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“Of course it’s for her.” Fitz sighed and stepped aside. When Clare didn’t move he said, “They literally won’t give it to anyone but you.”
Cautiously, Clare stepped forward and held out her hands. The gray-clad figure placed the box in them, then bowed and left without a single word.
“Congratulations,” Fitz said sardonically, “you’ve interested someone enough that they went to the exorbitant cost of hiring a Celerian runner.”
Clare frowned. Celeria was one of the older goddesses, her domain that of mystery and silence. Of promises made and promises kept.
“What are they?”
“An extraordinarily expensive delivery service. They guarantee absolute anonymity and they’ve never been compromised in over a hundred winters of operation.”
“Could the package be dangerous?”
“They have a strict threshold for the nature and level of magic that can be sent in any package. They don’t accept anything with intent to harm, and while that can be manipulated, they won’t accept any package containing levels of magic high enough to kill or seriously injure.” He shrugged. “Sending such a package also gets you banned from the service for life. Turns out the nobles like having an ironclad way to send letters to their lovers more than they like sending death in a box.”
Clare stared at the box in question, wanting to open it but wanting, also, the solitude of a closed door, and knowing there was no way in Ferrian’s hells she would step inside her room.
She looked at Fitz. “Switch rooms with me.”
“No.”
“Do you have a particular attachment to yours?”
“Why? Do you have a particular dislike of yours?”
She gritted her teeth. “Yes. I won’t step foot inside it.”
He crossed the living area, pushed open the door to her room and surveyed it. She’d expected him to come back with a sarcastic remark, but instead his brow furrowed. “You don’t like white, hmm?”
She didn’t dignify that with a response. She had already said as much.
He shut the door, and she relaxed a little at having the space closed off. “My question for you is, why does the king know you don’t like white? And why does he care?”
She lifted her chin. “Will you switch me rooms or am I sleeping in Marquin and Verol’s until they come back and make you switch me?”
He studied her. “Have it redecorated.”
“I can’t. And if you take it, you can’t either.” Because if anyone came into this suite to “redecorate”, Alaric would know. And if he knew it bothered her, his suspicions about her would be confirmed.
“I don’t like you,” he said.
“I believe we’ve established that. It’s a mutual feeling.”
“I don’t like you,” he repeated, “but I don’t want you dead. So if and when you decide the subject of ‘white’ is one that needs to be dealt with, and if the Arrendons aren’t here when that time comes, bring it to me.”
He didn’t linger to receive her acceptance or refusal. He simply moved his things from his room to the white one, and shut the door between them once more.
“If and when I decide the subject of ‘white’ is one that needs to be dealt with,” she muttered under her breath, “there won’t be a damn thing you or the Arrendons can do to help me.”
Since there wasn’t yet a damn thing she could do about it either, she pushed it aside, as she pushed aside so many things in her mind, and took her trunks and her odd delivery into her new room. It was a plainer, darker, infinitely more comforting setting than the one she had just left. Soft black rugs covered the floor around a carved oak bed frame, a matching chest at its feet and a wardrobe on the far wall.
The room had a small window, and Clare twitched the heavy black curtains closed before eyeing potential hiding places for the coin purse currently tucked into her cloak pocket. It wasn’t that she thought she needed to hide it, necessarily. The Arrendons had no need of her money, and she doubted Fitz did, either. But the coins represented the whole of her independence, her security, and that was something she could not leave to chance. In the end, she chose three hiding places and split the coins between them, because her paranoia would allow for nothing less.
Only once she’d completed this task did she sit down on the bed and place her mysterious package in front of her. It could be from anyone, could contain anything. But the black and the green colors said it could only be from one person. A single tug undid the ribbon, and she lifted the lid of the box to reveal a stack of simple leather-bound books. She pulled the first out, turning it over in her hands, wondering what the point was in giving a book to someone who couldn’t read.
Then she opened it and understood. The alphabet—for she knew enough to recognize the letters, at least, could still sing the silly song made of them all that had been one of her few pieces of childhood learning—was printed on the inside cover. The next pages bore strings of images. Beneath each image was a word, and when some compulsion tugged her to run her finger across that word, Numair’s voice spoke it to her.
She thought of a red envelope, packed carefully between her clothes in one of her bags. Thought of asking Numair to tell her what it said and his easy It’s for you to read. You’ll learn to soon enough.
