CHAPTER THREE: THE ACCORD II

The quarters they gave her were on the third level of the eastern tower, high enough that the window offered a view of the outer wall and the plains beyond it, flat and grey and enormous in every direction, stretching to horizons she could not reach.

The room itself was not a cell. That was important to note. It was furnished with care, a wide bed with wool blankets and a canopy of dark green fabric, a writing desk with ink and paper already laid out, a wardrobe containing clothes that were not hers but had been chosen for a woman of approximately her build. A fireplace. A mirror. A bookshelf containing, she was startled to see, actual books rather than a performative arrangement of decorative volumes.

She crossed to the bookshelf immediately and read the spines. History. Military theory. Three volumes on agricultural management. A collection of star charts. And then, tucked at the far end, nearly hidden behind a larger volume on siege engineering, a thin book with no title on the spine. She pulled it out.

The cover was plain, undyed leather, the kind used for working documents rather than treasured ones. She opened it.

The first page was blank except for a symbol she did not recognize, drawn in what appeared to be ordinary ink but which caught the light strangely, as though the lines were very slightly raised from the page. It was a circle containing nine smaller circles arranged in a ring, each connected to its neighbors by thin lines, and at the center of the circle, smaller than the rest, a tenth circle that was filled in entirely black.

She stood there for a moment, staring at it.

Then she heard footsteps in the corridor outside and she closed the book and replaced it behind the siege engineering volume with the careful unhurriedness of someone who was simply browsing, and she was standing at the window looking out at the plains when the door opened.

It was not a guard.

It was a girl about her own age, perhaps seventeen, with the kind of stillness that comes either from extreme shyness or extreme self-control, and Eliana could not yet determine which. She had dark eyes and close-cropped hair and the deep brown complexion of the Azhari people who lived in the southern reaches of Elandor's territory, near the border with Zarlia. She wore the blue and grey of castle household staff, but she wore it with the particular straightness of someone performing a role rather than inhabiting one.

"I am to attend you," the girl said. Her voice was low and steady. "My name is Vanya."

Eliana looked at her for a moment. "Vanya," she repeated. "Vanya what?"

A very brief pause. The kind that is too brief to be called a hesitation, but is one regardless. "Vanya Elfhame."

Elfhame.

Eliana knew that name. Not from her own life, but from the books in her father's library, the genealogical records that she had read at sixteen purely out of the particular boredom of a rainy week with nothing else available. The Elfhame line was an old Azhari family that had married into the Elandorian nobility several generations ago and then disappeared from the records sometime in the last century, following something the dry official histories referred to only as the Dissolution. She had not found any account that explained what the Dissolution actually was.

"It is a pleasure to meet you, Vanya Elfhame," she said, and she said it as though the name meant nothing to her, which was a skill her mother had taught her and which had never been more useful than in this moment. "I would like a bath, if one can be arranged. And then I would very much like to sleep."

"Of course," Vanya said. And then, very quietly, as she turned toward the door: "The books on the shelf. The one without a title. It was left there for you."

Eliana did not move. She kept her eyes on the plains outside the window. "By whom?"

But when she turned, the girl was already gone.

...* * *...

Xarren did not sleep after returning to the castle. He did not often sleep in the first hours after a campaign, his body still running on whatever fuel it produced when stillness was not an option. He changed out of his riding clothes and went instead to the training yard, where in the grey before-dawn he worked through the forms his sword master had drilled into him so many times that his body could perform them without his mind's participation, which was precisely the point.

He was on the fourteenth form when he became aware that he was not alone.

His older brother stood at the edge of the yard, leaning against the stone wall with his arms crossed and his particular expression of unhurried amusement arranged on his face like something he'd put on along with his morning clothes. Tyrespiel Elfhame Thebes was twenty-five and had been born looking like he already knew the ending of whatever story was currently being told.

"She arrived, then," Tyrespiel said.

"Obviously," Xarren said, and continued the form.

"Father saw her this morning?"

"Yes."

"And?"

Xarren completed the form and lowered his blade. He considered the question with more care than its surface simplicity seemed to warrant. "She is not what he expected."

"You spoke with her? On the road?"

"Minimally."

Tyrespiel pushed himself off the wall and walked toward the center of the yard, his hands still loosely clasped behind his back, his footsteps unhurried. He moved like a man who had long ago decided that urgency was for people who had not yet learned how things worked.

"I have read the reports from the campaign," he said. "You did not draw weapons on her when she refused initial compliance."

"She was alone. Surrounded. Drawing weapons would have been theatrical."

"Father would have drawn weapons."

"Father was not there."

Tyrespiel stopped beside him and looked at him for a moment. His eyes were light brown, almost gold in certain lights, which was unusual for an Azhari-line face, and they held the particular quality of attention that Xarren had always found slightly unnerving, the sense that his brother was reading something in the air beside your head rather than looking directly at you.

"She asked about the forest path," Tyrespiel said. It was not a question.

Xarren's jaw tightened fractionally. "You were informed quickly."

"I am always informed quickly. That is why I am useful." Tyrespiel reached out and took the practice sword from Xarren's hand with the casual ease of a man who has never been refused anything he reached for. He turned it over once, examining the blade, then handed it back. "What did Father say to her question?"

"That it was not a question for today."

"Wise." Tyrespiel began walking back toward the wall. "There are some questions whose answers can only be managed, not resolved. It is best to delay the management until the situation is more... favorable."

"Tyre"

His brother paused.

"Who told them about the path?"

The silence between the question and the answer was eleven seconds. Xarren counted them.

"Someone who understood," Tyrespiel said at last, "that the war needed to end." He glanced back over his shoulder. "As should you, little brother. It has gone on long enough. The girl is the closing of a chapter. Allow it to close."

He left. Xarren stood alone in the training yard with the grey morning expanding around him and the forges beginning their day's song, and he thought about what his brother had not said, which was the same thing the king had not said, which was a shape he could feel at the edges of his understanding without being able to look at it directly.

He thought about the princess's voice in the torchlit forest: steady, analytical, without a trace of the fear that everyone in her position should have been feeling. He thought about the way she had looked at his riders not as a captive looks at captors but as a general looks at an opposing force: measuring, calculating, filing away.

He thought about the question she had asked his father, and the fact that she had asked it at all.

She knew there was a traitor in Regalia. And she had announced that she knew it, openly, in the first private audience with the man most likely responsible for arranging the betrayal.

Either that was recklessness, he thought.

Or it was the opening move of someone who already had a plan.

......................

......End of Chapter Three......

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