POV: Sylra
We sat in the small parlor off the nursery wing.
I had asked the nurse to keep Lyra. I needed both my hands to be free for the next stretch of time, and I needed not to be holding a child while I asked the question I had been carrying since I was old enough to know I had been a secret.
The aunt Maelry sat across from me. The chair she chose was not the chair the wall would have suggested. She took the one that put her face at an angle to the lamp, so the light fell on her cheek the way it had fallen on Maelric's the last time I had sat at the foot of his bed. I did not know if she had done it on purpose. I did not ask.
"His handwriting was illegible. I was the only person who could read it without him at my elbow. Even the king's clerks lost arguments with it. He used to send me letters on the fold of paper any other man would throw away — three lines at the corner, in a hand that ran uphill. I kept them."
She held my eyes.
"He decided too fast and held too long. He was not good at being wrong in public. He was good at being wrong in private, with one person who would not use it against him. I was that person while we were children. I was that person while we were not."
She stopped. She let me have the silence after the description without filling it.
I let one breath out.
"Did he know about me? Before the end. That is the only thing I will ask you in this room about him before we move to what you came to say."
The aunt Maelry held my eyes.
"He knew you existed. Not where you were. He searched for a stretch of years, and then he stopped. I have the letter he wrote me the night he stopped. He stopped because he had begun to believe that his looking was making the people around him look, and the looking from those people was not safe for the child."
"He stopped because finding me was dangerous to me."
"Yes," the aunt said. She leaned forward a fraction — not for emphasis, but because what she was about to say mattered to her and she wanted me to hear it close.
"He did not care what the search cost him. What he could not bear was the thought that his looking would lead the wrong people to you first. He had watched what happened to me — a girl carrying knowledge that powerful families wanted buried. He knew what they would do to a child who carried the actual line."
She kept her eyes on mine.
"He stopped looking for you to keep you alive. He hated it. He wrote to me about it more than once."
The grief opened in my chest and stayed open. It did not move me to tears. I had been crying at the bedside for too many hours to have the body for full tears in the small parlor across from a woman I had known for less than an hour.
The grief sat hot and quiet under my breastbone. He had looked. He had stopped. He had stopped because he loved me enough to stop. The information I had wanted my entire life had a weight I had not imagined for it, and the weight was both heavier and easier to hold than I had thought it would be.
I had spent a stretch of my childhood angry at him for not coming. I had spent a stretch of my early reign furious at him for the same thing.
The anger went out of the room without anyone telling it to leave. What was left in its place was not relief. It was a quieter kind of grief, the kind that does not need to be loud to take a place at the inside of a person's life.
"Thank you. For telling me the version of him you carried. I do not have many other people who knew him as a brother."
"You are welcome."
She set her hands flat on her thighs. The motion was the motion of a woman who was about to say a different kind of thing, and was telling herself with her hands that she had moved out of one room and into another.
"The founding history. I came to give it to you the way I have it. You should hear it before the next session of the Conclave. The shape of it is not the shape the public records have given you. The public records were built by the side that won."
"Tell me."
"The founding queen needed the cooperation of two pack lord families from the northern territories to hold the alliance through the first years. She did not have the option of doing without them. The alliance was held together with rope and not yet with stone."
She breathed once.
"The two families understood what the threads were. They considered the threads a power they could not control and would not be able to negotiate against in the next generation. They asked for the suppression as a concession. The founding queen gave it to them. She gave the full line up in exchange for the alliance."
"Stability."
"Stability. She believed it was temporary. She wrote so. She intended to lift the suppression in the second generation, when the alliance was old enough to hold under pressure. She did not live to do it."
She breathed in.
"She had a daughter who carried the full line. The official record says the daughter died young. There is a second record in the archive — the founding queen's hand, written in the last year of her life — that says the daughter was sent east. Neither version has ever been confirmed. Both are in the archive. The line you carry could be from the suppressed daughter or from a cousin of the suppressed daughter. Both are possible. Neither is settled."
I had been a queen for long enough now to file the second piece of information without flinching. The thread I had been told had been bargained off my grandmother might or might not be the thread that had come down to me by direct line. My ancestor might be alive in the east in a settlement I had not yet asked Mira to find.
I was not going to think about that yet.
"The two pack lord families. Name them."
"Vrelock," she said. "And Sothren."
I felt my breath stop in the muscle behind the ribs.
Vrelock had a representative in the current Conclave. So did Sothren. They had both signed the inspection protocol I had spent the morning resolving the dispute over. They had both kept their seats through every challenge of the last stretch of years.
The two families that had pressured my grandmother's suppression were sitting at the table with me.