CHAPTER I
Why am I here again?
I should have said no. I absolutely should have said no, but apparently all Oreste has to do is look at me with those miserable fucking eyes of his and every ounce of common sense I’ve spent twenty years developing promptly abandons me, which is why I’m currently clinging to the side of a tower in the middle of the night, alone. Why am I always the one who ends up breaking the rules alone?
Actually, I know why. Because of that motherfucker sleeping somewhere above me, who has been tormenting us for years simply because he was born into enough privilege to get away with it and possesses an ego larger than the kingdom, if such a thing is even physically possible. Alaric, why the fuck did you have to start digging?
I tighten my fingers around the damp stone and force myself to breathe as Oreste’s panicked voice plays again inside my head.
Gauvin, if he’s truly discovered who I am, then I’m finished. And so is your uncle. You have to do something.
So here I am, doing something. Something incredibly stupid, admittedly, but something nonetheless. It’s only a tower, I’ve done worse than this. All I have to do is reach Alaric’s window, climb inside, find whatever information the bastard has uncovered and leave without waking him. Colin assured me that he slipped a sleeping potion into Alaric’s drink during supper, which means Alaric should be unconscious for the entire operation and I should be perfectly safe. Then why the fuck am I petrified?
The bricks are slick beneath my fingers, damp from the evening mist, and every tiny crack I use as a foothold seems determined to crumble the moment I trust my weight to it. Somewhere below, the watch patrols the Academy grounds, supposedly searching for intruders but far more likely to catch students who are exactly where they shouldn’t be.
A lantern appears beneath the tower and I flatten myself against the wall, pressing cheek and chest to freezing stone as two guards cross the courtyard below. Their voices drift upwards, too indistinct for me to understand, while the lantern light crawls dangerously close before finally disappearing around the corner. I breathe again. I swear by the Three, this is the last time I let Colin talk me into something like this. He can go fuck himself with that convenient clumsiness of his, which somehow appears whenever a task becomes remotely dangerous. The boy is one of the best archers in the Academy; surely someone capable of putting an arrow through a target at a hundred paces can climb a fucking wall. Next time, he’s doing it. Better yet, Oreste can do it himself, it’s his secret, after all. But who am I kidding?
Oreste asked me for help, and of course I came.
My boot slips, and my stomach drops before the rest of me does, one hand tearing free from the stone as my body swings out over the courtyard, my remaining fingers taking my entire weight so suddenly that pain shoots through my wrist. I bite down on a cry, and for one endless second, there is nothing beneath me but darkness, stone and enough distance to make whatever remains of me extremely difficult to identify in the morning.
Please. My fingers slip. Please, not before September. Not before the Challenge. Not before I can prove myself. Not after everything it took for my parents to get me here.
The Cairnmore name doesn’t open doors anymore; sometimes it makes people hesitate before opening them at all, and I’ve spent enough of my childhood watching my father straighten his shoulders whenever someone recognized it to know exactly what that hesitation means. He has never asked me to repair any of it, nor has Mother. But I want to leave this Academy with something they can attach to our name with pride again.
My boot scrapes desperately against the wall until it catches another ledge, and I slam myself back against the tower, breathing through clenched teeth while my heart attempts to escape through my throat. Perhaps I should simply fall. At least then Oreste would have to solve his own problems for once. I start climbing again, one brick after another, until Alaric’s window finally comes within reach. I catch the ledge with both hands, haul myself upwards and tumble through the opening with considerably less grace than the circumstances deserve, landing hard enough that for one horrible moment I’m convinced I’ve just announced my arrival to the entire Academy. But silence greets me and I remain crouched beneath the window.
The room is almost completely dark, illuminated only by the dying embers in the hearth, but there is enough light for me to make out the large shape lying beneath the covers. Alaric doesn’t move, but I still wait another minute. But it looks like Colin has done his job, so I rise carefully.
Alaric’s chambers are exactly what I expected: orderly, almost offensively so, everything in its place, not a scrap of clothing abandoned where it shouldn’t be, his weapons arranged within easy reach of the bed. I cross the room as quietly as possible and start searching his desk, only to discover almost immediately that there isn’t enough light to distinguish one page from another, let alone read them. Fuck. Maybe I should take everything. Grab the papers, climb back down, sort through them somewhere that doesn’t contain a sleeping Alaric. A snore cuts through the room, and I freeze. Alaric shifts beneath the covers, as my hand stops halfway across the desk until he settles again, and only then does my heart remember how to beat. Now that I think about it, Colin never actually told me how long his potion was supposed to last. No matter, I don’t need long. Think, Gauvin. I’m not the brightest of the bunch, but surely, I can manage this. I lean closer, moving one sheet aside and then another, searching for anything that might explain why Alaric has suddenly taken such an interest in Oreste, but there is nothing.
Suddenly, my hand stops. There is a drawing, and even in the darkness, I know the crest: Mortefayne. Every thought in my head disappears, as I bend closer. It can’t be, but it is and beside it what looks like a letter. My hand closes around the edge of the desk. If Alaric has connected that crest to Oreste, this doesn’t end with Oreste. Secrets like his don’t collapse neatly around the person keeping them; they drag down everyone who helped preserve them, everyone whose name can be attached to them afterwards. One more scandal tied to Cairnmore, one more reason for the court to decide that whatever honor remains in our name is nothing more than an old story we refuse to stop telling, and everything my parents have spent years holding together could come apart. How the fuck did Alaric find this?
I need light. I need to read that letter to know exactly what he’s discovered because if this is what I think it is, Oreste was right and we are completely fucked, and not in a good way.
“If you intended to rob me, Cairnmore,” Alaric says from the bed, perfectly awake, “you could at least have used the door.”
My heart stops, he’s awake. He’s fucking awake. I spin towards him, and wait how does he know I didn’t use the door?
“Nothing to say?”
The covers shift.
“That’s new.”
He sits up, bare chest first, a lot of bare chest actually and I quickly drag my eyes upwards.
“Your friend is a talented archer,” Alaric says. “He’s significantly less talented at spiking wine.”
“You didn’t drink it.”
A quiet laugh leaves him, “Colin’s eyes almost never left me. People only stare that intently when they’re waiting for something to happen, so I switched my goblet.”
Fucking Colin.
“And the snoring?”
“That was for you.”
“You’re insane.”
“I’ve been called worse.” he says before getting out of bed, and unfortunately, this makes the bare-chest problem considerably worse.
“But never mind Colin,” he says. “What are you doing here, little fox?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
His mouth curves.
“I’d much rather fuck you, if we’re being honest.”
My brain stops, and I stare at him.
“What?”
For the first time tonight, something almost uncertain crosses Alaric’s face, so quickly I might have imagined it, then it’s gone.
“Now,” he says, recovering far too quickly, “why are you here?”
“None of your business.”
“You’re standing in my bedroom, after climbing eighteen feet and after Colin attempted to drug me.”
“Allegedly.”
“And now you’re standing beside my desk trying very hard not to look at the Mortefayne crest.”
Everything inside me goes still, and his amusement fades with mine.
“There you are,” he says quietly.
I hate him, I genuinely hate him. Not because he caught me, but because I don’t know how much he knows.
“What do you want?” he asks as his eyes remain on mine.
Alaric has always had an irritating way of looking at people as though silence is merely another weapon he was trained to use, and I know better than to fill it for him, so I cross my arms and stare back. His gaze flicks briefly towards the desk.
“You came for him,” he says.
My jaw tightens, “Don’t.”
Something shifts in his expression before he turns away from me and crosses to the desk, calmly gathering the scattered pages I disturbed. I watch him put them back into order.
“Do you want the document?” he asks.
My stomach twists, “What?”
“The one you nearly killed yourself climbing a tower to steal.”
He lifts the letter between two fingers.
“Do you want it?”
I take a step towards him.
“Give it to me.”
“No.”
“Alaric.”
“Cairnmore.”
“I swear by the Three, if you don’t give me that letter I will…”
“You’ll what?”
I stop as Alaric looks at me, not mocking, just waiting.
“I could take it.”
“You could try.”
There it is, not a threat, not even arrogance, really, just the deeply irritating fact that we both know exactly how that would end. I glance at the sword beside his bed, then at him, then back at the sword.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
“I was assessing my options.”
“Poorly.”
“Fuck you.”
“Again, mixed messages.”
My mouth falls open, and his, does not quite smile.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“A little.”
The answer comes too quickly. So quickly that for a second neither of us says anything, and before I can decide what to do, he places the letter back on the desk.
“Go back to your room, Gauvin.”
My amusement vanishes, “what?”
“Go back to your room.”
“And the letter?”
“I’m sending it tomorrow.”
The words hit harder than I expect, and my stomach drops.
“Alaric.”
“I have enough evidence to justify asking questions.”
“You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“Then tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“Then don’t ask me to ignore what I’ve found.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
Something in his voice changes, not anger, exactly, but the humour is gone. If this were only Oreste’s secret, perhaps I could take the risk, but it isn’t mine to expose and the consequences won’t stop with him. My uncle built his life around protecting what Alaric has started pulling apart, and Cairnmore is not powerful enough to survive being caught in another scandal simply because one highborn bastard decided he was curious, but even that isn’t the worst of it. The worst of it is Oreste. Oreste, who asked me for help, who has stood beside me since we were children, I can’t abandon him.
“Please don’t send it.”
Alaric studies me, “why shouldn’t I send it?”
I stare at him weighing my options hopelessly…
“Fine. What do you want?”
His eyebrows draw together, “what?”
“In exchange for the letter.”
His expression has become strangely unreadable at that. I can feel myself losing control of the situation, which is particularly insulting considering I started it by breaking into his room, so I do the only thing I can think of and reach for the letter. Alaric catches it first and I glare at him, as he looks at my hand, then at me. His mouth twitches again, and somehow that tiny movement makes everything worse because this is a game to him, while Oreste’s entire life is sitting on that desk. The thought kills whatever amusement I had left. I can’t abandon them.
“I’ll do anything.”
Alaric goes still. For once, there is no immediate answer, no irritating smile, no clever remark. His gaze moves over my face, then drops briefly to my mouth.
“Anything?”
“Yes.”
“Then, kneel.”
