Chapter 9

Clara POV

I pressed my back against the cold stone wall, trembling.

So that was it. No divine guidance. No mercy. They had taken me in, bathed me, dressed me in fine clothes, drilled etiquette into me — all of it to package me into a perfect commodity, a girl to be shipped off to some other noble house as a broodmare, traded for political advantage. The real Cecily, the one carrying a child she wasn't supposed to have, would disappear to some safe corner of the world and deliver her baby in peace.

I was the scapegoat. I was the offering.

"And another thing," Martha's voice had dropped lower. "Word is the Veyr Imperium envoy came back yesterday. Brought a small fortune in gold coin and grain. The Lord was shut up in his study with the man all night. The way I see it, this place won't hold much longer. If the Empire marches through, the Calders are the last lifeline they've got. So that foster girl has to be gone before the envoy leaves."

A Veyr Imperium envoy.

The only name that came to mind was Silas. Was he here too? No — that was impossible. A man of his standing wouldn't come in person to negotiate a surrender. But if it was someone under his command —

Either way, time was running out. If the Empire took this city, I was finished. Silas would not forgive the person who had stolen his intelligence. And if the Karrows discovered I was trying to run, I was finished then too. Death on both sides — but I refused to die here.

I checked the corridor in both directions, slipped out of the shadows, and made my way not toward the upper floors but through the castle's ventilation passages toward the rear courtyard. My target was the kitchen waste outlet, the one gap in the guard rotation I had identified over the past two days.

The night lay over the Karrow estate like a piece of cloth soaked through with ink, heavy and suffocating. I moved like a rat along the base of the walls, keeping to the deepest shadows. The tin badge in my pocket pressed against my hip with a weight that felt nothing like metal — it felt like Perrin's eyes in his final moments. Drop it into the donation box marked lamp oil, fulfill what he had asked of me with his last breath, then slip onto the pre-dawn garbage cart and dissolve back into the slums, into the faceless crowd where no one looked for anyone.

A clean plan. A workable plan. Assuming I knew this terrain any better than I did.

I climbed a low wall and dropped into a cluttered rear courtyard. The moment my feet hit the ground, pain exploded through my ankle — I had come down directly onto a cellar hatch that had been left improperly latched. The worm-eaten wood gave way with a crack that split the silence like a gunshot.

I hadn't even managed a curse before torchlight flooded in from every direction at once, blinding me.

"Got her."

The voice was flat and unhurried. I squinted against the glare and made out a dozen armed guards stepping forward from the dark. They didn't rush me. They watched me the way men watch something already caught, with a particular species of amusement that belongs only to people who set the trap.

The captain walked to the front, kicked aside the broken hatch with one boot, then crouched down and grabbed a fistful of my hair, wrenching my head up.

"Fast little thing, aren't you, my lady." He smiled without warmth. "The mistress called it. Said you'd come this way."

The cold that moved through me then had nothing to do with the night air. This had been a trap from the beginning. They had known I would run. They had calculated exactly which path I would take.

I was dragged back to the main keep and thrown into the room that had once belonged to Cecily. Hugh Karrow and Isabel Karrow sat behind the long table, their expressions dark enough to wring water from.

"It seems we've been too generous with you," Isabel said. Her voice had the quality of a fingernail drawn slowly across glass. "We gave you warmth. We gave you food. We gave you a noble name. And you responded like a stray dog that bites the hand that feeds it."

I knelt on the floor with my wrists and ankles bound in coarse rope that bit into the skin. "I'm not a dog," I said through my teeth. "I just don't want to die."

"Die?" Hugh let out a short, cold laugh. He picked up a document from the table and dropped it onto the floor in front of me. I looked down. Parchment, the Karrow family seal pressed into the wax at the bottom, the signature of a Church notary alongside it. "That is the Church's official guardianship registration," Hugh said, with the measured patience of a man explaining something obvious. "This afternoon, we formally registered you with the Church as a ward of House Karrow. In the eyes of the law, as of today, you are my daughter."

I stared up at him.

"The marriage contract," he continued, the corner of his mouth lifting, "names Lord Karrow's lawfully presented daughter. It does not name Cecily. That distinction gives us room to work. If the legal documents establish you as my daughter, you may stand in Cecily's place. That is the elegance of the law, my dear."

The nausea that rose in me was thorough and complete. They intended not only to sell me in flesh but to first convert me into property on paper.

"And if I refuse?" I held his gaze.

The pleasantness left his face immediately. "Then you are a spy," he said. "Theft of Imperial military correspondence. Fraudulent impersonation of a knight's orphan. Deliberate interference with a marriage alliance between Houses Karrow and Calder. Any one of those charges is sufficient to hang you from the city wall and leave you there for three days." He rose from his chair and came to stand over me. "You have a choice. Go north as my daughter, in comfort, and become mistress of the Calder household. Or go to the gallows as a thief and a spy. I'll give you three seconds."

One.

Two.

The image that surfaced was not of the gallows. It was Silas Veyne's expressionless face, and Perrin's chest soaked through with blood.

Three.

"I choose —" My voice came out rough, scraped hollow. "Daughter."

Hugh smiled the smile of a satisfied man. He waved a hand toward the guards at the door. "Lock her up. No visitors, no exceptions, until the day of departure."

As the guards hauled me to my feet, Isabel's voice cut across the room. "Wait."

She crossed to where I stood, raised one lace-gloved hand, and patted my cheek with a gentleness that was somehow worse than anything else that had happened tonight. "Don't think about running again," she said softly, in the tone of a mother reminding a child to wear a coat. "The north is far, but at least you'll be alive. If you stay here —" she paused — "you'll wish you'd gone."

They pulled me out. As the door swung shut behind me, I caught Hugh's voice through the narrowing gap: "Send word to the Calders. Move the wedding up. The day after tomorrow."

"And Cecily?"

"Send her south. A convent. She doesn't come back."

The door closed.

The dark came back.

I sat against the cold wall and let the tears fall without making a sound. The day after tomorrow. I had two days. Two days before I was loaded into a carriage bound for a place I had never been, to marry a man whose face I had never seen.

I had heard stories about the north — the kind told in Old Hale's tavern by men who had fled the Calder territories and were deep enough into bad ale to let the words out. They said there was no spring up there, only a winter that never quite ended. They said the Calders tested newborns by stripping them bare and leaving them in the snow overnight: if the child was still crying by morning, it earned a warm room and milk; if it had gone still, it went into the river. They said the women of Calder weren't women at all, that they were raised in ice water and rode into battle bare-chested.

I knew most of it was the kind of nonsense meant to frighten children. But fear grows like weeds in the dark, and in the right conditions it doesn't need much to take root. If I arrived there and my identity unraveled, death would be the least of my concerns. A counterfeit bride would be flayed and mounted on the wall as a trophy — an insult delivered back to House Karrow in the most literal terms possible.

I curled into the corner and watched the gray nothing of the sky through the window, and a bone-deep helplessness settled over me like sediment. Living was so relentlessly, exhaustingly hard. All I had ever wanted was enough copper for a loaf of black bread and enough anonymity to survive this broken world one day at a time — and maybe, eventually, to find Sigrid, my sister, who was probably already dead. I had never wanted to be anyone's hero. I had never asked to save any kingdom. So why me? Why had Perrin pressed that badge into my hands? Why had the Karrows reached into the gutter and pulled out me?

I was a dead leaf caught in a storm, being carried toward a cliff with no say in the direction.

"I don't want to die," I whispered into my knees, my voice muffled, small, the sound of something wounded and cornered.

But I wasn't dead yet. And as long as I wasn't dead, I couldn't stop.

There's an old saying: when your luck hits absolute bottom, it has nowhere left to go but up.

They thought locking me in a room was the end of it.

They had forgotten what I was. I was a thief. And a thief, as long as she could still move her hands, never stopped looking for the way out.