Chapter 56: The Party

AZIZA

Sena was already awake when I knocked.

She opened the door and took one look at my face and stepped back without a word. I came in and sat on the edge of her bed and she sat across from me in the chair and waited with her hands in her lap and her eyes doing that thing where they were moving over my face cataloguing damage.

"The pool," I said. "Last night. Vessa found me."

"How bad?"

I tilted my head so she could see the left side of my jaw where Vessa's knuckles had caught me. Sena's eyes went there and stayed.

"She hit you."

"We hit each other," I said. "I won't pretend it was only her."

"Who won?"

I looked at the window. "She did."

Sena pressed her mouth together and looked at the floor for a moment. "And then?"

"She spat on me." I said it plainly because saying it any other way would make it into something I had to manage rather than something that happened. "Then she walked out."

The room was quiet for a moment.

"I went to Rhydian," I said.

Sena's expression shifted. Not judgment. Something more careful than that.

"I told him everything," I said. "The pool, what she said about his visits to her rooms — all of it." I paused. "He confirmed it. That he's been going to her."

Sena pulled one knee up to her chest and looked at me. She didn't say I told you so, which was one of the things I had always appreciated most about her.

"Ana," she said.

"Before you say it — I'm alright."

"You have a bruise on your jaw and you've been up all night and you're sitting in my room at dawn telling me the man you're sleeping with is also sleeping with his mate to try for a baby." She held my gaze. "You don't have to be alright."

"I know that." I pressed my thumb against the ring of bruise at my jaw and felt the tenderness of it. "But I need to be functional. There's too much to do to spend time not being alright."

She looked at me for a long moment. "What happened after you told him?"

I said nothing.

Her eyes went to the state of my hair, the tunic I had clearly put back on in a hurry, the shadows under my eyes from a night that had not involved much sleep.

"Ana."

"Sena."

"You stayed the whole night."

"I left before the bell," I said.

She put her face briefly in her hands. Then she lowered them. "This is getting very complicated."

"It was always complicated."

"It was complicated," she said. "Now it's — what happened to getting the records? What happened to the mission? You have weeks left at most before the blood magic goes completely and instead of moving on the records room you're—" She stopped. Adjusted. "I worry about you. That's all."

I looked at her. At her round face and her dark eyes and the particular quality she had of saying true things without making them sound like accusations.

"The records room," I said. "I haven't forgotten. I'm going to move on it. Soon."

"You've been saying soon for three weeks."

"I mean it this time."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she leaned over and picked up a small cloth from the basin table beside her and handed it to me. I pressed it against my jaw and held it there and looked at the window.

"Rhydian said he'd handle Vessa," I said. "I told him not to do anything drastic."

"And he agreed?"

"He said fine."

"Which means he's thinking about it," Sena said.

"Which means he's thinking about it," I agreed.

She pulled her knee tighter to her chest. "She's not going to stop, Ana. You know that. Last night was bad and next time will be worse because she's losing and she knows it and women like Vessa don't lose gracefully."

"Women like Vessa don't lose at all if they can help it," I said. "Which is what worries me."

We sat together in the early morning quiet with the compound starting to wake up outside the window, the first bell going somewhere across the inner wall, the distant movement of the kitchen staff starting their day.

Then Sena said, "Did you hear about the party?"

I took the cloth from my jaw. "What party?"

"Vessa announced it yesterday while you were on the duties circuit." She reached for the folded notice on her bedside table and handed it to me. "Ladies of the neighbouring kingdoms and allied packs. A full formal gathering, three days of events, hosted by her. Invitations went out two days ago."

I read the notice.

The paper was thick and the handwriting was Vessa's own rather than a secretary's, which meant she had written these herself. Thirty-two invitations to the ladies of every pack and allied territory within two weeks' ride. Music, feasting, a formal hunting party on the second day, a reception the third evening. All of it stamped with the Ironfang seal.

She had planned this before the garden.

She had planned this before the declaration in the hall, before the miscarriage, possibly before any of it, and she had been waiting for the right moment to deploy it. Thirty-two visiting ladies from thirty-two allied territories, all of them arriving to find Vessa as their host, Vessa at the head of the table, Vessa in her rooms and her household and her position as the mate of the Crown Prince. All of them watching. All of them forming opinions.

And me, in the eastern wing, in my new chambers, with my title and my short hair and my bruised jaw.

"When does it start?" I asked.

"Ten days," Sena said.

I folded the notice and held it in my hands and looked at the window.

Outside, the morning was coming up grey and cold. The kitchen staff would be stoking the fires now. The supply runners would be starting their routes. The administrative corridor would be opening up. Two corridors down from the administrative wing, past the eastern guard rotation, the records room would be sitting in its usual quiet with its iron lock and its forty years of evidence and its eleven-minute patrol gap that I had been mapping and remapping for months.

Ten days.

"Sena," I said. "I'm going to get the records."

She looked at me.

"Before the party," I said. "I need to move before thirty-two allied ladies arrive and turn this compound into somewhere I can't move freely." I handed the notice back to her. "Ten days. That's enough time."

Sena took the notice and looked at it and then looked at me. "And if something goes wrong?"

"Then something goes wrong," I said. "But I've been here long enough. I have the access I came for. I know the route. I know the gap." I pressed my hand to the rings through the fabric of my tunic. "I can't wait for perfect conditions. Perfect conditions aren't coming."

She held my gaze for a long moment. Then she nodded once, small and serious.

"Tell me what you need from me," she said.

I looked at her and thought about the records room door and the patrol gap and the iron lock and the forty years sitting behind it, and I thought about Rhydian sleeping with his jaw loose in the grey dawn light, and I thought about my parents' rings against my sternum and the reason I had walked through the palace fire in the first place.

"Just be ready," I said. "When I come back."