They Hanged My Parents as Traitors, Now the Prince Needs My Heart novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Lady at the Gate

The first mate pours herself into the hall; the prince's veins surge at her touch and ebb at Bronwen's, and Olwen sees the silver line on Bronwen's wrist.

By sundown the whole keep knew that the prince's first mate had come back.

I knew because the kitchens emptied.

Every girl who should have been plucking pheasants was on the back stairs with her neck craned.

Sioned stood in the middle of them with a wooden spoon.

"Back to work," she said. "She's a woman, not an eclipse."

Then she put the spoon down and went up to look herself.

I went because Dafydd came and asked me to.

"He wants you in the hall," he said. "Not serving. Sitting."

"I'll stand."

"Then stand where he can see you. He asked."

I stood against the wall under the third window, with my stitched hand wrapped in a clean cloth, and watched the doors.

The prince sat on the dais in the carved chair that had been empty for ten years.

Lord Aneurin Rees, the Regent, stood at his right shoulder with his hands folded.

He was a man of fifty or so, with silver in his brown hair and a trimmed gray beard.

He had not once looked in my direction since the night before.

That was how I knew he was thinking about me.

The doors opened, and forty wolves in gray coats came down the hall two by two and parted at the dais steps.

The woman at the center of them walked the last twenty feet alone.

She was tall and slim, with red-gold hair pinned up and a gray wool coat that fitted her at the waist.

She had the kind of face people trusted before they had a reason to.

Lady Olwen Rees, the Regent's sister.

For a hundred and fifty years she had been Cadoc Gwynfor's mate.

She stopped at the bottom step and looked up at the prince, and for a moment her careful face came apart.

"Cad," she said.

"Olwen."

"Twenty-four years." Her voice shook a little, and she let it. "I came the day I heard you'd left the tower."

He said nothing.

His left hand lay on the arm of the chair, black to the elbow.

I saw his fingers close on the wood.

Olwen turned her head, and her gaze went over the room and found me.

"You," she said, kindly. "Would you bring me some wine? I've been in a car since Hereford."

Three hundred wolves watched me to see if I would do it.

I took the jug from the nearest table.

A servant was already holding out a cup, white to the lips.

I took it from her, filled it, and carried it up the steps myself.

"My lady," I said.

Olwen took it.

"You're the girl with the glass," she said.

"Yes."

"I heard about it at the gate. Forty minutes of it." Her mouth did something that was nearly a smile. "I'd have liked to see that nephew's face."

"It was a good face," I said. "It went red, then white."

"Thank you for the wine."

I had not expected to be thanked.

It threw me so badly that I stepped back.

Then I was standing a few feet from the chair with nothing in my hands.

Olwen put the cup down on the step.

She climbed to the top, took the prince's veined hand in both of hers, and held it against her chest.

"The bond isn't dead," she said, low, so that only the dais could hear. "It's starved. Twenty-four years of starving. Let me feed it."

The prince's face went white.

The black lines on his wrist moved at once.

They ran up past the elbow and under his sleeve toward his shoulder.

His breath hissed through his teeth.

He tried to pull his hand away, and he couldn't.

"Cad?" Olwen said.

He slid out of the chair onto one knee, and a sound came out of him that I will never forget.

It was the sound a man makes when something has been ripped out of him.

The Regent's hands, still folded, did not move.

I do not remember crossing the dais.

I only remember that I was suddenly on my knees beside the chair.

My good hand was wrapped around his wrist, right on the black, between his skin and Olwen's.

I had not been asked.

I had not asked.

My own heart gave a thump so heavy that I felt it in my ears.

The veins stopped.

They shivered under my palm and pulled back, down past the elbow and across the forearm.

They hid themselves in the back of his hand.

The prince dragged in air and looked at me.

His eyes were gold from rim to rim.

"Thank you," he said, hoarsely.

"Don't thank me," I said. "I broke my own rule."

Olwen had stepped back with her hands open in front of her.

The whole hall was on its feet, and not one of them was making a sound.

Then I saw her looking at my hand.

My sleeve had slid up when I grabbed him, and the cloth around my cut had come loose.

Around my left wrist ran the thin silver line I had been born with, no wider than a wire.

My mother had called it a mark of luck and told me never to let anyone see it.

I had only just realized that I had never once been told why.

Olwen's face had gone as blank as the wall.

"Where did you get that mark?" she said.

"I was born with it."

She looked at it for a long moment.

Then she looked at the prince's left wrist, where the cuff had come open.

The same thin silver line ran beneath the black.

"Of course you were," said Olwen.

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