The Conquering, page 49:

  Varuht made armor for the rest of us, myself and his seven friends, with the remaining bones. With it, he promised them glory and a gold of their choosing from the wyvern’s harem. The wyvern bone armor, too, was white and brittle, but withstood a careful march to the palace.

  There, I showed them inside, through the passages we and the Stewards took in and out. They never expected an attack, not one they couldn’t easily subdue.

  We baited the first we came across into changing. It was my second cousin who blew the flames that turned the sword from white to black—his fate and the fate of all their kind sealed in that moment.

  We allowed the beast to burn us all and, though it felt as if our flesh burned from our bones, we did not die. We became invincible, except only for our open eyes.

  We killed my second cousin.

  And then we made plans to kill them all.

  “You did very well,” Clara says, rubbing ointment into the gold patch on my right forearm with gentle, methodical strokes—the pleased ones. The lantern’s flame flickers in my dark bedroom, glinting off my gold like I, too, am made of fire.

  My head spins with everything that’d happened earlier in the day. I ache to fish that little book out from the loose floorboard under my bed and devour it—soon, but not yet.

  “However, I expect more of you next time,” Clara continues. “He needs to forget how many laps he’s taken, forget he’s with his friends. You must ask him about himself, compliment him, keep him constantly engaged. His eyes should never wander.”

  “I will do better, stepmother.” My gaze slides from Clara’s reflection in the tall oval mirror to the shuttered window. The sun has long since set, and only inky black lines trim the wooden shutters. A faint shout from the night watchman declaring the late hour filters in, but I wish it were open wide to let in the cool night air and whisk away the acrid stench of the ointment—everyone loves lavender and citrus, Clara insists, so perhaps only I hate it. Alas, the window remains shut, as Clara won’t allow the risk of anyone catching sight of me naked, even though we are on the third floor and even though most of my dresses leave little to the imagination.

  Clara dips her fingers into the jar resting on the vanity’s polished surface. “We have the Privetts’ support and already a promising interaction with the Prince. We have an opportunity.” She smooths the ointment over my shoulder and the stretch of gold that nearly reaches my jaw now. “Perhaps the greatest evidence of this… is the letter I received earlier this evening.”

  I still, my breath catching in my throat. “A letter?”

  Clara slaps the back of my head. “Silence! Did I ask you a question?”

  I stifle a flinch and drop my gaze—the answer she wants.

  Clara’s composure and gentle tone returns. “Yes, an invitation for you to join the Queen for tea. The day after tomorrow.”

  Hope sparks in my chest and I slowly raise my gaze to the mirror.

  Clara replaces the ointment jar’s lid. “It’s a good omen that you’ve secured an invitation so quickly. But you mustn’t become overconfident or complacent. We will spend tomorrow preparing. Our future rests on your shoulders, my child.”

  A shiver rolls down my spine. To say ‘thank you’ feels like handing Clara a victory I can’t quite stomach. “I will not fail.”

  Clara replaces the gauze bandage around my freshly scarred palm, as Clara is fastidious to details and determined to maintain the facade for at least a few more days. “Rest well, Aubrey. You must look your best.”

  With a final scrutinizing sweep of her gaze over my body—never once meeting my eyes—she nods and slips from the room.

  I remain at the vanity, staring at the closed door reflected in the mirror and listening as Clara’s footsteps fade down the hall.

  I sit as long as I can stand it, trying to push myself a little longer, testing the limits of my restraint against the anxiety crawling up my spine. Tea with the queen. Skies Above. I’ve looked forward to this for so long, I suppose I expected every moment to be magical. For all this newness to be exciting, to feel free at last. I didn’t expect it to be so terrifying. For the weight of responsibility to settle itself quite so heavily between my scarred shoulder blades.

  That book. I need to get it back to Farnell as soon as possible. How is another matter. Hopefully he’ll be able to trade his way into working at the market again—which means I need to take every opportunity to go there.

  Until then, I’m surely going to read every word and try to make sense of that old man in the square. If there’s any sense to be had of what was clearly a drunken outburst.

  Satisfied with my restraint, I launch from the chair and tug a nightdress over my sticky ointment-slathered body. For good measure, I toss a scarf around my neck to hide the gold there. Supposedly wyverns don’t fly at night, but no need for undue risks. I collect a candle, match, and the little book from its hiding place. It’s time to read—and I want the freedom of the breeze in my face to do it.

  With everything shoved into my nightdress pockets, I fling the window shutters open and suck in the night air. Warm humidity and the bite of stagnant water and horse manure oozes up from the street below. Somehow we’ve skipped from cool spring directly to hot, sticky summer nights in an eye-blink.

  The window overlooks a narrow alley behind the townhouse, not the canal street and palace as Lilianna and Clara’s rooms do, which affords me at least some level of privacy, especially since the windows of the opposite building are all dark.

  I inspect the roof and ledges. Escaping windows and navigating ledges had been my speciality at the palace, and even more so since Clara locked me up. This one will do just fine.

  I climb out the window and, with one hand tightly gripped on the upper frame, I stand up on the sill. The roof overhead is high, but I’m just able to reach it standing on my tiptoes. I dig my bare toes into an irregularly laid brick and use it to hoist myself up onto the coarse roof tiles.

  I straighten, and the view takes my breath away. To the north, the mountain spire cuts jaggedly into the night sky. Beneath it, the Palace glows like a downed moon from the hundreds of lanterns hanging on its white exterior. Those lanterns reflect off the canal, like a river of night sky cut through the earth and dotted with stars.

  I pivot slowly, taking in the cityscape that stretches out for nearly as far as I can see. Beyond the borders of rooftops, lies the black of unlit forests and fields. I keep turning, taking in every glittering stretch of sleepy city and—

  I freeze.

  A figure sits at the far end of the roof, midway down its slope, casually reclined onto one elbow.

  A man.

  The dim light of the streets below silhouette his profile like an inky blotch on a greyed-out world. He wears all black and I can just barely make out a mask pulled up over his face. Only two eyes reflect any light at all.

  “Good evening, Lady Aubrey,” Abel says, his smooth, arrogant voice unmistakable.

  A flutter ignites low in my belly. Fear, must be fear. I ought to swing back into my window. Yet… If you want to know the rest of the story—including the truth of why he was killed—don’t run from me the next time I find you.

  He’s found me. And, Skies, I want to know.

  My stomach still churns over new of the attack on the Venon factory, though. An attack this man—or the rebels under his command—perpetrated. Except… Farnell knew workers in the burned factory; he’d lived and worked around them for years. He should have been upset, not eager to join the murderers.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “I tend to frequent roofs when given the opportunity. They are excellent for uninterrupted travel. And also superb for a quiet rest, as you can see I’m doing just now,” he says, as if we’ve merely bumped into one another on a pleasant afternoon. “What are you doing here?”

  My fingers curl around the book in my pocket that I’d very much been about to read and he’d probably like to steal, given how badly Maurus apparently wanted it back. I lift my chin and take a small step back. “I felt like some air.”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “And you didn’t consider using your front door?”

  “I prefer the view from up here.” My veins hum with a wild mix of fear and exhilaration and defiance.

  “I’d prefer you step away from that edge.”

  Damn, he noticed me edging away. I’ll have to remember he’s as observant as Clara. “I didn’t want to wake anyone.”

  “Now that I believe,” he says, amusement coloring his tone.

  I ought to climb back inside. Or scream. On a street lined with Founder homes, there’s bound to be a patrolling guard nearby. “How do you know about my mother’s necklace? And how do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “He told me about it,” he says, so easily, so simply. He sits up and loops an elbow around his knee. “You know, you aren’t what I expected.”

  I cross my arms over my flimsy nightgown. “Don’t change the subject. What do you mean, he told you? My father hunted vermin like you.”

  “Vermin like me?” he asks with an air of incredulousness that comes off far more mocking than insulted.

  An entire factory burned down. Nearly a hundred workers lost. “Yes. Murderers.”

  “Whoa now.” He raises his hands, silhouetted by the city lights behind him. “Whose death have I been blamed for today?”

  “Is it that easy for you to forget the lives of a hundred peasants? Do they have so little worth to you?”

  He leaps to his feet in one fluid motion. “And what worth do they have to you, noblewoman?”

  I jerk back, my body taut with the urge to flee back to my window. But his words sting too much to back down. “Worth? They’re my—” I abruptly cut myself off. Farnell is family. Our servants are some of the few people who are kind to me, in their own way. There’s no worth that would ever be enough. But I also won’t be so stupid as to offer this man any sort of leverage over me. I won’t put Farnell at risk. I settle on, “Friends.”

  “Oh,” he says, his tone cracking with mock scandal, “the little Lady Aubrey has a peasant lover?”

  “Lover? Of course not,” I scoff, then snap my mouth shut. I tried that once. Hell-bent on losing my virginity to a boy of my own choosing, I’d disguised myself and made advances on one of Farnell’s friends a few years ago. He’d undone about four of my dress buttons, caught one sight of the gold at my collarbone, and fled. It’d been a stupid, stupid thing to do, as it’d put him at such risk. Peasant boys’ve been slaughtered for far less than deflowering a gold girl.

  “It repulses you so, to think of a peasant as a lover?”

  “No, of course not. It’s just… not like that.”

  “Not a lover. A peasant friend? How very Gallant of you.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” he begins with a derisive edge, then stops short. His shoulders rise and fall with a deep breath. When he speaks again, his voice is calmer, more controlled. “The rebels have killed no peasants. We may be responsible for some killed by Venon’s hand, but, I assure you, no harm has come to your peasant friends by us.”

  “And the hundred or more burned alive when you torched the Venon factory? Those don’t count?” My pulse pounds in my ears. I want to scream at him. How can he be so callous? No, I should go, end this now, return to safety.

  He stares at me, as if he’s debating his next words. City crickets chirp into the silence, as if they mean to remind me that even the wild can sneak into this stone-and-brick world. Slowly, he shakes his head. “No. They are safe. Those who were able and willing have joined our ranks as soldiers for the cause. Those who were not, well, they’re in a safe place now.”

  “A ‘safe place’?” I raise my brows. “That sounds a lot like ‘dead’.”

  “A safe place. A place where one can be safe. Safe from being raped or whipped to death for sport. Safe to eat and feed their children without fear of physical harm. Safe.” His words sizzle across the night air.

  My breath hitches in my chest. Safe is all I’ve ever wanted for Farnell. For the servants of our manor. For myself. “How… can I possibly believe you?” My words come out as little more than a whisper; a weak futile attempt to hang onto my fear and loathing. Safe.

  “It’s better that the Founder Lords think them dead. A hundred servants equate to quite a loss, and a hundred fleeing into the woods to join a rebel army?” His voice softens. “Dead peasants aren’t hunted.”

  My gut twists. Skies, I almost believe him. “What about the carriage alongside the High Road? You killed those guards. I saw their bodies. What of their deaths?”

  “Those were… an extenuating circumstance I did not deal with directly. War does not always offer the option of mercy. I made a vow to fight for the people of this kingdom that cannot fight for themselves, and I’ll do that by whatever means necessary.”

  “And the guards’ families?”

  “We welcome with open arms, either at our sanctuary or among our ranks, if they will swear their fealty. I do not take human lives lightly.”

  I turn away from him, to the cityscape and its pretty, orderly buildings. It’s as if he’s just thrown open doors to a new reality. It makes little sense for Farnell to admire a faction that commits atrocities against its own people—but he would admire one that rescues them and hides them. Farnell would fight for safety. He must believe it to want to join them.

  I want an advantageous marriage to save Father’s manor and give Farnell, Lilianna, and the manor staff a better life. This man kills to give the same to the entire peasant class. I can’t bring myself to hate him for it.

  “You make me nervous so close to the edge.” His voice comes from just behind my shoulder.

  I startle with a jerk and my foot slips on loose roof-tile grit.

  His arm catches me around the waist and pulls me flush up against him. Heat from his body and the hard, muscular arm wrapped around me pours across the nightdress’s thin fabric and sends my stomach flipping as if I’d actually fallen. He cocks his head as if to say, see, that’s why.

  This close, the city lights illuminate his face and the rough texture of his wrap, the knit of emotion between sharply angular dark brows. And eyes, fixed upon mine with an intensity that unhinges a heady weightlessness in me, that glitter almost… green?

  “How did you know my father?” I whisper, distantly appalled by how breathless I sound.

  He peels his arm from my waist, though he leaves it hovering in the space between us, as if prepared to grab me again. “Sit, please, and I’ll explain. Or return inside and I’ll not seek you out again.”

  The night air is abruptly glacial where his arm has vacated my body, and a shudder grips my bones. This man can cross the roof in a silent flash of speed I never heard coming. This man sanctioned the murder of Venon guards along the High Road and burned an entire warehouse. This man can take whatever he wants from me. Yet, he offers me a choice.

  I sink down to sit on the cool tiles. I want those answers. I want the story he began out on the High Road when he’d ambushed our carriage.

  He lowers himself beside me, his thigh just a palm’s width from mine, so close I can feel the heat radiating from him. He dangles his feet off the edge and looks out at the city, an almost pained expression pinching his forehead. “I met your father in guard training. I was a… troubled young man. I had a lot of rage and hate. He taught me how to control it, how to direct that rage. I knew him for two years before he died.”

  He’s a defector, then. I wrap my arms around my knees. What could consume a man like Abel with rage?

  He draws in a breath and turns away from the city to lay his gaze upon me, intense and dangerous and transfixing. “He told me many secrets—one of which was the story of your mother’s necklace. He said it’d been a gift from the King. An attempt at a proposal. The King wanted your mother for himself, did you know that?”

  My stomach twists. “What? No. That—that can’t be.”

  His brows ease and the mask shifts on his cheeks like he’s smiled—one that doesn’t reach his eyes. “It was quite the scandal. The goldest Gold in the kingdom refused the King and chose your peasant-born father. She’d have lost her life over it if they both didn’t love her so damn much.”

  My heart hammers in my chest and I reach inadvertently for the necklace that isn’t at my throat, but down below in my room. All this time, I’d thought it a precious gift from Father. But it’d been from the King? Skies, had the Queen known when she saw me wearing it at the ball?

  “I don’t know how your father convinced the King to let him have her. Perhaps it was she who did. That was before I knew him. He and the King had a… relationship I never understood.”

  I stare at him. I have no proof what he says is true. Yet I want to believe this little sliver of history—a history I know so little of. A little piece of my father. “Why did you defect?”

  The moonlight catches flecks of forest green in his eyes. “Because I believe in a dream where anyone can rise to your father’s level of greatness—commoner, lord, or woman.”

  My throat squeezes. Or woman? I’ve never heard anyone even hint at such a thing. But more than anything, I am in awe that he’s voiced any of this. I know, acutely, the risk of words, the power of secrets. The risk to those hidden, safe peasants. “Why tell me any of this?”

  “Because you threw rocks at a dangerous masked man to save your horse and…” His gaze drops to my lap, where he gingerly turns over my hand and runs a thumb across the bandage wrapped around my palm. “Because you struck one of my men with a lantern and cut your own hand to wield a shard of glass against me and my dozen trained men.” Those eyes swivel to meet my gaze and his intensity consumes me. “And because you asked after the wellbeing of your driver before you even noticed you’d been injured.”

  My breath hitches. He had been watching, then, just like I thought. “You said my father was murdered?”

  “Yes.” The crinkle of his eyes fades. “But that… is a complicated story for another night, as I don’t think you’re quite ready to believe me. Not yet.”

  Yet. It hangs between us like a promise. I want to argue, to insist he tell me more, everything. But there’s something in the way he looks at me, the way he doesn’t look down upon me like I am less, a woman to be bartered, but like I am a person. Just a person. So, instead, my voice little more than a whisper, I ask, “Who are you?”

  His eyes crinkle again with a smile hidden beneath his mask and I ache to see it for myself. “Abel, surely you haven’t forgotten.”

  Heat pours inexplicably down my face, neck, chest, and coils low in my abdomen. It’s a dangerous, exhilarating feeling I can’t get enough of.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” He nods at the city. Though his wrap is pulled up over his nose, I can see the smooth skin of his upper cheeks. See the long, dark lashes curling up from his eyes. Eyes that, as they look out at the city, reflect the lights like the canal reflects the stars.

  “What?” I say, realizing he’s said something. The way my voice sounds surprises me; hoarse, light, breathless.

  His cheeks shift his mask, and he turns those captivating eyes back upon me. “The city. It’s beautiful from up here, don’t you think?”

  I cannot tear my gaze from his. The breeze is humid and its coolness titillating on my neck as it tousles my hair. “Yes.”

  He draws in a deep breath. “I’m afraid my time for rest has come to an end. It’s been a pleasure, Lady Aubrey.”

  The way my name sounds on his lips… My chest draws heavy and something stirs deep inside. Will I see you again? I open my mouth. I shouldn’t. Won’t. He’s everything I can’t have, the opposite of everything I’ve worked so hard for. I want to ask him a hundred more questions. “Goodnight, Abel.”

  His name sounds both foreign and strangely delicious on my tongue.

  He springs into a crouch, a movement so quick it sends a stab of fear lancing through me again. Inhuman speed. He’d toyed with me in the forest. Any moment he could have chased me down with ease, stopped me from throwing those silly rocks. The realization doesn’t frighten me like I’d expected. Instead, it lights a contagious, tantalizing excitement—and a burning yearn for more.

  His eyes crinkle with that devilish smile. The last I’ll get tonight. “Your father was a good man, Aubrey. Know that I am not.”