The room was barely wide enough for the bed and desk to fit side by side. A single wardrobe leaned in the corner, its doors forever crooked, its hinges squealing if I so much as breathed on them. The air smelled faintly of stone and lavender soap, but the lavender never chased away the cold. My father called it suitable, but it was a servant’s cell dressed in finer sheets.
The candle on my desk trembled as the latch clicked.
I didn’t need to look up. “Emerson,” I whispered, too low for anyone but him to hear.
The door slipped open, and there he was—chestnut hair sticking out at odd angles, as if he’d run the whole way from his wing to mine. His gray-green eyes glimmered against the flame, restless and bright where mine always seemed to give me away. He clutched a book to his chest, its cracked spine and smudged corners betraying how many hands it had passed through before reaching him.
“You’ll be caught,” I murmured, lifting my head at last.
His grin was quick, mischievous. “Then you’d better read it fast before Father throws me into the stables.” He crossed the little room in two strides, taller now than I remembered, his boyish frame beginning to sharpen into something leaner, older. He dropped the book on my desk and tapped it once with a conspirator’s pride.
“Poetry,” he said, lowering his voice. “From Solvayne. They burned the rest, but someone smuggled this out. I bribed a servant for it.”
“Emerson—” I started, the warning faint even to my own ears. My gaze lingered on the cracked leather cover, the faint lettering barely legible in the flickering light.
He leaned closer, his hair catching in the candle’s glow. “Not Father’s histories. Not Mother’s lists of suitors.” His lips quirked. “Something worth keeping you awake.”
My throat tightened. He never said the word marriage, never spoke of the way our mother’s eyes lingered on me at dinner, or how servants whispered of dowries and alliances. He didn’t have to. His defiance was answer enough.
I traced the book’s spine with ink-stained fingertips, letting the silence stretch. In his eyes I saw the warmth this house denied me, the unspoken truth that I was more than Father’s decree or Mother’s bargain. Just a sister. Just Alora.
“Read to me,” I whispered. And for a while, the stone walls around me felt less like a cage.
The candlelight flickered across the book Emerson had brought, gilding the cracked spine in gold. I leaned closer, breathing in the faint scent of smoke and dust, when a knock—sharp, hurried, not at the door but on the wall itself—made both of us stop.
“Lady Alora?” The voice was low, careful. A maid’s. I recognized it at once: Mirelle, the only one bold—or foolish—enough to treat me as something more than a locked-away duty. She eased the door open a finger’s width, her round face pale in the dim light. Her eyes darted from me to my brother and back again.
“You need to go,” she whispered to Emerson, barely moving her lips. “Now.”
He straightened, a flicker of annoyance crossing his face. “Why?”
Mirelle’s gaze slid over her shoulder before she leaned in closer. “Your guard is searching for you. Said you weren’t in your wing. If he finds you here—” Her words cut short, but the meaning was enough.
The warmth of our little rebellion cracked, replaced by the cold reminder of the house we lived in.
Emerson’s grin faltered, though not entirely. He snatched the book from the desk and tucked it beneath his arm with a shrug meant to look careless. “Then he’ll think I was in the kitchens. Or the library. Or anywhere but here.”
Mirelle’s hand tightened around the edge of the door. “Don’t be clever. If he reports back to your father, it won’t just be your skin. She’ll suffer for it too.” Her eyes flicked to me, quick and sorrowful, before lowering in the deference drilled into her.
I rose from the desk, the chill of the stone floor seeping through the thin soles of my slippers. “Go, Emerson,” I urged softly. “Please.”
His jaw set. “I hate leaving you like this.”
“You’ll do worse if you stay,” Mirelle said, urgency sharpening her voice. “He’s already in the west wing.”
The room seemed smaller with every second. Emerson hesitated, his gray-green eyes meeting mine in a silent promise that he would come back, that he always would. Then, with one last quick grin—a spark of defiance even under threat—he slipped out, his footsteps swallowed by the hush of the corridor.
Mirelle lingered in the doorway, her fingers tight on the handle. “You shouldn’t encourage him,” she murmured, though her eyes softened. “Your father means to keep you apart for a reason. If the boy’s caught—” She stopped, her words trailing into silence heavy with secrets she would not speak aloud.
I sank back onto the chair, it creaked beneath me, and pressed my palms into the desk to keep them from trembling. “Thank you,” I whispered.
The silence after Emerson left felt different, heavier, as if his absence had been stitched into the very stones. The door had clicked shut, but I could still hear the ghost of his footsteps in the corridor, swallowed one by one by the vast, listening halls. I leaned back in my chair, staring at the empty space where his book had rested only moments ago. The shape of it lingered, shadowed in the candlelight as though the desk remembered it better than I did.
Mirelle lingered in the doorway. The candle caught her face in slanted light, cutting across the hollows of her cheeks, softening the stubborn lines around her mouth. Her cap sat askew, wisps of brown hair slipping free, and in that moment she looked younger than her years—like a girl herself, caught somewhere between duty and rebellion.
“You shouldn’t let him risk this,” she said softly, though her eyes betrayed more worry than scolding. “Your father doesn’t make idle rules, my lady.”
I pressed my palms against the desk, fingertips smudged black with ink. “He shouldn’t have to sneak just to see me.”
Her gaze softened but held steady. “And yet he must. The duke would rather raise strangers than risk his children knowing each other too well.” She swallowed, voice lowering further. “He fears what closeness costs.”
A sharp retort rose in my throat, but I bit it back. What did Mirelle know of fear? Of being shut away and watched as though my very presence might summon ruin? Yet something in her expression stilled me. She was one of the few who dared speak at all, and fewer still who spoke without disdain.
She stepped inside, closing the door partway behind her, though her eyes flicked toward the hall. “They’re speaking of you more often now. Servants, courtiers. Even some of the knights who guard the gates.”
I lifted my head. “Speaking how?”
Her hands twisted the edge of her apron until the fabric puckered. “Of names. Matches. Your mother has begun asking after dowries, after alliances. She’s not waiting anymore.” Mirelle hesitated, then added, “Seventeen is old enough. Old enough for them to think of you as coin.”
The words sank like stones in my chest. I had known it was coming—the looks at dinner, my mother’s too-careful questions about how I carried myself, what I thought of courtly life. Yet hearing it spoken aloud, in Mirelle’s hushed tone, stripped the hope I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
“Who?” I asked, voice thin.
Mirelle looked away, toward the crack of darkness at the door. “A baron’s son. A lordling from the southern coast. Whispers of something higher, perhaps even a prince, though that could be no more than gossip spilling through the kitchens.”
My lips parted, but no sound came. A prince. A stranger. Chains gilded with titles. I pressed my nails into the desk until the wood bit back.
“You should know,” Mirelle said more gently now. “They’ll dress it in finer words—duty, alliance, honor. But it will be no less a prison.”
My throat tightened. I wanted to ask her if she had ever been locked away, if she knew what it meant to count hours by the way light fell through a narrow window. But I only managed, “Why tell me?”
Her eyes found mine then, steady despite the risk in them. “Because no one else will.”
For a moment I could only stare. The words pressed hard against my ribs, carving out an ache I didn’t know how to name.
“Thank you,” I whispered, the only gift I had to give.
She dipped her head quickly, almost guiltily, then slipped out, her steps hurried, vanishing into the hush of the corridor.
The silence closed in again, thicker now, as though the air itself held its breath. I crossed to the bed and sank onto the thin mattress. The frame groaned faintly beneath me. The candle sputtered at the desk, throwing long shadows that reached across the room like grasping fingers. I pulled the drapes tighter over the narrow window, shutting out the moonless night.
Alone again. Always alone.
I lay back, staring at the ceiling until my eyes blurred. The stone above seemed to ripple, and in the next breath I was no longer sure if I was awake at all.
The room darkened further, though the candle still burned. Water seeped along the floorboards, silver-blue and restless, swelling higher with every blink. It licked the legs of the desk, the frame of the bed. My lungs seized. I sat upright, but the air clung heavy, pressing me down.
The walls dissolved. The ceiling fractured into stars reflected in water too deep to touch. Bells tolled somewhere beneath the surface, not sharp or bright but mournful, bending like voices dragged through the current.
A figure wavered in the distance, faceless, impossible to measure in size or distance. Her outline was light one moment, shadow the next, like the memory of someone I should have known but couldn’t name.
You are not forgotten.
The voice was everywhere—in the water, in my skin, in the rush of my blood. I tried to answer, to ask what she meant, but the words drowned as quickly as they left me.
My chest seared. The mark on my shoulder burned like it had come alive, silver fire pressing outward, demanding to be seen. My breath tore ragged from me, chest burning, throat full of water that wasn’t there.
I gasped, choking on nothing. The vision shattered.
The room returned at once—small, still, the candle nearly drowned in its own wax. My shift clung damp against my skin, though no water touched the floor. My heart thundered, the sound too loud for a place so quiet.
The mark pulsed once, then fell quiet, leaving only a faint ache in its wake.
I pressed my palm to it, eyes stinging. The silence had returned, but it no longer felt like emptiness. Something lingered with me, unseen, unheard, waiting.
And though I had no name for it, I could not shake the feeling that the walls of my little cell were no longer strong enough to keep it out.