Chapter 3 Mara

Stroud runs me down the corridor with one hand on my elbow, and I run with my thighs clamped together like I'm carrying something precious between them, which, God help me, I am.

"Left," he says. "Left! Your other left!"

"I don't have another left, Stroud, I have one left!"

My stomach makes a noise that bounces off the stone. A maid carrying a stack of linen flattens herself against a tapestry.

The privy door is oak with a little brass raven for a handle. I know, because I wrote the raven, and as I shove through and slam it behind me, I'm so grateful to past me for one specific decision that I could cry.

After book two, a reviewer gave me two stars and wrote, "Gorgeous romance but WHERE DO THESE PEOPLE POOP." So in book three I gave the Ravelles a marble privy with a cistern, a seat carved from black walnut, and a fat roll of soft paper on a silver spindle, all in one very smug paragraph.

Thank you, BookishBecca1987, wherever you are.

What happens next stays between me, the walnut and the Quill.

When it's over, I wash my hands in a basin shaped like a seashell and face the little mirror. Dirt on one cheek. Petal in my hair. A rip near the hem of my shirt, and mud on both knees of my pyjamas.

"You're in your book," I tell my reflection. "You're in your actual book, and you just pooped in it."

Somebody bangs on the door. "Lord Ravelle wants you in the great hall," Stroud shouts. "Now. The princess is here."

"Coming!"

I yank my waistband up, tuck the back of my shirt in so the rip won't show, and hurry out.

The great hall is exactly as I wrote it, and that's what undoes me. The long table. The black and silver banners with the raven on them. The fireplace big enough to roast a cow, which Soren did once in book one out of spite. Morning light pours through the tall windows, and at the far end, under the gallery, stands Soren, in a black coat buttoned to the throat now, hair combed back, every inch the man people cross the street to avoid.

The hall is packed. Courtiers, servants, guards, and the Caravel household pouring in through the main doors in sky blue and gold, with trunk after trunk behind them.

Every head turns as I walk in.

Fair enough. I'm a muddy woman in avocado pyjamas.

A lady near the door presses her fan to her mouth. A page boy points, and his mother slaps his hand down, but she's staring too. Somebody snorts and smothers it. The whispering runs ahead of me down the length of the hall.

I lift my chin. I'm the author. They can stare. I can kill these little shits whenever I please.

Soren's eyes find me. They drop to somewhere below my waist, and his mouth goes tight.

Oh, for God's sake.

He steps off the dais and cuts through the crowd, and people scramble out of his way so fast a footman drops a tray of cups. He comes around behind me. I spin to keep him in front of me. He circles again. I spin again.

"Hold still," he says, low.

"I will not hold still."

He reaches past my hip, toward my bum. His hand is right there.

I slap it. Hard. The crack echoes off the rafters.

"I knew it!" I say, much louder than I mean to. "Five minutes. You couldn't keep your hands to yourself for five minutes."

The hall goes dead quiet. Over by the doors, a horse whinnies.

Soren looks at his hand, then at me. His face is completely calm, which is how I know he's furious. "Mara."

"No. You listen to me, mister. You think because you've had a countess and two opera singers and a bear wrestler..."

Someone gasps in the gallery.

"...you can just walk up behind any woman in your hall and..."

"Madam." He lays the words down separately, each one colder than the last. "If I ever wanted my hands on your arse, there wouldn't be two hundred witnesses, and you wouldn't be shouting. You'd be begging." He leans in so only I catch the rest. "And I'd rather be dead."

My face goes hot right up to my hairline.

The cruel part is that the piece of my brain that wrote him goes absolutely feral at the word begging. The rest of me flinches at the word dead, because I know exactly how dead he's going to be. I know the page number.

"Oh, darling."

The redhead from the garden steps glides out of the crowd in a green silk gown she's clearly spent an hour on. Lady Corvina Marlowe. I wrote her as Soren's ex-mistress, the one who sells him out in book two for a seat on the council. She's prettier in person. She's also enjoying this more than anyone in the room.

"You've dropped something," she says.

She bends, picks something up off the floor behind me, and pulls.

And keeps pulling.

The paper slides out of the back of my waistband in one long, soft whisper. It goes on and on, yards of it, gliding over the flagstones, because it's been trailing behind me all the way from the privy, past the linen maid, down the corridor, through the doors and across the entire great hall. Corvina reels it in hand over hand like she's landing a fish. The Caravel guards step over it. One of them has it wrapped round his boot.

When she finally reaches the end, she loops the whole heap around my neck, twice, and pats it into place like a fur stole.

"There," she says. "Much warmer."

Nobody holds it in any more. The laughter starts in the gallery and rolls all the way to the doors. Stroud turns his face to the wall, shoulders shaking. One of the Caravel horses picks that moment to fart.

I want the flagstones to open. I want the laptop to spark. I want my apartment and my cold coffee and the dog and the bag.

He was reaching for the paper. He was trying to get it off me before anyone noticed, and I slapped him and shouted about his sex life in front of a princess.

Soren steps in front of me.

He doesn't say a word to me. He unwinds the paper from my neck himself, one loop at a time, his knuckles brushing my jaw, and he's so close and so careful that my heart does something deeply embarrassing. He balls it up and hands it to a footman without looking at him.

Then he turns to Corvina.

"Get out."

She laughs. "Soren, darling, it was a joke..."

"You have until the bells. After that my shadows walk you to the border, and they won't use the road."

The colour drains out of her face. She curtsies, stiff as a board, and goes.

I stare at the back of his coat. "You... thank you. That was really..."

"Don't mistake it for kindness." He doesn't even turn round. "You're my prisoner. Nobody humiliates my prisoner but me."

"I'm not your prisoner."

"You're in my castle, under my guard, eating my butter. I'll decide what you are once I've worked out how to kill you."

"You're still trying to kill me?"

"I've barely started."

And I'm smiling. I'm actually smiling at the man who poisoned my tea an hour ago, and I hate it. I hate that the hall smells of woodsmoke and fresh bread, that the light through those windows is the most beautiful thing I've ever stood in, and that I've been here half a morning and some stupid part of me already doesn't want to leave.

"Lord Ravelle!"

A girl in sky blue comes through the crowd with a basket on her arm. Blonde curls, a face like a cake decoration. Princess Evelina of Caravel, exactly as I wrote her, right down to the dimple. A hedgehog pokes its nose out of the basket and sneezes.

She curtsies to Soren. He bows. Neither of them looks the slightest bit interested in the other, and that's wrong, it's completely wrong. They're supposed to loathe each other on sight. Instead they're as polite and bored as two dentists at a conference.

"Forgive us for arriving early," Evelina says. "My cousin insisted. He was so eager to meet your household." She turns. "Severin?"

A man steps out from behind her. He's tall and pale, in a grey coat and grey gloves, with ash-blond hair tied at the nape and a thin silver scar running from his left eyebrow into his hairline.

Every drop of blood in my body goes cold, because I know that scar. I gave it to him in book one. And in book three, he gives Soren one of his own, straight through the heart, on page four hundred and twelve.

Lord Severin Hollis. The villain. He isn't supposed to set foot in Duskryn for two more books.

He bows to Soren. Then he turns to me, and his pale eyes travel over my mud and my pyjamas and my ruined shirt, and he smiles like we're old friends.

"And you must be Miss Bell," he says. "I wondered when you'd turn up."

Nobody told him my name.