"You're frightening me. Is someone dying?"
He smiled, but it was the sad sort. "No one is dying or sick. Well, other than what you already know about Arlen."
"Oh, good." I let out a breath and sat on the edge of the bed.
Codric pulled out the chair from my desk and turned it so he was facing me when he sat down. He then looked down at the folded pages clutched in his hand and unfolded them.
"'Kailin, my love,'" he started reading. "'The rest of this I asked Codric to read to you alone because what I'm about to tell you is a state secret that I'm supposed to keep until the Catonian annual ball. I wish I could tell you this myself, and I'm sorry it has to be delivered by Codric's voice and not mine. This is something neither of us has known, so it will be news for him as well, and I don't know how he is going to take it. It was difficult for me, and I expect that it will be difficult for him as well.'"
Codric's jaw tightened, but he kept on.
"'If Arlen cannot be restored by the night of the ball, the crown does not go to the next brother in line. It comes to me. I didn't know that, but it was my father's plan all along, in case Arlen couldn't be king or refused. They'd never told me this until they dragged me back to Catonia. I always thought that as the fifth son, I was free to decide my own destiny, and Elurion knows I have done everything I could to build my own life the way I wanted. But as the saying goes, if you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plans.'"
"Did you suspect anything?" I asked Codric, mostly because he didn't look shocked, just sad.
He shook his head. "Not the slightest clue. Alar's brothers always treated him like the baby of the family, and his parents never corrected them. I think they did it to protect Alar in case someone attempted to assassinate the heir. Everyone assumed that the twins were the next in line, followed by Avren, and finally Alar."
I nodded, and he went back to the letter.
"'I have a fortnight to pull off a miracle, and I do not think I can do it. I would give anything to be wrong, and I still hope even though it seems foolish given Arlen's state. I just want you to have the facts and decide whether you want to keep hoping with me or give up now instead of tormenting yourself for the next two weeks. If I fail, I will be made heir. And as the heir to Catonia, I will not be able to leave. I am so sorry, Kailin. I love you. Whatever happens, that part was, is, and will always be true.'"
The bottom had gone out from under my world, and the falling was not yet finished.
I had felt exactly the same thing once before, after the saddle gave. One endless second in the open air, when there was nothing under me and nothing to catch me, and the ground was rushing toward me.
Codric lowered the pages and looked at me, and he didn't say anything, because there was nothing he could say to make this better.
"He's not coming back, is he?" It was more of a statement than a question.
"Probably not," Codric said.
He sat down beside me on the edge of the bed, his shoulder touching mine, bracing me. "If he can't fix Arlen by the ball, he can't return, and it doesn't look like he can pull it off."
47
IDRILIA
A single observation is not data. It is an anecdote, and anecdotes are most persuasive when they confirm what we already believe.
—From the field notebook of Princess Idrilia
Ihad my feet in a basin that Ursa had loaded with a cloudy green steep of mountain herbs. It smelled foul and stung, but it was a fair price for being able to feel my toes again.
"Hold still," Ursa said, crouching at the basin with my left foot in her lap, working at a blister on the heel with a cloth and no mercy. "If you flinch you'll slop it everywhere and I'll have boiled up these weeds for nothing."
"It hurts."
"You wanted to go up a mountain, and this is the price you have to pay." She turned my foot to the lamplight and clicked her tongue at the state of it, the broken skin and the place where theboot had rubbed me raw across four days of going up and down a mountain. "That and your mother's fury."
I grimaced. "I'll take your stinky and stingy remedy any day over a visit from my mother."
"I bet." She kept rubbing. "It's a shame that it was all for nothing."
"A shame indeed," I agreed.
The expedition had been a failure, but not because of anything I had done, and since we'd all come down the mountain unharmed, it was all good.
I was already planning another one after the Catonian ball.
