Kellan Thorne could not find a single record that the tea had ever existed.
That was how he knew it was real.
He'd spent three days on it — quietly, carefully, in the hours his father thought he was sulking. He started where anyone would start: the Temple's public register of blessings, the meticulous, sanctimonious ledger in which the Moon Temple recorded every gift and rite it bestowed, available for any House to inspect, because the Temple's whole power rested on seeming to have nothing to hide. Every candle. Every reading. Every blessing-cup dispensed to a nervous groom on the eve of a Marking.
Every one but his.
The night before his own ceremony did not exist. There was no record of a cup sent to the Heir of House Thorne — no acolyte assigned, no rite logged, no leaf accounted for. A blank, sanded smooth, in a ledger that recorded everything precisely so that a blank would be invisible.
Someone had reached into the most transparent institution in the world and quietly unwritten a single night.
Kellan sat in the Temple's public archive with the ledger open in front of him and felt the floor of his life tilt, because he had seen a blank exactly like this before. His father's face wore one, when he thought no one was watching. And Kellan understood, with a sick lurch, that the thing done to him and the thing his father had spent twenty years hiding might be the same size, and the same shape, and made by the same hand.
They drugged me. The Temple drugged me the night before my own mating, so that I would feel nothing, so that I would stand up in front of the whole Council and throw her away.
And the worst of it — the part that made him grip the edge of the desk until the wood creaked — was where his mind went first. Not what did they do to that poor girl. Not I destroyed an innocent woman for an alliance.
His first thought, God help him, was: then it was never my fault. Then she really is mine, and they stole her, and I can take her back.
He hated himself half a second later. But half a second was too late; the thought had already surfaced, ugly and possessive and entirely his, and it told him something true about the kind of man he still was. He was not doing this because he was sorry. He was doing this because the sound in his chest wanted its property returned.
Later, he told himself. Be a better man about it later. First, the truth.
"You have the look," said a warm voice behind him, "of a young man reading something that disagrees with him."
Kellan closed the ledger half a second too fast, and turned, and Lucian Vale was standing in the archive doorway with two cups of tea in his hands and a smile like a hand held out to help you off a ledge you hadn't known you were standing on.
"Lucian." His mouth had gone dry. "I didn't hear you."
"Blessing records." Lucian glanced at the closed ledger, and his smile did not change, and something behind it went very still and very attentive. "How devout of you. Or how curious." He crossed the room and set one cup down in front of Kellan, steam curling up off it, pale-green and flower-scented and faintly, horribly familiar. "You've been asking questions, dear boy. In the Temple. In your wife's rooms. Questions about tea, of all things." He sat, unhurried, folded his hands, and the temperature of the whole room seemed to drop three degrees beneath the warmth of his voice. "I do wish you'd come to me first. I'm the one person in this entire city who is actually on your side — and here you are, poking at old ledgers, upsetting the Reverend Mother, when all you ever had to do was ask." He nudged the steaming cup an inch toward Kellan. "Drink. You look pale. We'll talk it through, you and I. There's an explanation for everything, if you let the right person give it to you."
Kellan Thorne looked down at the cup of pale-green tea steaming gently in front of him.
And for the first time in his life, he understood exactly what he was being offered, and by whom, and why.
