The Name Thief's Bargain

The name-warden cell smelled of tallow and old rope. Wren had spent the night counting the drips from the ceiling and had reached four thousand and eleven when the door opened without a sound.

Queen Maelis came in alone. That was the first frightening thing.

She wore grey wool, no crown, and a single silver pin at her throat shaped like a closed rose. Her hair was the same colour as the pin. She looked at the cot, the bucket and the prisoner, and chose to stand.

"You've been busy for a girl of twenty-four," the queen said. "Eleven seals, the wardens tell me. Three of them good enough to fool a reliquary keeper."

"Four," Wren said. "One of them hasn't been caught yet."

"I know." Maelis smiled as if Wren had passed a small test. "That is why you are alive."

She set a jeweller's box on the cot. Rosewood, brass corners, the sort of thing a bride's mother gives her on the morning of a good marriage.

"Your wedding gift. Open it."

Inside, on green velvet, lay a forger's sealing kit. Bone stylus, a needle-fine graver, a vial of pine resin and a cake of red Kesset wax. In a hollow at the centre sat one blank disc, smooth as a held breath.

Wren rubbed her thumb across her knuckles, one, two, three, four. Owning this box anywhere outside this cell would hang her.

"You'll marry Corin Ashgrove at noon," Maelis said. "He has been my guest for six years. He is charming and he is idle, and somewhere in his head or his rooms is the knowledge of his true name. You will bring it to me before the Midwinter Seating."

"Midwinter is seven weeks away."

"Then you have seven weeks." The queen's voice never lifted. It didn't need to. "The north behaves because I hold its heir. Once I hold his name, I hold one word he cannot refuse. One is all I need. After that, the rest of him is mine to dispose of."

She left the door open behind her. Wren understood that too. There was nowhere to run that the queen hadn't already thought of.

The laundress arrived an hour later with a basket of pressed linen and a mouthful of pins.

"Don't scowl," Tamsin said around them. "Brides who scowl get talked about."

"Brides who forge get hanged. I'm aiming for a middle road."

Tamsin Reed had been Wren's partner for three years in the lower city, back when they'd shared a room above a tannery and a single good graver. Now she wore palace grey and smelled of lye and lavender, and she laced Wren into ivory silk as if she'd been doing it all her life.

"Left hand," Tamsin said.

Wren held it out. Tamsin turned the glove inside out, slid a slim steel pick along the seam at the wrist and stitched it closed with six neat stitches.

"Who's paying you for this?"

"You are. Later. With interest." Tamsin bit the thread. "And listen. His desk is in the outer room, under the window. The left drawer has a false back, it sticks in damp weather, lift then pull. The reliquary niches are behind the stag tapestry, three of them, but the middle one's plaster."

Wren looked at her. "You do laundry in the East Wing?"

"I do laundry everywhere." Tamsin tugged the glove onto Wren's hand, smoothing the ink-stained fingertips out of sight. A new silver thimble glinted on her own finger, too fine for a laundress. "Fine gossip at the Copper Eel, by the way. Old Gorsey finally drowned in his own vat."

"Good."

"His son's worse." Tamsin stepped back and studied her. "You'll do. Try to look like you've never touched wax in your life."

The briar-chapel had no roof. Climbing roses, black-red and bare of leaves this late in the year, arched over the aisle on iron frames, and the thorns caught at Wren's hem as she walked. Two hundred courtiers watched her from the benches. Nobody whispered. In Thornwake, whispers were evidence.

Corin Ashgrove waited at the altar stone.

She had expected someone softer. He was tall, his pale hair tied back with a black ribbon, his coat the dark green of a house that no longer had lands. One of his eyes was blue and the other grey, and both of them were on her gloves.

The priest spoke their public names. Wren Hale. Corin Ashgrove. Neither name meant anything, which was the point.

Corin took her hand for the binding cord. His thumb pressed once, lightly, along the inside of her wrist, where the seam was.

"Which hand do you forge with?" he murmured, his face turned politely toward the priest.

Wren kept her smile for the benches. "Which hand did you use to sign your surrender? I imagine it's tired. Six years of feather beds and other people's wine must be exhausting."

"I'll tell the queen her bride has opinions."

"Tell her the groom can't keep his eyes off a lady's gloves."

"The left, then," he said, and the cord went round their wrists. "You favour it when you're lying."

She said her vows in a perfectly steady voice and wanted to stab him with the priest's ceremonial knife.

The feast was laid in the Long Hall under a ceiling painted with roses so lifelike they looked ready to drop petals in the soup. Wren and Corin sat halfway down the second table, beyond the great silver salt cellar shaped like a swan.

"Don't take it to heart," said the man who had slid into the seat across from her before the fish course. "Below the salt is a kindness, today. It means Her Majesty doesn't expect you to speak."

He was perhaps forty-five, with a well-trimmed beard and rings on four fingers. Lord Hadrian Voss, the chancellor. Wren had forged a receipt in his name once and been paid handsomely for it.

"And above the salt?" she asked.

"Means she does. Three places from the throne means she's fond of you. Seated with your back to a door means she is very fond of someone else." He poured her wine himself. "You'll learn. Come to me if anyone makes it difficult. Brides in this court need friends."

"And what do chancellors need?"

"Gratitude," Voss said cheerfully. "In small, regular amounts."

From his sleeve he took a sprig of white briar, three thorns and a single closed bud, and laid it beside her plate.

"For luck," he said.

Beside her, Corin went still. He didn't freeze; he simply closed, the way a shop shutters at dusk, and the easy mockery drained out of his face until she was sitting next to a stranger. He lifted his cup and drank all of it.

"Thank you, my lord," Corin said. "My wife will treasure it."

Voss inclined his head and moved on to charm a duchess.

Wren touched the sprig. "What does it mean?"

"It means Voss is generous with flowers," Corin said, and asked a servant for more wine.

The hostage apartments occupied the end of the East Wing, three rooms knocked through from what had once been a guard barracks. Somebody had tried to make them pleasant. There were rugs from the north, a fire behind brass dogs, a stag tapestry on the far wall and windows that looked onto a sheer drop into the briar gardens.

Corin saw her to the door of her chamber, bowed and said he'd promised the guards a drink.

"On your wedding night?"

"They'll be offended if I don't. They've been very good company. Six years of feather beds, you understand."

He went out. She listened to his boots fade down the corridor and counted to six hundred.

Then she unpicked the glove seam with her teeth.

The desk sat under the window, exactly where Tamsin had said. Walnut, ink-stained, a stack of northern poetry on top. The left drawer stuck. Wren lifted, then pulled, and the false back slid away on a tongue of polished wood.

Inside lay letters. Dozens, tied with black ribbon, and every one was addressed in the same round hand to a woman named Isolde Ashgrove. None had been sent. The top one began, You'd laugh at the gardens here.

Wren put them back exactly as they'd been.

The stag tapestry swung on a rod. Behind it, three niches. The left held a dry inkwell. The middle one was plaster, just as Tamsin had promised. The right was empty except for dust and the faint outline where a box had once stood.

She was kneeling on the rug, running her fingers along that outline, when the fire popped and a voice said, "Red Kesset."

Wren didn't jump. She rubbed her thumb over her knuckles, slowly, and stood.

Corin leaned in the doorway with his coat over his arm. He smelled of cold air and nothing else. No wine at all.

"Cut with pine resin," he went on, "so it won't crack when you carry it through the cold to the Rose Seat. A bone stylus because steel leaves filings the wardens can find. And one blank disc, because she won't trust you with two." He crossed to the desk and closed the drawer with one finger. "Before the Midwinter Seating, I'd guess. She likes an audience when she collects."

"You've been listening at cell doors."

"I've been a hostage for six years. Listening is what I have instead of a sword." He tilted his head. "You've been in my letters."

"I put them back."

"Badly. The ribbon was under the third one, not the second."

Heat crawled up her throat. Not shame; she was too old for shame. It was the strange bare feeling of being read in full by someone she'd written off in a sentence.

"So you knew," she said. "At the altar."

"Before the altar. She sent a forger to steal from a man whose house fell to forgery. Maelis has a sense of humour, she simply never lets anyone hear it."

"Then why marry me? You could have refused."

"Hostages don't refuse." He sat on the edge of the desk. "And I wanted to see who she'd send."

"Disappointed?"

"Not yet." His blue eye caught the firelight; the grey one didn't. "You took eleven minutes to find a drawer someone told you about. Who told you?"

"Nobody. I'm good."

"You're good. You're not that good." He let that sit. "Keep your source. I'd keep mine."

Wren folded her arms, mostly so he couldn't see her hands. "You lied about the guards."

"I didn't. I bought them a drink. I didn't say I'd share it." He nodded at the empty niche. "That's where the box was, if you're wondering. My mother's travelling reliquary. The wardens took it the week they took her head."

He said it the way someone mentions rain. His fingers, though, had found the black ribbon at the back of his neck and were turning it, over and over.

"Then your name's in the queen's vault," Wren said. "She doesn't need me."

"If it were in her vault, I'd be doing her laundry and thanking her for the privilege." He smiled without warmth. "It never reached the queen's vault. Somewhere between that niche and her strongroom, someone kept it. The same someone, I think, who told her which pass my father would use, and how many men he'd have, and on which night."

"And you think that someone gave me a flower today."

His hand stopped on the ribbon. "I think you notice things for a woman who claims not to know what they mean."

"I notice you drank three cups after he gave it to me."

"Four." He pushed off the desk. "Here's what I propose, Wren Hale, if that is even your name. You're inside rooms nobody watches closely because they think I'm harmless. You go below stairs where I can't. You read hands and paper better than anyone at this court. Help me find who sold my family."

"And in return?"

"In return I stop you from hanging."

"You're very kind. That isn't enough."

"No." He seemed pleased she'd said it. "In return you may try for my name. Honestly. No drawers, no wax, no prying at my sleep. Earn it, if you can. If you do, I'll give it to you myself, and you can carry it to Maelis and buy your freedom with it."

Wren stared at him. "That's insane. If she has your name, she has you."

"Yes."

"Why would anyone offer that?"

"Because you'll fail," Corin said lightly. "And because I would rather be beaten by a thief than outlasted by a queen."

There was a recklessness under it that she didn't like, something dull and practised, like a blade kept sharp for no particular reason. She thought of the unsent letters. You'd laugh at the gardens here.

"Your sister," she said. "Isolde."

His face didn't move, but the ribbon slipped from his fingers.

"She taught me to pick that drawer," he said after a moment. "She was faster than you."

He reached into his collar and drew out a chain. On it hung a heavy gold ring, worn smooth at the band, cut with a stag beneath a single star. He unhooked it and set it on the desk between them with a small, final click.

"The Ashgrove signet," he said. "The last thing of my house that Maelis doesn't own. Wear it at breakfast and the court will read it as a wife's loyalty. I'll read it as terms."

"And if I don't?"

"Then leave it there. I'll never mention tonight, and you can go back to stealing from me the queen's way." He walked to the narrow door that joined her chamber to his and turned the key. The lock clicked open. He drew the door wide by a finger's breadth and left the key on her side.

"You're leaving it unlocked," Wren said.

"I'd like you to have every advantage. It'll make winning more satisfying." He paused on the threshold, half in shadow. "You have until dawn."

The door didn't close. Through the gap she heard him cross his room, heard a boot drop, then nothing.

Wren stood alone with the fire, the walnut desk and the ring. On the far side of the chamber, inside her trunk, the rosewood box waited with its single blank disc.

She picked up the signet. It was warm from his skin and heavier than it looked.

Her thumb moved over her knuckles, one, two, three, four, and came back to the ring.