a moment, blew lightly across the page to dry it, then slipped a green feather into the envelope, sealed it with wax, and gave it to one of her father’s messengers.
“Deliver it well,” she said with a smile, picturing the sly look that would appear on Queen Junn’s face when she received it upon her arrival in Varn—when the queen realized that she had an ally. That together, they were going to take down the Wolf.
Friend—
You said to me that Fear is a tool of survival.
I hope that you are right.
There is indeed a Wolf among us, and we must work together to hunt him down. If he kills again, there are three who will share in the spoils. Two will be found with red blood on their hands. To find the third, look foerward; he is closer than you think.
La st we spoke, you said, “It only takes One clever fox to best a thousand men.”
I confess, I wish to be that fox.
These days, the Sha dows are long. Soon, the nights will Sta rt to swallow us whole. There is always a part of me that dreads the winter. Now more than ever.
—Fox
16
The guards had led Ayla into the bowels of the palace: into the maze of the west wing and then through a wooden door and down a flight of white marble steps that seemed unending, the air growing cold and dank the farther they descended. They were taking her underground. Ayla couldn’t stop her hands from shaking, just a little. They were so far underground that she knew she could scream and the noise would just be swallowed by the rough, ugly stone walls and the darkness.
Were they leading her to her death, right here, right now?
She thought of her crime—curling up beside the lady of the house. In her own bed. What had she been thinking? In the moment, all the fury of her fight with Storme, all her fear and confusion, had simply led her there without thinking, without questioning. She’d been drawn to Crier.
Maybe it was because Crier had been the object of her thoughts, her obsessions, for so long. Since long before she’d become her handmaiden. And now, the obsession had begun to morph and change in the light, no longer as simple as a desire to kill, now colored, in certain moments, with a desire for something else.
A desire Ayla simply could not name.
The guilt and shame of it exploded in her gut, and she almost doubled over, sick with it, except that the guards held her, kept leading her forward into the darkness.
At least, she reminded herself, she’d gained something from last night.
Crier had mentioned something important—something potentially very important.
Kinok had a “special compass.” If it were anyone else, she’d think nothing of it; a compass was a compass; it pointed north and that was it.
But a special compass carried by a Watcher of the Iron Heart was another matter entirely.
They turned a corner toward another set of stairs. One of the guards let go of her arm in the narrowness of the stairwell, and instinctively, she reached for the familiar weight of her necklace, but her fingers found nothing but skin.
Frowning, she felt all around her throat. Then her hair, it sometimes got tangled in her hair while she slept, and then around the collar of her uniform. Nothing. She checked her underclothes. Nothing. It wasn’t caught on the inside of her shirt, either.
If fear was cold water, paranoia was ice. It spread across her skin like frost on a windowpane.
It was missing. The simplest explanation, and the most horrifying. Her necklace was missing. The one item she owned that could get her (Benjy) killed, and it was gone. She’d lost it. When? In Crier’s bedchamber just now, when the guards had dragged her out of bed? In the halls before that?
If someone found it.
If they traced it back to her.
Benjy.
Lost in her thoughts, Ayla almost walked straight into a guard’s back when they finally reached the bottom of the steps. It was so dark, the torchlights spread far apart on the damp stone walls, that she didn’t see the stone door until someone was unlocking it, pulling it open from the inside.
Kinok had lit a single lamp, and Ayla just barely managed to bite back a surprised curse—she’d been expecting a prison cell, but instead they’d brought her to Kinok’s study.