Chapter 144: A familiar voice in an old friend

“You raised me to be a sacrifice,” I said.

“I raised you to survive,” he said, and for one moment the old desperation in his voice sounded almost like love, twisted nearly past recognition by thirty years of fear. “I kept you alive long enough to have a choice at all, Elara, when there were people in that order who would have simply let you starve in a ditch the day you were born, certain the Crown would find you again in your next life regardless.

I know that doesn’t forgive anything. I know it doesn’t undo what I let them do to you. But I am telling you now, while I still can, because Garrick has decided the time for patience is over, and they’re not planning to wait for you to choose anymore.”

“What are they planning,” Aurelian demanded.

Hollis opened his mouth to answer. He never got the chance.

The small window high in the stone wall, barely wide enough for a cat, exploded inward in a spray of glass and dark feathers, and something small and fast, a crossbow bolt fletched in black — buried itself in the old steward’s throat before any of us had time to so much as flinch.

Hollis made a single, wet, choking sound. His eyes found mine one last time, wide with a final, useless apology, and then he slid sideways off the bench and did not move again.

“Down…..” Aurelian’s arm hit my shoulders, dragging me to the floor as a second bolt cracked against the stone where my head had been a heartbeat before, and somewhere out in the corridor, alarm bells began to ring too late, far, far too late, while I lay pressed against cold stone beside the body of the only person who had ever, however selfishly, kept me alive, and understood, with a clarity sharper than any pain the Heart of the Curse had left in my chest, that whatever the Faithful were planning, they had just decided my patience was no longer something worth respecting either.

The palace went into lockdown within the hour, every gate sealed, every gallery searched, and not a single trace of whoever had fired through that window.

The bolt had come from an angle that should have been impossible no rooftop, no ledge close enough for a clean shot and the guard captain’s face, when he reported as much to Aurelian, had the particular grey pallor of a man whose entire understanding of his job had just stopped making sense.

“They’re not climbing in through windows like ordinary assassins,” he said. “Whoever did this either has magic we don’t know how to detect, or they were already inside the wall when they took the shot.”

“Both,” Aurelian said grimly. “Knowing this kingdom’s last hundred years, I’d bet on both.”

I sat through the rest of that day in a kind of numb, exhausted fog, the fresh wound on my chest aching in time with my pulse, Hollis’s wide, apologetic eyes still sitting behind my own whenever I closed them for too long.

Bryn didn’t leave my side, not once, not even when the healer tried to insist I needed rest more than company. She sat on the edge of my borrowed bed with her knees drawn up, watching the door the way she’d watched it since the Council interrogation, like she’d decided somewhere in the last two days that vigilance was simply something she did now, the same way breathing was something she did now.

“You’re thinking about something,” she said, eventually, when the light outside had gone the deep orange of late afternoon. “You’ve got that face. The one you used to get right before you’d say something that got us both in trouble with the overseer.”

“Hollis said they’ve watched every nameless child in the lower city for a hundred years,” I said slowly.

“Waiting to see which one the moon would want.”

“That’s horrifying, yes, I was there.”

“He said his family served them for generations.

Mother to daughter.” I looked at her, and something cold and uncertain settled in my stomach even as I made myself say it. “Bryn. How long has your family lived in the lower city?”

Bryn’s face went very still.

It was, I would think later, the worst possible way to ask the question — clumsy, blunt, born out of fear rather than any actual evidence and I watched the hurt land in her eyes before the rest of her expression could catch up to hide it.

“You think it’s me,” she said quietly. “After six years scrubbing the same floors. After last night, when I screamed your name while a woman held a knife to my throat because of you. You think I’m one of them.”

“I don’t think that,” I said quickly, too quickly, the way you say things you’re not entirely sure of yet. “I just.… I have to ask everyone, Bryn, I have to be careful now, you don’t understand what it felt like watching Hollis die for almost telling us the truth….”

“I understand exactly what it felt like,” she snapped, and tears were standing in her eyes now, furious ones. “I was there, Elara. I have been there every single time something has tried to hurt you in the last two days, and the very first time you have a moment alone to think clearly, the thought you land on is that I might be one of the people doing it.”

“Bryn……”

“My grandmother worked in the laundries,” she said, standing abruptly, her voice shaking. “My mother died of fever when I was nine. I have no family left to inherit anything from, Elara, faithful or otherwise the only thing I’ve ever inherited is whatever loyalty I decided to give you myself, with my own two hands, because you were the only person in that kitchen who ever once asked if I’d eaten before asking me to fetch something for her.”

I felt sick with myself, suddenly, in a way that had nothing to do with the wound on my chest. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have….”

“No,” Bryn said, quieter now, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, “you shouldn’t have. But I understand why you did, and I’m choosing to forgive you for it, because I think you’re about to need someone in this palace who doesn’t flinch when you ask hard questions, and I would rather be that person angry than not be that person at all.”

I reached for her hand, and she let me take it, though her grip stayed stiff for a long moment before it finally softened.

“I’m scared,” I admitted, the words coming out smaller and more honest than anything I’d said since the courtyard. “I don’t know who’s safe anymore. I don’t know if the Crown chose right by choosing me at all, if all it’s done since is get people killed for trusting me.

“It didn’t get Hollis killed,” Bryn said firmly. “Whoever fired that bolt did that. Don’t you dare carry that weight for them, Elara, not on top of everything else they’ve already put on you.”

A soft knock interrupted us careful, deliberate, nothing like the urgent fists that had been hitting doors all day. When Bryn opened it, Councilman Garrick stood in the corridor beyond, leaning on his carved walking stick, his old face arranged into an expression of perfect, grandfatherly concern.

“My lady Elara.” His voice was warm, unhurried, exactly as it had always sounded in the Council chamber. “I heard about poor Master Hollis. Terrible business. I wonder if I might have a word with you alone, I believe I may have some insight into who’s truly responsible, if you’re willing to hear an old man out.”……