“Who are they?” I said once the women had disappeared down the hallway.
“Our competitors. Fresh from their confessions.”
I jerked my head around to Dorian, expecting to see a smirk there. But he wasn’t smiling.
“They saw you,” he said. “Though they pretended they didn’t.”
“But those women. They didn’t look like fighters.”
“Never underestimate a woman in this kingdom.” He resumed walking. “No matter how they might look. They’re the most dangerous of us all.”
Words I never thought I’d hear. They frightened me. They thrilled me.
I caught up to him. “Why is that?”
“They have the greatest connection with nature. The queen even has the power to bind her subjects to silence.”
A bouquet of questions flowered in my mind, the first of which was— “What do you mean by silence?”
“Her magic. With it, she can force us to keep secrets as well as reveal them.” He glanced over at me, eyes narrowed. “The better question is, how can she leverage it?”
So many ways. More ways than I could fathom.
Just then we stopped before a door. Dorian set his palm to the surface and it yielded, opening onto a bedroom much like mine. It had been furnished similarly, but these quarters were larger and included a second room almost as large as the bedroom. Through the doorway I spied a whole wall of books.
“You’re not shy, are you?” he said as I stepped in, my eyes traveling everywhere. He shrugged off his cloak and set it on a hook. “There’s food in the study. Cheese, fruit, meat.”
I stopped at the study’s archway. There, on a round dark-woodtable with two chairs, had been set a full meal with at least three different dishes. A carafe of red liquid glistened under the room’s crystal light. Hunger lit in me, but I hesitated.
The room was so much more than food. Bookshelves lined every wall, each of them brimming. A wide wood desk had been set with a high-backed oak armchair with a gray animal skin slung over it. Papers lay in semi-disarray over the desk’s surface, and a white-feathered quill sat upright in a wooden inkpot.
Just like Elisabet’s room over the inn.What would she have thought of this place?
“What are you,” I breathed, “some kind of archivist?”
“Archivists are for musty dungeons and candlelight.” His voice drifted from the washroom. “I prefer historian.”
Historian.The word pinged through me with sharp edges. That didn’t cohere with the Dorian I’d seen that night in the Dip, his sword raised, on the verge of running me through.
You didn’t send a historian to a battle.
“You? The court historian?”
Water splashed from the other room. “You expected white hair and spectacles?”
“Not white hair. Spectacles, yes.”
He let out an amused, echoing breath. “It’s not a particularly valued role in the court.”
I stood closer to the doorway of the washroom. “You don’t value history?” Elisabet would be horrified.
“Oh, we do.” He appeared, hair dripping, as he wiped a moss-towel over his scalp. “But not every monarch does.”
I suspected he was referring to Rhiannon.
“How long have you been the court’s historian?”
“What you really want to know is whether Rhiannon killed the previous historian.” Dorian wrung his hair with the towel. “Yes?”
