“You can’t assassinate a prince with ghosts and incantations,” she said, but this time she sounded a little less certain. “Did the prince offer a reward?”
“His guards didn’t offer coin,” Wren said, “and he didn’t leave his carriage.”
“The assassins were caught?”
“Two died in the fight. The others got away.”
“Well. At least the garrison was doing its job.”
“They didn’t,” Wren said. “They watched from the wall.”
She blinked and stared, apparently dumbfounded by the strategy. “They watched an attack on a Gated prince?”
“And then complained afterward. Rill said they weren’t bodyguards for the Lys’Careths.”
“Oh, he cannot be that brainless. I’ll send a message tomorrow.” She believed herself one of the brightest political minds in the stronghold. “And given he’s alive because of your intervention, it’s only right he offer a reward. I’ll request it.”
The important work done—milking every coin and scrap of information from us—she pulled the frame toward herselfagain. She looked at her needlework, picking at a mote of dust that threatened the bar of the canvas. “Tomorrow, you’ll have the morning to yourselves, but there may be work to be done at midday. Be here on time.”
Because she knew we had no choice but to obey, we were dismissed.
We walked across the courtyard to the small building where the servants slept; Wren and I shared a small room and the narrow bed at one end. The bed—a lumpy ticking mattress stretched over a rope frame—wasn’t large either, and it still filled most of the space. Wren was a kicker, and the room barely kept out the wind in winter. But it was better than sleeping on the plank floor, or huddled in the portico of a shrine to one of the gods.
“Maybe the Lady will let you work here for a while,” she said as we peeled off our worn leather boots.
I let my boots drop heavily onto the floor—it wasn’t like they could get more scuffed—and looked at her. “You want to punish me for saving the prince by locking me up?”
“I want to keep you alive.”
There were a chipped bowl and pitcher on the only other bit of furniture in the room—a small table with a wobbly leg. We were broken castoffs, so we got the broken castoffs.
I sat down on the bed. “You know what they’ll be talking about in the market tomorrow? The price of radishes and the new prince. They won’t remember me. And the soldiers won’t, either.” They would be focused on protecting the prince or finding the practitioner. And since strongholders and royals didn’t mingle, or at least not strongholders like us, we wouldn’t cross paths again.
I let the disappointment slide over me, then glanced at her. She sat on the bed, her gaze vacant, her brow furrowed.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
Wren wasn’t the type to worry.
I remembered almost nothing from before my arrival at the Lady’s manor. I had no memories of my mother. Only a few images of my father, the things he’d tried to teach me after he got sick and before he was too far gone. But I remembered with perfect clarity Wren stomping into the Lady’s manor for the first time, two months after I’d arrived. We’d both been ten years old, and she was the fiercest person I’d ever seen. She didn’t speak to me for the first three days. But on the fourth, when I’d fallen out of the pangan tree behind our building, she’d been the one to help me up. We’d named each other Fox and Wren that day; we couldn’t go back to the lives we had before, and the Lady only called us “Girl.” What came before didn’t matter. We would start a new life together, and we would help each other survive. A few years later, we met Luna and became our own kind of family.
She scratched her arm absently. “I don’t like it.”
Ignoring Wren’s honed instincts would be dumb. We both had our skills, and listening to her was one of mine. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Wasn’t your dad into tapestries of fate?” She crossed her arms. “Maybe one of those threads was snipped.”
“More than one. The stronghold became less safe in the time it took those carriages to roll inside.”
“Fucking Lys’Careths.”
“We just get up,” I said, “and we keep going.” That’s what she’d said to me when she’d pulled me up off the ground, and we’d repeated those words a thousand times since then. When she’d tried to run away but had been hauled back by a garrison soldier with a new black eye. When I’d tried to run away but wasratted out by one of the Lady’s personal servants. We’d said them during broken bones and illness and misery, and nights spent wishing we’d been born into better luck.
I reached out and squeezed her hand.
She squeezed back. A little too hard.
“Ow,” I said. “Careful with the thief’s hands.”
