Chapter 2 THE GIRL WHO DIDN'T SCREAM

Osric's POV

I almost called off the fire.

My hand was already up, the signal half-formed, when the carriage door burst open, and Barnaby dragged the girl out onto the dirt. I expected her to scream. Every noble who'd ever come through our gates screamed, or cried, or fainted, or begged. That was the whole point of the fire. Fear was faster than words. Fear made people leave.

She didn't scream.

She rolled once in the dirt, came up coughing, and looked straight at the flames eating her carriage like she was memorizing the shape of it. Not scared. Furious. There's a difference, and I've spent my whole life learning to spot it, because fury is the only thing in this world that doesn't lie to you.

"That's the last thing that rolls in here on royal wheels," I told her, crouching down so she'd have to look up at me. I wanted her small. I wanted her to feel exactly how far outside her palace walls she'd landed.

She didn't shrink. She asked if I'd meant to kill her, voice shaking but not breaking, and something about the way she held herself while she said it hit me somewhere I didn't have a name for. I've watched grown men flinch at less than what I just did to her carriage. This girl had ash in her hair and dirt on her hands, and she was still finding the nerve to argue with me.

I told her she'd last two weeks. I meant it as a warning. Some small, stupid part of me meant it as a hope, too, though I didn't understand that part yet.

Barnaby, of course, couldn't help himself. He had her back on her feet and grinning before I'd even stood up straight, calling her "shinier than dirt" like this was some kind of introduction and not the ruins of the life the crown sent her here to give up. Fenwick didn't say a word, just watched her the way he watches everything, quiet and complete, filing her away somewhere behind those eyes of his. Torin, predictably, told her to save us the trouble and go home now.

She said she wasn't running anywhere.

I looked at her longer than I should have. Something in my chest turned over, slow and unwelcome, like a lock shifting open after years of rust. I told myself it was nothing. I told myself a lot of things that day that turned out to be lies.

We walked her through the gate in silence, past every set of eyes in Thornhollow, and I watched her chin stay up the entire way, even when the whispers started, even when old man Ferris spat near her boots without bothering to hide it. She didn't look at any of them. She looked straight ahead like she'd already decided this ground wasn't allowed to make her flinch.

I hated that I respected it.

I left her at the base of the stairs to the guest room, Barnaby practically skipping beside her the whole way up, and went straight to the war room where Torin was already waiting with a look on his face I didn't like.

"You saw it too," he said. Not a question.

"Saw what?"

"She didn't run. Didn't cry. Didn't beg." Torin dropped into the chair across from me, arms crossed, jaw tight the way it gets when something's chewing at him from the inside. "Every noble we've ever burned out of here folded in under a minute. She didn't fold."

"So she's stubborn."

"So she's dangerous," Torin said. "Stubborn people we can scare off. Stubborn people who don't scare, Osric, those are the ones who actually stay. And we can't afford her staying. Not with what's coming."

That last part landed heavier than he meant it to, or maybe exactly as heavy as he meant it to. I felt my jaw tighten. "What's coming" was a phrase Torin had been dropping for two days now, small and sharp, never explaining further, and every time I asked, he changed the subject as it cost him something to answer.

"Say it plainly," I told him.

He didn't get the chance.

One of the younger scouts burst into the room without knocking, out of breath, face pale in a way I didn't like at all. "Rider came through the south pass an hour before the carriage," he said. "We only just found the horse. No rider."

"Whose horse?" I said, though something in my gut already knew the answer before he gave it.

"Palace crest," the scout said. "Royal messenger colors. But nobody's checked in. Nobody's reported to the gate. If a royal messenger came through before the princess did..."

He didn't need to finish it. Somebody from the crown was already inside Thornhollow's walls, hours before we ever lit that carriage on fire, and not one of us had known it.

I was on my feet before I finished the thought, Torin right behind me, both of us moving fast toward the main house, because if there was a stranger loose inside our own territory, hiding, unaccounted for, then the fire at the gate hadn't been a warning to the only threat that mattered. It had been theater. A distraction we set ourselves, while the real danger walked in quiet, through a door none of us had bothered to watch.

We reached the bottom of the stairs just as I heard footsteps above us, soft and quick, moving toward the study.

Her footsteps.

I opened my mouth to call out, to tell her to stop, to warn her that something was wrong inside these walls tonight that had nothing to do with the four of us, but the words never made it out.

Because right then, from the study at the top of the stairs, I heard a door creak open.

And a voice that did not belong to me, or Barnaby, or Torin, or Fenwick, said her name.