Chapter 2 All The Girls Who Died Before Me

The voice faded the way smoke does - not gone, exactly, just thin enough that you could pretend it wasn't there anymore. I wasn't pretending. Welcome home, my queen. The words sat at the base of my skull like something that had always been there and was only now making itself comfortable. I pressed my free hand against the mark, half-expecting it to respond, but it had gone quiet under my fingers, no heat, no pulse, nothing except the faint geometric lines that hadn't existed on my skin this morning and apparently had no intention of leaving. Lucien still hadn't let go of my hand. The guards behind us had regrouped, the nobles had returned to the hall in clusters of urgent whispering, and Rowan was somewhere at the edge of the corridor doing what he always did - standing where trouble was likely to arrive from and making himself difficult to move. None of them had reacted to the voice. Not one person in that hall had turned, startled, searched the room for a source. "Did anyone else hear that?" I asked. "No," Lucien said. "So it was only for me." "Yes." "And you're not going to explain why." "Not here." He walked us forward, and I let him, which was either a sign that I was developing reasonable instincts or a sign that the fear I was managing to keep off my face had gone somewhere else entirely and settled in my legs. The corridor stretched ahead of us, wide and cold, lined on both sides with portraits of men who all had the same careful eyes and the same expression of someone accustomed to making decisions that cost other people everything. I studied them as we passed. "Are all of them your ancestors?" "Most." "They all look exhausted." "The crown does that." I glanced at him. "Helpful information. Thank you." His expression didn't change, but something around his eyes shifted in a way I was beginning to recognize as the closest he came to acknowledging that I'd said something worth acknowledging. Two servants pressed against the wall to let us pass, heads lowered, and I caught the whisper between them the way you catch something falling - without thinking, purely on instinct. Did you hear what the crown called her? Another one. I stopped walking. Lucien took a half-step before he realized I wasn't beside him anymore, and when he turned, I was already looking at the servants, who had found something fascinating to study in the floor tiles. I let them stare at their shoes. It was Lucien I turned toward. "Another one," I repeated. "That's what she said. Another one." "Aria." "No. Don't use my name as a redirect. You do that when you want me to stop asking something, and I'm not stopping." I kept my voice low because we were still in a corridor that amplified sound and I had already caused enough disruption for one evening. "There have been other girls. Haven't there." It wasn't quite a question. Lucien was quiet for long enough that the quiet became an answer. "How many?" I asked. "I don't have an exact number." "Give me an approximate one." He turned us toward a narrower corridor, away from the guards, away from the portraits, and for a moment I thought he was going to walk us somewhere else entirely and call the change of location a change of subject. Then he said, "The records that still exist mention seven. I believe the actual number is higher." Seven. I rolled the word around in my head and didn't enjoy how it felt. "What happened to them?" Lucien looked toward the far end of the corridor. "Most are dead." The word most did a significant amount of work in that sentence, and I caught it. "Most." "One disappeared entirely. No body, no record of where she went. Another was married into a noble family in the eastern territories and never appeared in public again." He paused. "The official documentation attributes the deaths to illness, magical complications, accidents." "And you believe those records." "No." The answer came without hesitation, and something about the flatness of it told me he had spent time with this - real time, not the passing concern of someone who had heard a story once and filed it away. He sounded like a man who had gone looking for the truth and found enough of it to be angry about what he hadn't found. "Then why hasn't anyone done anything?" I asked. His hand tightened around mine. "Because this crown has survived five centuries by making sure that the people who ask the right questions don't live long enough to share the answers." I thought about that. I thought about the seven names in the records that still existed and the unnamed ones that apparently didn't. I thought about a girl in a corridor exactly like this one, carrying a mark exactly like mine, being told by someone she probably didn't know well enough to trust that she needed to stay close, stay quiet, and stop asking questions. I wondered how long she had managed it before she stopped being a problem. "Why did you come back?" I asked. "Tonight, specifically. You've been gone for three years. The crown has been locked in that chamber for three years. And then I touch it, the mark appears, and within hours you're walking through the royal hall like you never left." I looked at him. "That isn't a coincidence." For the first time, something in his expression cracked - not much, a hairline fracture in the composure he wore so comprehensively it might have been a second skin. "No," he said. "It isn't." "Then you knew this was going to happen." "I knew it could." "And you didn't do anything to stop it." "I wasn't here." "You could have sealed the chamber better. Warned someone. Left instructions." I heard my own voice rising and pulled it back down. "You could have done something other than disappear for three years and then walk back in the moment the damage was already done." Lucien stopped walking. We were near a window that looked out over the palace's eastern garden, moonlight laying itself across the stone floor between us, and he turned to face me with an expression that wasn't anger or guilt or the cold authority I had come to expect from him. It was something worse than all of those. It was the face of someone who had already had this argument with himself and hadn't won. "You're right," he said. I opened my mouth. "You're right," he repeated, quieter. "I should have done more. I knew what the crown was capable of, and I should have done more." The admission landed somewhere I wasn't ready for it, and I stood there with the argument I had been building dissolving into something I had no idea what to do with. Lucien Draven, who had spent the entire evening telling me what to do, where to go, and how afraid I should be, was looking at me like a man who had already passed judgment on himself and found the verdict fair. I hated that it made him harder to be furious at. "Fine," I said, because I needed to say something. "We can have that argument properly once you've told me everything else you're hiding. Right now I'd settle for an explanation of what the mark actually does and why that voice called me a queen." He looked like he was about to answer - genuinely, for once, like a man preparing himself to say something he hadn't said aloud before - when footsteps came fast around the corner and a guard appeared, breathing like he had run from somewhere far away and hadn't stopped to reconsider whether the news was worth the pace. He looked at Lucien. Then at me. Then back at Lucien. "Your Highness." He swallowed once, hard. "We have a problem." "The crown chamber," Lucien said, before the man could continue. The guard's expression confirmed it. "The guards stationed outside swear no one entered or left after you brought the bearer upstairs." He paused, and I watched him search for a way to say the next part that would make it sound less catastrophic. He didn't find one. "The Forbidden Crown is missing." The silence that followed was the kind that fills a room completely, leaves no space for anything else, not movement, not breath, not the ordinary sounds of a palace at night. I looked at Lucien. He looked at me. And the mark on my throat, which had been quiet since the corridor, began to glow. Somewhere beneath the tower floor, something scraped against stone.