Chapter 14: What Calista Carried

"Not at the start," Calista said, before I could speak. "At the start I thought it was a gift."

She hadn't moved from the window seat.

Behind me Hedda had planted herself against the library door.

She held a heavy book open in her hands and wasn't reading it.

"Caspar told me the winter he turned nineteen," Calista said.

"He said the ring made him better, and that you gave it freely because you loved him."

"I didn't know it did anything."

"I know." Her mouth shook. "I told myself that too."

"For eighteen months."

"For a year and a half." She took a breath. "I'm not asking you to forgive me."

"I wrote the reports because it was easy, Linnea."

She bent and pulled a flat bundle of paper from under the cushion.

It was tied with a faded blue ribbon, and the top sheet was in her round, careful hand.

I knew the hand.

It had written me notes through the schoolhouse window in Marren Cross since we were six.

"I made copies before the originals went to the Provost," she said.

"Every week. What you ate and who you wrote to, and which days you were tired."

"Why would anyone want that?"

"So she'd know when the ring was working." She looked at the floor.

"I wrote that you were lonely. That you'd follow anyone who said they loved you."

Hedda made a low furious sound in her throat.

I took the bundle.

I turned the top page over and read my own life in my friend's handwriting, and my hands stayed quite steady.

"Why bring these to me?" I said.

"Because they're signed."

She said it.

"They've got my name at the bottom, and her seal. Anyone who reads them can see I did it."

For a moment I couldn't answer.

It was the first costly thing anyone from the White Crown had ever done for me.

"Keep talking," I said.

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