Chapter 2 Soren

My shadows reach her and stop.

They don't miss. I've never missed. I've pulled a wyvern out of the sky with them. They wrap the air an inch from her throat, quiver there, and then, all at once, they recoil.

They pour back across the grass and pile up behind my legs. My shadows, the terror of three kingdoms since I was nine years old, crowd behind my calves like children hiding from a dog.

The woman has both hands clamped over her neck and her eyes squeezed shut. "Am I dead? Is this the dead part? Tobin, tell me honestly."

"You're in my roses," says Tobin. "Still."

She opens one eye, then the other. She pats her throat, her chest, her ridiculous shirt, and the relief on her face is so total and so stupid that I want to strangle her with my bare hands, since apparently nothing else will do it.

"Oh, thank God," she breathes. "Plot armour. I gave myself plot armour."

I have no idea what that means. I hate that I have no idea what it means.

I flex my fingers and call them again, harder, from the deep places, the cellar dark and the well dark, and the garden goes so cold that Stroud's breath turns white. Black spills over the garden wall, thick as tar.

It gets within a foot of her and veers off to sulk under the bench.

Stroud clears his throat. "My lord..."

"Say one word," I tell him, "and I'll take that moustache off your face with a spoon."

He closes his mouth. The slug is still on it.

Steel, then. I pull the knife from my boot, and she sees it and points at me, outraged, as if I've used the wrong fork at dinner.

"No. Absolutely not. You'll get blood on the moonroses and Tobin will never forgive you."

"I won't, my lord," says Tobin.

I look at him. He looks back. He's worked this garden forty years, and I've never once heard him string more than four words together, and today he won't shut up.

I turn the knife in my hand and step in close. She's small. The top of her head reaches my collarbone. Dirt is drying on her cheek, there's a petal stuck at the corner of her mouth, and she smells of earth and something bitter and roasted I can't put a name to. Her eyes are brown, with green near the centre.

She isn't afraid of me.

Everyone is afraid of me. My tailor is afraid of me, and I pay him triple.

"What are you?" I say.

"I told you. Mara Bell." She swallows. "Okay, so this is going to sound insane..."

"It already does."

"...but I know you. Third brick left of the fireplace in your study. It slides out. You keep honey drops in there, and sugared violets, and those little lemon things from the confectioner on Ash Street, and you eat them in the middle of the night when you can't sleep, which is most nights."

The knife goes still in my hand.

Nobody knows about the brick. I chiselled it loose myself at fourteen. The maid who dusts the study doesn't know. Corvina, who has been in that study wearing nothing but my signet ring, doesn't know.

"Who told you that?"

"Nobody. And there's a stuffed rabbit under the floorboard beneath your bed. Grey, one ear. His name's Sir Lumpkin."

Behind me, Stroud makes a noise like a man swallowing a sneeze.

I'll have to kill him as well. A pity. He's good at his job.

"Who," I say, very softly, "told you."

She rolls her eyes! She rolls her eyes at me, with my knife under her chin. "Calm down. I literally made you."

Every shadow behind my legs gives a hard shudder, and so does something low in my stomach.

Duskryn is an old kingdom with an old faith. Village children fold their hands at bedtime and pray, "May the Quill write kindly of me." The priests teach that every life is set down by a great invisible hand, every birth and every grief, and that the Quill never explains itself.

I stopped praying at nine, the night the Quill wrote the fire that took my father.

And now a woman in a shirt calling her somebody's okayest aunt stands in my garden claiming to hold the pen.

Either she's mad, or she's a liar, or she's exactly what she says she is, and I have a great many complaints.

I slide the knife back into my boot. She lets out a shaky breath and grins at me, big and lopsided, and I want to wipe it off her face with something sharper.

"Bring her inside," I tell Stroud.

"Wait." She holds up a hand. "I know what this is. You're taking me inside because you're curious now and you can't help yourself, and next you'll do the thing in the study with the fire and the brandy, and I'm telling you right now, buddy, it's not happening."

"Buddy," I repeat.

"I'm not falling into bed with you. I know what you're like."

Stroud studies the sky. Tobin studies his shears.

"Madam," I say, "in the last year alone I've bedded a countess, two opera singers and a woman who wrestles bears for money at the autumn fair."

"Exactly my point..."

"I'd sooner bed the bear."

Her mouth falls open. Her cheeks go blotchy pink, right down her neck. I turn and climb the steps with my shadows slinking at my heels, and I don't look back, because if I look back I'll want to see how far down that pink goes.

The breakfast room faces east. She sits where I put her, at the far end of the table with Stroud behind her chair, and gapes at the food as though she's never met a sausage.

"Is that real butter? Oh my God. I wrote the butter."

"Eat," I say.

I pour her tea myself. Mrs Pratt, the cook, stares at me from the doorway, because I haven't poured anyone's tea since I was in short trousers. With my back blocking her view, I tip the little vial from my sleeve into the cup. Blackroot. Three drops drop a man before he can finish saying his own name. I use six.

I set it in front of her. "Drink."

She picks it up in both hands and drains it. All of it. Then she holds out the cup. "Can I have more? I'm so thirsty. I think I was face-down in that garden for hours."

I fix my eyes on her throat and wait.

She reaches for the toast. Butters it. Hums.

Then her chest jumps, and out of her comes a belch so enormous the spoons rattle in their saucers. Mrs Pratt makes the sign of the Quill.

"Oh my God." She claps a hand over her mouth. "I'm so sorry. It's the tea. Is it a herbal thing?"

"Something like that," I say through my teeth.

Six drops. Either a god, or a woman with the constitution of a goat.

She talks through the toast, crumbs on her lip. "Okay, important. Stuff is going to start happening, and I can help, but you have to listen to me. You're not supposed to meet Princess Evelina until the Harvest Ball, that's chapter twelve, and you're going to hate her for at least six chapters, and..."

"I don't know any Evelina."

"Princess. Of Caravel. Blonde, gorgeous, nice to animals. You'll..." She stops, and her eyes slide off mine. "You'll get along eventually. Forget it."

She's hiding something. I add it to the list, next to the brick and the rabbit and the blackroot, of reasons she has to die.

The door bursts open. Fenwick, my steward, skids across the polished floor with his wig sliding over one ear.

"My lord! Princess Evelina of Caravel is at the gates with her entire household and four carts. She says she's come for the hunting season."

The toast falls out of Mara Bell's hand and lands butter side down.

"That's not supposed to happen until chapter twelve," she whispers.

She keeps saying that word, chapter, and before I can ask what it means, she goes the colour of old porridge. Her fingers grip the edge of the table. A sound rises out of her stomach, long and low and liquid, a sound I've only ever known from the castle drains in a thunderstorm.

She lifts her eyes to mine, and for the first time since my roses, Mara Bell looks terrified.

"Soren," she says. "Where's the privy?"