The feast was still loud below when Aelinor climbed the stair with a candle she did not need. She had walked these stones for forty winters; her feet knew every hollow worn into the slate. But tonight she carried the flame anyway, because a flame was a small honest thing, and she wanted a small honest thing in her hand.
The wedding had gone as such weddings go. Igraine had smiled the smile that was not a smile. The bishops had blessed the new king's hand. And Aelinor, standing at the back among the women, had watched the dragon-bannered man's shadow lie the wrong way across the rushes, and watched the second shadow inside it turn, slow as a heron, and look at her.
It had only looked. That was the worst of it. The thin man in Uther's frayed dark had marked her — the old nurse who had taught a child to read shadows — and then gone back to his wine as if she were already tallied and shelved.
So she meant to do one rash thing before morning.
The stillroom door was warm under her palm. Inside, the air smelled of dried emberfern and the sea below, and of the iron nail Morgana had driven, years ago, into the lintel for luck. Aelinor set the candle on the shelf and knelt by the third board from the wall. Her knees made the small wet noise of knees that have knelt too often.
The board lifted. Beneath it, wrapped in a square of linen the colour of old milk, lay the wand — a length of dark wood no longer than her forearm, its tip set with a thumbnail of amethyst. She lifted it as one lifts a sleeping child. The crystal was warm. That was good. The crystal was warm to true kin, and she was not kin, only the woman who had rocked the kin to sleep. To her hand it should have been cool as river-stone. It was warm. The little wand knew her.
"Hush," she whispered to it, because it felt, faintly, as if something inside the amethyst had turned over and listened. "Hush, you. Not tonight."
She would not take it from the floor — to move it far would be to leave a track, and trackers walked the keep tonight. She would only shift it, three boards down, under the loose flag where the salt damp had eaten the mortar. They would lift the obvious board first. They would lift the one a girl of nine would have chosen. The new hiding place was a woman's hiding place. It would buy Morgana a day. A day was a great deal.
While her hands worked she rehearsed what she would say to the girl in the morning, if morning came for her. Listen. The man your mother married is two men. The thin one is older. Do not look long at either. If you must run, the Wells will take you in; ask the river for Brother Iwain's ford, and say my name to the old woman with the burned hand. Tell Morgana — She stopped. There was so much to tell Morgana that it had no shape. She unhooked the small bone pin from her shawl — a fish carved by Morgana's father in a winter Morgana could not remember — and laid it on the shelf beside the candle, where the girl would find it and know.
The candle guttered.
It did not gutter in a draught. There was no draught. It bent sideways as if something cold had leaned past it, and the flame went the wrong way, and stayed wrong.
Aelinor did not turn. She had taught a child not to turn.
"You came up by the inner stair," she said to the room, mildly, as if to a kitchen boy. "That stair is for the women of the house."
"Aelinor," said a voice she knew. It was the steward's voice — old Branoc, who had carried her bread up these forty winters. It was exactly his voice. It was not his voice at all. "You should be at the feast, old mother. You'll catch your death up here."
She felt, on the back of her neck, the cold that is not weather. The dew on the sill outside whitened with a small dry crackle, like sugar setting. The candle's wrong-tilted flame steadied, as if something had decided to be still.
Her chest tightened — not sharply, not as in songs. Only a closing, like a hand being shut around a moth. She thought, with great clarity and no fear at all, the wand is in the second place. She will look in the first. She thought, the pin. Let her find the pin.
"Tell her," Aelinor said, because Readers can hear a true thing said into a room, even from far away, even after — "tell her the shadow with two hearts came up by the women's stair."
The borrowed voice behind her did not answer. The candle went out without smoke. And from the doorway, very quietly, a shadow walked out the wrong way down the corridor — and the dew on every stone it crossed went white, and stayed white, all the long way back to where the king slept beside his bride.