Chapter 22- A Room Like Home

Iona wakes me before the light, and her hands are shaking. “My lady. Get up! You have to get up now!”

I jolt awake, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “What is it?”

“The Emperor has called the court. The full court, my lady, all of them, at first bell.” She is already pulling my gown from the press, moving too fast, not meeting my eyes. “You are summoned. Now. There are guards at the door while I dress you.”

I realize just how serious this is. Quickly I get up and let Iona help me get ready, her hands shaking against the laces, neither of us saying the thing we both know. And the moment I step out of the room the guards grab me by the arms.

“Ow! What are you doing? I can walk.” But the guards do not listen as they drag me down through the palace and into the great hall, the same long hall where I first met Theron.

Theron is on the throne. Not standing to meet me the way he does in private, but seated, still, the crown a hard line on his brow, the whole court ranged down the hall in their furs and their jewels to watch the hollow northern girl be hauled the length of the stone. The guards stop me at the foot of the dais.

“I must admit, I am almost impressed.” His voice is cool, unhurried, and it carries to every corner of the silent hall. “You walked into my den. You slept in my bed. And you passed my secrets right into the hands of fools, all while looking at me with those innocent eyes.”

It seems it is too late. The time has come. I see Cassius and Lord Petros arranged on one side of him and Lykos on the other, and I understand that Iona’s warning came too late, that Theron already knows, that he has called his whole court to order so everyone can watch.

“Did you really think I would not notice the leaks, sweetheart?” He tilts his head, he sounds almost amused, and that is the most frightening thing about him. “Or did you simply underestimate who you were playing with?”

He does not wait for an answer. He does not need one. “Commander. Tell them what you told me. Let no one leave this hall calling it a jealous husband’s whim.”

Cassius steps out from the foot of the dais with a leather folio in his hands, and I know what is in it before he opens it, because Iona stood in my room last night and tried to warn me about it. I thought I had more time. A day at least, but it seems I was wrong.

Cassius opens the folio. He reads it the way he reads everything, flat and complete, which is worse than if he took any pleasure in it at all.

"Since the thaw, the Empress has met in private with an envoy of the north. Torsten of Eloria. In the lower garden, at the changing of the guard, each time after her escort had been sent off on some errand. Fourteen occasions that I can prove." He turns a page. "After eleven of them, a dispatch reached Eloria inside the week. Troop movements. Supply roads. Which garrisons stood thin and which stood whole. Word that ran north faster than any loyal rider could have carried it."

"And I will tell you what else." Petros cannot hold it in. "The escorts were always sent off for something trivial. I have watched her empty a corridor of her own guards a dozen times and thought it strange and said nothing, because who accuses an empress of wanting a walk alone." He turns to the rest of the nobles in the hall. "And she asked questions at council that no bride asks. Which passes we held. Where the Kolzhvar line ran thin. I sat across that table and watched her file every answer away behind those quiet, downcast eyes. She may look meek, but it was all a lie!"

"Every road she was shown," Cassius says, and he closes the folio, "her father had sent either scouts or patrols within the week. That is not chance. It is a map, drawn from inside this house, and handed to the man who has spent two years bleeding us." He does not raise his voice once. He does not have to. “The Empress of the south,” he finishes, “was Emperor Canute’s daughter before she was ever our Empress. Eloria sent us a bride, and we opened the gate to a spy.”

The hall comes apart.

People are shouting for my death out loud. A hundred voices finding the same word, and Lord Petros is on his feet before any of them, his face bright with the joy of a man who has waited a long time for this.

“Treason,” he says, like a toast. “Proven treason, in the Emperor’s own bed. There is only one answer to it, Your Majesty, and that is death! If you do not give it, every throne between here and the sea will hear that the south lets its enemies wear its crown.”

I say nothing.

There is nothing I can say that does not cost more than my silence. If I deny it, they bring Torsten’s name and the garden and the dates, and I am caught in the lie in front of all of them. If I explain it, I have to say my mother is sick and held hostage, and I will not tell this to a room full of people who want me dead.

As panic bubbles in my ribs, I see Aodh walk up to me. He curls along my legs and I lean down and hold him in my arms. I touch the softness of his fur. I try to ignore the roar of the nobles shouting for my head. I can feel Theron’s eyes on me, but I cannot meet them.

“She did not act alone.” Petros says again, circling now. “A spy needs hands. A maid to carry the letters, a guard to look the other way. Give the court the names, Commander, and give us the whole rot, not only the flower of it.”

I briefly look to Iona in fear, before turning my gaze up to Theron and Cassius. But to my surprise Cassius does not react.

He is quiet for a moment.

“There are no accomplices,” he says.

“Commander—”

“There are none that I can prove,” Cassius says again, “and I will not bring others into this if I cannot prove otherwise. Based on my observations, the Empress acted alone.”

He does not look at me when he says it, and he does not look at the gallery either, where I know, without turning, that Iona is standing with her hands knotted in her apron. I realize then that Cassius just lied in the court room to protect her.

“Commander.” Theron speaks now, and the hall goes still. “You have watched her longer than any man here. I will have your judgment, not your evidence. Based on what you gathered, do you think the Empress did this freely?”

Cassius turns and looks at me, the tired, almost-sorry look I have seen from him before, and I know he is deciding, in this one breath, what I am to be.

“No,” he says. “I do not believe she did. Torsten left last night and he was the main accomplice. I also heard from several spies that she has been writing to a sick maid up north.”

Confused murmurs fill the court and Melina steps forward.

“Your majesty, if I may,” she says politely. Theron nods.

“Speak.”

“You know I hail from House Corvus, and that we have always had close ties with ravens and crows.”

Theron nods.

“I’m aware.”

“Well, the maid you speak of is likely Lady Bree’s mother. Her biological mother. Based on what Cassius reported, I would not put it past Emperor Canute to keep Lady Bree’s mother hostage.”

More murmurs, and Lord Petros speaks, “even so, she is not innocent. Her loyalty should be to the Skiagreth, not some woman in a sick bed.”

Cassius chimes in next.

“A woman whose mother is dying in Canute’s keep is not a free woman, Majesty. I have watched a great many people lie, and what I saw in the Empress was not a spy who delighted in it. It was someone paying a ransom she could not stop paying. That is not innocence. But it is not treason’s whole heart either, and this court should hear the difference before it asks for a head.”

Across the dais, Lykos says nothing, but his jaw is tight, and he is not looking at me like a man who wants me dead. Petros makes a sound of pure disgust.

“Sentiment—”

“Is not what the Commander offered,” Theron says, and his voice cuts the word clean off. “He offered testimony. I asked for it. Sit down, Petros.”

Petros sits.

Theron rises, and the hall rises with him because it must, and his eyes come back to me. There is no warmth in them and no death in them either, only something colder and more certain than both.

“You thought you could sabotage my kingdom from within.” He says it almost lightly, walking the edge of the dais, every soul in the hall leaning to hear it. “Sweetheart. You just signed your permanent residency. You are not going anywhere. From now on, the only person you will be reporting to is me.” His gaze does not leave mine. “Send her to the north tower. She leaves it when I say she leaves it, and no one, no one, speaks with her but me.”

It is not the answer Petros wanted, but I can tell it is not mercy.

It is ownership.

The Emperor has caught a knife in his own house, and he is not breaking it, and he is not throwing it away. He is keeping it. A room full of people who came for a killing find they cannot say a word against a man who has just turned his own betrayal into a show of strength. Petros’s mouth opens and closes and makes no sound at all.

Theron does not wait to see it done. He walks out, and he does not look at me again.

The guards take me up to the north tower, and the room is comfortable but sparse. I sit alone in this room with Aodh and look around.

It is round, and high, and cold, with one window too narrow to be anything but a slit of sky. A narrow bed. A washstand. A chair. Stone that has never been warm and never will be.

I stood in a room exactly like this for sixteen years of my life after my father found out I was hollow. At age six I was sent to a tower in the north, the bastard girl kept out of the way.

I know the size of this tower without even pacing it. I know how the cold comes up through the floor, and how many steps it is from the bed to the window and back, because I walked that same distance ten thousand times in another tower in another country. The guards place me inside and lock the door. I sit on the bed, with Aodh still in my arms.

That is the one mercy.

He jumps out of my arms then and decides to sit on the narrow window sill. He looks at me and speaks.

“Should I help you break free?”

“No. I do deserve this. I just thought I had more time before it would come to light.”

I sit there and think mostly. Left to my thoughts as my anxiety ebbs and builds throughout the day.

Theron doesn’t come until it is later in the evening when the guard has already changed twice and I have stopped expecting him.

I hear the lock.

I sit up from the bed and stand to greet him as he enters. Theron is alone. He wears no crown now.

“Tell me,” he says at last, and the coolness is still there in his voice, but there is an edge under it now. “What did Canute promise you that I could not provide? Gold? Freedom?” He steps into the room. “Or did you simply want to see what it takes to make a king bleed?”

“I do not want you to bleed,” I say. “And the whole court now knows why.”

“So it seems.” He circles me then. “Did you think I did not know, Bree? I have known there was a leak in this house since the spring. I did not know it was you, not for certain, not until lately. But I knew, and I fed it. Half the soft places you drew your father are soft because I made them soft, on purpose. He has spent good men taking towns I wanted him to have. You did not open my throat. You handed me a map of exactly where your father would look, and I have been reading it all season.”

The floor tilts under me. Every road I drew in terror, every night I hated myself for it, and he was standing behind me the whole while, turning it against the man I drew it for. I do not know whether to weep with relief or with shame. “Then why,” I manage. “If I cost you nothing. Why any of this? Why the tower?”

“Because it cost me something else.” And the edge finally cuts all the way through. “Not the empire. I can armor the empire. I could not armor the part of me that told you that you were not carrying it alone and meant it more than I have meant anything in my life.”

“Then let me give you the one thing you do not already have.” I make myself say it, because he has earned it, because I am so tired of holding it. “You want to know what Canute promised me. Not gold. Not freedom. Not your blood. My mother is dying. Just as Melina has said. It’s true.”

My eyes water.

“Remember before, when I said she was sick and you would help bring her here? I had hoped. I wanted to. But I didn’t know how to bring it up or what to say and then everything happened so fast.” Tears fall from my face and I find my hands flapping against my will, but I catch myself and clutch my dress tightly.

Something in his face goes very still.

“In Eloria. My father keeps her alive with a medicine that comes from his hand and no one else’s, and the day I stopped being useful to him was the day it stopped coming. He did not send me south to love you, Theron. He sent me to collect information in exchange for her care, and he told me that every road I drew him bought another month of her breathing. So I drew them. I hated every hour of it and I drew them anyway, to buy my dying mother weeks. If that is treason, then it is treason. But I never wanted to hurt you. I just wanted her to not die. She is the only person who has ever loved me.”

He is quiet for a long time.

“You could have told me,” he says. Not an argument. The wound itself, spoken plainly. “I told you that you were not alone. And you stood in my study, in my bed, in my library, and let me believe we were on the same side, while you carried this the whole time. I am not angry that you were afraid, Bree. I am angry that you were afraid of me. That after everything, you looked at me and decided I was one more danger to be managed.”

"I have been afraid my whole life!" I say with tears. "Of my father. Of the court that raised me. Of every person who ever decided what I was worth before I opened my mouth. I have always been afraid."

My hands want to move again and I let them, just once, I let my hand flap before I make them stop. "And you are right. You offered to help, and at the time I was still unusure. But I held onto that hope. But I was scared, scared to tell you everything because telling you everything meant trusting you with her life, and I could not afford to be wrong about that. So I said nothing. I let her get worse. I chose the fear I knew over the help I did not, and she has paid for it every day since. So have you. So have I."

More tears fall down from my eyes. I try to rub them away, and Theron steps closer. His golden eyes bore into mine.

A slow, humorless smirk touches his lips."You should have taken the gamble on me," his tone low. "Just once. It would have cost you nothing but a fraction of that stubborn pride, and it might have bought her a season. Even a new life."

He doesn't say it to wound me, but the casual indifference in his delivery is what makes it cut so deep.

"But I suppose I can’t blame you. I’ve spent my entire reign ensuring that anyone foolish enough to miscalculate me pays with their life. I built the monster you were so terrified of, sweetheart. I don’t get to act surprised now that you were too weak to face me."

The quiet stretches between us, heavy and suffocating. It is full of every road I did not walk.

"Here is how this game ends." The mock-amusement vanishes from his voice, replaced by that chilling, absolute composure. It isn't a threat; it is the flat certainty of an emperor who has already written the execution order.

"You will stay in this tower. Not because I think you'll run back to your father, you aren't that foolish. But because the rest of the court needs to see me treat a traitor exactly as they deserve. And frankly, because I need time to decide if the part of me that didn't tear you apart tonight belongs to the crown, or if I'm just pathetic enough to still want you. We are both going to find out." He looks away and idly turns the ring on his finger.

"As for your mother." A dark, fleeting shadow crosses his face, transforming the generous offer he once made into something sharp and weaponized. "I offered to bring her south when I thought she was merely ill. You omitted the fact that she was dying, and that your father was holding her hostage. If you had just crawled to me and said it, I would have burned his kingdom to ashes a season ago." A brief pause, his eyes narrowing. "I am going to rip her out of Eloria. I won't insult your intelligence by promising she will survive the extraction. But Canute has spent years trying to force me to my knees. He's about to find out I'm a much better hunter than he is. I’ll make him choke on his own leash."

It undoes something in me I did not know was still knotted. My eyes fill again, and this time I do not fight my hands. I let them flutter, letting him watch my weakness. He doesn't look away; his gaze remains utterly fixed on me, consuming.

"Do not look for forgiveness from me tonight," Theron says, stepping closer until his shadow completely swallows me. "It might take a lifetime for me to overlook this. A pretty excuse doesn't wash away blood, even if it’s a reason I would have slaughtered an entire empire to spare you from."

His hand comes up, fingers tracing the air just millimeters from my cheek. The heat radiating from his palm is a cruel tease, but he stops just short of touching me.

"But make no mistake, I am not letting you go. Not to your father, not to Petros, not even to my own good sense. You will stay in this room, where every single soul who breathes near you answers directly to me, until I figure out what to do with a wife I cannot trust and refuse to give up. Both are facts. I am not going to pretend otherwise. You already mean too much to me, and I’m not letting you go."

“That is not a marriage," I whisper, my voice trembling. "That is just a nicer cage."

"I know." He leans down, his breath brushing against my ear, his voice dropping into that dangerously soft, intimate cadence reserved only for me in the dark.

"It is the best thing I can offer you tonight, sweetheart. A nicer cage, a husband who will keep walking up these stairs to claim what's his, and a promise about your mother that I fully intend to execute. I'm not sorry it isn't more. And I'm certainly not sorry enough to unlock the door." He turns on his heel and leaves. The lock clicks into place, heavy and final.

“He came up the stairs,” Aodh says softly, from the sill. “That is not nothing. In my long life it is very close to everything.”

I go to the window, the narrow slit of it, and I put my hand flat against the cold stone, and I look out. I can’t stop crying. Everything is messed up now. If Theron means to wage war with the Eloria in order to bring my mother back, then Milki and Mealla are in danger too.

I don’t know how long I cry, but Aodh rubs along my leg.

“It will be okay, Bree. Come.”

"Come where," I say. "The door is locked. There are two men on the other side of it who answer to a husband who will not let me go. There is nowhere in this tower to come to, Aodh. That is the whole point of a tower."

"There is always somewhere." He is standing now, and his tail has come up, and the little fire in it that has guttered low for weeks is not low anymore. It is bright. Brighter than I have ever seen it. "You have been listening to the wrong thing all night, Bree. You have been listening to him. Listen to the other thing. It has been calling to you, and it is calling you now, and it is not calling you south."

And I stop crying, because he is right, and I hear it.

The song.

Louder than it has ever been. No longer faint, no longer under everything, but rising up through the floor, and the stone and the soles of my feet.

I don’t understand how I know, but this time it feels different. Not a luring thing promising to silence everything or a warning. It sounds familiar.

“Wait, I thought you couldn’t hear the song?” I ask Aodh then, and he chuckles.

“You’re right. I can’t. But this is a different song. She’s calling you.”

I take a breath and focus on it. In my heart I can feel that it is a summons.

North.

Head to the mountain where the snow never leaves and the thing beneath it turns in it’s sleep. Head to where my mother is dying, and where Mikli and Mealla dwell, all of them in the path of the war Theron means to light.

I cannot let Theron fight it blind. I cannot sit in a room and be someone's reason while my whole family burns as a result of his idea of rescue.

"I don't know how to get out," I whisper.

"You have never known how," Aodh says gently. "You have only ever known that you could. Reach for it. The way you reached for me in the woods. With all of your heart. The thing that was always yours."

So I put my hand flat against the cold iron of the door, and I stop being afraid of it, and I reach.

Heat blooms under my palm. Not the stone's cold, mine, and it runs down my arm and pools in my hand and it does not burn me. I hum the song that I hear. Lulling and warm.

The iron around the lock goes soft as candle wax under my fingers and gives. I do not understand what I have just done. I only know that I have done it, and that some long-shut door in me has opened at the same moment as the one in the wall.

The door swings without a sound. The two guards who answer to my husband are slumped against the stairwell wall, not dead, only sleeping. Aodh slips past them like a red thread pulled through the dark, and I follow, down and down the winding stair of a tower exactly like the one I was born in, and out.

The night is enormous, cold, and full of stars. Somewhere behind me is a man who chose me and locked me away, and a promise he means to keep with a war that would put my brother and my sister in the ground to buy back my mother. I turn my back on all of it. Not because I do not love him. Because I finally love myself enough to stop waiting in rooms.

I pull my cloak close, and Aodh presses warm against my ankle, and I turn my face north, to where the song is, to where everyone I love is waiting to be saved or waiting to be lost, to where the thing under the mountain is at last awake enough to be answered.

"All right," I say back to the song, and it is the first promise I have ever made for myself and not for someone else. "I'm coming."

I take the first step, and the song rises to meet me.