Page 126 of Flames and Blood

He goes red at that and looks away toward the cloud.

“Shall I walk you in?”

I smile. “It’s okay. I’ll go back in a minute.”

He smiles and leaves without another word.

I don’t go back to the long room. I go up to my own rooms, and I stand in front of the shelf by the window for a while before I do anything at all.

My grandmother’s ring lives in a wooden box on that shelf. It has gone in there every night since the day she died, and it went in there the morning I flew out, the same as always, because you don’t wear a ring like that on a boundary flight.

I’ve been home ten days, and I haven’t opened it once. I’ve walked past that shelf a dozen times a day and not put my hand on it, and I don’t know why.

I open it now.

It’s there. Exactly the way I remember it.

It has been in this room the whole time. Nobody took it. Nobody needed to.

Somebody made one instead because they couldn’t lift the real one out of my suite without the entire house knowing it was gone by morning.

I put it on. It goes on the way it always has, and I don’t take it off again.

Everything I’ve learned today points the same way. Somebody who knows me handed over my details so a dead woman could wear my name. Somebody close.

I go through them one at a time. My mother, who wept over the wrong body. Sereth, who just told me about the ring unasked. Kaevor, four days of road away when it happened and nowhere near this house. The council, eleven faces I’ve known my whole life.

I get through four names. The fifth one that comes to me is somebody I don’t want to look at yet, so I stop.

You’re not going to like where this ends, my dragon says. It’s the only thing she’s said all day.

“I know,” I whisper. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Heir.” It’s Hesper. “There you are.” She’s at my door, a folded cloth still in her hand. She’s left something mid-task to catch me.

“What is it, Hesper?”

She’s out of breath. “Two people have asked me this evening what you’ve been wanting to know about the recovery party. Sereth’s cousin, at the fitting. And the steward’s boy, not an hour ago, wanting to know why the Heir is so interested in who signed the gate log.”

“People talk,” I say. “It’s a small community.”

“It is.” She doesn’t look convinced. “I only thought you’d want to know it’s being noticed.”

She leaves with her cloth, and I stand at my door a while before I shut it.

People are keeping track of what I’m asking. I started this morning, and by tonight they already know.

“It was always going to happen,” I tell myself as I head back into my room and prepare for bed.

I don’t sleep much, and I’m awake before the woman with the slate gets to the end of my bed.

“The nineteenth,” she says. “Your mother’s decided. The blue for the contract signing, the white for the ceremony, and there’s a fitting for both on Thursday.”

“I wasn’t asked.”

“It’s not really that sort of decision, Heir.” She says it kindly and moves on to the guest list before I can answer.

That’s how I learn the date of my own wedding. From a woman reading it off a slate, in the middle of a sentence about shoes.