I started to smile and then grimaced as the extra inhale stabbed at my ribs. The dress was tighter than anything I’d ever worn.
My eyes were a bit blurry, and ever mindful of Celine’s warning I lifted a cautious finger to swipe away the water that had started to form at the rims.
I blinked twice, and then regarded myself in the mirror.
And that’s when I saw it.
What I had been missing all along. What I had failed to see until the moment that yellow silk caught the light.
“Might I have a couple minutes,” I rasped, “alone?”
“My lady, you don’t have much time before the ceremony!”
“Please?” I was gulping up air, my fingers trembling as I pressed them together in hopes no one would notice.
Madame Pollina sighed and then motioned for my ladies to go, trailing after them to the door. She ducked her head in one last time. “Ten minutes, my lady!”
I waited until their mindless chatter trailed off down the corridor.
I took one last look at my dress. My yellow silk dress.
Then I shut my eyes and let the memory come flooding back:
A scared girl, no more than six, tugging at a yellow silk ribbon at the end of her curly black braid.
A man who looked nothing like his daughter, dragging her along to meet with a crown prince in the stands of the Candidacy.
The black-haired Caltothian ambassador looking on, no longer indifferent, cold fury written across his face, fists clenched at his sides, eyes locked on the same pair as me.
And then Blayne’s voice: “Come now, Father, everyone knows the noblemen take a lover or two during their travels. Even their wives. Why, it’s a common enough saying: the longer at sea, the more lovers she keeps.”
The woman we kidnapped. During the apprenticeship. In Dastan’s Cove.
Lady Sybil was awaiting her husband’s return.
I left the dais to press my palms against the side of the wall. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not like this.
But now that the gates had been thrown open, the memories wouldn’t stop: Three years ago the lady had had a three-year-old daughter. With black curls.
The mother adjusting the pale silk ribbon on the waist of her daughter’s dress.
Little Tamora. Who looked just like that girl in the stands. The same blue eyes, the same age, the same fondness for silk. The black hair of the mother. The curls that mirrored Lord Tyrus. The blue eyes that matched both.
The cold fury on his face…
He couldn’t have been Baron Cyr. The other dignitaries would have recognized…
Was Lord Tyrus the lover?
Was Tamora his daughter?
Cold steel cut at my chest, and my whole body seized: Had Blayne known?
But how? How would he—
And then I remembered.
The Caltothian traitor. Flint. A sentry who had served among Lady Sybil’s men. The man who had mapped out the terrain for Dastan Cove. A common soldier who knew the in’s and out’s of Baron Cyr’s castle. A husband who was away at sea for many months at a time.
Master Byron’s words returned: “Lucky for you Commander Chen has recently received orders from the Crown itself.”
“Just think,” Alex had said, “a month at sea on a secret mission. Imagine all the stories you’ll be able to tell us when you return, Ry”
And finally, Mira’s threat as she informed us that our mission was, “never, ever to be discussed with anyone unless you have permission from the king himself.”
The Crown had ordered a kidnapping. But on whose orders? King Lucius?
“I asked my father that year we returned to the palace,” Darren had replied. “He told me he couldn’t recall.”
What if the reason the king couldn’t recall was because the orders were never his?
Blayne and Darren had hated their father. But Blayne…Blayne had suffered much longer at his hand.
The crown prince just gave me a sardonic smile. “It takes much more to impress when you are his heir. Darren wasn’t always around. In any case I’m better for it now.”
Had Blayne planned all of this? Had he been planning this for years?
Crown orders for a secret mission nobody knew about. Kidnapping the lover and child of the head Caltothian ambassador?
Blackmailing Lord Tyrus with his child’s life. Had the girl been brought to the Candidacy, within the lord’s sight as a reminder? A promise to keep her alive, in exchange for his crime? Murdering a king in front of a room of soldiers and knights and the world’s greatest mages. The man had never expected escape.
“For Caltoth!” It had been a cry to remind the audience it was an attack. To show the other country’s ambassadors the ultimate breach of a treaty.
No one would be able to tie Lord Tyrus to Baron Cyr’s missing wife and child. No one would have known she had a lover.
No one but a traitorous sentry, one who had managed to explore every inch of Baron Cyr’s castle unnoticed. One who had perhaps seen Lord Tyrus visit Lady Sybil while her baron husband was away.
Perhaps Flint had been one of the traitors hired by King Lucius to stage the attacks on the Jerar-Caltothian border.