Page 75 of The Crown’s Temptation

"I am aware." He moved to the far side of the room and stood with his hands clasped behind his back. He clearly had the patience of someone who had been waiting a very long time and had stopped being bothered by it somewhere along the way. The burgundy of his eyes caught the candlelight and held it. Up close he was more unsettling than he had been in the dining hall, mostly because everything about him suggested depth I could not measure. His face should have been young. It was not young. It was simply ageless. He was a feeder and looked human, yet most of the creatures here seemed to fear him no matter how terrifying they looked.

And he was a Rathmor. My Uncle-in-law, to be specific. Nothing of him reminded me of Colsar, but every time he turned his face toward me there was something uncannily like Sevrin.

"I am not a man of many words," he said. "And I hate explaining things." He reached into his coat and withdrew a tattered sack that appeared to be filled with stones. He opened it and pulled out something small and dark and smooth, and set it on the table beside the bed. "I went to the Witchward searching for the truth of what happened to you, to learn if you were alive or dead. While I was there, they gave me memory stones, some of which your mother left specifically for you.” He looked at me directly. "I have seen what I needed to see. But it is time for you to understand the past so you can understand what is at stake. And why you are in danger." A pause. "Lie down."

The door opened without a knock.

Fiersa stepped in, crossed the room in four even strides, and dropped to her knees in front of Axar with her head bowed. The motion was practiced. She had done this many times before.

I stared at her. "What?"

She looked up at me. Her expression did not change, which I found more unsettling than if it had. "I serve him. I have since the day I arrived in Morrath." She rose and crossed to me and took my hand in both of hers, which was the most physical contact she had initiated since I had met her. "I sent word to him the moment you arrived." Her grip did not loosen. "You can trust him, my lady."

"I trust no one," I said.

I looked at her when I said it. She did not flinch.

"Good," Axar said approvingly. "But if you trust nothing, this should be the exception," he said from across the room. "Memory stones are incapable of lying. They do not interpret. They do not editorialize. They do not spare you or soften what they hold." He picked up the stone from the table and held it out toward me. "Whatever you see is what happened. Exactly as it happened. Nothing added and nothing removed."

I looked at the stone. It was small enough to fit inside a closed fist, dark enough to read as black in most light, and warm in a way that had nothing to do with the room's temperature. I looked at Fiersa. I looked at the bed. I looked at Axar's face and found nothing there that looked like a trap, which was not the same as finding something that looked like safety but was, at this moment, close enough.

"I am sure you wish to know of your mother, of where you came from," he said quietly. "Besides, you are already dead and forced away from your husband and children."

I was already dead. I had nothing left to lose, at least when I did die I would have the comfort of the truth.

His eyes landed on the wound the creature had left on my arm. “Fiersa will treat the wound while you are in the memories,” he said.

I lay down.

The bed was softer than I expected. I stared at the ceiling while Axar crossed the room and stood beside me and placed the stone against my palm, closing my fingers around it carefully. His hand was warm. The stone was warmer. It pulsed once faintly against my palm, like something recognizing something else.

I closed my eyes.

The ceiling dissolved.

When I opened them I was not in Morrath.

I was standing on the docks of Yorali. The air smelled of salt and smoke. The water ahead was gray and vast and moving. The dock beneath my feet felt real enough that I looked down at it, half expecting to find it wasn't.

And in front of me, with her back turned and her hair loose in the wind off the water, was a woman I had never met and recognized immediately.

My mother was standing on the docks of Yorali, watching the water, and I was watching her, and whatever came next I understood I could not stop it or change it or reach for her across the distance between us.

I could only watch.

CHAPTER 15

Sisters of Yorali

RYARAN’S MEMORY STONE

It came in pieces the way memories did when they were not your own. I was standing in Yorali. The palace was vast and silver-blue, the corridors wide and cold and precise. I could hear water somewhere.

It was King Orsin’s palace, and it smelled familiar because my mind had been here before when I had dreamt of the horrors of the yellow room and the North Tower and the bloody sheets.

My mother was young. That was the first thing that struck me. She was younger than I had imagined her and moved through the corridors of the Yorali palace with the ease of someone who had not yet learned to be careful. Beside her was a woman I recognized even from behind.

Jularin.