: Chapter 6

I don’t reach the Crystal City until very late, and the cobblestone streets are slick with fallen snow, forcing this last part of my journey to take longer than any other. Mercy picks her way along the darkened streets, and I listen for trouble, though all I’ve heard for hours are the rhythmic clops of her hooves and the whisper of snow settling across Syhl Shallow. I’m nearly home, but my thoughts are trapped back in Briarlock, and I can’t settle on what’s drawing my focus the most. The unexpected appearance of Lord Alek? I don’t think so. He’s hated me for years—and it’s rather mutual. It’s not like he caused an issue while I was there.

The tension in the bakery doubled when I arrived, too—a tension that followed the beguiling blacksmith all the way to his forge. I made Jax nervous, clearly, because I caught the many glances he threw across his workshop. I liked how gentle he was with Mercy, the way his voice went low when he spoke to the mare. Is your master always like this? I heard him say, and the memory makes me smile. I liked how he didn’t try to overcharge me, even though he must have known I’d carry good silver.

Callyn didn’t try to overcharge me either, and she blushed when I gave her two silvers, the same as Jax. The meat pies were incredible, though, the crust sweet and buttery, with the insides full of a savory mixture of chicken and vegetables. I feel like I should ride back to pay her more.

But I can’t shake that overriding worry that I walked into … something. Maybe it’s just that I wear the crests of both countries, and lately that seems to be enough to cause tension.

When I reach the guard station at the palace gates, I don’t recognize the guard there, which means she doesn’t recognize me, and I have to wait for her commanding officer. I sigh inwardly and wait while Mercy paws at the slush.

“I know,” I murmur and bite back a shiver. Those warm meat pies from Callyn’s bakery feel like a distant memory. “We’re almost there.”

An army lieutenant named Ander reaches the station rather quickly, and I sigh with relief when I see him. We’ve never been friends, but I’ve known Ander since I was a recruit.

“Well met,” I say.

He gives me a curt nod and looks to the guard. “Let him through.”

It is the middle of the night, so I ignore his terse manner and cluck to my horse. Once we’re past the gates, Mercy trots across the deserted training fields without any urging. The stables are dark and closed up for the night, but a sleepy stable hand comes down from the loft with an oil lantern when Mercy clops into the aisle.

“I’ll take care of the horse,” I say quietly. It’s not his fault that I’ve arrived so late. “Go back to sleep.” He leaves the lantern with me and shuffles back up the steps.

Mercy’s tack is soaked and soiled from snow and sweat and days of hard riding, but that can wait till tomorrow. I tie her in the aisle and pile my equipment in the storage room, then grab some rags and a currycomb.

When I emerge, there’s a cloaked man in the shadows feeding an apple to Mercy. I stop short in the doorway, but then he looks up. “Welcome home.”

“Grey,” I say in surprise. I smile, then put a hand over my heart and bow. “Ah, forgive me, Your Majesty—”

“Oh, stop it,” he says lightly. “Give me a rag.”

I hand one over. Mercy is only half finished with the apple he gave her, but she starts nosing at him for more anyway, slobbering a trail of apple bits along the front of his cloak. I catch her halter and pull her away. “Don’t drool on the king.”

Grey says nothing, he just takes the rag and begins to rub the sweat marks out of her fur. I hesitate, then do the same.

The people of Syhl Shallow—and Emberfall, really—have a lot of thoughts about the king: opinions about his once-banned magic, about his prowess on the battlefield, about whether he was earnest in his attempt to unite warring countries by marrying Queen Lia Mara. There are whispers that he was once working with an evil enchantress to destroy Emberfall, that his “alliance” is a farce to take advantage of the queen, that his magic will overwhelm Syhl Shallow and cause endless suffering to all who oppose him.

The real truth is that Grey is an honest man who was raised in poverty, only to later discover that he was secretly the heir to the throne of Emberfall. He’s a good king, though: strong and fair, devoted to the countries he united. But I sometimes wonder if he craves quiet moments like this in the same way that I do. Moments where he doesn’t have to be the fierce ruler and I don’t have to be a well-armed messenger carrying word of threats against the throne, and instead we’re just two people with a horse that needs tending.

I press the rag into Mercy’s coat, rubbing hard. “You really did take me by surprise,” I say to Grey, and mean it. “I thought the entire palace was asleep.”

“I saw you cross the training fields,” he says. “Lia Mara is sicker with this one than she was with little Sinna, so no one is sleeping these days.”

My eyes flick up, and I study him over the crest of Mercy’s neck. “The queen is pregnant again.”

“Ah. Yes.” He doesn’t smile, but there’s a warm light in his eye that only appears when he speaks of their daughter—but there’s a hesitation in his voice, too. “You were gone before we knew.”

I understand the hesitation. Another royal baby. Another potential magesmith.

Another target.

I think of the reports from Emberfall that are still wrapped up and tucked beneath my breastplate. Grey hasn’t asked for them yet, but I know he will. I don’t want to ruin the quiet by offering.

“Is Lia Mara well?” I ask instead.

He nods. “She misses you.” He half smiles. “She says you’re the only one allowed to teach Sinna to hold a sword, as it has been decreed by the princess herself—”

I snort. Princess Sinna is three. “Does she know you taught me?”

“Well, clearly I am no longer the favorite teacher.” He fetches a currycomb from a rack, then rubs it into Mercy’s fur, just below her mane. “How fares my brother?”

Prince Rhen. Grey asks me this every time I return, and the weight in his voice is always the same. Sometimes I wonder if it’s about Rhen himself, because Grey and Rhen have a long, complicated, dark history that nearly broke them both—and nearly tore apart each country in the process. Grey seems to have moved past the curse that tormented them, but Rhen still wears the weight of his past like a cloak he can’t shrug off.

But sometimes I wonder if this question is about me, as if the king worries that sending me to Ironrose Castle is asking more of me than he should.

Prince Rhen once tortured us both for a secret we kept.

Thinking about that moment always makes me feel weak, especially in front of Grey, so I lean into the currycomb and answer. “Prince Rhen is busy,” I say. “When I first arrived, he’d received word that a small group from Valkins Valley had been shipping grain through the harbor at Silvermoon, but messages were found buried inside the sacks.” It was a brilliant hiding place, because none of the messages would have been discovered if a sack hadn’t been caught by a rusty nail and torn open. “At first the messages seemed ridiculous—nothing worth hiding.”

Grey glances up. “What do you mean?”

“Like … Mama fed the goats today. Papa didn’t help her.”

Grey frowns.

“Exactly,” I say. “I don’t think anyone would have paid any attention, but one of the dockworkers was in the marketplace talking about these mysterious letters in the grain sacks, and the Grand Marshal’s guards overheard and demanded to see them. They hadn’t kept all of them, but they had a new shipment waiting to go south on a ship, so they tore them all open—and found dozens of ridiculous messages.”

I crouch to rub the mud from Mercy’s fetlocks. “Marshal Blackcomb turned the messages over to Rhen, and you know how he loves a good puzzle. Well, one of the letters mentioned how ‘Papa’ couldn’t see straight, which made Rhen wonder if it was a reference to him, what with his missing eye and all, so he went back through the messages and began to determine a code. ‘Mama’ was Harper, and ‘feeding the goats’ seemed to indicate a trip she’d taken to Hutchins Forge, because of the livestock market, and Rhen hadn’t accompanied her—”

“So they were tracking Rhen and Harper’s movements.”

“Not just theirs,” I say. “Yours and Lia Mara’s, too. It took Rhen a while to figure it out, because you’re Father and Mother, so for a while he thought it was interchangeable, but then they mentioned someone named Nyssa—”

“Sinna.” His eyes flash to mine, and there’s no questioning the sudden flare of fury and fear in his tone.

“Yes,” I say. “We think so.”

“Do you have these letters?”

“Yes. Some.” I’ve already begun unbuckling the breastplate. “But there have been no threats to the princess. No threats to any of you, really. The vast majority of the letters are simply reports going back and forth between Syhl Shallow and Emberfall, tracking where you’ve been and what you’ve done.”

I jerk free of the armor and unroll the leather that keeps their messages safe. “There’s one line that appears several times, to gather your best silver, which we think could be an instruction to pool funds for another attack. But we’re not sure. I was going to return at once, but Rhen felt it would be better to check shipments going through other towns, to see if we could find any true threats. But obviously, that’s a lot of ground to cover.”

Grey scans the first note in the pile, but looks back at me. “And did he find anything?”

“No. Nothing relating to the messages. Any true threats against the Crown seemed to be lone dissenters who were quickly captured and dealt with. But we did discover that there are small groups of Truthbringers that seem to be growing in number throughout most of the larger cities in Emberfall. He suspects that for now, these messages may be an attempt to set up some kind of … collaboration. Harper called it a ‘whisper network.’ They’re seeing what messages get through, and what messages are stopped.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and when he speaks, there’s a tone of resignation in his voice. “So they can plan something bigger.”

He’s thinking of the Uprising. I remember the rush of magic that swept through the palace, the way so many bodies dropped where they stood.

I also remember the way Sinna screamed when a dozen armed men burst into the nursery and killed her nanny in an attempt to capture the “magical princess.”

My voice is equally resigned. “Possibly.”

He flips to the next message in the pile, then frowns. Then the third. He sighs and folds them back up in the leather. “I shouldn’t have troubled you with this now, Tycho.”

“It’s no trouble. I knew you’d be eager to hear. I would have been earlier, but Mercy threw a shoe just after we passed the border.” I pause. “In that stack, you’ll find that Rhen wrote you a letter detailing everything he thinks you should do.”

“Of course he did.” Grey pauses. “We’ll have to search shipments here, too. I don’t like the idea that messages could be passed right under our noses. Anything else?”

“No.” I untie Mercy to lead her to a stall. “Maybe.”

“Tell me.”

I turn the mare loose in a stall and latch the gate. She immediately thrusts her face into a pile of hay. “I stopped in Briarlock to get a fresh shoe for Mercy. While I was there, I saw Lord Alek.”

Grey frowns. “Did he say what he was doing there?”

“No—but you know how he feels about me. I’d have to put a sword through him to get an honest word out of his mouth.”

“It’s the same way he feels about me.” Grey thinks for a moment. “But that’s interesting. Was anyone with him?”

“No.” I hesitate. I’ve been turning my time in Briarlock around in my head for hours. I keep thinking of the tension in the bakery, especially once Alek arrived. Was that because of my presence? Or was it something else?

“What is it?” says Grey.

I tell him about Callyn and Nora and the sweetcakes, then about Jax and his forge. “He said he’d never seen Alek before. But it’s a small town near the border. Well off the main road. Alek would have no reason to be there. I can’t imagine he would be overseeing fabric shipments himself.”

I frown, turning it over in my head for the thousandth time. Alek has never been proven to be working against the throne, but his sister was caught working as a spy for Emberfall years ago. She died in the final battle. I was there. I might have shot the killing arrow. Alek doesn’t let me forget it.

I was fifteen years old, and it was the first time I took a life. I don’t let myself forget it.

So maybe all the tension and animosity was personal. Maybe I spent so many weeks in Emberfall looking for signs of treason that I found it in a remote bakery with a man I can’t stand.

I look at Grey. “Alek knew I was looking for the forge. It was rather remote, and I was alone. If he were up to something, he could have ambushed me.”

“He’d be a fool to ambush you.” He pauses. He doesn’t trust Alek either. “I know you’ve been gone for well over a month,” he finally says, and his tone is grave, “but I’d like to know if Alek is still there. If I send soldiers, we’ll spook him, but you can be explained away. How soon do you think you can return to Briarlock?”

I’m exhausted, and I’ve been thinking about my bed in the palace for longer than I’d admit out loud. But I pick up my armor and toss my cloak over my shoulder. “Your Majesty,” I say grandly, partially teasing and partially not. “As soon as you need.”