Chapter 171: The Heirloom’s Undoing

Chapter 171: Chapter 171: The Heirloom’s Undoing

He looked at her for a long time.

Then he gently drew the pen from her hand and closed the ledger.

She did not stir.

Cassiel wheeled closer. He slid one arm beneath her knees and the other around her back, and with one careful pull, he gathered her off the chair and into his lap.

She was so light.

Elysia murmured something unintelligible.

For a moment, he thought she might wake. Instead, she turned her face into his chest, her fingers curling loosely into the front of his coat, and settled there as though she had done it a hundred times before.

Cassiel went very still.

He let out a slow breath, then guided the wheelchair across the room with one hand, the wheels rolling softly over the floorboards so as not to disturb her.

At the bedside, he lifted her onto the mattress as carefully as if she were made of glass. He slipped off her shoes one at a time, drew the blanket up over her shoulders, and tucked it in at her side.

A loose strand of hair had fallen across her face.

He brushed it back behind her ear. His fingertips lingered against her cheek, tracing the soft curve of it down to her jaw.

Even in sleep, a faint crease remained between her brows, as though she was still working through ledgers in her dreams.

He smoothed it away with his thumb.

"You don’t have to fight everything alone, Lysa," he murmured.

She did not answer. But the crease did not return.

Only then did Cassiel brace his hands against the bedframe and lift himself onto his own side of the bed. He lay back against the pillows and turned his head to look at her.

Emotions churned in his eyes briefly before he suppressed them in their depths.

Tomorrow would be another long day.

---

When Elysia woke, she was in bed.

She lay still for a moment, blinking at the canopy. She was certain she had fallen asleep at the table by the window.

Her shoes stood neatly at the foot of the bed. The blanket had been tucked in at her side. The other half of the bed was already empty, but the pillow still held a shallow dent.

Last night, he had barely kissed her before telling her to go to sleep, as though he could not have been less interested.

And then he had done this.

She let out a small, bewildered breath.

Men were truly impossible to read.

Still, she could not stop the faint warmth spreading through her chest. Whatever may be on his mind, he never failed to take good care of her.

---

By midday, the tavern on Cloudmere Lane was full.

Tobin sat on his stool by the hearth, a cup of watered wine at his elbow, and told the same tale he had told twice the night before.

"Far across the southern sea," he began, "there lives an old woman who has never slept in the same bed twice..."

She travelled from kingdom to kingdom, he told them, with a single trunk and a ring on every finger.

She did not care for silk or spices. She collected memories.

A ring a widow could no longer bear to wear.

A locket a soldier had carried into battle.

A brooch a bride had pinned on the morning of her wedding.

She would pay a fortune for each one, but only if its owner could tell her its story.

"Because jewels," Tobin said, lowering his voice until the whole room leaned in to hear him, "are only where stories go to sleep."

When he finished, the crowd clapped and called for the bandit king.

Nobody thought anything more of it. It was only a story.

Almost nobody.

At a corner table near the door sat a young man with his hood drawn low and a cup of wine he had not touched. He had come in just before the tale began and had not moved since.

Behind the counter, Imogen polished a cup and did not look at him.

At the next table, a pair of carters who had spent the previous evening losing small coins at the Velvet Lantern caught her eye. One of them gave the smallest nod.

Imogen went on polishing.

When the applause had died down, the young man rose and came to the counter.

"That old woman in the storyteller’s tale," he said quietly. "I hear she isn’t just a tale."

Imogen raised an eyebrow. "Where did you hear that?"

"Does it matter?"

She studied him for long enough that he began to shift his weight. Then she set the cup down.

"She took a room upstairs a few days ago," she said. "Paid in advance and asked not to be disturbed. Old Tobin tells her stories to the whole lane. She says it brings her customers." She shrugged. "Not many, mind you. She’s particular. Sent two gentlemen away yesterday because their stories bored her."

As she spoke, a serving girl came down the stairs with an empty tray. A thread of strange, spiced smoke followed her, something sweet and heavy that did not belong in a tavern on Cloudmere Lane.

From somewhere above came the sound of a dry, elderly cough.

The young man’s fingers tightened on the edge of the counter.

"Tell her," he said, "that I have a story worth hearing."

---

Xanther had thought about sending one of his men instead.

He had lain awake half the night considering it.

But the pendant in his coat was no ordinary trinket.

The crest etched into its face belonged to the Asheford family.

The Dowager Queen’s own family.

Any jeweller in Caelvyr would know it at a glance, and anyone he sent could steal it, or talk, or sell him out.

And if word ever reached his aunt, or worse, his cousin...

No. He would do this himself.

Quietly.

The room at the end of the corridor was dim, the curtains half drawn against the noon light.

Smoke curled from a small brass burner on the sill.

The old woman sat in a high-backed chair by the window, small and wrapped in layers of dark silk, a veil falling from her head to her shoulders.Rings glittered on every finger.

Before her stood a set of brass scales and a lacquered box.

"Sit," she said. Her voice was thin and dry, her accent stretching the words as though the language were a coat that did not quite fit her. "You have something for me?"

Xanther sat and laid the pendant on the table.

She did not touch it. She only leaned forward slightly, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that behind the veil, she was studying him far more closely than the silver.

"Old," she murmured. "A proud house." She sat back. "Whose was it?"

Xanther had prepared a dozen stories on the walk over. Now, under that hidden gaze, he chose the one closest to the truth.

"My grandfather’s."

He let his voice drop.

"It was supposed to be passed down to my father. He was a general. He died on the northern border, shielding another man with his own body. They buried him with his soldiers on a hillside by Oren Lake." He paused, letting the silence work for him. "This was all that came home."

The old woman was very still.

"My mother cannot bear to look at it," Xanther went on softly. "Every time she sees it, she weeps. I thought it would be kinder to let it go somewhere far away. Somewhere it can be a story, instead of a wound."

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

Then the old woman let out a slow breath. "A son who sells his father’s memory to spare his mother’s tears." She tilted her head. "That is a sad story, young man."

"It is the truth."

"Is it?" Something that might have been amusement threaded through her voice.

Xanther couldn’t help but fidget slightly in his seat under that gaze.

"Well. True or not, it is a good one. And I pay for good stories."

She opened the lacquered box.

She counted out the coins one by one, unhurried, until the pile on the table was larger than anything Xanther had held in years.

More than enough to settle with the Velvet Lantern.

Then she picked up the pendant with two ringed fingers, dropped it into the box, and closed the lid.

"Go well," she said. "And give my regards to your mother."

---

Xanther stepped out into the bright afternoon with the purse heavy against his hip and the sun warm on his face.

For the first time in months, the world seemed to be on his side.

He did not feel the slightest pang of guilt for the lies that he just passed off as a sentimental story about his own family.

His father was long dead.

His aunt had more jewels than she could count.

And his cousin, the great Duke of Draevenor, would be gone by tomorrow morning, taking his cold eyes and his shadow guards with him.

Xanther began to whistle.

He did not notice the two men in plain coats who rose from the table by the tavern door and followed him into the street.