Chapter No. 07
A Crown of Borrowed Thorns
A thief steals a crown for the wrong prince. The right one catches her, locks her in a tower, and waits to see whether the thorns will cut her.
Content warnings
Violence · Imprisonment · Blood · Death of a sibling · Past parental death · Explicit sexual content
The crown was lighter than the stories promised.
In the Needle, where I grew up, they said the Briar Crown weighed as much as a drowned man, that it hummed at night like a hive. It did neither. It sat on the altar of Saint Briar’s chapel on a cushion gone bald with age, seven thorns of blackened silver twisted into a ring, a single garnet at the brow the colour of a split lip. It looked like something a jealous husband would buy his wife after hitting her.
I had spent eleven nights learning that chapel. The verger who coughed at the second bell. The lock on the reliquary grille, old Ardmere work, three wards and a false pin, which took me four breaths once I had peeled off my gloves to feel it properly.
Then there was only the crown.
Every child in the city knew the rule. The Briar Crown chooses. Put it on without being chosen and the thorns bite, and the wound does not close clean. King Aldric had worn it thirty years without a scratch. His queen had worn it for a quarter of an hour on the night he died, to steady the court, and the fever from the cut had taken her before the leaves fell. For forty days since the king’s burial it had sat on that altar untouched, waiting for Thornmass eve, when by law the crown must be offered to the court and someone must wear it, or the throne would pass by right of arms to whoever held the most swords.
I did not care who wore it. I was being paid not to care. Two hundred gold crowns, half up front, from a man with a signet ring turned palm-side and a voice like a well-oiled hinge, who had sat across from me in the back room of Mother Gall’s and said, “Bring it out of the chapel before Thornmass eve, and bring it to me, and you need never climb a wall again.”
I had not asked his name. I had not needed to. There is only one man in Ardmere who wears the Veyle boar on his ring and has the jaw to go with it, and only one man who would profit if the crown simply vanished before the court could see it choose.
Lucan Veyle. The elder son. The one the old king had not named.
So I stood in the chapel with my gloves in my belt and the reliquary grille open, and I reached in barehanded, because I have never trusted anything I could not feel, and I lifted the Briar Crown off its cushion.
The thorns were cold. They pressed into the meat of my palm, sharp enough that I felt each point distinctly, seven small promises. I waited for blood. There was none. I told myself the silver had gone blunt with centuries of priestly fondling, and I wrapped the thing in black velvet, and I tucked it inside my coat against my ribs, and I had one leg over the sill of the east window, the rope already paying out into the dark garden below, when a voice behind me said, quite pleasantly, “That belongs to my brother.”
I didn’t turn. “Then your brother should buy better locks.”
“He’d agree with you. He paid you to steal it, after all.”
Now I turned.
Prince Caspian Veyle leaned in the chapel doorway with the lazy stillness of a cat who has already decided how the mouse ends. Moonlight came through the rose window and laid a red petal across his throat. It caught the edge of the sword at his hip. It did not catch his eyes, which were darker than the rumours and far less kind.
The broadsheets in the Needle drew him as a pretty, idle thing, a collector of rare books and rarer wines, the soft son. The broadsheets had never stood in a dark chapel with him between them and the only door.
“You can drop,” he said, as though offering me a chair. “It’s thirty feet. You’d break an ankle, possibly both, and my men are in the garden. Or you can come down off the sill, and we can be civilised.”
“I’ve never been civilised in my life.”
“No.” He smiled, and it was not a nice smile, but it was an interested one. “I don’t suppose you have. Rook, isn’t it? That’s what they call you in the Needle. Mother Gall’s best climber. You took the Orsolt emeralds out of a locked strongroom two winters ago and left a single black feather on the empty tray. My brother paid a great deal for your particular vanity.”
My heart was going like a trapped bird’s, but my voice held. It is the first thing the Needle teaches you. Your hands can shake. Your voice belongs to you.
“If you know who hired me,” I said, “then you know I’m the least important person in this room.”
“You’re holding the crown. That makes you the most important person in this kingdom, for another four minutes.” He came forward, unhurried, the heels of his boots loud on the old stone. “Come down.”
I thought about the rope, and whether he was lying about the garden. I thought about Mother Gall’s wrinkled mouth saying nobody hangs for climbing, girl, they hang for being caught, and about my mother’s feet in the square when I was eleven, turning slowly, one shoe gone.
I came down off the sill.
He held out his hand, palm up. Not for my hand. For the crown.
I took it out of my coat and unwrapped it and, because I am contrary to the marrow, I did not give it to him. I held it between us on my bare palm with the thorns pressing in.
He looked at the crown. Then he looked at my hand, for a long moment, with an expression I did not understand at the time and would come to understand very well: the expression of a man who has turned over a card he has been waiting all his life to see.
“No blood,” he said softly.
“It’s old. It’s gone dull.”
“It opened my mother’s forehead to the bone,” Caspian Veyle said, “in front of three hundred people.” He lifted his eyes to mine. “Guards.”
The cell they put me in had a window, which I thought was an insult until he came to stand beneath it every night and talk.
It was the old Warden’s Tower, where they kept noble prisoners in the days before nobles were simply fined. The room was round and clean and cold. A straw pallet, a bench, a slop bucket, a jug of water changed every morning by a guard who would not meet my eyes. The window was a slit of iron bars at head height, and below it was a little walled herb garden gone to seed, rosemary and rue and a lemon balm that smelled, when the wind turned, like someone else’s childhood.
The first night I spent examining the lock. It was southern work, with a spring cage I could not reach without tools, and they had taken my tools, including the pick I kept braided into my hair and the one sewn into the hem of my shirt. Whoever had searched me had known exactly where to look.
The second night he came.
I heard the gravel first, then a pause, and then his voice, pitched low and carrying clearly through the bars.
“Have you eaten?”
I did not answer. After a while he went away.
The third night he asked again, and I said, “Go to hell, Highness,” and he laughed, a real laugh, startled out of him, and said, “Good. You’ve eaten.”
By the fourth night I had stopped pretending I was not waiting for the gravel.
I told myself it was strategy. And he talked, Saints, how he talked, standing in that dead garden with his face turned up to a window he could not see me through. He talked about the Thorn Council, the seven lords who sat in judgment over the succession, and which of them were bought. Lady Orsolt, whose emeralds I had stolen, was Lucan’s creature to her garters. Old Pellam still believed in the crown, the way village women believe in wells.
“And you?” I said through the bars. “What do you believe in?”
“Arithmetic.” The gravel shifted as he moved. “My brother commands the northern garrison. Four thousand men, and half of them are already quartered in the lower city under the pretence of keeping order through the mourning. I command a palace guard of three hundred and the loyalty of some librarians. If Thornmass eve comes and the crown is not on the altar, or if it is on the altar and refuses every head that tries it, the law passes the throne by right of arms. Lucan does not need to win a war. He only needs the crown to be absent for one night.”
“So he hired me.”
“So he hired you. And had you succeeded, the crown would have been at the bottom of the Sallow by dawn, and someone would have sworn he saw me leaving the chapel with it.” A pause. “You were never going to see the second hundred crowns, Rook. You were going to be found in the river beside it.”
It was not news, exactly. It was only the shape of the world, said aloud in a cultured voice.
“You knew,” I said. “You knew he’d hired someone. You let me get all the way to the window.”
“I needed to see who he’d hired.”
“Why?”
He did not answer that. Instead he said, “The guards. Have they been rough with you?”
“No.”
“If they are, you’ll tell me.”
“And what would you do?”
When he spoke again his voice had not risen, but some warmth he had been lending it was gone, and what was left was very quiet and very flat.
“I would make certain it did not happen twice.”
I believed him. That was the problem. I lay awake that night on the straw and believed him, and hated the part of me that liked it.
On the fifth night he asked me the question that undid everything.
“Have you ever stolen anything you actually wanted to keep?”
“No,” I said.
“Liar.” His voice through the bars was almost gentle. “You kept looking at the garnet like it owed you something.”
I should have let it go. I had let a great many things go in twenty-four years; it is the only real skill a thief has. But it was dark, and the lemon balm was sweet, and I had not said my mother’s name aloud to anyone since Mother Gall pulled me off the gallows steps and slapped me until I stopped screaming.
“My mother’s name was Hesper Rook,” I said. “She took in washing. Your father’s magistrates hanged her in Tallow Square for stealing two loaves and a jar of pickled plums from a baker who’d shorted her wages all winter. The Bread Statute, they called it. Theft of food in a year of scarcity, a capital offence, by order of the Crown.” I stared at the stone. “She was wearing a red scarf. When they dropped her, her face went that colour. The garnet is that colour. That’s all.”
The garden was very quiet.
“I’ve read the Bread Statute,” Caspian said eventually. “When I studied law I thought it was a fine one, because the preamble was elegant.” A breath. “I’m sorry. I know that’s worth nothing.”
“It’s worth exactly nothing.”
“Then I won’t say it again. But I’ll remember it.”
He didn’t leave for a long time after that. I sat below the window with my knees drawn up and felt, for the first time in years, as if someone were standing guard over something I had set down.
On the seventh night, someone came to kill me.
It was not a guard. It was a woman, small and neat, in the grey livery of the palace laundresses, and she had a key. She came in at the dead hour after the third bell with a clean pillowslip over one arm and a length of waxed cord in her other hand, and she moved like someone from the Needle, which is how I knew what she was a heartbeat before she reached me.
I have never been a fighter. But I had been lying awake, listening for gravel, and so when the cord came down over my face I got my forearm up inside the loop, and the wax bit into my wrist instead of my throat. We went over together into the slop bucket. She was stronger than she looked and she knew where to put a knee. The cord slid up my arm. My vision went to sparks at the edges.
Then the door slammed back against the wall and the room was full of lantern-light, and the woman’s weight was simply gone, lifted off me as though she weighed nothing, and there was a sound I did not recognise at the time. A wet, brief sound. Then another.
When I could see again, Caspian Veyle was standing over the laundress with his sword out and her blood running down the fuller. His coat was open over a shirt and nothing else. His hair was wild. He looked like a man who had come running up four flights of tower stairs, and his face was absolutely, terribly calm.
Behind him in the doorway stood Ser Edric Hale, captain of the palace guard, a big fair man with a broken nose, holding the lantern.
“She had a key, Highness,” Edric said. “Saints. She had a key.”
“Yes,” Caspian said. “She did.” He did not look away from me. “Are you hurt?”
I was on my hands and knees in spilled filth with a rope burn on my arm that would scar. I said, “No.”
He crouched. He did not touch me. I want to be clear about that, because I have thought about it many times since: he crouched in front of me in that stinking cell with a dead woman at his back and blood on his blade, and he held out his free hand with the palm up, the same way he had in the chapel, and he waited for me to decide whether to take it.
I took it.
His hand was warm and very steady. He turned my wrist to the lantern and looked at the burn, and a muscle moved in his jaw.
“Edric,” he said, “who holds the keys to this tower?”
“Myself, Highness. And the day sergeant. And the housekeeper’s ring, for the linens.”
“Then find out which of the three sold one, and bring me a name before dawn.”
Edric went. Caspian stayed, while the laundress was carried out and fresh straw and salve were brought, and after the door was locked again, with him on my side of it.
“You could leave,” I said.
“I could.” He had wiped his sword and laid it across his knees. In the lantern-light the fine bones of his face looked older than his twenty-nine years. “I’ve had men watching this tower since the night you came. They were watching the stairs. They were not watching the laundresses. That was my error, and it nearly cost me the only thing in this palace I can’t replace.”
“The crown’s in the chapel. Replace me with another thief.”
He looked at me then, a long look, and I felt it on my skin like weather.
“I’m going to tell you something,” he said, “and you won’t believe it. I’ve been worried about Thornmass for a year and I sleep like a dead dog. But since you came I stand in that garden and talk to a window, and when I go back to my rooms I keep thinking of things I want to tell you. That hasn’t happened to me before.” A humourless curve of his mouth. “I’m aware that I’m your jailer. So I’m not asking you for anything, and I won’t, not while there’s a lock on that door. I’m only telling you why I ran up the stairs.”
My pulse was loud in the burn on my wrist. I wanted, very badly and very suddenly, to cross the four feet of cold stone between us. I didn’t. There was a lock on the door and his key was in his pocket and I had nothing, not so much as a hairpin, and whatever I wanted in that room could not be trusted, not by me and not by him.
He seemed to know it. He stood, and sheathed his sword, and went to the door.
“Two more nights,” he said. “Then you’ll have a choice. A real one. I give you my word.”
“What’s a prince’s word worth in the Needle?”
“About two loaves and a jar of pickled plums,” Caspian said, and let himself out.
In the morning the guard who brought my water told me, without meeting my eyes, that Ser Edric had found the traitor: the day sergeant, who had hanged himself in the barracks stable before he could be questioned. Very convenient, I thought. In the Needle we would have called it tidy.
On the ninth night he unlocked the cell himself and set the crown in my lap.
He came alone, without a lantern, and he left the door standing open behind him so that the draught from the stairwell stirred the straw. The crown was not wrapped. It sat on my knees on its seven blackened thorns, and the garnet caught the moonlight from the window and held it like a drop of something that had not yet dried.
“Put it on,” he said.
“It’ll cut me.”
“Only if it doesn’t choose you.” He knelt so that we were level, and I saw for the first time that his own brow was clean. No scar, no mark. He had never worn it. “Do you know how the first Briar Queen came by this? The priests keep the account locked away because they find it embarrassing. She wasn’t a princess. She was a pickpocket from a river town, and she stole it off the altar of a god who had been using it to choose kings, and the thorns didn’t touch her. The god was so offended he left the country. That’s the story. It chooses the hand that takes it, not the head that expects it.”
I stared at him. “You knew. In the chapel. When you saw my hand.”
“I suspected. I’ve spent a year in that archive trying to understand why the crown opened my mother’s head, and why it would almost certainly refuse Lucan, and me. And then my brother hired the best thief in Ardmere to walk in and pick it up.” He smiled, and there was something raw under it. “My brother wants a crown. I want someone who could steal it from under a whole palace and still come back for the part she liked.”
“I didn’t come back for anything. You caught me.”
“Yes,” he said. “Put it on.”
I lifted the crown in both hands. The thorns pressed my palms, cold, and did not break the skin. I thought of my mother’s red scarf, and the laundress’s waxed cord, and the arithmetic of four thousand men. There was no version of this night that ended with me as I had been: a woman who owned nothing she couldn’t carry up a drainpipe.
The thorns were cold against my hair. I waited for the pain.
It never came.
The crown settled. That is the only word for it. It settled onto my head the way a cat settles into a lap it has chosen, and for a moment, a single impossible moment, I felt something like attention turned on me from a very long way off, ancient and amused and not at all kind.
Then it was only silver, and weight, and the man kneeling in front of me.
He smiled then, slow, awful, triumphant, and I understood that I had not been caught at all. I had been recruited.
The fury came up in me so fast it tasted like copper.
“You used me,” I said. “Every night. The window, the questions, my mother. You needed to know whether I’d break or run before you showed me to your council. You were testing me.”
“Yes,” Caspian said. He didn’t look away. “At first. The first three nights, I was doing exactly that.”
“And after?”
“After, I was standing in a dead garden talking to a woman I couldn’t see, and forgetting to ask the questions I’d come to ask.” He sat back on his heels. “I’m my father’s son. I was raised in a court where every kindness is a lever. If you put that crown on in front of the Thorn Council on Thornmass eve, Lucan’s claim dies in the hall, and I would be a liar if I said I didn’t want that more than I’ve wanted almost anything.”
“Almost.”
He reached into his coat and took out a heavy purse and a folded paper sealed with the Veyle boar, and set them on the straw beside me.
“Two hundred crowns,” he said. “The amount you were promised and wouldn’t have got. And a pardon, signed and sealed, for every theft you’ve ever committed in Ardmere, including the Orsolt emeralds, which I’ll admit gave me particular pleasure to write. The door’s open, and so is the postern below. Walk out.”
I looked at the open door. I looked at him.
“You’re lying,” I said. “This is another test.”
“It isn’t.” His voice was very low. “I’ve taken enough from you. If you stay, I want it to be because you chose to. If you go, I’ll face Lucan on Thornmass eve, the night after next, with three hundred guards and some librarians, and I’ll probably lose, and it will not be your fault.”
I lifted the crown off my head. The thorns slid through my hair without catching a single strand. I set it on the straw beside the purse.
Then I stood, and picked up the purse and the pardon, and walked out of the Warden’s Tower without looking back, and he did not call after me.
The Needle does not change for anyone. That is its only mercy.
I came down into it at dawn through the fish stairs, with two hundred crowns under my shirt and a royal pardon in my boot, and the smell met me halfway: tannery lye, river mud, frying lard, the sweet rot of the plum-sellers’ carts. Nobody looked at me twice. In the Needle you are what you’re carrying, and I was carrying nothing anyone could see.
Mother Gall was in her back room, in a chair shaped to her like a shell, with a pipe and a ledger and a grey cat asleep on the ledger. She looked at me over her spectacles for a long time.
“They told me you were dead,” she said. “So. You’re not dead. And you’ve not got it. And you’ve got a face on you like a girl who left something on a windowsill and is trying very hard not to think about which windowsill.”
I sat on the crate across from her, the one I had sat on since I was small, and put the purse and the pardon on the table, and told her. Not the garden, not the lemon balm, not his hand held out palm up in the filth. But enough.
She read the pardon twice. Then she laughed until she coughed.
“The Orsolt emeralds,” she wheezed. “He wrote it down. The little bastard wrote it down in his own hand.” She wiped her eyes. “Well. You’re free, Tamsin Rook. Richer than your mother ever dreamed and clean as a priest’s cuff. What’ll you do?”
“Leave,” I said. “Go south. Buy a boat, or a house with a door that locks from the inside.”
“You’ll hate it.”
“I’ll learn.”
“You never learned anything you didn’t want to.” She tapped her pipe out. “There’s two kinds of thieves. The kind that takes things so she’ll have them, and the kind that takes things so nobody can take them from her first. The second kind never keeps anything. She’s too frightened of the day it gets took.” Gall looked at me. “Your mother kept you. They hanged her for plums, but she kept you right up to the steps. Don’t you tell me it wasn’t worth it.”
I did not leave that day. I told myself the southern coaches were full for Thornmass. I spent the evening at the Drowned Bell, a sellsword’s tavern where half of Lucan Veyle’s northern garrison had been drinking for a month. Most of them were not northern at all: dock bruisers and deserters and tannery boys in borrowed livery, drunk and sour, their pay three weeks behind. In a corner booth beneath the stairs, a sergeant in the boar’s-head tabard sat with a big fair man in a plain brown coat whose broken nose I would have known in the dark.
I took a jug to the table behind them, put my head down on my arms like a woman who has had too much, and listened.
Midnight on Thornmass eve, when the council sat in the Hall of Briars. The river gate under the palace kitchens, which Ser Edric Hale’s own men would hold. Four hundred of Lucan’s best through it before the bell finished ringing. The verger paid to find the crown gone. The prince to be taken alive if convenient and dead if not, resisting arrest for the theft of the Briar Crown, with his own captain to swear he had seen him take it.
“And the thief?” the sergeant said. “The girl?”
“Let go,” Edric said. “Walked out with her pardon, like the soft fool he is. She’ll be halfway to the coast. The laundress was a waste of good silver.”
I sat with my forehead on my arms and my heart going very slowly and very hard.
I could have gone south. I want that written down. There was a coach at dawn, and Caspian had said it himself: it would not be my fault.
But I thought of him talking to a window in a dead garden, and running up four flights of stairs with his shirt half open, and of the two kinds of thieves, and of my mother’s arms around me on the steps of Tallow Square, holding on until the magistrate’s men pried her loose.
I had never kept anything. I had told myself it was because nothing was worth keeping. That was a lie. It was because I could not bear to be the one holding it when they came to take it away.
I paid for the jug, and I walked out of the Drowned Bell, and I did not go south.
His rooms were in the King’s Wing, above the water garden, and the ivy on that wall was a hundred years old and thick as a ship’s rope. It took me nine minutes to climb. The casement was latched but not locked. Of course it wasn’t.
He was awake, in shirtsleeves at a long table littered with archive boxes and candle-ends, a glass of wine untouched at his elbow and the Briar Crown in front of him on a square of black velvet. My velvet. He had taken it out of the chapel in secret after I left. He was looking at it with his chin on his fist, the way a man looks at a letter he cannot bring himself to answer.
I stepped down from the sill onto his carpet. He did not turn.
“If you’re another laundress,” he said to the crown, very tiredly, “I should tell you I’m armed.”
“You should buy better locks,” I said.
He went absolutely still. Then he turned, and I watched it happen on his face: the idle prince, the patient spider in the chapel doorway, all of it falling away, and underneath a man who had not slept and had not expected to see me again in this life.
“You came back,” he said.
“Edric Hale is Lucan’s,” I said, because if I didn’t say it first I would say something else. “He gave the laundress her key. Midnight on Thornmass eve, the river gate under the kitchens, four hundred men. The verger’s bought. They’ll swear you stole the crown and they’ll cut you down in the Hall of Briars for resisting.” I took a breath. “Your sergeant didn’t hang himself, either. I’d lay money on that.”
He took it without moving. Only his eyes changed. Edric Hale had taught him the sword, I learned later, and had carried him home from the hunting field with a broken collarbone when he was a boy.
“Edric,” he said at last, very softly. “Of course. Of course it’s Edric. It’s always the lever you lean on hardest.” He put his hand flat on the table as if the floor had tipped. “I’d have walked into that hall and put my back to him.”
“I know.”
“You could have been three counties south by now.”
“I know that too.”
He stood. He crossed half the room toward me and stopped, the way he had stopped in my cell, four feet of carpet between us instead of four feet of stone.
“Why did you come back, Tamsin?”
He had written my name on the pardon, but he had never said it aloud, and hearing it in his mouth did something to the backs of my knees.
“Not for the crown,” I said.
“Then what for?”
I could have lied. But he had given me an open door and a choice, and I did not want to hand him back anything less.
“For the part I liked,” I said.
Something broke in his face. He took one step and then made himself stop again, and I saw his hands close at his sides.
“I had you behind a lock for nine nights,” he said, low and rough. “I wanted you for most of them, and hated myself for every one. So hear this. The window’s open. The door’s open. Nobody can make you stay in this room, least of all me.” He swallowed. “I need you to say it plainly, whatever it is. I won’t guess.”
I crossed the four feet myself.
“I’m choosing this,” I said, and put my hand flat on his chest, over the shirt, over the heart slamming under it. “I want you. Tonight, with the window open. Do you want me?”
“Saints,” Caspian Veyle said, and it came out of him like a confession. “Yes.”
He did not grab. That is what I remember first. A man that hungry, and he lifted his hands and framed my face as if it were the crown, as if it might cut him, and he looked at me for one long breath, and then he kissed me.
It was not gentle. It had nine nights in it. He kissed me as though every word he had said to my window had been a kiss he could not give. I pushed my fingers into his hair and pulled, and he made a sound against my lips that went straight down my spine and pooled low and molten in my belly. I walked him backward until his shoulders met the bedpost. He let me.
“Tell me if you want me to stop,” he said against my throat.
“I’ll tell you. Don’t stop.”
I undressed him the way I open a lock: slowly, by feel, listening for the give. The buttons of his shirt, one and then the next, my knuckles brushing the skin they bared. The cuffs. The belt with its heavy royal buckle, which I unfastened with one hand while he laughed, breathless, and said, “You’ve done that before,” and I said, “Only to steal the purse,” and he laughed again, helplessly, into my hair. He was lean under the linen, harder than the broadsheets would have believed, with an old white scar at his collarbone where it had once been broken. I set my mouth to that one. His whole body shuddered.
Then it was his turn, and he was not slow at all.
My coat went. My shirt, with its unpicked hem where his guards had taken my last pick. He went to his knees in front of me to pull my boots off, and he stayed there, looking up at me in the candlelight with his dark eyes gone black and his mouth swollen, a prince of the Briar kneeling on his own carpet to a gutter thief. He unlaced my breeches and drew them down my thighs and pressed his open mouth to the inside of my knee, and then higher, and then higher still, and waited there, his breath hot against me, until I put my hand in his hair and said, “Yes. There. Please.”
I had been touched before, quick careless things with men gone by the morning bell. Nobody had ever worshipped me. He did it with terrible patience and total attention, learning me with his tongue as he had learned me through a barred window, every catch of my breath remembered, every place that made my hips move chased and returned to. My thighs shook. He held me up with his hands spread on my hips and did not let me fall and did not let me hurry, and when I came it was with my fist knotted in his hair and his name torn out of my throat, the first time I had ever said it, Caspian, raw and loud enough that the guards on the stairs must have heard.
He rose and caught me as my knees went. He carried me to the bed. I pulled him down on top of me with my heels, and the full length of him pressed against me, hot and heavy and aching, and he braced himself on his forearms and held there, shaking, on the edge of it.
“Tamsin.” My name again, a rough plea. “Are you sure?”
I reached down between us and wrapped my hand around him, and watched his eyes close.
“I’ve never been surer of anything I’ve taken,” I said, and guided him into me.
He sank in slowly, so slowly, the stretch of him sweet and enormous, and we both stopped breathing at once. For a moment neither of us moved. His forehead came down against mine. I could feel his pulse where we were joined, and mine answering it, and I thought, from very far away, of the crown settling onto my head like a cat choosing a lap. Oh, I thought. So that is what it feels like, to be chosen.
Then he began to move, and I stopped thinking at all.
It was a long, dark, rolling thing, the way we went at each other. He was careful until I bit his shoulder and told him not to be, and then he wasn’t, and the old bed knocked against the panelling and the candles guttered in the draught from the open window. I dragged my nails down his back and he groaned into my neck. He caught my wrists and pressed them into the pillows above my head, and then stopped, and looked at me, asking, and I laced my fingers through his and held on and said, “Yes, like that,” and he kissed me as though I had handed him a kingdom. I felt the second peak building long before it broke, a slow coil pulled tighter with every stroke, and when it broke it took me apart so thoroughly I heard myself sob. He followed a moment after, with his face buried in my hair and my name on his lips like a prayer he had only just learned the words to.
Afterward we lay tangled in the wreck of the sheets, sweat cooling. On the table across the room the Briar Crown sat on its black velvet and watched us with its one red eye.
“I told myself I wanted you for the crown,” he said into my shoulder. “That was the lie I lived on for nine nights. I needed it, because if it was only strategy, then I wasn’t a man keeping a woman in a tower because he couldn’t stand to let her go.” He lifted his head. “I don’t care if you ever put that thing on again. If you want to go south after tomorrow, I’ll buy you the boat.”
“Tomorrow,” I said, “we let Edric think nothing has changed. We let your brother walk into that hall and show the whole council what he is. And then I come down out of the roof.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and then he laughed, low and wondering, and kissed my palm.
I took a thin steel pick out of my own hair, bought in the Needle that afternoon, and braided it into the dark hair at the nape of his neck, where no one would think to look.
“When they chain you,” I said, “don’t let anyone search you.”
The Hall of Briars has a hammerbeam roof of black oak, and above the beams there is a crawlway the width of a coffin, left by the builders for the lamplighters. I lay in it for four hours on Thornmass eve with the Briar Crown wrapped in velvet against my ribs, exactly where it had been the night all this began.
Below me, the court came in. Seven lords of the Thorn Council in their high chairs, Lady Orsolt glittering in emeralds that were not the ones I’d stolen. Old Pellam with his lips moving. Two hundred courtiers in mourning silk. Caspian at the foot of the dais, bareheaded and unarmed as the rite required, and Ser Edric Hale a pace behind his left shoulder, where he had always stood.
At the first stroke of midnight the verger came up the aisle with an empty cushion and a performance of horror. At the fourth, the doors at the kitchen end burst inward and boar’s-head tabards poured through them. At the ninth, Caspian’s wrists were chained behind him, Edric’s sword was at his throat, and Lucan Veyle was walking up the centre of the Hall of Briars in black half-armour, with his hinge-voiced man at his side, as calm as a bridegroom.
He did not look at his brother. He looked at the council.
“The crown is gone,” he said. “Stolen, on the night of its offering, by the man who would have worn it. My captain is witness.” Edric said nothing; the blade said it for him. “There is no crown to choose. By the old law, the throne passes by right of arms. I have the arms. Does the council dispute it?”
“The council does not,” said Lady Orsolt at once.
“The council,” said Pellam, rising, shaking, “has not voted, boy,” and a soldier struck him across the mouth and he sat down hard, bleeding into his beard.
I took the black feather out of my sleeve and let it go.
It fell a long way, turning. Every eye in that hall followed it down. It landed on the council table in front of Lucan Veyle, and I watched him understand what it was, and then I clipped my line to the chandelier chain and came down after it.
It was the only entrance I have ever made on purpose to be seen. I dropped the last ten feet onto the council table, scattering ink and seals, and I stepped down onto the dais in my climbing blacks with my hair bound back, and I unwrapped the Briar Crown, and I put it on.
The silence was so total I heard the candles.
The thorns settled into my hair. Nothing bled. Somewhere very far away something ancient turned its attention on the hall, and I felt the courtiers feel it, a pressure in the ears like weather coming.
“It chooses,” Pellam whispered through his split lip. “Saints and mercy. It chooses.”
“It’s a trick.” Lucan’s voice cracked on it. “A gutter thief and a blunted crown. My brother’s whore in a costume.”
He came up the dais steps and tore it off my head.
The thorns went into his palms to the knuckle. He screamed, a raw animal sound, and the blood ran down his wrists into his sleeves, and still he would not let it go. He was his father’s son too. He lifted it in both ruined hands, and before anyone could move, he jammed the Briar Crown down onto his own brow to show them all it was only silver.
It opened him the way it had opened his mother. I will not describe it further. I have seen men hanged, and I still wake some nights and hear the sound.
He staggered back, blinded by his own blood, and the crown fell and rang on the dais steps. The boar’s-head soldiers stood frozen in the aisle. I looked down at them and knew half their faces: dockside boys, tannery boys, men I had drunk beside at the Drowned Bell, owed three weeks’ pay.
“You know me,” I called down to them, and my voice belonged to me. “I’m Hesper Rook’s girl, from the Needle. The Bread Statute dies tonight. Any man who puts his sword down keeps his pay from the crown’s own purse and walks out of this hall with his neck. Any man who doesn’t is fighting for that.”
I pointed at Lucan. The first sword hit the flagstones. Then a dozen. Then a sound like hail.
I did not see Lucan find his knife. I saw Edric’s head turn toward the ringing blades, his sword drift a finger’s width from Caspian’s throat, and I saw Caspian’s hand come out from behind his own back with the manacles hanging open from one wrist and a thin steel pick between his fingers. He took the sword out of Edric’s grip as if it had been offered to him.
Then Lucan was on me, half blind, the knife coming low toward my belly, and Caspian was between us.
It was over in one stroke. Lucan folded over his brother’s blade with a look of pure surprise, as though, of all the arithmetic in the world, this was the one sum he had never thought to do. Caspian caught him as he fell. He went down on the dais steps with his brother across his knees and the Briar Crown lying beside them in their blood, and he held Lucan’s ruined head against his chest while he died, and he did not make a sound.
They crowned me on the ninth day after, in the Hall of Briars, with the floor scrubbed white and the doors thrown open to the Needle. Old Pellam set it on my head with shaking hands. It did not cut me. My first act, before the oaths, before the feast, before anything, was to tear the Bread Statute in half on the council table and to pardon every woman in the city’s gaols for the theft of food. Lady Orsolt fainted. I have always privately believed she did it for effect.
Edric Hale was tried in the open, in daylight, before a jury of the city, as Caspian insisted. Nothing tidy. He hanged on the river gate he had sold.
Caspian buried his brother beside their mother and did not speak for two days. On the third night I climbed the ivy to his window and found him sitting on the floor with his back against the bed and a child’s wooden sword across his knees. Lucan had carved it for him, he said. The winter he was six.
I sat down beside him and took his hand, palm up, and held it until he wept.
It was a week after the crowning before he came to me. Not through the window. Through the door of the Queen’s rooms, knocking like any petitioner, in a plain dark coat, and when I opened it he went down on one knee on the threshold and did not rise.
“I have no crown and no brother and no captain,” he said. “I have three hundred guards, and some librarians, and a very long list of things I’d like to tell you. I’m not here as your prince, or your consort, or your council. I’m here to ask whether you want me to stay.”
I looked down at him. At the dark head bowed. At the man who had once decided how the mouse ended, kneeling in a doorway with his palm held out.
“Get up,” I said. “And come in. And close the door, because I’m choosing this, and I want you to hear it with every lock in the palace open.”
He rose and kissed me in the doorway, and then against it, and then we did not make it as far as the bed.
This time I was the slow one. I pressed him down into the great chair by the fire and climbed into his lap, still in my court silk. I kissed the scar on his collarbone. I unbuttoned him one button at a time and asked whether he would let me set the pace tonight, and he said, “Anything you want. I want all of it,” so I told him he could touch me only when I asked, and watched him grip the carved arms of the chair until his knuckles blanched and his breath came ragged, and loved him for the trust in it. When I finally lifted my skirts and took him inside me, sinking down by slow inches while he watched my face as if it were scripture, he said my name like a man breaking a fast.
“Touch me now,” I said, and he did, his hands sliding up under the silk to my hips, my waist, my breasts, and I rode him in the firelight until the chair creaked and the rhythm went ragged and sweet, and I felt him shaking beneath me with the effort of letting me set the pace. When I came apart I did it with my forehead pressed to his, looking into his eyes, and he held me through every shudder before he let himself follow, his arms locked around me as if the whole palace might tip into the Sallow and he would not let go.
Later, in the bed, he fell asleep with his head on my stomach, the first real sleep he’d had since his brother’s death. I lay awake and looked across the room at the Briar Crown, where I’d hung it on the bedpost like a peddler’s hat.
The garnet caught the last of the firelight. It was not the colour of a split lip any more, or of my mother’s red scarf. It was the colour of a mouth that has been thoroughly kissed. Of a pomegranate seed. Of a thing you have decided, against all your training, to hold on to with both hands.
I have stolen a great many things in my life and kept none of them. Emeralds. Purses. A crown off an altar, in the dark, for the wrong man.
The man asleep against me, I never stole at all. That is how I know I get to keep him.
✦ End of Chapter No. 07 ✦