Finding Her Magical King novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Roadstay
The king's convoy stops at the Starlite Motel for the old coronation custom, and Sorrel goes in with towels and a hex tied in red thread; when she touches the king the mark on her wrist blazes, and the chancellor in the doorway sees it.
A line of black cars turned into our motel parking lot at dusk, and every driver on the highway slowed down to stare.
I was behind the front desk with the linen count when the first car stopped under our broken sign.
The owner came out of the office in her good scarf, smiling in a way I had never seen.
"Straighten your polo," she said. "It's the Roadstay."
Everyone in the kingdom knew the custom.
The night before a new king reaches the capital, he sleeps in some ordinary place on the King's Road, so the crown remembers where it came from.
The palace had picked our little motel out of four hundred along the road.
I had been waiting eight years for a Beauclerk to come near me, and now one had driven up to my front door.
His father hanged my parents in the palace yard when I was ten.
The new king was Anselm Beauclerk, and tonight he would sleep in Room 12, forty feet from my bed.
A silver-haired man in a grey coat climbed out of the second car and carried his own suitcase to the desk.
"Lord Ambrose Thrale," he said. "I'm the Chancellor. Please don't stand on my account."
He had a kind face and a pewter ring on his right hand.
He fixed the flickering lamp by the door without being asked.
Then he slid a folded bill under the bell and said, "For the staff. You've all worked hard for this."
My name tag said only S.
"Thank you, Sorrel," he said.
Maeve, the owner, was already pouring him a coffee.
Maeve must have told him, I thought, and went back to the linen count.
A very large man in a rumpled jacket stopped at the desk next, holding a paper bag of fries.
"Ivor," he said. "I guard the king. Is there ketchup in this place, or is this a hardship posting?"
"Vending machine by the ice," I said. "It's fifty cents."
He grinned at me and ate a fry.
"I like you, motel," he said. "Put the best towels in Room 12."
I went to my room first.
My black cat Soot was asleep on the pillow.
The window had frost on the inside again, a thin white fern across the glass.
It came whenever I thought about the Beauclerks, and it had come every time since I was ten.
I scraped it off with the spoon I kept on the sill, because I did not have time to wonder about it tonight.
Then I opened the sock drawer and took out the knot.
It was red thread, twenty-one turns, tied by my own hands the week I turned eighteen.
My mother taught me knot-work before she died, back when witches were still allowed to be what we were.
A knot like that, slipped under a pillow, stops a heart before morning.
I put it in my apron pocket and picked up the towels.
Ivor was leaning on the wall outside Room 12 with his fries.
"He's at the window," he said. "Don't take it personally. He looks at windows."
He opened the door for me and went back to his fries.
The room was dark, and the lamp by the bed was off.
Anselm Beauclerk stood at the window in his shirtsleeves with his back to me.
He was taller than the boy I remembered.
I had seen his face once before, on a palace balcony, looking down.
"I asked them to bring nothing," he said without turning.
"The Roadstay comes with towels," I said. "It's in the custom."
My right hand was inside my apron pocket, holding the knot.
He laughed, very quietly, and turned around.
He looked tired.
That was the first thing that threw me, because I had spent eight years picturing someone who looked proud.
"Then I'll take the towels," he said. "Thank you."
He reached out, and his fingers closed over the cuff of my left sleeve.
My wrist went cold, then white-hot.
The thorn-shaped mark I had been born with, the thin silver ring no one had ever been able to explain, lit up under my sleeve and burned through the cloth.
His sleeve shone silver at the same place.
The window behind him went white with frost from corner to corner.
Cold air rolled off both of our wrists and set the towels in my arms trembling.
Neither of us moved.
"You have it too," he said.
He pushed back his cuff, and a ring of silver thorns blazed around his wrist, the same as mine.
I knew what it was.
My mother had read me the old stories, the mate-mark, the one person the world chooses for you whether you like it or not.
I should have dropped the towels and run.
I should have dropped the knot on the carpet and stamped on it.
I did neither of those things.
I stood where I was, with his hand around my wrist and the cold pouring off us, and I decided I was not going anywhere.
If the world had put him in front of me, I was going to use it.
"Who are you?" he said.
"Sorrel," I said. "Briggs. I work here."
It was my first lie to a Beauclerk, and it came out smooth.
The door behind me opened without a knock.
"Your Majesty, I wondered if the room was," Lord Thrale began, and stopped.
I looked over my shoulder.
He was standing in the doorway with the hall light behind him, and he was looking at both of our wrists.
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