Page 16 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

“To our collaborator and all who matter, he is your husband. I expect you to treat him as such.”

Nore swallowed, feeling the lump of hatred traveling down her throat. Keeping Khari in line, she could attempt. But acting as his wife? She wasn’t certain she’d be able to keep up the ruse without murdering him, or worse.

“Worry not, darling,” Celestine said. “I know your work. I have every faith in you. You are my finest—if anyone can do it, it is you.”

Nore closed her eyes. “Thank you, Your Highness,” she said, trying not to taste the bitterness and fear on her tongue. She was no fool: to threaten the newly restored nation was a death wish, and that was without factoring in complications with Caspian.

But Celestine asked. Celestine trusted her. The crown would name her as a successor, and she would run her own ring of spies; she would know what this was all for. It was all she had wanted for her life, wasn’t it?

Nore managed a small smile, trying to reach for any feeling of victory. “It’s an honor.”

That night, she crawled into her bed, alone. She stared at the ceiling, her thoughts whirring dangerously.

She didn’t need Celestine to tell her about Idistra, nor give her further context for the war. She had known Caspian during those years, lived with him, watched him process whatever news trickled to them—his parents sent word, when they could, but ships to Idistra were infrequent, the letters delayed by weeks or months.

In Lindan, their system was calculated and learned—anyone could perform magic as long as they were within the geographical boundaries of Lindle power. Though Nore wasn’t good at it, the ability was still there, when she went looking. But in Idistra, the system was inherent: mages, those capable of doing magic, needed to draw from a human power source—a well. All wells drew their power from the Isle of Locke—though she remembered Caspian’s voice as he corrected her: not the Isle itself. The High Sovereign rooted and directed the Isle’s power.

The realities of the Idistran war had always scared her, especially when she was a child. Nore was still just a girl in Arlowe when the tiny but powerful Isle of Locke was destroyed, killing thousands—and, since the magic system didn’t immediately collapse, leaving one person linked to the Isle’s power alive.

But why? she’d asked Caspian once, early in their relationship, when they still spoke of the war ending—it was hard to see much hope, after it had dragged on past the decade mark, after Caspian was still here and unable to safely return, if he ever wanted to.

To seize power, he had answered. For control. For territory. For influence. For revenge. Does it matter?

The war lasted for sixteen years—but near the end, Nore tried to stop paying attention to it entirely, avoiding whatever news reached her from Idistra. She was able to avoid the topic (and the ache that surrounded it) until one day almost three years ago, when she was hard at work focusing on a trade partnership with Nisielle and the news swept through the streets: the heir had returned, the Isle of Locke was resurrected, and the war was ending.

Though she didn’t work on Idistran intelligence as a rule, her knowledge was now too valuable for Celestine: though she didn’t travel to Idistra—she staunchly refused—but she spent weeks taking meetings in the northern territories and Isbeta, verifying information, getting as close as she could to the truth without disrupting any of the duchess’s other spies.

She learned the High Lady had chosen a show of strength over brutality, proving herself to be a formidable leader by temporarily ripping away power from all wells from two of the nations to stop the war.

The idea of it was shocking, when she heard. She had traveled enough outside of her own system to know what it was like to reach for her magic and find nothing there—but she could not imagine such a deprivation in her own home. How unsafe it must have felt. How vicious a violation. How brutal.

It was the first time in years she had thought of Caspian with anything other than hatred. She was in a warehouse, discussing stock with a merchant in Caracen, one of islands of the northern territories, when their talk turned to the war and its abrupt end. The merchant had only shaken their head, sighed, and said, “I give her two months before the retribution comes. They’ll kill her for that.”

It was awful, Nore had thought then, to know death was coming, to know there was no other choice to prevent it. She was immediately back in her apartment, lounging on the rug at Caspian’s feet as he explained the intricacies of Idistran politics to her. Desperately in that moment, more than any time before, she wanted to ask him what he thought of all of this.

Then, she’d pushed the thought away as quickly as it had come. She wished she had pursued it, that she had chased the lead, that she had done anything in her power to change the tides of fate and prevent this from happening. Now, in her bed, she knew she recalled that moment with reluctant acceptance. Maybe it had been the moment that sealed her fate: wishing to know his mind again.

Nore threw an arm over her eyes, exhausted yet unable to find sleep. She still felt the phantom grip of his hands on her waist.

Grimsby came up and bit her fingers. Cats were good, and noble, and gentle, and they did not protest when one pressed one’s face to their fur and wept.

“I should’ve killed him,” she confessed into his patchy fur. “I should’ve killed your father when I had the chance.”

Grimsby bit the end of her nose. Nore took that to mean he begrudgingly agreed.

before

IF SHE WERE ORTISSIAN, the prophet-gods at the temple would’ve declared she was born under an ill-fated star. If Maroushan, they would’ve dressed her in silks and trained her as a lady. If Nadiran, she would’ve been given to the Inkmen as one of their own. If Isbetan, she would have been raised in the house of the emperor’s favored courtesans.

But Elinore Arlowe was not Ortissian, or Maroushan, or Nadiran, or Isbetan. She was Lindle, and so, when she was born in the dead of winter to one of the duke’s scullery maids, when she was pulled from her mother and laid in her arms and the bright red of her hair did not wash away with the blood, the midwife only tsked. The implication was heavy as soon as she arrived with hair as bright as flames, just like the duke’s youngest son, but no one dared suggest it—after all, there were already two other fatherless red-haired children about, and two more followed in the years after Nore’s birth, even after a stern reminder to the young man about the merits of contraception. The duke’s youngest son had the misfortune to die in a hunting party when Nore was six, and no more was said about the matter.

In the fashion of all Lindle bastards born in a noble household, her first name was given by her mother, and her second by affiliation with her employer. If her mother had been different, an independent seamstress or a village baker and not a maid in the duke’s manor, she might have had Golda’s family name—but she was not, and so, Nore did not.

She was who she was from a very early age: Nore learned as a child that the duke’s family liked her best when she was charming, but the servants she grew up around were kindest when she was helpful. She knew better than to raise the question of where she belonged, or whom she belonged to; she shared a room with her mother, in the servants’ quarters of the house, until she was fourteen.

She took her lessons with the children of the house, and though the servants were never really taught magic, she excelled in languages and mathematics. She liked the numbers, the logic of finding a solution.

She was fourteen on the eve of the Winterfast celebration. It was the longest night of the year, and the turning point in the fifteen-day thirteenth month of the continental calendar—the other twelve months had a uniform thirty.