The Price of a Ring

The grey came first through the gap in the connecting door, a thin bar of it across the rug, and then the birds started in the briar garden below.

Wren had not slept. She had sat in the window seat with the signet closed in her fist until it was the same heat as her hand, and she had done sums. Seven weeks. Eleven forgeries in a warden's ledger. One blank disc. One man who knew all of it.

The sums did not come out in her favour any way she arranged them.

She pushed the door wide with her foot.

Corin was dressed already, in dark green with the collar buttoned to the throat, sitting by a cold hearth with a book open on his knee. His hair was damp. He did not look up.

"You're on the same page you were on last night," Wren said. "I could see the woodcut through the gap. A heron."

"It's a very absorbing heron."

She crossed to him and held up her right hand. Then she slid the signet onto her own middle finger, where it sat loose, the stag and the star facing him.

He closed the book.

"Terms," Wren said, before he could make a joke of it. "I help you find your traitor. I don't touch your drawers or your sleep. And when it's done, whoever it is, you get me out of Thornwake alive. Not pardoned. Out. Past the walls, past the wardens, past her."

"That's a great deal to ask of a hostage."

"You offered me your name. I'm asking for a door."

He studied the ring on her hand rather than her face. "And if I said I can't open one?"

"Then you'd be lying. You've had six years and you're not stupid. A man who reads that slowly has spent his time planning something."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. A man finding a draught in a room he thought was sealed.

"There's a way north," he said at last. "There has been for some time. I won't tell you what it is."

"I didn't ask what. I asked for my seat on it."

"You'll have it."

"Say it properly."

He looked up then, blue eye and grey. "When the traitor is named, I'll take you out of this city alive, Wren Hale. On my house."

"Your house is a ring on my finger."

"Then you'd better not lose it."

She should have stopped there. She had what she came for, and a woman who wanted to vanish did not hand over more than the bargain asked. But a promise from a man with nothing was a promise made of air, and she wanted him holding something heavy.

She went back to her room, knelt at the trunk and lifted out the rosewood box. Bone stylus. Graver. The resin in its twist of paper. The red wax. And in a nest of velvet, the blank disc, pale as a peeled almond.

She brought it to him and put it in his palm.

He did not take it at once. Then he weighed it, the way a moneylender weighs a coin he suspects is clipped, and she watched him understand.

"This is the queen's," he said.

"It's the only one she gave me. Without it I can't forge your seal unless I find another blank, and you'd hear about that before I did." She folded her arms. "And it's hanging evidence. Found in your rooms, it hangs me. Found in mine, it hangs me faster. You hold it. If I break terms, you know where the wardens live."

"You're giving me the rope."

"I'm giving you a reason to believe me. You've been a hostage long enough to know the difference."

He turned the disc over. His thumb rubbed its blank face, slowly, as if something might come up through the wax. When he spoke his voice had lost its lightness, and he talked quickly, the way people do when they want to be past a thing.

"You asked at the feast what the briar meant."

"You said you didn't know."

"I lied. White briar, three thorns, the bud closed. In the north it's mourning. A sister's mourning, specifically, sent when a brother can't be reached. Isolde used to leave it on my pillow when I'd been sent away for something, so I'd know she was sorry I was in trouble." He put the disc inside his coat, against his chest. "Nobody south of the Fell River should know that. Nobody at this court has any reason to."

"Voss knew."

"Voss gave it to my wife. On my wedding day." He stood and set the book on the mantel, face down. "Someone wanted me to see it."

"Or wanted me to carry it to you and watch what you did."

"Which was drink four cups of very bad wine." He held out his arm. "We're late. The court likes its newlyweds punctual and visibly devoted."

* * *

The Briar Gallery ran the length of the south front, a hundred paces of white stone and tall windows, with the rose hedges pressed against the glass like an audience. Courtiers lined it in clusters. The air smelled of beeswax and cut stems.

At the near end stood a page in rose livery with a slate on a cord.

"He counts," Corin murmured. "Steps between the doors. Too fast means you're eager to be done with each other. Too slow means you're showing off."

"And what's correct?"

"Two hundred and twelve. The queen's own number, from her wedding."

"Of course it is."

He offered his hand, bare. The ritual required it. Wren put her gloved one into it, and his fingers closed over hers with the ring between them, hard against both their bones.

They walked.

Heads turned along the hedge of silk. Wren kept her face pleasant and her chin level. Around the thirtieth step his thumb moved across the back of her glove and found the place over her first knuckle where the leather had been stitched twice, where the old ink always bled through by noon.

He stopped there. He did not press it, and he did not mention it.

She felt the touch all the way up her arm, absurdly, and was furious about it.

"You're counting," he said quietly.

"I'm keeping pace."

"You're counting out loud, under your breath. Sixty-one. Sixty-two."

"Someone has to. You'd have us at three hundred out of spite."

"I'd have us at two hundred and eleven. One short. She'd notice. She'd lie awake."

Wren bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing in front of forty witnesses, and that was when Lord Voss stepped out of a window bay into their path.

He bowed low, rings flashing on four fingers. His beard had been trimmed since yesterday to a sharper point.

"The happy couple. And on count, I see. Lady Ashgrove, you carry the gallery beautifully."

"I've had practice carrying things," Wren said.

"So I hear." His eyes dropped to her hand in Corin's. The signet sat plain on her finger, the stag catching the window light. For a moment his face did nothing at all. Then it warmed again, too quickly.

"Well," he said. "There's a thing I never expected to see again. We all thought it was lost on the road south."

Corin's grip did not change, but his thumb, still resting on her knuckle, went entirely still.

"We?" Wren asked pleasantly.

"The council. The wardens. Everyone who had the sad task of accounting for Ashgrove property." Voss smiled at Corin. "You've kept it hidden all this time, my lord. Clever. I'd have sworn the inventory listed it with the reliquary."

"Inventories," Corin said, "are only as honest as the men who carry the boxes."

"Indeed." Voss stepped back with another bow. "Gratitude, Lady Ashgrove. I meant what I said yesterday. Should you need a friend, you know where the chancellor's door is."

He went. The page with the slate was frowning. They had lost four steps.

Corin walked on, and Wren matched him, and neither spoke until the far doors closed behind them on two hundred and twelve exactly.

Then he let go of her hand, flexed his fingers as though they'd cramped, and looked at the hedge outside, not at her.

"The signet never travelled with the reliquary," he said. "It was on my father's hand at Greyfold Pass. I took it off his hand myself, afterward. Nobody but whoever packed that reliquary would think it should have been in the box."

"Or whoever unpacked it."

He looked at her then. "Go and find your source, Wren. I think you need to have a conversation."

"You knew I had one."

"I knew you didn't take eleven minutes to find a drawer by luck." He tugged his collar straight. "I'll be in the library being harmless. Bring me something."

* * *

The palace laundry sat two floors under the kitchens, at the bottom of a stair worn into a dip by six generations of baskets. Wren smelled it before she saw it: lye, wet wool, hot copper. Steam rolled along the ceiling and beaded on the lamps. Paddles thudded in the vats in a slow, sullen rhythm.

Nobody looked twice at a woman in a plain grey cloak. Nobody looked twice at anyone down here. That had always been the point.

Tamsin was at the far copper, sleeves rolled past the elbow, forearms red to the skin. She was stirring linen with a pole. On her left hand, the silver thimble.

"You're in the wrong part of the palace for a lady," Tamsin said without turning.

"And you've got the wrong thimble for a laundress."

The pole paused, then went on.

"Gift," Tamsin said.

"From whom?"

"From a woman who forged a dock-master's mark for you in the rain, once, when your hands were shaking too much to hold the graver." Tamsin pulled the pole out, set it against the wall and wiped her palms on her apron. "You want to talk about who owes who, Wren, I'll fetch a stool."

"You knew where his drawer was. The false back. The plaster niche."

"Laundresses talk."

"Laundresses don't go behind tapestries in the East Wing."

"You'd be surprised what we see when we're changing the sheets."

"His sheets get changed by his own man. I asked." Wren hadn't. But it was a good guess, and Tamsin's eyes flicked once to the stair, which was answer enough. "Who sent you to help me? The queen?"

Tamsin laughed. It was short and not happy, and she began turning the thimble on her finger, round and round, the way she used to spin coins on the counter at the Lantern when a deal went sour.

"You think the queen talks to me? Gods. You were always like this. You walk into a room and assume it was built around you."

"Then tell me who it was built around."

"I'm not spying on you, Wren." Tamsin's voice dropped under the thud of the paddles. "Nobody's paying me a copper to tell them what you do. You're not interesting enough. Not to them."

"Them."

"Him. Her. I don't know. A letter, a purse, a place to leave the answers. Never a face." She stopped turning the thimble. "I report on Corin Ashgrove's rooms. Who comes and goes. What he burns. What he writes. When he doesn't come back at night."

Wren felt the floor tilt a little under the wet flags. "Since the wedding."

"Since he arrived."

Steam drifted between them. A girl at the next vat hauled out a sheet and slapped it over a rail.

Wren looked down into Tamsin's copper because she could not look at Tamsin. The water was grey and churning. Among the linen a shirt surfaced, fine lawn, a gentleman's, and on its cuff was a stain that had not lifted in the lye. Dark red. Waxy at the edges. The exact red she had carried in a rosewood box until this morning.

Kesset.

Tamsin saw her see it, and shoved the cuff under with the flat of her hand, scalding herself, not flinching.

"Leave that alone," she said. "That one isn't mine to report on, and it isn't yours."

"Tamsin. How long?"

Tamsin met her eyes, and for once there was no angle in her face at all.

"Six years. The first coin came the week they brought him down from the north in chains, before you'd ever cut your first seal for money. Someone in this palace wanted to know what that boy did in the dark. And they've wanted to know every week since."