Finding Her Magical King novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Guest Wing

In the palace a lady calls her the motel girl in front of the court, and the king answers that she is under the crown's protection; that night she finds him alone in the yard where her parents died.

Maeve did not say goodbye to me in the parking lot.

She stuffed a sandwich into my bag, pushed the cat carrier into my arms and looked at the king's car instead of at me.

"If it goes wrong, you call the front desk," she said. "Any hour."

"It won't go wrong."

"That's what your mother said."

She went back inside before I could answer.

I rode to Highcastle in the second car, with Soot yowling in his carrier on my knees and Lord Thrale across from me.

Anselm sat beside me, reading papers he was not reading.

Our wrists were a hand apart on the seat, and every few minutes the silver under my sleeve brightened and dimmed.

I kept my eyes on the window.

"What a handsome cat," Lord Thrale said, leaning forward.

Soot flattened his ears and hissed at him through the bars.

"He doesn't like men in good coats," I said.

"Then he and I have something in common. I never liked them either." Thrale smiled and sat back. "Miss Briggs, I'll say this once. Nobody at court needs to know about the mark until the king decides. I can keep a secret."

"Thank you, my lord," I said.

I meant it.

Highcastle rose out of the morning mist, grey towers and flags and a front courtyard full of people in good clothes.

I had last seen it from the back of a linen van, under a pile of sheets.

Now I walked in through the front door, behind a king, carrying a cat.

Two hundred courtiers lined the stairs to watch us go up.

A woman in an emerald dress stood at the front of them with a glass in her hand.

She looked at my motel polo, my cardigan and my carrier, and she smiled slowly.

"Is this the motel girl?" she said, loud enough for the whole staircase. "Does she come with the luggage?"

Somebody laughed.

Somebody else stopped laughing very quickly.

I felt my face go hot, and my wrist went cold under the cuff, and I thought of ten different things to say.

I was still choosing one when Anselm stopped on the step above me.

He turned around.

"Madam," he said, and everyone near enough to hear went quiet, because his voice was very cold.

"Miss Briggs is my guest. She is under the protection of the crown for as long as she stays in this palace."

The woman's smile slipped.

"Your Majesty, I only meant..."

"I know what you meant." His voice was quiet and very even. "Anyone who insults her insults me. I'll remember who does."

Nobody on that staircase moved.

Then he held out his arm, and I took it, because there was nothing else to do with two hundred people looking.

The silver ring under my sleeve warmed at once.

"You didn't have to do that," I said, very low, as we climbed.

"I know."

"I could have handled her."

"I'm sure you could have." He did not look at me. "I wanted to."

I hated how much I liked it.

My room was in the guest wing, with a high ceiling and a bed bigger than my whole room at the Starlite.

Soot inspected every corner, found the radiator, and claimed it.

I put the red knot in the toe of a spare boot and the boot at the back of the wardrobe.

Then I went to the window.

It looked down on a stone courtyard with a wall on three sides and a balcony above.

There were four pale squares in the paving, where the footings of a platform had been taken up and the stone had never darkened.

I knew those squares.

I had been ten, standing between them, and I had been told to look at the ground.

I looked at the ground then, and I looked at it now, and I did not cry.

Frost spread across the glass until the yard was gone.

I scraped a hole in it with my thumbnail.

I did not eat dinner, though a maid left a tray, and when the house had gone quiet I put on my cardigan and walked down the back stairs.

The door at the bottom was unlocked.

The night air in the yard was cold and smelled of wet stone.

I walked to the nearest pale square and stood on it.

It was exactly where my mother had stood.

"I thought you'd come," said a voice behind me.

I turned.

Anselm was sitting on the steps under the balcony, in his shirt and trousers, with no coat and no guard.

He had plainly been sitting there a long while.

"You don't know what I'm doing here," I said.

"No." He stood up. "But I'd have come here too, if I'd been given the room with the window."

I said nothing.

He walked toward me, slowly, and stopped a few feet away.

He looked at the pale square under my shoes.

"I was seventeen," he said. "I was on that balcony."

My heart went cold and hard.

I had known it for eight years, and still it hurt to hear him say it.

I remembered a boy beside the king, looking down.

"I'm sorry," Anselm said. "I've wanted to say that to someone for a long time. I just didn't know who."

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