Old Allies

Cressida caught her crossing the outer courtyard that morning, before Isolde had so much as decided which direction to walk in search of the scribes’ wing. She fell into step beside her with the easy familiarity of a woman who had never once considered that her company might not be wanted.

“You look like you didn’t sleep, cousin. I’d ask if married life disagrees with you, but I hear from Petra it’s a rather more chaste arrangement than the court’s imagining.” Cressida’s tone stayed light, teasing, and her eyes, as ever, found the nearest door before settling back on Isolde’s face. “I wanted to say again how glad I am you’ve come home. And to offer, properly this time, whatever help I can give with this business of the thornwood. I still have my father’s old maps of the border holdings. If the curse is moving the way the General says, they might show something his newer surveys miss.”

“That’s generous of you.” Isolde kept her voice even, testing the shape of ordinary conversation against the ring she hadn’t been able to stop seeing since the rites chamber. She watched for anything in Cressida’s hands, her sleeves, any glint of black pearl that might settle the question one way or the other. There was none visible today, plain gold at her wrist instead, which proved nothing at all. “I’ll ask Garrick to send for the maps. Where do you keep them?”

“At Aveline’s old townhouse, just past the chapel wall. I could bring them myself, if you’d rather not wait on a messenger.” Cressida smiled, warm, easy, convincing if Isolde hadn’t spent a childhood learning how far that particular warmth could be trusted before it curdled into something else. “It would give us a proper hour to talk, cousin, just the two of us. I feel we’ve hardly had one since I arrived.”

“Soon,” Isolde said, noncommittal, already calculating how much of this offer to accept and how much to quietly verify first. “I’ve an errand this morning I can’t put off. We’ll have our hour, Cressida. I promise you that.”

“I’ll hold you to it.” Cressida squeezed her arm once, warm through the sleeve, and peeled off toward the east gallery with a parting smile. Isolde watched it a half-second longer than courtesy required, noting it the same way she’d noted the eyes going to the door at the feast. Then she continued on toward the scribes’ wing, with considerably less certainty about anything than she’d started the morning with.

Osric Fenn had taken rooms in the old scribes’ wing after the coup, a modest set of chambers Isolde remembered visiting as a girl. The wing had still housed a dozen busy clerks then, rather than one man and the ghosts of a job he no longer officially held.

She went alone, in the end, though Thane had offered to come and meant it. Fenn had served her father for thirty years before he’d served anyone else. She judged, correctly as it turned out, that a frightened old man would say less with the general who’d ended that service standing in the doorway.

He opened the door himself, no servant, which told her something about how far his circumstances had fallen even before she saw the thin fire in the grate. The trunk pushed into one corner was half-packed, as though he’d been debating for weeks whether leaving Highmarrow might be safer than staying.

“Majesty.” His bow was too deep again, the same overcorrection she’d noticed at the wedding feast, a man performing deference at a volume meant to be seen rather than felt. “I didn’t expect you’d come yourself.”

“You didn’t expect I’d come at all, Chancellor, given how quickly you left the feast once you’d said your congratulations.” She let herself in without waiting for a formal invitation, old habit from a childhood spent treating this wing as an extension of her own household. She took the single good chair by the fire while he hovered near the door, as though still weighing whether to bolt. “Sit, Osric. I’m not here to arrest you for cowardice. I’m here because you’re the only person left at this court who might remember what my father’s final year actually looked like, and I find I need that more than I need anything else right now.”

Fenn’s mouth thinned at final year, quick and unguarded, before he caught it and smoothed it back into careful neutrality. Isolde set the reaction aside the way she’d set aside Cressida’s eyes going to the door.

“Your father’s final year was difficult, Majesty. The war with Vantor weighed on him. Every king’s final year looks difficult, viewed closely enough.” He lowered himself into the chair opposite her, hands folded too tightly in his lap. “I’m not certain what more I can tell you that the histories haven’t already recorded.”

“The histories say he died fighting a coup he never saw coming. I’ve since learned the thornwood was already crawling toward Highmarrow faster than anyone admitted at the time.” She watched him carefully as she said it, gauging how much of his fear was general anxiety and how much was the specific, cornered kind. “Was my father ill, Osric. Before the coup. I’m not asking you to guess. I’m asking whether you saw it yourself, serving him as closely as you did.”

The trunk in the corner seemed, suddenly, like the only honest thing in the room.

“I served the crown, Majesty, not any one man who wore it.” Fenn’s voice had gone thin, careful, each word placed like a foot tested on ice before weight went onto it. “Whatever I observed in your father’s final months, I observed as a servant of the kingdom’s stability. I’ve held my tongue about it for three years, because speaking would have served no one, least of all you, freshly exiled and grieving.”

“Speak now, then. I’m no longer freshly grieving. I’m asking as a queen who’s had her own hand on a working that told her the curse eating Caldreth’s border was set on purpose, by someone with access to my family’s blood.” She leaned forward, softening her voice rather than sharpening it, an old trick she’d learned watching her mother use on frightened courtiers years ago. “You’re not betraying him by telling me the truth, Osric. You’re finishing a service you clearly started and never let yourself complete.”

He was quiet long enough that the fire popped twice. When he finally spoke his voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper, as though the walls themselves might report him.

“Your father grew tired in a way no amount of rest cured, the last year of his reign. Thin, in the way a candle thins near the end rather than the way illness usually thins a man. He forbade the court physician from recording it. Forbade me from writing it in any ledger that might survive him.” Fenn’s hands had begun to tremble faintly, the fire’s low light catching the movement. “I asked him once, directly, whether it was the old thornwood sickness returned, the kind our grandmothers told stories about. He struck the question from the room so completely I never dared ask it again.”

“And the General. Did he know.”

Something shuttered behind Fenn’s eyes at that, fast and absolute. He stood abruptly, moving to the trunk, as though the conversation had physically driven him toward whatever escape he’d been packing for.

“I’ve said more than I intended already, Majesty. Please. I’d ask you not to press me further on that particular question.” His voice had gone from thin to genuinely frightened, a different register, the fear no longer general but pointed at something specific enough to have a shape. “Some truths are safer left where they’ve been sitting. I’ve watched what happens to people who dig at this particular one.”

“Watched how, Osric.” Isolde rose too, unwilling to let him retreat behind the trunk’s lid without answering that. “Who has been threatened. By whom.”

“I didn’t say threatened.” He said it too quickly, the denial arriving before the accusation had even fully landed, which told her more than a slower answer would have. “I said I’ve watched. That’s all I intend to say tonight, Majesty. And I’d ask, as the last service I have left to offer you, that you not repeat this conversation to anyone until you understand what you’re asking about. Not the General. Not your own guard. No one.”

“Not even Thane.”

“Especially not the General — not until you’ve heard whatever he has to tell you in his own voice, on his own choosing. Not secondhand from a frightened old man who’s spent three years too much of a coward to say any of this sooner.” Fenn’s eyes came up to hers at last, wet, ashamed, older than his years by a decade at least. “He’ll tell you himself, Majesty, if you give him the chance and ask the right question plainly. I believe that of him more than I’ve believed anything of anyone at this court in three years. Ask him what your father was truly dying of. Ask him why the coup happened the night it did rather than any other night in the preceding month. I think you already suspect the shape of it, or you wouldn’t have come to me asking about his final year at all.”

Isolde stood very still, the fire’s low heat doing nothing against the cold that had settled somewhere under her ribs. It had nothing to do with the room’s poor stock of wood, and everything to do with the sudden, vertiginous sense of a floor she’d thought solid tilting beneath her.

“You’re telling me there’s more to my father’s death than a blade in the night.”

“I’m telling you there’s more to it than either the histories or your own grief have let you look at squarely.” Fenn closed the trunk, gently, as though sealing something inside it rather than merely shutting a lid. “I’m an old man who served three kings badly at the end of each of their reigns, Majesty, by staying silent when speaking might have cost me something. I don’t intend to make that mistake a fourth time by being the one who tells you this instead of him. You deserve to hear it from the person who actually carried it, not from a coward who only watched him carry it.”

He would say nothing further. Not when she pressed again. Not when she softened her voice a second time. Not even when she reminded him, gently, that she had once trusted him with more than any other person at her father’s court besides her father himself. He only repeated, with the stubborn, frightened dignity of a man who had found one line he intended to hold, at the very end of a long service. The truth belonged to Thane to give her. He would not be the one to take that choice away from either of them.

She left his rooms with considerably less than she’d come for and considerably more than she knew what to do with. She did not go looking for Thane immediately, though every instinct in her wanted to. Instead she walked along the outer wall in the last gray light of the afternoon. Past the chapel stair, past the sealed gate to the old rites chamber, turning her mother’s ring around and around her finger. She tried to decide whether she wanted the answer Fenn had all but handed her the shape of. Or whether some smaller, more frightened part of her would rather keep living inside the version of the story where Thane was the man who had murdered her father cleanly. Without complication. Without any truth underneath it large enough to require this much careful, cowardly protecting from everyone who’d touched it.

By the time the light failed, she had decided. Not because she wanted the answer. She had spent three years hating a story that had apparently never been true. She would rather know what she was standing on, however much it cost her, than spend one more day building anything — a marriage, an alliance, whatever this was becoming — on ground she hadn’t tested herself.

She found Garrick at the base of the stair and asked him, quietly, to send word to the General. She wished to speak with him tonight, in his study, alone — and no one else was to know the reason why.

“You’ve the look of a woman who’s just been handed something she isn’t sure she wanted, Majesty.” Garrick fell into step with her a few paces, old enough in her service to read her moods without needing to be told which one had taken hold. “Should I be worried?”

“I don’t know yet.” She stopped at the base of the stair, looking back once toward the scribes’ wing. Toward the trunk Fenn had been packing, and the fear in his voice when she’d said Thane’s name aloud. “Ask me again tomorrow, Garrick. Tonight I mean to find out what I’m standing on before I decide how worried either of us ought to be.”