Percival novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Wrong Bed
A storm sends June to the wrong room, and when her cold foot touches the king's adviser a silver thread blazes on both their wrists and he says the one thing he cannot take back.
The storm took the heat out of the archive tower at ten o'clock.
By eleven there was frost on the inside of my window, and my ink had stopped flowing.
I am the record keeper for the Crown of the Eastern Wolves, and I am the only human who sleeps in the north tower.
Nobody had thought to tell the furnace that.
I put on two cardigans, and my breath still showed in the candlelight.
Maisie Dunn found me on the stairs with my quilt over my arm.
She is the housekeeper at Greyholt, she is fifty-eight, and she can smell a lie through a closed door.
"You'll freeze solid, June," she said. "Take the north guest room. Number forty-one, the end of the east corridor."
She pushed an iron key into my hand.
"Every old door in this keep takes that one."
"Won't somebody be in it?"
"Not tonight. Go on."
The east corridor was black, and the storm was loud against the stone.
At the far end I found a brass number screwed to a heavy door.
It read 14, but I was tired, and I was cold, and Maisie had said forty-one.
I decided the numbers were hung wrong, which is the kind of thing a keep this old does.
The key turned without a sound.
The room inside was warm.
A fire had burned down to red coals in a deep stone hearth.
There was a wide bed with the covers turned back, and it smelled of cedar and woodsmoke and something I could not name.
I did not think about whose room it was.
I thought about my feet.
I put my quilt on top of the blankets, climbed in on the near side, and was asleep in a minute.
I woke when the mattress moved.
The fire had gone out, and the room was full of grey light from the snow.
Someone was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me, pulling off a boot.
I should have screamed.
Instead I did the stupidest thing of my life.
I stretched out my freezing foot, and it landed squarely on his thigh.
He went still.
The boot hit the floor.
Heat poured up my leg from where I touched him, hot enough to hurt.
On the inside of my left wrist a line of silver light drew itself across my skin.
It lit the whole room.
He turned and looked down at his own wrist.
An identical line of silver ran across it, from the heel of his hand to the edge of his sleeve.
I knew him.
Everyone at Greyholt knew him.
Percival Wolcott had been the royal adviser for two hundred and thirty years, and he had never once looked at me for longer than a second.
He was looking at me now.
His eyes were amber in the glow, and his hair had come half out of its tie.
He was breathing.
"Miss DeMille," he said, in that low, careful voice. "You are in my bed."
"I know that now."
"The numbers on the door."
"Upside down," I said. "I'm sorry. I'll go."
I started to get up.
His hand closed around my ankle, very gently, and every nerve I had lit up at once.
"Don't," he said.
I looked at his hand.
He looked at it too.
"I mean," he said, and his jaw worked, "you will be escorted back to the tower, because the Council would."
"Is that what you want?"
"Yes."
The word did not come out.
I watched him try again.
His mouth shaped the yes, and what came out was a rough, shaken breath.
"No," Percival said. "That is not what I want."
Neither of us moved.
"I do not say what I do not mean," he said. "I find that I cannot."
"You're a diplomat. You lie for a living."
"I did," he said. "Until you put your foot on me."
The silver on our wrists pulsed, once, like a heartbeat.
"What do you want, Mr. Wolcott?"
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them there was nothing left of the courtier in his face.
"I have waited three hundred years for you to get into my bed," Percival said.
It was not a line, and I could hear that it was not.
I had never been looked at by anyone.
My heart went off.
I sat up, took hold of his waistcoat in both fists, and pulled him down to me.
He tasted of snow and smoke, and he kissed me.
His hands came into my hair, and a sound came out of his chest that was not quite human.
When he pulled back, his forehead was against mine, and he was shaking.
"Go," he whispered. "While I can still say it."
He tried to say it again.
I watched the words die in his throat.
"Stay," Percival said hoarsely, and it sounded like a surrender.
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