I woke before the gulls, and I knew.
It is a cruel small gift, to know a thing before anyone has said it. I lay in the grey light listening to Tintagel breathe — the wind in the arrow-slits, the sea three hundred feet down chewing patiently at the rock — and my chest was already hollow in the place Aelinor had filled since I was an infant at her breast. I told myself I had only dreamed. I told myself twice.
Then the women's footsteps came along the passage, soft as people walking near something that must not be woken, and I shut my eyes so the maid would not have to look at my face when she said it.
"Lady," she whispered, "the old nurse —"
"I know," I said.
They had laid her out in the lower chamber on a board, with a candle at her head and a candle at her feet, and someone had already folded her hands. She looked so unsurprised. That was the worst of it. Aelinor, who had startled at every dropped spoon for sixty years, lay as if a small polite question had been put to her in the night and she had answered, yes, very well. I went to my knees beside the board and I did not weep, because there was a maid at the door and a steward in the passage and behind them, somewhere in this keep, a king with the wrong shadow.
"It was her age, my lady," the steward said gently from the doorway, and I did not look up at him, because I could not yet trust myself to look at any man's feet. "Her heart, only. She went easy."
"Yes," I said. "She went easy."
I kissed her forehead. It was colder than stone has any right to be in summer, and there was no frost in the room, and yet the cold of her skin had a frost's quality — a thing taken, not a thing lost. I thought, they have settled her, and I did not let the thought finish.
I waited until the bell rang for the chapel before I went up to the stillroom.
The door was unlatched. That alone would have told me. Aelinor had latched that door every night of her life as if the latch itself were a prayer. Inside, the herbs hung as always, the dried emberfern in its bunch, the little jar of fanleaf she had rationed me one steeped leaf at a time. The board by the southern wall — the obvious one, the one I had pried up the first night I knew I had a thing worth hiding — had been lifted and set back not quite flush. A clever hand. Not clever enough.
I knelt and worked the second board, the one under the broom, and slid my fingers into the dust. The wand was there. The amethyst was warm. It was warm the way a small animal is warm, the way a thing that knows you is warm, and I had to close my hand around it for a long moment before I could put it back. She moved you, I thought at it. She moved you for me, the last thing she did.
On the shelf above, where Aelinor kept her thimbles, lay a bone pin no longer than my finger, carved into the shape of a leaping fish. My father's work. I had not seen it since I was nine. I picked it up and the shape of his thumb was still on its tail, and that was when my eyes filled, finally, fiercely, and I had to press the heel of my hand against my mouth so the sound would stay inside me.
By the door, along the threshold, ran a thin pale line that I first took for spilled salt. It was not salt. It was dew, perfectly drawn, and the sun had been on it through the slit window for an hour and it had not melted. It would not melt at noon. It would not melt at all.
I knew then, with the clean dry knowing that is Reading, that no one in this keep had killed Aelinor with a hand. Something had walked through her door wearing a voice she trusted, and there was no blood-price owed for it, because no one alive would call it murder but me.
I put the pin in my sleeve. I put the wand back beneath the broom. I went down into the yard with my face arranged.
The naming-ring still lay on the slate where Uther's shadow had pooled the day before. A small thing, a thin thing, easy to overlook unless you were looking. A page was crossing the yard towards it with a broom.
And from the shadow of the gatehouse, where no one of the retinue should yet be standing, Accolon caught my eye and shook his head once — sharp, urgent, the way a man warns you not to step on a stair that will give. His lips moved without sound, and I read them.
Not you, he said. Let me.
Then, before I could answer, before I could even wonder how a knight I did not know knew my danger by the door of a yard, he added one thing more, and the shape of the words on his mouth went through me like cold water:
The woman who sent him is here.