The morning after his father came back, Kellan Thorne understood that he had made a mistake.
He couldn't have said how he knew. The King had returned from the aborted Council trip the way he returned from everything — cold, contained, giving nothing away. He had not accused Kellan of anything. He had not mentioned the girl, or the fire, or the road that had been so conveniently blocked. He had simply looked at his son across the length of the great glass room, once, for a moment too long, and then looked away, and that single unbearable look had told Kellan everything the King would never say aloud.
He knows. He knows what I did. And he is never going to speak of it, because I am not worth the words.
Kellan told himself it didn't matter. He told himself he'd done the right thing — the only thing — that Lucian was right, that his father was bewitched, that the girl was a witch who had wormed her way into the House and had to be dealt with. He told himself the sound in his chest, the pull that had gotten worse since the night of the fire, not better, was the witchcraft loosening, the curse breaking, the proof that he'd been right all along.
He almost believed it.
Then he went to see his wife.
Ophelia Ashcroft — Ophelia Thorne, now, though neither of them ever used it — kept rooms on the ninetieth floor that she had decorated to look like a woman lived in them, and Kellan found her there at her mirror, and he stood in the doorway and watched her not notice him for a moment, and he thought, with the flat clarity of a man who has stopped lying to himself in at least one small room of his mind: I feel nothing when I look at her. I have never once felt anything when I look at her.
He had told the entire Council he felt nothing for Sera. It had been a lie he'd been paid, in a marriage and an alliance, to tell.
But this — this blank, this absolute absence where a mate-bond was supposed to be — this was real. He felt more standing in a doorway facing north at three in the morning than he had ever felt in his marriage bed.
"You're staring," Ophelia said, to her mirror. "It's unsettling."
"When did Lucian first come to you," Kellan said.
He hadn't planned to ask it. It simply arrived, the way the truth had been arriving lately, unbidden, through the cracks.
Her hand paused, for just a moment, in her hair. In the mirror, he watched her face do something quick and careful before it smoothed. "I don't know what you mean."
"Our marriage was arranged in nine days, Ophelia. Nine. My father spent three years failing to name me his true heir, and in nine days your House produced a bond, a blessing, and a Priestess to read it." He came into the room. "Who arranged it? Who came to your father first? Was it my father?" He watched her. "Or was it Lucian Vale?"
And Ophelia Ashcroft — who was, Kellan was beginning to understand, exactly as much a pawn as he was, moved onto the board by warm hands neither of them had questioned — looked at him in the mirror with something he had never expected to see in his political wife's face.
Fear.
"You need to stop asking questions like that," she said quietly. "For both our sakes. The people who arranged us do not like their arrangements examined." She turned to face him, and dropped her voice, and for the first time since the Marking Ceremony she spoke to him like a person instead of an obligation. "You want the truth, Kellan? Here's a piece of it, and then I'm never going to speak of it again. The night before your Marking Ceremony — the night before you called that girl a fake in front of the whole Council — the Reverend Mother's people came to my rooms. And they gave me a cup of tea, and told me to give it to you, to steady your nerves." Her jaw tightened. "You drank it. And the next morning you couldn't feel your own mate standing three feet in front of you, and you called her barren and empty and threw her away, and you have never once wondered why the not-feeling came on so suddenly, or the night before, or in a cup." She turned back to her mirror. "I've said too much. Get out, Kellan. And stop facing north. People are starting to notice."
Kellan Thorne stood very still in the middle of his wife's rooms.
They gave me a cup of tea.
The sound in his chest, the pull, the thing that had been screaming north for two weeks and getting worse — he pressed his hand to his sternum, over it, and for the first time he did not think witchcraft.
For the first time, he thought: what did they do to me?
And far away, forty feet under a different part of the city, the thing his blood was screaming toward slept dreamlessly in a drowned brick room, holding the hand of his father, and did not know that the boy who'd thrown her away had just, at long last, started asking the right question.
