The drawer stuck, then gave all at once, and the letter lay on top as if Edmund Greaves had set it there that morning.
Sorrel's hand was still wound in the blue cord. She reached before she could be told not to, because a servant caught holding a thing has lost, and a servant who has read it first has at least kept the page.
"Quickly." Lucan stood behind her with the study door shut and the lamp turned to a bead. "Hollis went up at eleven, but he does not sleep. And you may stop watching the door. Delphine told me this afternoon she will keep it to herself. She only worries."
"Does she."
"She said please twice."
Sorrel nodded. It was a kindness, and she had been handed few enough to count.
Cold pipe ash and old paper filled the room. On the blotter, pale brown and perfectly round, sat the ring where a cup had stood. Her cup. Ten o'clock, one dollar on the tray, every night for eleven years.
Two sheets, folded once. Lucan's name on the outside in a hand she knew from a thousand orders, every t crossed low, like a fence rail. The wax had never been warmed. He had written it and not sent it.
She opened page one. It was dated Sunday the fourteenth of September last year.
My tongue goes to sleep after my tea these nights. Her eyes ran on, quick and precise, the way they did when she was hurt. Fallow calls it the wasting and tells me to rest. I have quarrelled with Hollis over what I mean to do at the autumn council.
Your tea puts my tongue to sleep, girl. He had said it over the cup, mild, almost joking. She had said sorry, sir. She had carried it up again the next night.
Her tea. The tea she carried.
The paper began to fold itself in her fingers, once, twice, small enough to vanish into her sleeve. "It's household accounts," she said. "Nothing."
The lie went out of her and through the bond, and she felt it land in him like a pin in a board.
"Sorrel." No contractions, which meant anger. His hand came down over hers, hot and steady, and took the letter out of it without hurting her at all. "Thank you for the key. Now give me my father."
She let go. There was nothing else to do with her hands.
The lamp hissed in the quiet. He read standing. She watched his face, because she could not watch the paper, and saw it go through three kinds of still. At my tongue he stopped and did not go on. He sat down in his father's chair, which she had never seen him touch, and laid the page face down on the blotter.
"The fourteenth," he said. "I was at the north border. I was counting Corrin scouts, and he was writing to me, and I was counting scouts."
Sorrel said nothing. There was nothing in her mouth that would not have been an insult.
"When the rider came to say he was dead." Lucan stared at the ring on the blotter. "I was relieved. I stood in a tent and felt my shoulders come down. Thirteen months I have waited for someone to tell me what kind of son does that."
She did not tell him it was grief, or that grief looks like that. She crossed to the sideboard, where his father's decanter stood in its dust-free place, because someone still polished it. Brandy, a short glass. Her hands did not shake. They never did, and for once she was glad of it.
She set the glass beside his hand. He drank it in one swallow and put the empty glass down on the brown ring, exactly inside it, and they both looked at that.
"On Saturday," he said, "I will swear the bond true."
"No."
"Alliance or none. Forty wolves or none."
"Sir, you need Alaric's forty." Her voice came out low and level. "You said so at breakfast to the whole table. Corrin is at your fence."
"Then I will hold the fence with what I have." His jaw set. "Hollis will say I have lost my head."
"He'll be right."
"Then he may say it to the Moon Eye."
"With what you've got, it falls. And it falls on me." She heard herself and could not stop. "I don't want to be your Luna. I want a cottage with a lock on the inside of the door. I'll walk down that drive on Sunday if I have to crawl it."
"You cannot walk. You are bound to this land."
"Then unbind me. Do not call it a marriage."
He was on his feet, and the desk was no longer between them. She felt his anger, and under it the fear, and under that something that was neither and was warm, and she knew he felt hers do the same. The bond pulled like a hand at her back. His breath smelled of brandy. His eyes had dropped to her mouth, and her whole chest leaned.
She stepped back first.
"Sir," she said, which was a wall.
The word sat between them, starched and ugly, and neither of them could say it was false. He let her have it. He turned to the window and stood with his bandaged hand flat on the glass.
Sorrel went back to the blotter. She turned the sheet over, the one he had been unable to finish, and read down past her own tea to the bottom of the page.
Someone in this house wants me dead before the council, and I believe I know who.
The sentence ran off the edge of the paper and stopped. She pulled the drawer out to its end for page two. A pen. A stick of wax. Nothing else.
Whoever Edmund Greaves had believed wanted him dead, somebody had taken the page with the name on it.