Witch-Brew

You wake with the silver leaf stuck to your cheek.

You peel it off and lie there for a moment, blinking at the carved branches overhead, remembering. The glow in the dark. His words, appearing in thin lines of light across the silver as if someone were writing on the inside of the leaf with a star. Your own fingertip, shaking slightly, writing back.

You'd meant to write one cold sentence and go to sleep. The leaf, when you hold it up to the morning light now, is blank and innocent and gives away nothing about how long that conversation went on.

Through the bond, his heartbeat is slow and even. Asleep, still. Good. You hope he dreams about tax law.

There's a knock on the connecting door. Not his knock. Too heavy.

"Witch," says a voice you don't know. "The prince requests you in the armory. Dress for walking."

The man waiting for you outside is not an elf you've seen before. Dark-haired, which is rare here, with a scar through one eyebrow and the kind of face that belongs on a recruiting poster, if the poster were warning you off. He wears black and silver like the prince, and a sword like he was born holding it.

"Eryndel Lorn," he says. "The prince's sworn shield."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning if anything happens to him, I die first." He looks at the knot on your wrist. "Turns out I'm second in line now. You can imagine how I feel about that."

"About the way I feel about everything here."

"Good," Eryndel says. "Then we understand each other."

The armory is a long, cool hall cut into the roots of an enormous tree, lined with racks of pale elven blades. Thalion is standing at a table near the back, freshly bathed, in a dark coat, his silver hair tied back. He looks up when you come in, and your pulse does a small, humiliating thing, and you see him register it, and you see him decide not to comment.

He lets the silence say it instead.

"Morning, Highness," you say.

"You write very long sentences for someone who claimed she was going to sleep."

"You answered every one of them."

"I'm a diplomat. It's rude not to reply."

Lady Ilvaris is leaning against a pillar near him, a vision in pale gold, arms folded. "Is this flirting?" she asks the room in general. "I can never tell with witches. I thought they just cursed you."

"Only when asked nicely," you say. "Good morning, Lady Ilvaris."

She smiles. It's a beautiful smile and has no warmth in it at all. "I'm told I'm to marry him in the spring. So you'll understand if I keep an eye on his new jewelry." She nods at the knot on Thalion's wrist.

"I'd give it back if I could. Believe me."

"I do, actually," says Ilvaris, and wanders off before you can decide what she meant.

On the table lies the assassin's blade. A short, thin knife with a leaf-shaped edge, elven make, still stained black along the cutting edge. Beside it, in a glass dish, the gray cord that fell from his collar when he ran.

"Tell me what you see," Thalion says.

You lean over the dish without touching it. The cord is ordinary linen, dyed gray, knotted in a tight chain of loops. "Glamour knot. A good one. Somebody spent days on this. It would've made him look like whatever the knotter imagined, an elven server in this case, until it was cut or torn."

"Witch work."

"Obviously witch work."

"And the venom?"

You look at the black stain on the blade and feel the ghost of it crawling up your arm. "Blackthorn. Brewed. It takes a month and a coven still-room to make it properly, and this was made properly." You straighten. "So, yes. A witch made this. A witch knotted the glamour. A witch held the knife."

"Then we agree," says a smooth voice from the doorway, "on the essential point."

Chancellor Maelor Feydric strolls in with two Thornguard at his back. He's dressed in pale gray, and in the light from the high windows his golden hair looks like a cathedral painting. He gives you a gracious little nod.

"The coven struck at the prince," he says. "At the oath cup, before both our peoples. It's the end of the summit, I'm afraid. The King will want to hear it from his own advisers."

"A witch struck," you say. "That's not the same as the coven."

"Isn't it?"

"If the coven wanted the prince dead, why would it send its own heir to stand next to him? I was cut too. I nearly died on your floor."

"A sacrifice the High Witch might consider worth making." Maelor smiles at you, almost kindly. "I'm told she's a very determined woman."

The words land somewhere under your ribs and stay there.

My chest is bad again.

Through the bond, Thalion's heartbeat ticks up. You don't know if he's angry at his cousin or at you or simply feels your own heart lurch. His face shows none of it. "My cousin's position is noted," he says. "So is the witch's. My father will hear both. Thank you, Chancellor."

It's a dismissal. Maelor takes it gracefully, the way water takes a stone. "Of course, Highness. Do be careful. You never know what a binding like that can be made to do."

When he's gone, the armory is very quiet.

"He's not wrong that it looks bad," Eryndel says.

"He's wrong about everything else," you say.

Thalion picks up the knife by its hilt and turns it in the light. "Whoever did this knew a witch would be standing next to me," he says slowly. "They knew it would be you. If I'm killed with witch-brew at the oath cup, the summit dies. If you're cut too, so much the better: a witch heir who dies poisoning a prince is a better story than one who doesn't."

You stare at him. "You don't think it was us."

He puts down the knife. Then he looks at you with those absurd green eyes, and his voice drops so that only you can hear it.

"I don't think a witch would cut herself on her own assassin's blade, Ava. I said so last night. I keep saying true things to you. It's becoming a habit I'd like to break."

You don't know what to say. Your heart says it for you, a hard, warm thump, and the corner of his mouth moves.

"Stop that," he murmurs.

"Make me."

Eryndel coughs loudly into his fist.

You spend the afternoon in the delegation rooms with Wynna, rewriting your mother's draft of the treaty terms because there's nothing else you can do. Wynna keeps glancing at your wrist.

"Does it hurt?"

"Only when he stubs his toe."

"Has he stubbed his toe?"

"Twice. He's very tall and the doorways here are very decorative."

She laughs, then sobers. "Ava. Is there anything you're not telling me? About home. About your mother."

"There's nothing to tell."

You say it too fast. Somewhere down the gallery, in a council room full of elven lords, a heartbeat that isn't yours stumbles in sympathy.

At dusk you're standing at the window of your room, watching the lanterns rise over the white trees, when the horns begin.

Not feast horns. Hunting horns, high and harsh, from the edge of the forest. Then shouting in the courtyard below. You lean out. Torches are streaming through the gates, and in the middle of them, Thornguard riders, and in the middle of them, dragged on foot with his hands bound behind him, a man with round ears and a stranger's face.

The assassin.

He lifts his head as they haul him under your window. He's bloodied and limping, and he's searching the windows. When he finds yours, he stops.

"The heir," he calls up, hoarse, in the witch-tongue no one else in that courtyard understands. "I'll speak to the heir. Only to her."