Chapter 14: A Mother's Face

Rurik's POV

When the Lord Councilor's footsteps had gone down the stair, I stood with my back to the door and counted to a hundred.

Then I said, "He is gone," and the curtain moved.

She came out slowly, one hand on the velvet, grey in the face and holding herself very straight.

She took three steps toward the fire and sat down in my chair.

"Did he see me?" she asked.

"He saw a curtain."

"He knows."

"He suspects. A suspicion is not a proof, and he is a man who likes proofs."

She nodded, and her eyes closed.

She was asleep before I had finished the sentence.

I should have called the captain.

I had said so to myself at midnight, when she walked into my room with a face I had spent twenty-two years learning to hate, and I said it again now.

A twin in my chamber, one I had not summoned, wearing my Healer's cloak.

I stood over her and did not call him.

I will say it plainly, because there is no one else to say it to.

I was nine years old when my mother's sister came to the palace.

They were twins, and I could not tell them apart across a room, and I thought it was a gift.

My mother sang to me every night in a low voice, one song, always the same.

One night in spring she came to tuck me in and sang a different one.

She smelled of lavender and warm stone, as she always did.

Under it, so faint that only a child's nose would have caught it, she smelled of something that was not my mother.

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