Chapter 5 - The Watcher

My new room is larger than my mother's whole tower.

There is a bed I could lose myself in, and a large window overlooking the open courtyard below, its stained glass doors patterned with two wolves and iris flowers, opening onto a small balcony. There is a separate room, too, with a tub and a basin. Here the air is soft, but a restlessness fills me. Soft things, in my experience, are never permanent, and never come without great cost.

The second thing I notice is Iona, who crosses the floor the moment the door opens and takes both of my hands in hers, and I cannot help but smile with relief at her familiar face.

“They told me you were to be married,” she says, and sniffles. Her eyes are red and puffy, as though she has been crying, and I feel my own eyes prickle at the thought. “Married! That is better than we hoped. I was sure they meant to send you home. Or worse!” She searches my face. “Are you all right?”

“I am not sure yet,” I say, because it is true.

“That is not a no.” She pulls me to the chair by the window and presses me into it and begins, at once, to fuss with my hair, because Iona's hands must be busy or her fear will eat her whole. “I don't like this place, Bree. The servants here do not speak unless they are spoken to, and not one of them will meet my eye. And the shadows in the halls move wrong. I have seen it. They lean.” She shivers. “I don't like any of it.”

“You do not have to stay,” I say, the way I have said it since Eloria.

“Don't start.” She tugs a curl straighter than it wants to go. “I go where you go. That is the end of it.”

I let her have the fussing. It is her way of loving me, and I have long since learned to sit still and let her. I cannot help but chuckle at the familiarity of it.

Then we both hear it. A knock on the door, but before either of us can speak the door opens anyway, and the spear-man is inside my room, filling the frame the way Lykos fills a frame, though he is leaner than Lykos, shorter, and far less warm.

Iona goes very still. Her hand tightens in my hair.

“Leave us,” Cassius says. Not to me. To her.

Iona does not move. Iona, who flinches at shadows, plants her feet and does not move, and in that moment I feel a love for her so fierce and so sudden it aches. But I do not want her to get hurt.

“It is all right,” I tell her. “Wait outside.”

She goes, slowly, and leaves the door open behind her out of spite. Cassius closes it.

He does not sit. He walks the edges of the room instead, unhurried, looking at my few unpacked things the way another man might look at evidence.

“You should know that no one here wanted this,” he says.

“I know.”

“The emperor has enemies who will use you. A foreign wife with no magic is a gift to every lord who wants him weakened.” He lifts the lid of my trunk with two fingers, looks inside, lets it fall shut. “And you should know that I will be watching you. Every letter you send north. Every servant you speak to. Every window you stand beside a moment too long.”

“That seems wise,” I say.

He stops.

I have found, over the years, that the truth is the best thing to hand to a suspicious man. He does not expect it, and it throws him off his footing. But I also know my mother's life hangs on my compliance, and that is never far from my mind.

“You agree with me,” he says slowly.

“Of course I agree with you. If I were in your position I would be wary too.” I say it as I think of my mother, of how, even alive and standing here, I am bound now to a marriage I do not want, and her medicine bound in turn to my obedience.

I fold my hands in my lap. “You are the only person in this court doing your work properly. It would be stupid of me to resent you for it.”

He studies me for a long moment. Whatever he came here to find, he does not find it, and it pulls his jaw tight.

“The emperor believes you cannot lie,” he says. “I have watched better liars than you die swearing they were honest.”

“I am sure you have.”

“So which is it?” He crosses the room and stops in front of me, and this close I can see that his eyes are not cold at all. They are tired. They are the eyes of a man who has kept one person alive in a nest of vipers for years. “Are you the one honest thing the north ever made, or the best liar my emperor has ever let through his door?”

I give him the only answer I have.

“I don't know how to make you believe me. That is the trouble with the truth. It sounds exactly like a lie, especially to a person who has already decided not to trust it.”

Something moves behind his eyes. Not trust. Not anything close to trust. But something.

“Rest while you can,” he says at last, and turns for the door. “You will need it. This court eats soft things, and you have three days until it has the chance.”

“Excuse me, but what do you mean, three? Was I not to be married within the week?” I ask.

Cassius scoffs. “You will find Theron is not a patient man. He has already made the arrangements. You are to be wed in three days' time. A seamstress will be sent up shortly to take your measurements for the wedding dress before you can retire for the evening.”

He is gone before I can tell him that I am not soft. That the north does not make soft things. That whatever else I am, I have walked out of every room that was ever built to break me, and I mean to walk out of this one too.

The door clicks shut, and the room is mine again, and only now, with no one left to perform for, does my anxiety begin to build in my chest.

I do not want to marry him.

I try to picture it, the altar, the vows, the cold gold eyes turned on me for the rest of my life.

Three days.

I have known the man for the length of one afternoon, and in three days I will belong to him in front of the whole south, and I cannot make the thought hold still long enough to look at it.

Restless, I get up. I trail my hand over the stained glass door that leads to the balcony and press my palms flat against the glass.

I take a deep breath. The truth is, I made it. Even though I hate what is about to happen, I am glad to be alive. I was sent here to be refused and killed, or caged, and instead I am standing in a beautiful room with a bed I could drown in, and some traitorous part of me is grateful, and I hate that part, and I cannot make it be quiet.

I think of Cassius's warning.

If he is watching, how am I to send anything to Master Torsten without seeming suspicious?

I take my hands from the glass and begin to bite my nails.

My mother.

Somewhere far to the north she is lying in a cold tower, and the only thread that keeps the medicine flowing to her runs through me, through my compliance, through every letter Cassius has just promised to read. Being alive is not the same as being safe.

Marriage is not the same as free.

Whatever I have won today, I have won on loan, and the debt is her life.

I cross to the other side of the bedroom and stare out the plain glass window. In the distance I can see the pale ivory towers and their shadowy banners. I need to find a way. I will not let my mother's medicine stop because of my own flaws.