Brandon Ashveil's Arc

Chapter 18 of 18

The queen left the chamber without a word. Her steps faded up the passage. Brandon stayed at the side of the canopied bed. Thornweave watched him from the pillows, yellow eyes bright with fever. The thread in Brandon's chest lay quiet for the first time in days, but quiet was not the same as gone. He still had one job. Find the last thread. Study it. Cut it without killing them both. And every book that could teach him how sat on a shelf in Dayna Sable's longhall, days south, behind a wall of the queen's soldiers he had just walked past. He pulled a stool to the bedside and sat down. Thornweave's white hair was damp. His breathing was shallow. "Water," Brandon said. Thornweave's mouth twitched. "Servant already." Brandon poured from a clay jug on the side table and held the cup to Thornweave's lips. The fae lord drank. Some ran down his chin. Brandon wiped it with the edge of the sheet. "I need her books," Brandon said. "The herbalist's. If I don't read them, this thread stays. It kills you first. The fever is faster than six months." "Send for them." "Your cousin's soldiers won't let a rider through. Not to a mortal's door. Not for me." Thornweave closed his eyes. "Then die here slower." Brandon sat with that. He had counted on Thornweave wanting to live. Fever had burned that want down to almost nothing. The fae lord would rather rot on silk than owe a mortal a favor. He tried again. "You swore an oath in front of her. If I die, you die. You want me alive whether you like it or not. I need the books to keep us both breathing." Thornweave opened one eye. "Write her." "She can't read my hand from this far. And a letter won't move soldiers off her road." "Write her," Thornweave said again. "I will seal it. My mark moves through the groves. The soldiers step aside for my seal, cousin or not. She sends the books. You read them here." Brandon stared at him. It was the smallest help a dying man could give. It was enough. "Paper," Brandon said. Thornweave lifted one thin hand toward a carved chest at the foot of the bed. Brandon found paper, a stub of black wax, and a ring with a thorn cut into the face. He wrote short. Her name. What he needed. The grandmother's book on bonds, and any working near it. A promise he was alive. He folded the page. Thornweave pressed the ring into the warm wax himself, hand shaking. Brandon carried the letter up the passage to the first guard he found and named the queen's cousin as the sender. The guard took it without a word and went. Brandon walked back down into the dark. He had bought the books. Now he had to wait, in a fae lord's bedroom, for a mortal woman to answer a sealed letter from her enemy.