Cass took the mug from Miri and set it onto the window’s ledge before facing her more fully. “Tell me about the stables.”
She stared into his eyes, felt the safety of telling him, and remembered that she’d told him the same only the night before. “The stables border the forest, but there is an old guard house nearby where deliveries used to be allowed through. The wall between the stables and the guard house is solid block, but the repairs were not kept up when the woods grew thick.”
“And what’s there, behind the trees?”
“A chink in Casper’s armor.” Cass’s mouth turned up a bit at the corner, and Miri went on, her voice low. “A split in the wall from roots formed beneath the earth, ignored because the opening is so small. No one would get in because of the tree, but even then, it would only permit someone very small.”
“Like a child.”
Miri nodded. “Like a serving girl who sometimes might want to sneak into town.”
“Or a woman.”
“Yes,” she said. “But who’s afraid of those?”
Cass did smile then, if just a little.
Miri said, “And it wouldn’t even matter, since the only access through the wall is to the stables. It’s not as if a queen’s army could chop down a tree and cross the courtyard to reach Casper in the safety of his rooms without notice. Why bother even inspecting beneath the roots for cavities large enough to burrow through?”
Cass watched her, and Miri realized her chest had loosened, as if she was once again herself. He took her fingers—still warm from the mug—into his hands. “How often have you been near a sorcerer?”
He wasn’t comforting her. He wanted her trapped—held there should she decide to run away. She shook her head. “Not since... before.”
“Never?”
“Any time they came—even word of a single kingsman—Nan hid me away. The entire time in Smithsport, and before—Cass, not since I was a girl and my mother was—”
“I need you to tell me, Miri. I need to know what happened.”
There it was, the thing that hurt her and would cause her to run. She tried to jerk her fingers from Cass’s grip, but he held fast.
“You know why I need you to tell me.”
He was her guard. He was meant to protect her.
At her expression, Cass sighed and let go of her hands. “I know you felt it. We both know something is there. You’re stepping into a dangerous task in two days, and you refuse to give me the tools to help you should you need it. Gods dammit, Miri, I don’t want you to die.”
Her arms drew tight around herself at his words, but Miri did not run away. Want, he’d said. Not duty and honor but want.
He seemed to realize what he’d said as well. He stood, pushing a hand through his hair, and resumed pacing the room.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “my mother used to tell me a story about a changeling. It was a child stolen from its crib, secreted away by magical beings—fae creatures of the forest.” He stopped his pacing, his gaze coming back to hers. “In that child’s place, they left one of their own whom they’d deemed unworthy or at least worth the trade.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine, Miri? Can you imagine what this was like for the rest of us?”
For me, he meant to say. For the boy Cass who’d been taken from a family who loved him so much that they felt his life was better served at the hand of the queen. But Cass was not the changeling. That distinction had gone to a poor serving girl who’d been murdered in the skirmish only moments before.
The kingsmen had been coming. They’d already taken Lettie captive—Miri had heard her screams. They were coming for Miri next, her mother had said. It was time to put the plan into place.
Cass’s brothers of the queensguard had stripped Miri’s thin frame down to her shift. They’d dressed the dead girl in the clothes of a princess and lain her body by the queen’s to let them both burn.
Later, the kingsmen had thought it was Miri, and every day for a solid year, Miri had wished that it was. She’d longed to have been laid beside her mother and turned to ash so that even the sorcerers could no longer tell it was her.
Miri had been jealous of a dead girl—a servant and child who would never again draw breath. Cinders.
It had worked, of course. All thought the second princess was burned, not carried away in drapery, half-naked and bleeding and covered in ash. They’d shoved her into a box on a boat, and she’d ridden in that hell down the Maidensgrace River alone and nearly dead. The feeling of being choked, the feel of the icy sea as the box had been dumped over, and the way the salt water burned her aching lungs were with her still. She’d wanted to die there, wanted so much for it to only end. That was when her hand remembered the pendant. Her childhood fingers took tighter hold of the only thing she had left—on a thin chain pressed to her flesh as she was choked to death by fire, sea, and loss.
Then Thom’s men had pulled her from the water. They’d cracked the box open so that she felt the shattering and splintering of the wood. Those men had cradled a broken, blistered shred of a thing and carried her to the place she would soon call home.
When the blisters had healed, Nan had shaved Miri’s head. The hair had been half burnt away, melted in the sorcerer’s fire. Nan had forced a bonnet lined with salve over Miri’s raw and ragged scalp. Miri had hated that bonnet. She’d hated everything. She hated it still.
Cass stared at Miri’s hand where it rested at her hem. She felt for her mother’s pendant at the memory, checking to be certain it was still there. It was. She was no longer choking. She was no longer a battered child who’d escaped with nothing but minor burns and a broken heart.
She might not be a princess of Stormskeep while those kings held their rule, but Miri was still a daughter of the Lion Queen. She would get Lettie back, and those kings would pay for what they’d done. Miri would have revenge in their name.
Her gaze was steady on Cass, his shoulders sagging beneath the weight of his duty. His lean muscled form was clad in tradesman’s rags, though he belonged in the uniform of a guard.
“They took her blood,” Miri told him. “The sorcerers used it against her. It was the only way they could have won.”
Cass pressed his lips together, which meant he was concerned about the extent to which Miri could be affected and how much of her own blood the sorcerers might have.
“I can handle it. If I’m no closer than I was today, I can do it. I can kill the kings. And they don’t realize that I’m alive. None of them knows.”
His mouth turned down, but he didn’t remind her of the risk she was taking or what could happen the moment those sorcerers realized she still drew breath.
“I will do everything I can for Lettie.” Miri let him see the truth in her gaze. She would not back down. “I’ve no other choice.”
Chapter 11
Miri woke two days later with a flock of sparrows fighting in her chest. By the time she and Cass had dressed and packed the horses, Miri was convinced the fluttering would burst free and spill out of her with her very being. But Cass had forced Miri to eat and—because she was stubborn and refused to back down from her plan—take a shot of brandy from a flask he’d been given at the Silverton Inn.