Chapter 5 The Woman Who Knew My Mother

Nessa’s hand hovered beside her face, two fingers curled toward her lips. The whistle sounded again, closer this time, and I understood that whoever waited among the trees was expecting an answer. Kyron understood it too. He caught her wrist before she could make a sound.

“Who did you bring here?” he asked.

Nessa twisted against his grip. “If I wanted Zivelle dead, I would have left her at Thornveil. Please, listen to me.”

The driver tried to sit up, but pain folded him back against the carriage. “I saw her at the eastern gate,” he gasped. “She spoke to the men who followed us.”

I stared at Nessa, searching her face for the girl who had shared stolen bread with me. She looked frightened, certainly, but she hadn’t denied speaking to the attackers. I remembered how confidently she’d moved through the darkness and how quickly she’d found our wrecked carriage.

“You knew they were coming,” I said.

“I knew someone was coming. That’s different.”

A second whistle cut through the clearing. Kyron shoved Nessa behind him and drew his blade, but no attack followed. Instead, a figure stepped from the trees, carrying a lantern covered with blue cloth. She was an older woman in a traveling coat, with silver hair braided tightly against her head. Her left arm hung stiffly at her side.

“Prince Kyron,” she said, stopping well beyond his reach. “If those men had been mine, you would already be dead.”

“A comforting introduction,” Kyron replied. “Name yourself.”

“My name is Orlina. I taught medicine in the northern provinces before your father closed our schools.” Her gaze moved to me. “And I knew your mother, Zivelle.”

The words struck so sharply that I forgot the sword between them. My mother had been a blank space in every story of my childhood, someone I could picture only by borrowing features from strangers. Suddenly this woman spoke of knowing her as casually as if they had shared tea yesterday.

“What was her name?” I asked.

Orlina’s face softened. “Liora Roswyn. She sang when she worked, usually badly, and hated anyone touching her books. You have her eyes, though hers were both violet.”

My throat tightened. I had spent years wondering whether my mother had ever wanted me. I hadn’t expected the first real detail about her to be that she couldn’t sing.

Kyron lowered his blade an inch. “You can tell her more after you explain your people at the gate.”

Orlina looked at Nessa. “You were supposed to send word before the carriage left Thornveil.”

“Garrick locked her in the cellar,” Nessa said. “I barely got the letter to her.”

“What letter?” Kyron demanded.

“Her scholarship,” Orlina answered. “We arranged it. The queen’s seal was genuine, even if the queen herself is gone. We used an authority she left to the academy trustees.”

I felt a small, ugly disappointment. For one afternoon I had believed I’d earned my escape. “So my examination didn’t matter?”

Orlina looked almost offended. “You received the highest mark in herbal diagnosis that we’ve seen in six years. We made certain your application reached the right desk. The rest was yours.”

Before I could answer, Kyron pointed at the driver. “He says Nessa let assassins through the gate.”

“She let our scouts through,” Orlina replied. “The king’s hunters were already inside the grounds. We were trying to find which road they planned to take.”

“And you failed,” Kyron said.

Orlina didn’t argue. That frightened me more than any excuse would have. She approached the driver, knelt beside him, and examined his wound. Her expression changed when she lifted the bloodstained cloth.

“This wasn’t done by an ordinary blade.”

Kyron crouched opposite her. The driver’s skin had begun to darken around the injury, although I had watched it heal minutes earlier. Thin black lines crept toward his throat.

“Nightroot,” Orlina whispered. “It’s in his blood.”

The driver gripped my wrist. “Don’t let me sleep.”

I knelt beside him, helplessly recalling the warmth that had gathered in my hands. It returned when I pressed my palms near his shoulder, but Orlina immediately seized my fingers.

“Stop. If you draw the poison into yourself, it could kill you.”

“Then what do we do?”

“I have medicine at our camp. He might survive if we move quickly.”

Kyron glanced toward the trees. “You expect me to follow strangers carrying a stolen royal seal?”

“I expect you to decide whether your father’s orders matter more than this man’s life,” Orlina answered.

Something passed across Kyron’s face, too brief for me to name. He helped lift the driver from the carriage, careful of his injured shoulder. Nessa stepped forward to support the man’s legs, but he flinched from her. She accepted it without protest.

We followed Orlina along a narrow trail. Every branch seemed to reach for my face, and every rustle sounded like another attacker. Kyron walked beside me, close enough to catch me when my foot slipped on wet roots. Neither of us mentioned his hand lingering at my elbow.

After several minutes, he leaned toward me. “If they try to separate us, run west. There’s a watchtower beyond the stream.”

“You don’t trust them.”

“I don’t trust anyone who knows more about you than you do.”

I almost laughed. “That includes you.”

He looked at me for a long moment. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It does.”

Leaving Thornveil, I found myself wondering whether reaching the academy would truly change anything. Every person I met seemed to recognize a version of me I had never known. Garrick saw a burden, Mirabel saw a danger, and Orlina apparently saw a princess. Kyron looked at me as though I were an impossible question he resented being asked. I wanted someone to look at me and see only Zivelle, the girl who loved books and wanted to heal people.

Ahead of us, a pale glow appeared between the trunks. I expected tents, perhaps a fire. Instead, we emerged before a stone arch sunk into the hillside. Vines covered its walls, but the crest carved above the entrance remained clear: a crowned silver wolf surrounded by seven stars.

Orlina stopped and bowed her head to me. Nessa followed, kneeling in the mud.

“Welcome home, Princess,” Orlina whispered.

I was still trying to breathe when the archway opened from within. A man stepped into the lantern light, his face hidden behind a half mask. He looked at me, then at Kyron, and drew a second sword from his belt.

“Get away from her,” he said. “That prince is the reason her mother died.”