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

The chest stood where she had said, in the dark corner beneath the stairs to the storeroom. The small seal of House Northfire was indeed pressed into the lid, and I traced it with my fingers, and the scar beneath my sleeve answered as though I had touched something hot. The lid groaned. On top lay sacks of grain, beneath them a stack of oiled rags, and beneath the rags — a leather-bound register, thick and dark, tied with cord. I drew it out, set it on my knees, untied the strings. The pages had yellowed, but the ink held. I turned them slowly. Expenses for salt. For firewood. For candles. For the cook’s wages. The entries ran on by year, and I searched for the year three years ago, when my name had been struck from the house records and my signature burned in the judgment hall.

I found it. “Expense of dissolution: silver — to the royal scribe; silver — to Judge Lisse; silver — for the temporary upkeep of the seal-bearer during proceedings.” The lines ran in an even hand, beside them the treasurer’s signature and the steward’s signature and a small wax seal, and — in the margin, in a different hand, hurried — a note: “The seal-bearer’s dowry transferred to the house treasury by decision of the council.”

I read the note twice. My throat closed. I had known they had taken the dowry — the whole castle knew — but I had not known it had been entered in the register as an expense, and that the entry bore a seal, and that it could be shown to the council, and that the council would be obliged to explain where twenty-six pounds of silver had gone — silver my father had gathered coin by coin from the neighbors when I was wed. I closed the register. Returned it to the chest. Locked it. The key stayed with me.

“Lady,” Tobin said behind me. I did not turn. “Lady, you have taken the key. You have taken the book. I have a matter to discuss with you, and the price is not silver.”

“The price we will discuss before witnesses,” I answered, still without turning, and my voice did not falter, and that was perhaps the most costly thing I had managed all day. “Now I must go to the steward. The seal-bearer has a legal question for him.”

I left the kitchen. The register I left in the chest, and the key sat in the pocket of a borrowed dress, and the pocket was tight, and the key dug into my hip, and I felt it with every step, and the scar beneath my sleeve throbbed — not sharply, but the way a tooth aches before rain — and I knew I had to return to my room, take out scribe Ervin’s ledger from beneath the mattress, and ask him to make a copy. I walked the corridor, and beneath my feet was stone, and the stone was warm, and for the first time in three years I knew that what sat in my pocket was not alms but a key, and that behind that key lay a document, and behind that document my name, and that my name, perhaps for the first time in all these years, was worth something.

At the door to my room I stopped. Listened. Beyond the wall, silence. The particular silence of a house where someone lies awake counting the beats of his own heart so as not to think. I turned the key in the lock — my lock, on my side — and stepped inside, and shut the door behind me, and leaned my back against it, and drew the copper key from my pocket, and set it on the table, and it gave a small clink against the wood, and the sound was so small that only someone standing beyond the wall, too afraid to knock, could have heard it.

The copper key lay on the table, and I stared at it as though it might vanish if I looked away. Small, warm from my pocket, with a groove on the bit worn to a shine by someone else’s fingers. I ran the pad of my thumb across it and felt the scar beneath my sleeve answer again — dull, low, like a note struck on the wrong instrument.

Beyond the wall, a cough. Just once. Dry, into a fist. I went still. The cough was his — I would have known it among a hundred, even through stone, even through three winters. He was not sleeping. He had heard me come in. He had heard the key strike the wood. And now he had let me know he was there, and I did not know why he had done it — whether to stop me leaning against the door with my back, or to let me understand that he was counting my steps.

I straightened. Slowly peeled my shoulder blades from the door. Crossed to the table. The key lay where I had left it. I sat on the edge of the bed, boots still on, because in a borrowed, too-tight dress pulling off boots was torture, and because I did not intend to settle in here as though it were home. Then I stood, went to the small stove in the corner, felt the air above it. The stove was barely warm. Ervin had told me that a laundress had lived in this room before, that she had been turned out for thievery, and that since then no one had been put up here, because the steward considered the room unlucky. Unlucky. I smiled without mirth. For a pauper with a dragon’s seal, it suited.

I sat again. Drew out from beneath the mattress scribe Ervin’s thin ledger — he had left it with me yesterday, along with a stub of a candle, and had said, without meeting my eyes, “If something needs to be written, my lady, I will copy it from the archivist. Only let me know before midday.” Ervin was the only person in this house who addressed me as “my lady” as though the word still meant something. I suspected he did it not from courtesy but from professional habit: a scribe may not address a bearer of the seal otherwise, or his copies would not be accepted by the capital archive.

I opened the ledger to a clean page. The pen lay beside it, and the inkwell. I dipped the pen and began to write slowly, forming each letter the way my mother had taught me — with pressure, without flourishes, without blots.

“To the Steward of Castle Northfire, Torstein called the Reckoner. The bearer of the seal of the house, Lady Astrid of House Northfire, widow of Lord Darven, demands an accounting of the silver paid into the house treasury as dowry in the year of the marriage. The sum — twenty-six pounds of silver, city-minted coinage, itemized in the register of kitchen expenses for the year of the wedding, on the page sealed with wax. I require your answer in writing within three days, according to the paragraph concerning the seal-bearer’s right to an accounting of expenditures in the house wherein she is maintained through the winter cycle.”

I read it through. The lines came out even, without blotches. I signed at the bottom — small, sharp, the way I had once signed in the house ledger. Back then the signature had been elegant, with a curl. Now it was short, almost angry. My hand did not tremble. My left hand — the one with the scar — lay on the table, and beneath the sleeve of the borrowed dress there was warmth, and I knew that he felt it through the wall, and that he was probably sitting on his bed now, looking at his own hands, and did not know why he had coughed.

Beyond the wall, footsteps. Slow at first, then quicker. I heard his door open — onto the corridor, not into my room. Footsteps on stone. Receding. Silence.

I set down the pen. Sat for a while, looking at my own signature. Then I folded the sheet, sealed it with wax from the candle, held it to the stove, melted the tip of the knife and pressed it down. The seal came out crooked — not the house seal, merely a drop — but Ervin would understand. I would hide the letter beneath the floorboard tomorrow, when I went to him. Today was too soon. Today let Tobin think I had only taken the key.

I stood. Crossed to the door. Pressed my ear to it. No footsteps, no breathing. He was gone. Gone somewhere into his own house, in which I now lived by right of the seal, and from this knowledge something ached beneath my ribs and pulled at my chest at once. I laid my palm against the door. His door — on the other side, in the corridor, without my lock. My door — here, with my key, with my right to refuse entry.

I took my hand away and returned to the table. Put the copper key back in the pocket of the dress. The pocket was tight, and the key dug into my hip again, and I thought that by spring there would likely be a bruise there, and that it would be my first bruise in this house, and that it would not be from a blow but from my own document, and that this was perhaps the most honest price I had ever been asked to pay.

Beyond the wall, silence again. The silence of a house where someone lies awake counting the beats of his own heart so as not to think. I sat on the bed, rested my hands on my knees, and looked at the dark square of the window, behind which there was as yet neither snow nor dawn, and waited for him to come back, and was angry at myself for waiting.

The cloak still hung over the back of the chair. I had hung it there as soon as I came in — not in the wardrobe, not on the hook by the door, but over the chair, because the hook was his, and the wardrobe was too deep, and if I had put the cloak away inside it, I would never have been able to explain whose it was. So it hung there, like someone else’s promise dropped across my furniture, and I tried not to look at it, and looked at it more often than at the ledger.

Beyond the wall, the bed creaked. Not a cough, not footsteps — a creak, heavy and uneven, as though someone had sat down too suddenly and the springs had not yet settled. Then silence. Then a voice, low and hoarse, as though it came not from the throat but from beneath the ribs.

“You’re not sleeping.”

It was not a question. It was a statement, spoken into the wall, into the stone, into that seam where the plaster had already cracked from the winter damp. I went still. My left hand — the one with the scar — I held on the table, and beneath the sleeve of the borrowed dress the seal answered at once, like a dog to a whistle. Heat climbed up my forearm, into my shoulder, into my neck, and I knew — did not think, knew — that he felt it too, because that first night after the council, when I had come back wearing the cloak, the scar had ached on his arm as well, and Brinn had told me so in the morning, in the kitchen, while he poured water.

“I am not sleeping,” I answered, and my own voice sounded too even, too ready, as though I had rehearsed the line while writing the letter to the steward.

“The porridge is going cold.”

I looked at the bowl Brinn had brought. The porridge was cold, greasy, with a scorched rim. The plate was clay, cracked straight down the middle and glued with something brown. I had not touched it since Brinn set it on the table, and he had seen that, and Darven had most likely heard as well — Brinn knocking at the door, me saying, “Leave it at the threshold,” Brinn saying, “My lady, the lord commanded,” and me saying, “The lord may take his own supper.”

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