Chapter 316: Will You Come With Me To Ashford?

"Yes." Draeven replied. "I think that’s the best thing to do"

"I have to go and find it."

"Yes."

"Not for her. Not only for her." She lifted her chin. "For me. I need to know."

"I understand." Draeven replied.

"I’m not asking you to say yes today."

"I would say yes today."

She blinked.

"I told you," said Draeven, very quietly. "You will go. Not today. Not tomorrow. But the day Carrick Greythorne’s horse is on the north road, I will have your own horse saddled." His eyes were warm. "And I will be on it."

"You’ll come."

"I will, if you’ll have me."

"I thought...." Her voice faltered. "I thought you’d send Rhen. With the riders. I thought you’d stay."

"I could not."

"Why not?"

"Because it is your mother," said Draeven, simply. "And your father. And the truth about your life."

Her throat closed.

She had meant to say something. A thing about gratitude, or the council, or the heavy weight of the throne. But what came out, small and cracked and entirely unplanned, was:

"I didn’t say it yet."

"No?"

"I haven’t asked you." Morgana said.

"No." He replied.

"I’m asking now." She drew a breath. "Will you come with me to Ashford?"

He smiled.

It was slow, and quiet, and it started in his eyes. It warmed his whole face, and made him look, for an instant, quite young.

"Yes," he said.

"Even if it’s dangerous."

"Especially then."

"Even if I...." She stopped.

Even if I find out something terrible about myself, she thought. Even if there’s something behind that stone that I can’t take back.

Even if you hate me for it.

"Even if what?" said Draeven gently.

"Even if it takes a long time."

"I have time." His hand lifted, and brushed a loose strand of hair from her cheek. "I have a great deal of time. I find I would rather spend it with you."

She leaned her forehead against his chest.

His arms came around her. He did not say anything. He only held her, warm and solid and steady, with his chin resting on the top of her head, and she closed her eyes. Through the bond, she felt INFERNUS stretch and settle like a great cat in the sun.

Through the window, across the long green fields, the north road lay pale and empty under the morning sky.

***

*THE CITY OF VALORHOLD*

Kael had stopped trying to sleep on wet nights.

The rain had started at dusk. It whispered against the high windows of the library at Valorhold, and the great room, which never fully slept, had gone as quiet as it ever got. On the third gallery, in the alcove at the far end that nobody else wanted because of the draft, a single lamp burned over a desk stacked with ledgers.

He sat under it with a pen held lightly in two ink-stained fingers, in the same plain brown robe he had worn for most of those years. Anyone passing would have taken him for one more scholar lost in a book.

Nobody passed. Nobody in the Order asked what he was working on anymore. They had stopped asking years ago, the way people stop asking about somebody else’s old grief.

He was writing in a ledger. The ledger was an old one, with a cracked leather spine and pages gone soft and brown at the edges, ruled into narrow columns. Each line held a name, a village, a date. Beside most of them, in a small neat hand, was a single mark: a line drawn through the entry.

Dismissed.

He had been working through this ledger for eighteen years.

It listed every girl born in the realm during one particular spring. Some twelve hundred of them. He had sent letters to parish clerks and traveling healers. He had paid midwives. He had walked to villages himself, in his younger years, and stood at the edge of fields, looking at girls who didn’t know why a stranger stared at them. Line by line, year by year, he had crossed them off.

Tonight he had two left.

He read the first. Isolde Greythorne, House Greythorne. The mark beside it was already struck through. Carrick’s daughter had been born two weeks too early and a hand’s breadth too tall, and he’d crossed her out the day Carrick first offered her. He didn’t need to look at it again.

He read the second.

Morgana. Born in Ashford. Mother: Elara, a weaver. Father: unknown.

Beneath it, he had not drawn a line.

He sat for a while with the pen above the page. Then he set it down, very carefully, and picked up a sheet of paper from the corner of the desk. It was a note, half finished. He folded it in thirds, and then in half, and tucked the corner under with his thumbnail, the way he always did, a small precise habit that he had never once noticed he had.

"You fold a letter like a man closing a door gently," someone had told him once.

He put the note down.

He had stopped writing to her years ago. He wasn’t sure why he kept folding.

Footsteps sounded on the gallery stair.

They were quick and light, and they didn’t belong to a scholar. Kael looked up, and saw a young man in grey robes coming toward him along the shelves, holding something wrapped in cloth against his chest. He was thin and pale, with a sparse beard and a nervous, eager look, and he stopped three paces away and bowed.

"Master Kael."

"Brother Tavish."

"The High Priest asks that you come to the Lantern Room."

Kael raised an eyebrow. "At this hour?"

"He says it’s urgent."

"Is it ever not?"

Tavish’s mouth twitched. He didn’t answer. He only stood there, shifting the bundle in his arms, and Kael saw that the cloth was damp, and that something under it gave off a faint, cold light.

He rose.

"Lead on," he said.