Chapter 85

CASPIAN

I had read the nine letters, by my own count, a little over three hundred times. Once, in the first summer, by the study fire at four in the morning, with my hands shaking so badly that I had to lay the pages flat to hold them still.

I had read every one of those three hundred times looking for her.

On the thirty-third night after the cells were found empty, I took out the folder I had laid on the desk and put back in the drawer unopened, three weeks before, and sent for Quill, and decided to read them looking for me.

***

He came in a brown coat buttoned over his nightshirt, with his glass in its case and his own lamp, because he trusted no lamp but his own. He looked at the floor by the hearth, where a small silver wolf’s head had lain for three weeks because I had told the maids to leave it. He stepped around it, as he had the first time, and sat down.

“Majesty.”

“I want you to read them to me,” I said. “Not the translation.