, and on every step I counted not steps but the rumor that had already run ahead of me.

On the landing between floors stood Brynn. He was twisting his cap in his hands and staring at the floor, and when I came round the turn he jerked his head up, and I saw his fingers tremble, and how he hid them behind his back at once, as if I could possibly not have noticed.

“My lady,” he said, and his voice was hoarse, “Lord Darven ordered — ”

“I know,” I cut him off. “Something hot. Later.”

He did not move. I stopped one step above him, and we were nearly level, and I saw a fresh bruise beneath his eye, and that he was not looking at my cloak, though he should have been, because the cloak had been on me all the way to the door, and now it was not, and that meant Brynn already knew I had taken it off.

“My lady,” he said, quieter, “down there… Tobin.”

The name fell onto the landing like a coin onto stone. I did not move, and he understood, and began to speak at once, tangling his words, the tips of his ears going red:

“He came to the kitchen right after the council. Sat at the housekeeper’s table. Says they won’t hand over the register without him. Says he returned the seal, and now it’s his turn.”

I looked at him and thought that the boy was lying, and that he knew it himself, and that the bruise under his eye was not the price of lying, but the price of lying badly, and that someone had already hit him for it, and that that someone was sitting below at my table.

“Who let him in?” I asked.

Brynn’s shoulder twitched.

“Marta,” he said, and the name sounded in his mouth like his own guilt. “Marta said a guest of the kitchen has the right.”

I nodded. Guest of the kitchen. Tobin. I knew that rule, I had lived beneath it for three years, when I myself was a guest beneath someone else’s bridge, and now it had come for me from the other side, and it was funny, and I did not let the laugh out, I swallowed it, and it lodged in my throat like a knot.

“Go to Marta,” I said. “Tell her I am coming. Tell her the kindred’s register is not to be released to a guest of the kitchen without the keeper of the archive. Tell her the keeper of the archive is me.”

He nodded and darted down, and his steps were light, hurried, and I thought he would run not to Marta, but back to Darven, and that Darven would know everything before I did, and that it might be for the best, because Torven would not have time.

I went after him, but slowly. Halfway down the flight I stopped, pressed my palm to the wall, and the stone was cold, but beneath the cold I felt a faint, barely noticeable pulse, and understood that the seal was listening, as I had thought, and that it was counting the steps below, and that it did not care whose they were.

The stair let me out straight into the kitchen corridor, and there it smelled of cabbage and fresh bread, and at the stove stood Marta with a towel over her shoulder, and she did not turn when I came in, and that was her answer, and I accepted it.

Tobin sat at the table that three years ago had been mine. He was thin, his hands red from the wind, dressed in a borrowed coat, and on the table before him lay the register, opened to the page with my dowry, and he was running his finger down the lines, as if he could read, and I knew he could not, and that he did not need to.

He raised his head. He saw me, and something quick and hungry flashed in his eyes, and I understood that he had already sold me today, and that the buyer was sitting in the council hall, and that the register was not paper, it was a price, and that I was half an hour late.

“A guest of the kitchen,” I said, “has no right to touch the house’s books.”

He smirked, and the smirk was black, toothless.

“And who is the house?” he asked.

I did not answer. I went over, took the register from under his hand, and his fingers trembled, but he did not hold on, and I closed the book, and laid my palm on top, and felt the seal under my sleeve answer to its warmth, and the scar grow warm, almost hot, and I thought that if Tobin made a move now, I would have time to press my palm harder, and that the seal would decide for itself what to do with him.

Tobin did not move. He leaned back in the chair and folded his arms across his chest.

“Without me the seal is stolen property,” he said calmly. “Everyone in the hall knows it. I am the witness. I am a guest. I have the right.”

“The right,” I repeated, “to sit at the house’s table uninvited by the house. The right to touch another’s register. The right to sell another’s seal to whoever pays the most.”

He did not look away.

“Tobin,” I said quietly, “I will not bargain with you. I will give you a place at the kitchen when the seal is confirmed in council. Until the council, you are a guest. A guest waits. If you do not wish to wait, you will leave the castle by morning, and I will not try to hold you.”

He smirked again, and the smirk grew thinner, and I saw that he was weighing my words, and that they did not please him, and that something lay in his pocket, and that the something was not a coin.

“Until morning,” he repeated, “I will wait.”

At the door into the corridor I stopped. Not because I wanted to turn back, but because the stone under my foot grew warm, and I understood what it meant, and I pressed the register to my chest and walked on, counting my steps so I would not have to count my heartbeats.

The corridor was empty. The candles in the wall sconces had burned down to the middle, and the wax had set on the stone in white trails, and it smelled not of cabbage but of someone else’s perfume, sweet, heavy, and I recognized it before I saw her.

Inara stood at the turn toward her chamber. No candle. No attendants. In a dark dress beneath which a belly was visible, and she held her hands on that belly, and I thought that she could already feel it, and that she already knew that I knew, and that between us there was left one seal and one unspoken name.

“Astrid,” she said quietly. Her voice was even, without tears, and that was worse than tears. “I heard about the council. I heard about the dress.”

I stopped three paces from her. I did not let go of the register. The scar under my sleeve lay on my wrist like a warm coin, and I knew she could see the edge of that coin, because the sleeve of the tight dress had slipped, and I did not fix it.

“The dress,” I said, “will be returned to me.”

“I don’t mean the dress,” she said, and her voice broke, and I understood she was about to ask, and that I did not want to hear. “I mean the elders. They will not let you go. They will make him. You know how it works.”

“I know,” I said. “I was there. In a borrowed dress.”

She looked away, and I saw her knuckles go white on her belly, and saw her swallow, and saw her look at me again, and in her eyes was what I had seen in everyone’s today — hunger and fear, half and half.

“I have nothing,” she said. “I have only him. And the child. If they close him in — ”

“If they close him in,” I cut in, and my voice was hoarse, “they will give you a room in the Winter Branch. They will give you a name. They will give you everything they promised.”

She blinked. I saw her head sway, and thought she would fall, and that I would not catch her, and that it would cost me something I could never get back.

“That is not why I came,” she said softly. “I came because he called me.”

“He did not call you,” I said. “He wrote to your father. Those are different things.”

She did not answer. I saw her lips tremble, and saw her bite them, and saw her look at the register in my hands, and saw her understand that it was not her document, and that for that document she would have to pay more than she had.

I went past her. Halfway round the turn I stopped, and I do not know why, and I turned back, and she was still standing by the wall, her hands on her belly, and I thought she was beautiful, and that I hated her, and that these were two different things, and that both of them were worth more now than the whole register.

“Inara,” I said, and she flinched at her own name. “If the child is his, you have nothing to fear from the council. If not, you have nothing to fear from me. Decide for yourself.”

I left. My footsteps rang through the empty corridor, and I counted them to her door, and to my door, and to the stair, and to the place where the stone under my foot grew cold, and where the seal under my sleeve stopped burning, and where I stopped and pressed the register to my chest and understood what I had just done, and that I would not take it back.

Beyond the wall, in his study, a chair creaked. I stood another minute, and went to my room.

He stood up, pushed the chair back, and the chair scraped across the stone, and the sound was long, and Marta at the stove finally turned, and I saw in her eyes what she had not said aloud, and what I understood without words: someone had already looked at the register. Not me. Someone before me.

I pressed the book to my chest. The seal under my sleeve burned steady, and I knew that Darven beyond the wall, in his study, felt the same thing, and that he would stand now, and that he would come here, and that I had to decide whether to open the door to him or meet him in the corridor, and that both decisions would cost me something I did not yet know.

I went toward the door, the register in both hands, the scar under my sleeve pulsing in time with my steps, and I counted the stairs, and thought that the price Tobin had named was no longer his, and that the price I would name had not yet been spoken, and that between those two prices stood one door, one seal, and one man beyond the wall, listening to me walk.

Chapter 5. The Register in the Kitchen

The kitchen smelled of yesterday’s bread and someone else’s sweat. I ducked through the low door, and this time the frame seemed lower than it had three years ago, though no one had rebuilt the jamb. I had simply forgotten how it felt to belong here. Marta glanced up from the worktable, wiped her hands on her apron, nodded — exactly as she would nod to any guest, no more — and I understood what I was now. A guest who bore a seal. Not the mistress.

Tobin the cook, my age, now a guest of the kitchen himself, sat on an overturned bucket by the hearth, peeling turnips. His hands were black with soil, grime caked beneath his nails, and he did not rise when I entered. He only lifted his eyes and said, “Lady Astrid.” Without irony, but without deference either, and I felt the muscle in my cheek twitch. He did not ask why I had come. He waited for me to speak, and I did.

“I need the register. The one kept by the cooks. Old, in a leather cover, with the house seal pressed into the corner.”

Tobin stopped peeling. Looked at Marta. Marta looked at me. I held my arms stiff against my sides so they would not see them tremble, and it was not working well, because my left hand — the one with the scar beneath the sleeve — always shakes harder when I am nervous, and Tobin knew that. He also knew the register existed. I saw his nostrils flare slightly when I mentioned the leather cover. So the register was here. So it had not been burned.

“Lady,” he said, “those are kitchen books. A guest with a seal has no business in them.”

“A bearer of the seal has business in any book of the house where her name is recorded,” I answered, and surprised myself with how steady it sounded. “I have the right to see it. The steward will confirm.”

Tobin set down the knife. Stood. He stood a full two heads above me, broad across the shoulders, and he smelled of turnips and pitch and that particular scent of poverty that no new apron can ever scrub from a pauper’s things. He spoke quietly, so only Marta and I could hear.

“Lady, you have not been in this house for three years. You have not been in any house for three years. The register sat where no one thought to look. I found it first. I preserved it. I have a matter to discuss with you, and the matter concerns a debt the house owes me, not one I owe the house.”

I did not look away.

“Where is the register?”

“In the chest under the stairs,” Marta said suddenly, without lifting her eyes from the dough. “Second from the bottom. I have the key.”

Tobin turned sharply toward her. She kept kneading. I held out my hand without a word. Marta wiped her palm on her apron, drew a ring of keys from beneath her belt, slipped off a small copper key, and laid it in my palm. The key was warm. Marta watched me close my fist around it, and her face wore that expression I remembered from my old life: she had done what she believed was right, and she did not intend to apologize for it.