She wondered as she tramped through the crunching snow: Does my father know?
She sat unspeaking at dinner between her betrothed and her father. They spoke of lands and alliances, of wars long past and grudges all too present. They never spoke of the crown, but plenty of latent meaning lurked in the not speaking.
Leta could not eat. She picked at the bones of a small roasted fowl, feeding much of it to the dog under the table. Her gaze kept shifting to the great, heavy chair, its wood as delicately scrolled as any illuminated manuscript, filled with Earl Ferox’s absence.
Suddenly Leta stood. Her father and Lord Alistair gave her swift glances but scarcely heard the excuses she murmured as she left the table and hastened from the room. She felt Lady Mintha’s gaze like daggers between her shoulder blades, and it drove her swiftly out to the darkened, frozen passages beyond the warm light of the dining hall. She picked up her pace, all but running now, lifting her heavy skirts as she climbed the stairs.
The Chronicler sat at his desk, bowed over his work by the light of three tall candles. He turned when he heard the door open and sat up straight. “M’lady.” He said nothing more, but Leta saw how quickly he covered his page with his blotting cloth. And she could feel the Wall surrounding him as though it were built of stone and mortar.
She closed the door and stood a moment, her face hidden in shadows. Her heart beat a dangerous rhythm in her breast, and she could feel the wellsprings of sorrow trying to rise up inside, to drown her. She forced them back.
“Chronicler.” Her voice froze on her tongue, unable to say what she had come to say. So she wrapped her arms around herself, her hands buried in her fur-lined sleeves, and moved across the room to his desk. By rights, he should have climbed down from the stool and bowed to the future wife of his future earl.
But the Chronicler only drew a long breath and let it out in cloudy vapors. “What have you come about, m’lady?”
“I . . . I was wondering,”—her voice dropped almost to a whisper—“what it is you are copying.”
His look was sharp. Slowly he removed the blotting cloth and allowed Leta to look at the vellum page. She saw there, in his firm hand, the nursery rhyme she had seen days ago in the hand of Lady Pero. Lady Pero’s own fragile parchment lay to one side of the book, held in place by a stone weight.
“Foolishness,” said the Chronicler. “More nursery rhymes. More tales of Faerie brothers and mystical houses full of lights and songs and truth. More deaths and prophecies of coming kings. Foolishness.”
Practical Leta nearly cowed her into submission. He doesn’t want to see you now. Leave him be. Go back where you belong.
But when Leta opened her mouth, though she could scarcely get the words out, she heard herself say, “Would you read it to me?”
He did not meet her gaze but sat staring at delicate lines of red ink, still drying, a little smeared from his attempt to hide them. The Wall around him was almost palpable. But there was a frailty to it. At the right provocation, it would crumble, leaving him unprotected.
He read:
“Fling wide the doors of light, Smallman,
Though furied falls the Flame at Night.
The heir to truth, blest blade of fire,
He finds in shielded shadow light.
“Not in vain the hope once borne
When flees the king to farther fight—
Dark and deepness hold no sway.
The brother dies, the lantern lights.”
It was like the nursery rhyme of Leta’s childhood, but quite different as well. A distant inspiration that had perhaps become twisted over time into the simple lines so familiar to her. This one was closer to the truth, she thought even as the last words died upon the frosty air.
“What does it mean?” Leta asked.
“What do you think it means?” he replied as she knew he would. Never willing to give an opinion for her, he forced her to form her own.
“I think it means,” she replied quietly, “that though he flees, though he hides, the king will come to us one day. I think it means the true heir will be revealed in the end.”
She felt his gaze upon her face. She felt him reading her thoughts. Drawing a sudden breath, she lifted her eyes and met his, and she thought with all the fury she dared not speak: You want the Smallman to be true, to be truly true. Not a symbol. Not a metaphor. You want him to be real. But you’re afraid.
She could not know how bright her eyes flashed, how her face resembled that of her father, a strong and determined lord of men. But unlike Lord Aiven’s, her eyes held kindness as well, and this made her face the stronger by far. In that brief span of time, she looked the woman she was born to be, not the creature she had been molded into.