Chapter 2

I didn’t sleep. I lay on the cot in the box room off the cellar with the brown roll under my pillow and the folded note on my chest, and I read it in the dark by the light of nothing, because I already knew every word.

Who taught you to write like that?

My grandmother had. At her kitchen table in Thornwood, with a pot of ink and the backs of old prescriptions, because she was the pack doctor and paper was precious. Cross your t’s long, Elowen, so nobody can add a stroke and turn them into something else. Put a hook on your g’s so they can’t become a nine. A doctor’s hand. A hand that couldn’t be forged.

I hadn’t thought about her hands in years. I thought about them all night.

***

Before dawn, I did the other half of my job.

The cellar was my night. The kitchen was my morning—lighting the fires, setting the bread to rise, scrubbing whatever the feast had left behind before the cook came down at six and found anything to complain about. The Long Night feast had left a great deal. I stood at the big stone sink with my sleeves rolled to the elbow and worked through forty swan-folded napkins’ worth of plates, and tried not to think about cedar.

“Excuse me.”

I nearly dropped a gravy boat.

There was a man in the kitchen doorway. Not the man with the lantern; I knew that instantly, because he smelled of leather and woodsmoke and nothing dark at all. He was tall—they were all tall, the King’s people; I had heard the floorboards complain about it all night—with short fair hair and a soldier’s plain coat, and he was looking at me with the polite, faintly puzzled expression of someone who has walked into the wrong room.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I was looking for—” He stopped, and looked at the bread proving on the side, and visibly changed his mind about what he had been looking for. “Is any of that ready?”

I didn’t answer. Luna Delphine’s second rule.

He waited. When I didn’t speak, he didn’t get annoyed, the way the pack’s wolves did when I went silent on them. He just nodded slowly, as though silence were a perfectly reasonable answer, and went and sat on the stool by the hearth.

I cut him the heel of yesterday’s loaf, because that was what there was, and put it on a plate with butter and set it beside him. He looked at it as if I had handed him something precious.

“Thank you,” he said.

I went back to the sink. I felt him watching me—not the way the pack’s males watched the kitchen girls, but carefully, the way you watch a deer at the edge of a field. Curious. A little sad, maybe.

“Do you work in the cellar as well?” he asked my back. “With the books?”

My hands were still in the water.

“I only ask,” he said, very mildly, “because there’s ink on your wrist. Just there. And there’s a smell of lamp oil on you, and old paper, and nobody washes plates by lamplight with ink on their wrists unless they’ve come straight from somewhere else.”

I scrubbed harder.

He finished his bread. He got up and brought his plate to the sink himself, which no guest in that house had ever done in eight years, and set it down at my elbow. Up close he was younger than I had thought, and his eyes were hazel with grey flecks in them, and he was clearly trying very hard not to frighten me.

And there it was, on the sleeve of his plain coat, faint as a thread: cedar smoke, and cold, and the inside of a church in winter.

He had been with the man with the lantern. Recently. Close enough for the scent to rub off.

I looked up at him before I could stop myself. He saw it. Something moved in his face—not surprise, exactly. Confirmation.

“My name’s Rhys,” he said quietly. “If anyone asks, you didn’t speak to me, and I didn’t see you. All right?”

I gave him the smallest nod in the world.

He smiled, a quick, crooked, relieved smile, and went to the door. Then he stopped, and reached into his coat, and put something down on the end of the table without looking at me, as if he were leaving it there by accident.

When he had gone, I went and looked. It was a honey cake from the feast. The good kind, the kind with the almonds pressed into the top in the shape of a star, that the cooks made once a year for the Long Night and that I had been carrying up to the great hall on silver trays for eight years without ever once being allowed to eat.

I ate it standing at the sink, very slowly, with my eyes closed. It tasted like the inside of a summer I had never had.

***

That night, when I went down to the cellar, I took the folded note out of my pocket and smoothed it flat on my desk. I looked at it for a long time.

Then I dipped my pen and wrote, underneath his question, in my grandmother’s hand with the long-crossed t’s and the hooked g’s:

My grandmother. She was a doctor.

I left it on top of my fair copy, squared to the corner, exactly as he had left it.

I sat in the dark behind the third row of shelves until four in the morning, waiting. I heard footsteps on the stairs twice and both times it was only the house settling. He didn’t come.

At four, I gave up and went to set the bread.

When I came back down at seven, the note was gone. In its place was another one, in that strong, slanting hand.

Then she taught you well. I need to ask you about the eleventh line, and I would rather not do it in a cellar where anyone could come down the stairs. The old mill above the river. Today, at noon. Come if you like. If you don’t, I won’t look for you, and I won’t ask anyone else.

It was signed with a little drawing. Not a name. A lantern.