Chapter 669: Marit

Her name was Marit, and she had been the royal nursery’s cook for twenty years, and she had stayed in the palace kitchens after the gates opened because nobody had told her to leave.

"They needed someone to cook," she said. She had refused for a long time to sit down in front of Nyx at all, and had only done it in the end because Nyx had sat on the floor instead, which was worse. Now she was at the big scrubbed table in the old kitchen with Nyx’s hands held in both of hers, as though afraid that if she let go, the princess would vanish a second time. "The new people. When they come in summer, which isn’t often. They say it’s damp." She sniffed. "It’s not damp. They just don’t know how to light the stove."

The others had come down from the Lark an hour after dark and were crowded at the far end of the table, being fed soup they had not asked for. Nobody spoke much. Even Ashe. Even Mara, who had her ledger open but had not written anything.

"We heard nothing," Marit said. "All these years. Not a word. We thought you’d died in the hills." Her grip tightened. "I prayed you had, some nights. God forgive me. I thought it would be kinder than whatever they’d do if they caught you."

"They didn’t catch me," said Nyx.

"No." The old woman looked at her face for a long time, as if learning it again. "No. You ran. She said you would."

Nyx asked her to tell it. Marit did not want to. Nyx asked again, very quietly, in a voice Vane had never heard her use, and the old woman closed her eyes and told it the way old women tell the things they have carried too long.

The gates had opened at dawn. That part Nyx had seen from the hill. What she had not seen was the square, an hour later, when the Imperial officers brought out the royal house of Verath.

All of them. The king and the queen, and every one of their house who had been inside the walls that morning. Everyone with the blood, and everyone close enough to the blood to matter, stood in a row in the morning light in front of the city that had just surrendered.

"They had a list," Marit said. Her voice was very flat. "The commander read it out. Every name. And one at the end that they couldn’t find." She looked at Nyx. "Yours."

Nobody at the end of the table moved.

"They looked for you for a month," said Marit. "In the hills. In the villages. They tore the palace apart. They offered money. Nobody took it. Not one person in Ithen." She lifted her chin, very slightly. "We’d lost everything else. We weren’t going to give them you."

Nyx’s face did not change. Vane, watching her from the end of the table, saw that it could not. It had gone somewhere very far behind itself, the way it had gone on the podium at graduation in the moment before every lamp in the hall began to flicker.

"Where are they?" Nyx said.

Marit took them out into the palace orchard after midnight, by the old kitchen door, with a single shaded lantern.

It was on the steep ground below the eastern wall, where the old fruit trees grew crooked and close together and nobody from the governor’s house ever came, because the slope was too steep to walk in good shoes. The grass under the trees was long and pale and full of dead leaves. There were no stones. There was nothing at all to mark the place, except that under nine of the trees, in a row, the grass grew a little greener than anywhere else.

"We came back for them the second night," Marit said. "They’d been left in the square. As a lesson. Some of us came with handcarts, in the dark." She held the lantern a little higher. "We couldn’t give them stones. Stones would have been found. So we gave them trees. Every spring someone comes down and sees to them. Not always me. Somebody."

Nyx walked along the row slowly. She did not need to be told which tree was which. Vane watched her stop at the fourth one, and stand there, and then go down on her knees in the long pale grass and put her hand flat on the ground at the foot of it.

The others stayed back at the edge of the orchard. Vane did not. He knelt in the grass behind her, close enough that she could lean on him if she wanted to. She did not, at first. She simply knelt with her palm on the earth over her mother’s grave and made no sound at all.

Then the Dreamscape moved.

He felt it go out of her, very softly, not into the ground but across it, the way it went across a room when she wanted to know what was there. It touched each tree in turn along the row. It found nothing. There was nothing left to find. He felt her know that, and he felt her keep reaching anyway, all the way to the end of the row and back, the way a child keeps calling into an empty house.

When she finally stopped, she leaned back against him all at once, and stayed there.

"She told me to run," Nyx said. Her voice was quiet and very steady, and he did not think he had ever heard anything so terrible. "In the passage. On her knees. Don’t look back. For fifteen years I thought I’d disobeyed her, because I looked back from the hill." She drew a breath. "I didn’t. I kept running. That was the part she meant."

"Yes," said Vane.

"I’m the only one left."

He did not answer that. There was no answer to it. He put his arms around her in the dark orchard and held on, and after a long time he felt her start, very quietly, to cry.

Marit gave her the letter at dawn, in the kitchen, with the others asleep around the stove.

It was old and soft, folded and unfolded so many times that the paper had gone thin as cloth. It had come from the east eleven years ago, Marit said, on a fishing boat: the only letter that had ever reached her from the ones who got out.

"Some of the court escaped," she said. "The ones who weren’t in the square. Servants, mostly. Soldiers. A few of the old families. They went east over the water before the Empire closed the harbors, and the Sovereigns took them in." She laid the letter on the table. "They wrote to ask if you’d ever been found."

Nyx unfolded it. She read it in silence, and then aloud, in a voice that did not quite sound like hers.

To Marit, in the kitchen at Ithen. We are at Sennet, on the eastern shore, three hundred of us. We keep the old songs. We keep the old names. If the princess lives, if you ever hear of her, tell her Verath is at Sennet. Tell her we are still waiting for her to come home.

Nyx put the letter down very carefully.

"Sennet," said Ashe, from beside the stove, where she had not been asleep after all. Her voice was strange. "Sennet’s on the eastern shore. South of Korreth."

She did not say the rest. She did not need to. They had all read her father’s note at Aelstrom. The coast is burning.

Nyx stood up.

"Tonight," said Vane.

Nobody argued. Isole was already packing her satchel. Valerica had already pulled out the map.

Marit caught Nyx’s sleeve as she passed. "Highness. When you get there. Tell them the orchard is kept."

Nyx bent and kissed the old woman’s forehead, once, hard.

"I’ll tell them," she said.

At the end of the table, Mara had finally opened her ledger to a clean page. She wrote, very neatly, Ithen. Nine trees. Marit kept them. And under it, after a moment:

Verath is at Sennet.