Chapter 8: The Postern

I didn't go any closer.

"You asked her that already," I said. "Didn't you?"

He looked down at his hands on the bars.

"On the road. She said she was too tired to remember."

"And you believed her."

"She had the slippers. She had the gown. Her mother showed me the gown."

His voice cracked a little.

"You were a kitchen girl with ash on your face. You were nobody."

"I'm still nobody," I said. "That's what changed your mind? A gown in a closet?"

"Tell me the second half," he said. "Tell me and I'll know."

I almost did.

The words were right there: a turn under the arm, and a step back.

My father used to call it the apology, because you let go of your partner and then come back.

Then I remembered the flagstones under my knees.

Ottilie's toes pressing into my apron. Good girl, Cinders.

"No," I said.

He stared at me.

"I knelt for you once," I said. "In front of the maids and the boot boy."

"I'm not doing tricks for you through a gate."

"You want to know who you danced with? Find out without me."

"Clemence."

"Go home, Fenn."

I shut the inner door of the postern and dropped the bar across it.

I stood with my back against it until I heard his horse go.

Then I looked up.

Cassian was sitting on top of the wall above me, his cloak black against the stars, his legs hanging down.

"How long have you been up there?"

"Since 'Clemence,'" he said. "I go up there when I can't sleep. It isn't my fault people come and talk under it."

"Did anything ring?"

"Not a single thing." He jumped down. The ground shook a little when he landed. "Fenn?"

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