She was still studying me. She should have known me immediately. A dozen memories continued to chase each other through my mind. Standing around a bonfire together. Eating Ander’s cooking, which was truly the most regrettable thing about him. She had retrieved the burnt meat from my hand behind his back—she was gifted at sleight of hand—and tried to feed it to Rees, but Rees had rejected it, so we had been caught. Ander had declared us both ungrateful wretches.
She had loved him. She had loved me, because Ander and I had been like brothers. One came with the other.
None of that was in her face now. Only the shadowy confusion of knowing someone but not being able to place them in time.
“The knife,” I said, returning to Riven. “When does Obsidian move?”
“Obsidian inconveniently does not share their plans with me. You’ll have to do some work yourself, shifter.”
“Very well. I thank you for the information.”
“You’ll owe me.”
“I owe you much, Riven. I intend to repay you with freedom and more.”
“I was in her guard when the queen hosted a spy this morning whose news left her in wrath,” Tesa announced eagerly. She still had the directness of someone who had grown accustomed to making herself useful at any cost, and other memories tried to rise up like ghosts. We had been three orphans together once. “The spy had found something in the Low Fae court of King Nez.”
“Nez,” I repeated. He was a Low Fae lord, dangerously loyal to my mother. Or so I had thought.
“He has been keeping this knife a secret from the queen.” Her gaze rose to mine. “She immediately summoned Obsidian’s first. She implied violence in the retrieval would not be undesirable.”
“Why would she send Obsidian and not the Nightwalkers?”
“She must desire discretion. She ordered Obsidian to ride, not fly. She doesn’t want Nez to receive any warning.”
I considered her reasoning before I began on the problem. She only had so many Nightwalkers at her service; mortals could not be transformed. I hadn’t known until I saw Tesa that any but the Fae could serve as Nightwalkers. “Horses also let her create the appearance she wasn’t involved at all. Obsidian could be bandits.”
“They’ll have to journey through orc territory,” Riven observed.
“Always a pleasure.”
Even dragons dreaded dealing with orc territory; they had taken to catapulting rocks into the air at passing dragons. Their king Braegan could not seem to get a hand on them. I’d have to plan how to steal the knife from either Nez or Obsidian; if my mother needed it, I needed it more. But I was curious about Tesa. “How did you come to serve in the queen’s household?”
Tesa’s brow furrowed, slightly. “I was chosen to serve in her personal guard.” She paused. “I was—” Another pause. She did not recover from that one.
“Before that.”
The frown deepened, the expression of someone trying to read a passage they know they recognize and finding the letters have rearranged themselves. “I was elsewhere.”
“Where?”
Something in her gaze sharpened. “You ask as if you know the answer.”
“I ask because I’m trying to understand your history.”
“My history.” She repeated the words with a slight emphasis. Her gaze was steady. “You’re asking because you want to know what I know.”
She was intelligent. She had always been intelligent. That, at least, the queen had not touched.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve seen you before. It was years ago, though. You weren’t a Nightwalker. You were just a girl.”
Tesa had never been quitejust a girl.But it was close enough.
“I don’t remember everything. There are many gaps. If you can fill those gaps, I’d appreciate it.”
I looked at her face—this face that Ander had mourned for four years, that had become part of the architecture of his grief, that had turned him into something else—and I understood with a clarity that was cold and specific what I was looking at.
Forgetting was time and distance and the natural drift of things imperfectly held.
