Petra Navar's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Petra had proof of the plot and a clock ticking down to the feast. But proof was not protection. She stood at her post two steps behind the crown, hand on her sword, and watched the great hall fill. She saw doors, servants, cups. She did not know the shape of the feast to come. Where would the wine table stand? Which door would the pourers use? Without that, she could not guess where Rowan Sable would slip his poison. She needed the layout, and the palace kept it locked away. The records lived at the candlelit manor beyond the palace wall. Petra went at dusk. She followed the old boundary of stacked stone, its cracks stuffed with moss and pale flowers on trailing vines. She climbed where the mortar had crumbled and dropped into the manor grounds. The archive was one long room of shelves. A woman in a stiff black gown sat at the center desk, a red pen in her hand. Nira Dusk. The servants said she had read every letter the manor ever held and struck a line through every name that no longer mattered. She did not look up when Petra entered. "Guards don't come for love letters," Nira said. She drew a red line through a name. "So you want the seating." Petra kept her hand off her sword. "The betrothal feast. I need to know where the cups will pour." Nira set down the pen. Her dark eyes moved over Petra's battered armor. "Everyone wants the room arranged in their favor. The poisoner. The guard. Which are you?" "The one who stands behind the crown," Petra said. "And can't see the whole board." Nira studied her a long moment. Then she rose and pulled a rolled sheet from a high shelf. She spread it on the desk and weighted the corners. It was the feast plan. The head table. The side tables. And there, marked in the same red ink, a small servants' door behind the crown's seat. A narrow gap. The cups came through it, poured out of sight. "They fill the cups in the passage," Nira said. "No one watches the passage. I have crossed out three names who used it." She tapped the door. "A cup can change hands here between the pour and the table." Petra memorized the door, the passage, the path of every cup. The blind spot had a place now. She could stand where it mattered. "Why help me?" Petra asked. Nira picked up her red pen. "I keep records of what people do to each other. I would rather this one not need writing down." Petra climbed back over the mossy wall with the layout in her head. She knew the gap now. But so, she realized, did Rowan. He had chosen the passage for a reason. To guard it, she would have to leave the crown's side and stand where she had never stood before.