Chapter 10: The Rain Room

At dawn I sent Catrin and the head cook to the Abbey with a basket of bread and my seal ring.

"If anyone stops you," I told them, "say the Queen sends food to the Sisters. It's a queen's habit. It's even true."

Catrin tucked a hunk of cheese in her apron.

"And if the Abbess stops us?"

"Then show her the ring and look stubborn."

"I'm good at stubborn," Catrin said. "I learned it from you."

By noon the sky had gone black, and by one o'clock it was pouring.

I spent the morning at my desk answering letters, because it was something to do with my hands.

At two I gave up.

I found Daveth in the royal library annex, a long narrow room behind the main hall where the old state papers were kept.

He sat at the reading table with a candle burning in the gloom.

He was copying a page of the rite from the Rounds book in his neat black hand.

He looked up when I came in, and I forgot what I had meant to say.

"You've stopped eating," he said.

"I've stopped being hungry."

"Isaveth."

"Say it again."

He set down his pen.

"You said that last night, and I've thought of nothing else. I've started saying it to the candle."

"Does the candle mind?"

"The candle is a better listener than I am."

I laughed, and it came out as something else halfway through.

I crossed the room.

Rain beat on the high windows, and the whole palace seemed far away.

I stood in front of him and he looked up at me from his chair.

"Twelve queens," I said. "Eight years."

"A husband who says my name and loses it, and a mother-in-law who looks at me like a ledger with a mistake in it."

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Was the Perfect Queen, But He Forgot My Name from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.