CHAPTER 6: VISITORS AT THE GATE

  Morning had begun in the tower for Princess Irena Vaudrin.

  She sat in the gutted library with her shoulders hunched over the old wizard’s scroll. The parchment lay pinned open on the sturdy table she and Lira had dragged beneath the highest arrow slit. Scraps of salvaged brass and other bits and bobs held the corners down. Around it, her own sheets spread in a rough fan: columns of cramped notes, careful sketches of sigils, and attempted sentences in a language she had never truly learned.

  The walls above the table had begun to testify against her new obsession. She had fitted unused torch brackets with scavenged sconces, and in each she had wedged a torch. They sat dark now, but wax had crusted down their sides, and smoke had salted the stone with its stale scent. Anyone with a nose could have reconstructed her evenings, long after the Unsetting Sun had vanished over the horizon.

  On the paper nearest her hand, she had drawn a neat dividing line. On the left, she had copied a word from the scroll: letters unfamiliar and yet uncomfortably close to her own native language of Lyrics. On the right, she had written three possible meanings in modern script, scratching out two of them with decisive strokes.

  “Not note,” she muttered. “Not tone. It most likely means string. Possibly tension. No. String fits the construction more cleanly.”

  She marked the chosen meaning with a small star, then lifted her gaze to the scroll and checked the surrounding line. The sigils that followed the word rearranged themselves in her mind, not by magic, but by pattern. The intersecting lines suggested cords drawn taut, threads set under strain.

  “If those sigils indicate instruments,” she continued, barely registering that she spoke aloud, “then the phrase cannot describe a metaphor. It describes a mechanism.”

  She tugged another sheet closer and began to write again, building a ladder of half-formed thoughts into something she could climb.

  She had stolen the ink and quill from Lira’s household stores, along with the few unused sheets the halfling had brought as a foolish luxury for letters that would never be sent. Lira had protested weakly at first, then surrendered when Irena met her eyes and refused to apologise. Now the inkwell, the quill, and the paper sat before her, transformed into the foundations of what Irena privately called her library.

  The simple arrangement pleased her. No councillor dictated her reading. No tutor assigned her the task. She had chosen this work, and she pursued it in deliberate defiance of the very reason they had caged her here.

  She dipped the quill again, tapped it on the rim to shake off excess ink, and watched the morning light catch on the stains along her fingers. Thin black smudges mapped the pads of her fingertips and the crescent beneath each nail.

  How unseemly.

  “Irena Vaudrin,” she murmured, “what disgraceful hands you have.”

  She meant it as half a joke and half a charm against despair. The charm held. She bent back to the scroll, mouth twisting as she traced the next sigil in the air with the feather of her quill.

  The dragon bellowed.

  The sound rolled from the far peak like a physical blow. It shook dust from the rafters and made the table’s legs tremble beneath her forearms. The ink in the inkwell shivered into dark ripples.

  Irena froze with the quill poised above the page.

  The roar dragged on, low and grinding, territorial and furious. It rattled through the hollows of her bones. It pressed against the bruise along her ribs from yesterday’s encounter with the floor. For but an instant, she was back there, wedged in splintered boards, void yawning beneath her.

  The tower answered with a groan, as if it resented sharing the mountain with that boisterous, overgrown lizard.

  For an instant, Irena feared collapse. Stone. Timber. Dust. All of it tumbling down.

  Then, slowly, the sound ebbed. The vibration passed. The stone under her feet settled.

  Silence returned to the library.

  Irena let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. Her trembling hand had left a small blot where the quill hovered over her notes.

  She set the quill down, flexed her fingers once, and listened. No screams. No clash of steel. No sudden bloom of fire against the sky. Whatever had disturbed the dragon had resolved itself.

  The roar had served as a necessary reminder. The dragon had begun, absurdly, to feel like a story rather than a threat when it did nothing but slumber on the far peak day after day. That sound corrected the error. The dragon did not merely symbolise imprisonment. The dragon possessed teeth the length of swords and fire hot enough to melt a man’s armour and turn him to ash inside it. Probably. Irena realised, with annoyance, that she didn’t actually know how hot a dragon’s breath was.

  She pulled the nearest sheet back toward her and forced her shoulders to loosen. She reclaimed the quill and lowered it toward the page.

  Another sound pricked her ears.

  Hooves.

  At first, she heard only a faint, irregular thudding. Then she caught the heavier grind of cart wheels.

  Irena went utterly still.

  Outside, on the mountain road, someone was coming.

  She abandoned the quill at once.

  At the arrow slit, she pressed her cheek to the cold stone and peered down. The angle revealed only slices of the path as it snaked up the slope, but that was enough. Far below, a line of movement wound steadily upward. Sunlight flashed on metal. Green banners snapped above the leading riders, a rich vert that cut the craggy mountain landscape like a blade. In white and gold, a sharp little beast reared rampant on each cloth: a horned rabbit with wings flared, and fangs bared, claws extended ferociously.

  The Marchwardens. Wolpertinger rampant and proper, exactly as the tapestries depicted.

  Behind them trundled carts piled with crates and sacks. More riders flanked the wagons with spears upright. And at the tail end, a herd of sheep was being coaxed along, a woolly, reluctant tide.

  “Supplies,” Irena breathed.

  Her heart leapt in her chest, painful and contradictory. Fear, yes: these were the baron’s people, the very machinery of her punishment. But she also felt a sharp, almost childish spark of excitement. Aside from Lira, she had not seen another living face in what felt like an age.

  She didn’t think. Her feet moved before her mind caught up, carrying her to the door, down the stair, her hand skimming the wall for balance as she descended.

  She found Lira in the entrance hall, in the middle of a small, determined storm.

  The halfling had shoved the rough bench against the wall, swept the worst of the tracked-in dirt into a pathetic heap, and now assaulted the threadbare rug near the door with a ferocity that would have startled anyone who only knew her as that shy and quiet halfling maid.

  “What are you doing?” Irena demanded.

  Lira jumped. The rug sagged in her hands.

  “Making this place look less like a stable,” she said, breathless. “They’re coming, aren’t they? I heard the wheels.”

  “Yes, they are.” Irena said. “And you believe they will care about a rug?”

  “I care,” Lira shot back, mouth pinching. “If they’re bringing supplies in, I won’t have them going back to Baron Brennec saying we live like animals.”

  Irena opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. Something in Lira’s expression, tight and stubborn, made the truth obvious: this had nothing to do with pleasing the baron. It was about clinging to the dignity they had left.

  “Very well,” Irena said, and allowed herself a token roll of her eyes. “Assault your rug. But when they arrive, you will stand behind me.”

  “I know how to stand behind you, Your Highness,” Lira replied dryly, then flushed at her own boldness.

  Irena chose to take that as reassurance rather than insolence.

  “Come,” she said, turning to the door. “I will not have them imagine we cower in this tower either.”

  Together they stepped into the thin mountain light.

  The air bit at Irena’s cheeks. From the top of the short stair, she could see the approach clearly now: iron rims on wheels, spearheads catching the sun, horses breathing white in the cold.

  Two knights rode at the head.

  The man on the left sat tall and broad-shouldered in well-worn maille and a light travelling harness of steel plates. His surcoat hung straight. He held his reins with easy competence, and everything about him said reliable in a faintly tired manner.

  The woman on the right was smaller, with armour scuffed and patched where it had taken real hits and received real care afterwards. Her hair was braided tight at the nape of her neck, her jaw strong. She sat her horse as if she had been born in the saddle, weight balanced, one hand on the reins, the other resting on her sword’s pommel. Her gaze travelled over the tower, the pale stone circle, and the princess on the steps, cataloguing everything with a sharpness that made Irena take notice.

  Above them, the Wolpertinger snapped in the wind, ridiculous and fierce at once.

  “They look…” Lira began, then stopped, as though finishing the sentence would constitute treason.

  “Like they would rather guard a ditch,” Irena said.

  Which was likely true. Patrolling an isolated tower and ferrying sheep up a mountain would never earn them a ballad nor a place in the royal book of deeds.

  The caravan rolled closer to the pale ring carved into the ground around the tower’s perimeter. The marker stones lay half-buried in frost-hard earth, but the sigils cut into them still caught the light with a faint, unsettling sheen.

  At the circle’s edge, the knights halted and dismounted in unison.

  The taller knight reached under his surcoat and drew out a disc on a chain. It glinted as he lifted it, a small sun of hammered brass or gold. Etched rays radiated from a central point like an eye. The Concord’s symbol was unmistakable even at a distance.

  Irena’s stomach tightened. The priest who had locked her here had carried a similar emblem on his staff and had pressed it to the stones while he spoke the words that sealed her fate.

  The knight stepped to a marker stone and held the sun-disc over the barrier. The chain swayed, then settled, as if gravity itself had waited for it to arrive. Then he spoke.

  Irena couldn’t hear what exactly he said from this distance, but she could see his mouth work. He shaped the words slowly and carefully, like a prayer recited from memory. Irena recognised the dialect in the cadence as the old tongue that predated the Lyrical language. It lacked the ornate flourishes of high Concord theology. It seemed utilitarian to him.

  He finished the last syllable.

  The disc flared faintly. A ripple travelled the ring, stone to stone, like light racing along iron. Irena’s ears popped. Her teeth ached for a heartbeat. The air thinned, then released. She couldn’t see the ward vanish, but she felt it. A lifting of an invisible pressure over the span of a breath.

  This, her body said, without asking her brain, is your moment.

  She moved.

  One second, she stood on the top step, spine straight, hands loose at her sides.

  The next, she flew down the stairs, skirts hitched, boots striking stone, cold slicing her lungs.

  “Your Highness!” Lira yelped behind her.

  Irena ignored her.

  Past the bottom step, across the narrow stretch of yard, towards the place where the invisible barrier had opened. The road lay beyond, curving down the mountain, away from the dragon peak and the tower. Away from this prison.

  Wide open.

  Freedom.

  She took three wild strides, and each one tasted brighter than the last.

  Then something hit her middle like a battering ram.

  An arm hooked around her waist. Her feet left the ground. The world flipped over.

  She dangled upside down over a broad shoulder, breath knocked from her body for the second time in as many days.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Apologies, Your Highness,” a man’s voice said near her hip, genuinely contrite and only mildly out of breath. “Can’t let you do that.”

  From her undignified vantage, she watched ward-stones pass beneath his boots as he walked. The Marchwardens’ wolf-winged rabbit device flashed on his armour.

  “Put me down!” she snarled, twisting. “You overgrown pack mule! How dare you lay hands on me—”

  His grip tightened only enough to secure her.

  “Much as I’d rather not,” he replied calmly, “I’ve orders. And I’d prefer not to face My Lord Brennec having let you tumble off a mountain.”

  Her fists drummed uselessly against his back as he carried her, unhurried, back towards the tower steps. She landed one good kick against his thigh; he grunted, but he did not stumble.

  Lira had frozen halfway down the stairs. She stared wide-eyed as the Ser carried the King’s disgraced daughter to the threshold, bent, and deposited her on the top step like a sack of very rude potatoes.

  “There,” he said, stepping back at once. He lifted his hands briefly as if to demonstrate they were now off the royal person. “No harm done.”

  Irena scrambled to her feet, cheeks burning so hot she could have melted frost.

  “You will not touch me again,” she hissed.

  “If I can help it, Your Highness,” he said, and, annoyingly, he sounded sincere.

  Behind him, the Dame stood with one hand on her horse’s bridle and a smirk she did not attempt to disguise.

  “Impressive sprinting, Princess,” she drawled. “A tragedy of timing.”

  Something about the word Princess hit differently when she said it. Not the deferent “Your Highness” everyone at court used, wrapped in politesse. Not the contemptuous “girl” she’d heard hissed behind fans and closed doors. Just Princess, low and amused, a title and a just and a challenge all at once.

  Irena’s spine snapped straighter.

  “You will address me properly. I am—”

  “You’re Princess Irena Vaudrin,” the Dame said, inclining her head by a fraction. “Eldest daughter of King Halvar the Second. Lady of the Three Rivers. Dynast of the Masquerade of Lisse. Now, exiled in Baron Brennec’s care. I’m very well briefed.”

  Her eyes gleamed with something that wasn’t quite mockery. Something sharper still.

  Irena opened her mouth to say something cutting and formal, then realised that instead she was just… staring.

  The knight’s face was sun-browned and marked by faint lines at the corners of her eyes, the sort that came from squinting into the wind and laughing in rough places. Her hair, dark auburn and threaded with a few strands of silver at the temples, was braided back tight to keep it off her neck beneath the mail coif. Her armour had seen better days; the leather at the joints was patched and worn smooth by years of use.

  She looked, Irena thought helplessly, like someone out of the ballads—if the ballads ever bothered to mention that the heroes smelled of horse and greased iron.

  “Have you quite finished, Princess?” The Dame asked, one eyebrow lifting.

  Heat flooded Irena’s face. She realised she had not actually replied to the greeting. Or, indeed, even so much as closed her mouth.

  “I—” she began, then forced herself to straighten her shoulders further. “I expect my title to be respected.”

  The Dame’s mouth twitched. “You have it,” she said. “The first words out of my mouth.”

  The Ser cleared his throat and glanced between them as if he had suddenly found himself in a play he did not have the script for.

  “Ser Ralfus Harrow, Marchwardens, Third Company,” he said, grasping for formality as a shield. He bowed properly. “Appointed as your steward in matters of supply and security, on behalf of Baron Caldar Brennec, Your Highness.”

  The Dame stepped in as smoothly, having waited for her cue.

  “Dame Auralie Geraud, Marchwardens, Third Company,” she said. Up close, the rabbit on her shoulder badge showed chipped white and gold: horns, wings, and fangs all at once. Its savage playfulness suited her. “Sworn to the Wolpertinger standard. Seconded to Ser Harrow for this post.” She bowed, short and sharp, eyes never leaving Irena, as she added, “Princess.”

  Ralfus glanced at Lira then, as if only just noticing her. Lira drew herself up as much as her small frame allowed, hands folded tightly before her.

  “This is Lira,” Irena said before Ralfus could dismiss her with a look. “My attendant.”

  “Halfling, isn’t she?” he noted, without unkindness, but with the thoughtless distance of a man noting a trait in a horse. He returned immediately to his purpose. “You’ll find none more diligent, Your Highness. The baron sends his assurances that your needs will be met.”

  “My needs,” Irena repeated, flat.

  Ralfus shifted, maille clinking. “Within reason, of course. Given… our circumstances.” He gestured toward the tower, the ward line, the mountain itself. “I did not expect to spend my winter guarding the King’s scandal instead of the southern passes. But we go where we are sent,” he added, reaching for gallows humour and failing.

  Lira’s jaw tightened. The word scandal crawled down Irena’s spine like cold water.

  “Is that what they’re calling it?” Irena asked. “What does your baron tell you, precisely, about why I am here?”

  Ralfus looked uncomfortable under the admonishment. “It’s not my place to pry into royal affairs, Your Highness. Only to obey.”

  “So you obeyed,” Irena said, sweet as poison, “and hauled wagons and sheep up a mountain, and never once wondered why a king would prefer to lock away his own daughter rather than face whatever he fears she represents. How convenient for you.”

  Colour touched his cheeks, and his eyes refocused towards a disciplined distance. Auralie said nothing, but Irena caught the small tightening at the corners of her mouth. The Dame listened. Closely.

  “Rumours spread in barracks like mould in damp bread,” Ralfus said stiffly. “It’s not my habit to repeat them in front of the person concerned.”

  “How honourable,” Irena said. Anger now pounded behind her ribs, hot and bright. “Then allow me to clarify. Whatever tales you have heard say more about the men who tell them than they ever could about me.”

  Ralfus opened his mouth, shut it, and retreated into obedience as if it offered the safest ground.

  “We’ll see to the unloading,” he said. “You’ll find your supplies sufficient for the week. If there is anything lacking, write word via the tally lists and we’ll do what we can for the next week. Within reason.”

  “Within reason,” Irena echoed, dry as ash.

  He gestured to the men at the carts. They moved at once. Crates were lifted. Sacks shifted to shoulders. Goods began to flow through the ward line and up the steps, passing the princess and her maid like a river slipping around stones.

  Lira stepped back automatically, giving the men room but keeping her eyes sharp, dutifully and immediately seeing to counting boxes. As they worked, Irena found her gaze dragged again, irresistibly, to Auralie.

  The knight had stepped aside to give orders in a low voice to a guard wrestling an awkward length of lumber. The Wolpertinger device on her shoulder flashed green and white with each movement, as did her eyes. They were such a deep green. When the man moved off, Auralie rested a hand on her sword belt and surveyed the tower’s face, mapping arrow slits and cracks in stone.

  She belongs here, Irena thought, with an irrational twist low in her stomach. Not at court. Not in gilded rooms. Out on the road, at long-abandoned towers, and wherever danger arose. And here, where function made its own beauty.

  Auralie’s eyes cut back to her, as if she felt the weight of the stare.

  For one foolish second, Irena believed she had been subtle.

  Then Auralie’s mouth curved, slow and knowing, and her gaze travelled deliberately from Irena’s face, down the line of her shoulders, over her body to the twist of her fingers in her skirt, to the toes of her boots, and back up again.

  It was not crude. It was not leering. It simply said…

  I see you.

  Heat roared up Irena’s neck and into her cheeks. She snapped her chin higher and tore her gaze away, fixing it instead on a very interesting patch of frost on the ground.

  Behind her, Lira had gone perfectly still. She could feel the halfling’s attention like a hand pressed between her shoulder blades. Irena did not need to look to know the maid had noticed every reckless blush.

  “So,” Auralie said, as another crate thudded past, the men oblivious to their interaction, “they actually tell you why you’re here, Princess? Or did they just drag you up the mountain, say a few holy words, and leave you to guess?”

  Irena forced herself to meet her eyes. “They informed me,” she said, “that refusing a marriage and arriving with the wrong companion made me unfit for court.”

  “Ah,” Auralie said, as if she had heard that story before. “The wrong companion.”

  Her gaze flicked briefly to Lira, then returned. It held no censure. If anything, there was a wry disbelief.

  “It’s interesting,” she continued, “the things that get called wrong. I have known men in the marches who gambled away entire pay chests and never saw a cell. I have known lords who let their soldiers go hungry while they built dovecotes with marble floors. None of them ended up in a tower with a dragon.”

  “Perhaps they deserved such a fate,” Irena said tightly.

  “Perhaps,” Auralie agreed.

  There was a small, charged silence.

  Ralfus checked his tally parchment and called out numbers to a man by the cart. The guards focused on their loads. No one except Lira seemed to notice the way Auralie watched Irena, or the way Irena had become breathless.

  When the last crate was deposited inside the tower door, and Ralfus checked the tally twice, he returned with his helm under one arm.

  “That’s us done for now, Your Highness,” he said. “Grain, dried meat, roots, torches and oil, salt, and tools Lira requested. We will bring more cloth next run, if there are no delays at the Shirekeep.”

  “And the sheep?” Irena asked, hearing the flock bleat at the rear.

  “For the dragon,” he said, matter-of-fact. “We’ll drive them along to its ridge. It expects us now.”

  “Like a dog at table,” Irena said.

  Ralfus’ mouth tightened. “It keeps you safe.”

  “It keeps you employed,” she snapped, then let the quarrel die. There was no point. Not yet.

  He bowed. “We’ll be back next week. Same day, weather permitting.”

  He stepped away to mount. Auralie lingered a moment longer.

  She closed half the distance between them, moved into the space where Irena could smell leather and steel and horse. She leaned in just close enough that her words would not carry to Ralfus or the men.

  “Behave yourself, Princess,” she murmured, low and amused, “and I will bring you a treat next week.”

  The word treat knocked Irena’s world off-axis.

  Irena’s mind, which had been doing an excellent job of producing sharp retorts and righteous fury all morning, chose that exact moment to become completely blank.

  A treat.

  Her heartbeat hammered. Her mouth went dry. She could not summon a single dignified response. Honey? Books? Some contraband from Marchwardens’ stores? Auralie’s expression suggested it was something she fully expected Irena to squirm over.

  “I— I’ll bear that in mind,” Irena managed at last, and cursed how thin and reedy her voice sounded to her own ears.

  Auralie’s smirk deepened, satisfaction written in the small lines at the corners of her eyes.

  “Please do,” she said. “I hate to disappoint.”

  Then she stepped back, swung into the saddle with infuriating ease, and turned her horse with a nudge of her heel.

  “Marchwardens!” Ralfus called. “On!”

  The green banners lifted. The Wolpertinger on vert reared defiantly against the pale sky.

  The caravan filed back through the ward line. Ralfus paused only long enough to loop the sun-disc amulet back around his neck; the faint glow along the stones faded, and the pressure in the air settled around Irena’s shoulders again like a leaden shawl. Then the procession moved away, carts creaking, sheep jostling and complaining as the men urged them downslope before turning off toward the far ridge.

  “Come on,” Lira said softly after a moment. “We go inside before we freeze.”

  “I will join you shortly,” Irena said, eyes fixed on the dwindling figures.

  Lira hesitated, gaze moving between Irena and the tower. Something complicated crossed her face. Then she nodded.

  “Yes, Your Highness.”

  She disappeared into the tower’s shadow, leaving Irena alone on the steps with the wind and the echo of hooves.

  Later, from the high arrow slit, the world looked small.

  The caravan no longer resolved into faces and details. It had shrunk to moving dots: two ahead, a cluster at the carts, and a trailing pale smear of sheep. They wound down into the valley, then climbed another narrower path toward the dragon’s roost.

  The roost itself was a shelf of rock near the peak, scored black where old fire had licked stone. From this distance, the dragon’s sleeping bulk could have passed for another rocky outcropping, a strange craggy shape amongst many. Indeed, Irena wasn’t sure exactly where it began and where it ended. She only knew with absolute certainty that it was there, the head of the mountain itself.

  Irena watched, breath steaming faintly against the stone of the slit.

  The dots arranged themselves below the ledge at a respectful distance. The herders pushed the sheep forward and bunched them tight. The flock’s movement grew frantic as the animals sensed the danger ahead.

  For a long moment, nothing happened.

  Then the mountain’s summit moved.

  A shape unfolded from the sleeping mass, immense even at this distance. Wings unfurled slightly, then settled. A long neck arched. A head larger than a carriage turned toward the sheep. Fire flickered between jagged teeth as it yawned with bored contempt.

  Irena’s fingers curled against the stone until her knuckles whitened.

  The dragon slid from its perch with the lazy inevitability of an avalanche.

  It did not pounce. It dropped. It snapped its wings wide enough to control the descent and hit the ground with a thud Irena felt through the tower more than she heard. The sheep scattered, bleating desperately, but they had nowhere to go. Rock walls rose on three sides, humans and horses held the fourth.

  The dragon fell upon them.

  It ate with grotesque efficiency: a gout of fire, a sweep of the head, the flash of claws. Bleats cut off mid-wail. Wool and bone and flesh vanished into a throat built for ruin. The dragon did not toy with its food. It fed like a predator that had learned its meal would not fight back, that it would arrive on schedule, growing docile and fat.

  The Marchwardens’ horses shied at the perimeter, snorting and stamping, but the riders held them firm and kept their distance. From up here, they looked fragile and helpless before the creature, kept stalwart only by a sense of duty.

  When the dragon reduced the last sheep to a smear of red across trampled ground, it lifted its head and swallowed, throat bulging. It swung its gaze lazily over the humans, as if considering whether to extend the meal. Someone below, likely Ser Ralfus, raised an arm in some practised gesture of respect or appeasement that the serpent recognised.

  After a long, breathless pause, the dragon huffed once, dismissively, and turned away. Its bulk flowed back up the rocks to the shelf of the summit, where it curled itself into its previous rest. Within minutes, it looked like another feature of the mountain, as if violence had only been a trick of imagination.

  The caravan waited until certainty replaced fear. Then the dots began to move again, turning back down the path, their week’s work complete.

  Irena remained at the slit until the riders shrank to motes against the horizon, vanishing into the mists of the marches.

  Her breath quieted. Her pulse steadied.

  “It does not truly guard me,” she said aloud into the cold. “It obeys no one. They pay it in meat to remain on this peak and terrify anyone who attempts the climb.”

  The ward around the tower, the dragon on the ridge, the knights with sun-discs and banners; the pieces clicked together into a mechanism she could finally see. Not just some holy confinement ordained by fate, but a practical economy of fear, hunger, and obedience. She pressed her fingers to her temples, as if she could force the pattern to settle deeper and understand more of it.

  No rescue would come to free her. Sprinting through a momentary gap in the ward would not free her either. She had understood that in theory. Being thrown over a knight’s shoulder and watching a dragon consume seventeen sheep in moments made that knowledge real.

  Below, she heard Lira moving supplies, the scrape and thump of work, the murmur of counting. The sound steadied her more than the sight she had witnessed unsettled her. Lira built order from these scraps and detritus. Lira refused to surrender to chaos. It was most admirable.

  Irena’s thoughts, treacherous, returned to Dame Auralie. To the way Princess had sounded in her mouth. To the slow, measuring sweep of her gaze. To the murmur in Irena’s ear: I will bring you a treat.

  Heat returned to Irena’s cheeks.

  “Idiot,” she told herself. “She’s one of them.”

  She’s one of them, and yet she looked at you without flinching when the subject of your scandal came up.

  And Lira had seen all of it.

  Irena rested her forehead against the cold stone of the slit and let the chill fight her blush until sense returned. Now she had a scroll that might teach her magic, a tower full of secrets she had barely begun to prise open, and a solid direction to take that might get her out of this mess. She also had a schedule: weekly arrivals, where the ward was opened, and the dragon fed. Two knights. One dutiful to the point of blindness. One anything but.

  They believed they had secured her place here behind so many unassailable barriers. Distance and isolation, ravenous terror, magic and mysticism. She would prove them wrong.

  Irena watched the last green flicker of the Marchwardens’ standards vanish down the road. Her mouth tightened into a thin line.

  “Very well,” she said quietly. “If they will not let me through, I will find a way through them. I shall tear this tower down brick by brick, if I have to…”