The king had been asleep for a week, and no one sat with him. Fauna was only passing by when she noticed the guards at his door were asleep too. Ryden lay just a few meters away, and her chest ached with a longing so fierce it hurt. She was a scullery maid and he was the king, and she told herself to leave.
But her feet would not carry her away from him. They never had. She had loved him since she was thirteen. That was the day three men had backed her against a wall in the yard, claiming she had stolen a ring.
She was too terrified to speak, and her silence made her look guilty. Then a shadow fell across them, and the men dropped into bows. It was the young king. He had crouched down in the dirt in his fine clothes and waited until her words came tumbling out.
He believed her. He never even asked her name. To him, it was a small thing on an ordinary day. To her, it was the first time anyone had made her feel like she mattered.
And now he was dying alone behind this door. She stepped between the sleeping guards and slipped inside. He lay in the great bed, pale and still, hands folded on the blankets like he was already laid out for burial. She whispered to him, told him he did not deserve this, that he was a good and kind king.
Her hand hovered near his cheek, and then she heard voices in the hallway. She panicked and pressed herself into a dark corner behind a carved panel. The stone gave way, and she tumbled back into a hidden passage as the chamber door opened. She held her breath until the voices faded, then followed the narrow tunnel until it let her out into a small, forgotten courtyard.
She had found a secret way through the walls. A road for royals built for escape. Only royal blood was ever told these ways. And now her.
She knew she should not go back. But that evening, Berta kept sighing over the dying king, and the words would not leave her head. So she went back, using the passage this time because the guards were awake. The next night, she brought a book and read to him.
After the first week, she stopped reading and started talking. She told him the healer had come and everyone had hope. She told him the kingdom was holding its breath. She grew bolder.
“You have to wake up,” she whispered one night. “What am I going to do without you? ”
The next day, she heard the healer speaking to Ryden’s beta, Sir Alistair. “At this rate, Ryden will never wake.
He is fading. In the coming days, we will lose him. Perhaps tonight. ”
Fauna dropped the linens she was carrying.
That night, she half-ran through the passage. She sank down at the edge of his bed and took his hand. “Please do not go,” she whispered. “I know I have no right to ask you for anything.
I know I am no one. But please, I love you. ”
She told him everything. How she had loved him since she was thirteen.
How his whole face changed when he smiled. How he talked to the horses in the stables when he could not sleep. How he was good because he chose to be, even when no one was watching. She pressed her forehead to his.
“Please, the world needs you. We all need you. ”
Then she heard a sound from the passage. The hidden door swung open, and a man in black stepped through.
He drew a small vial from his coat and leaned over the king, tipping his chin down. “Goodbye, your majesty,” he murmured. Fauna did not think. She grabbed the heavy candlestick and flung it at him, screaming for help.
The candlestick cracked against his shoulder, the vial splashed onto the sheets, and the man wheeled toward her. She saw two eyes glowing gold. Then the whole palace woke with shouting and boots. The man bolted back through the passage, and she ran after him.
But when she burst into the courtyard, he was gone. Guards poured out into the night, searching. She realized with pure terror that if they found her here, they would think she was the attacker. She melted into the shadows and stayed still until they passed.
The next morning, the news broke. The king was awake. And he believed someone had tried to kill him. While he slept, he could hear everything, and more than once, he had heard a man come to his bed to poison him.
Fauna shook with fear. If he could hear everything, then he had heard her. Every night. And the last night, he had heard her tell him she loved him.
The servants were questioned in groups. When her group was called, she froze. The king asked if anyone had seen anything strange. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Her throat clamped shut like a fist. The king leaned forward. “There was a woman,” he said. “Last night.
She screamed for help. I have been trying to find her all day. Was it you? ”
The maid beside her spoke apologetically.
“She’s mute, your majesty. ”
The king frowned. He asked if she could speak at all. She could not.
But she could write. She took the pen and wrote that she had seen a man all in black running away. She led them to the courtyard and pointed to the seam from which the assassin had gone. Alistair suggested she might have seen a shadow and made a murderer of him.
The king swayed, suddenly tired. “Perhaps I did dream some of it,” he said. They sent her away. She had stood right in front of him and could not make him believe her because she could not make herself speak.
That night, she lay in the dark, knowing Ryden was not safe. A hand closed over her mouth. She thrashed, but then she heard the voice. She knew it anywhere.
He led her to a small unused room and pushed back his hood. It was the king. “Forgive me for scaring you,” he said. “But I couldn’t risk you crying out.
” He told her he knew someone had tried to kill him, and he knew she had seen the man. He had pretended to believe it was a dream so his killer would not panic and try again. “I need your help,” he said. She pointed at herself.
“You,” he said, and a smile tugged at his mouth. “People do not notice you. They will speak freely in front of you because they will forget you are there. ” He asked if she would help him find who had been poisoning him.
She nodded. So by day, she watched and listened. Every few nights, they met at a tavern in the low town, away from the palace. He wore a plain brown cloak and looked enormously pleased with himself.
She wrote down everything she saw, and the notes went into the fire. They made no progress. But somewhere along the way, the meetings stopped being only about the investigation. He asked her opinion on which coat to wear, which wine to choose, which words to use in a letter.
She became the person the king wanted the opinion of about everything. She learned the man she loved was not perfect. He talked too much when he had wine. He was at his brightest when he was most sad.
He was lonely. And she loved him a little more every day. One night, by the fire with a chessboard between them, he told her he realized while he was ill that he was in love with a woman. He said if he ever woke, he would go to her at once.
But he could not, because someone was trying to kill him. “Anyone close to me is in danger,” he said. “You are one of the truest friends I have ever had, and I have pulled you into the middle of this. ”
Fauna held herself together and smiled.
One of the truest friends he had ever had. That had to be enough. He was in love with someone else. He could never know it was her.
A few days later, Fauna was sent to the market. She spotted Alistair, the king’s beta, cloaked like a common man. He came to her and said he was worried for the king. He had found a guard, a wolf, quick and silent, exactly what the alpha needed at his side.
He wanted her to convince Ryden to accept him. A figure detached itself from the crowd. “My lady,” the man said. Two words.
But Fauna’s whole body went cold, because she knew that voice. It was the assassin. And Alistair was watching her face, waiting. She nodded as if she would help, then left as quickly as she dared.
A hand closed around her arm, and something cold and sharp pressed into her side. “Walk,” the assassin said pleasantly against her ear. “Make a sound, and I’ll open you up right here. ” She wanted to scream, but her voice would not come.
Fear had made her quiet all her life. He told her he had marked her scent the night he came for the king. He had been waiting to see if the mute little maid would know his voice. And she had.
He walked her out past the stalls. “We can’t risk you finally telling the king you were there that night,” he said. Then the cloth came down over her mouth, and a bitter scent flooded into her lungs. She woke paralyzed in the bottom of a small boat.
The assassin sat at the stern, steering them downstream. He had chosen the river because water scatters a scent. He wanted her to disappear. A maid who slipped and drowned would be no investigation at all.
And if she died, she could never warn Ryden. She was the only soul alive who knew the assassin’s face and heard Alistair’s name fall from his lips. The assassin pulled the boat to the bank and crouched at the hull. She felt cold water rising around her sides.
He had holed the boat so it would fill slow and gentle. “Goodbye,” he said softly. “It’s nothing personal. ” He turned to go.
She thought of Ryden’s face. She held on to it. Then a huge dark shape came out of the dusk and slammed into the assassin, carrying him clean off the boat. Ryden.
He was here. The boat heaved as the assassin came up and threw himself over the side. A blade punched down into Ryden’s thigh, but he did not scream. He yanked the knife free and threw himself at the assassin like a man possessed.
They grappled, half in and half out of the boat. The assassin laughed. “Finally, I get to end you. ” They locked together, the knife between them, forcing it down toward Ryden’s throat.
Ryden roared, got a hand free, and flung the man bodily off the side of the boat. Then Ryden turned, all the savagery draining out of him, and hauled her up against his chest. “I have you,” he said, his voice shaking. “I followed you down to the water.
If I had been a moment later…” He could not finish. She lay in his arms, frozen and silent. The assassin was dead in the river, but the man who sent him was not. Alistair, she wanted to say.
It was Alistair. But she could not speak. She could not move yet. The poison still held her.
Ryden would not leave her side. Then the door opened, and it was Alistair. He came in with a friend’s relief on his face, gripping Ryden’s shoulder. “Gods, you should have taken men with you,” he said gently.
“Let me sit with her a while. ”
Fauna saw it the way you see a thing in a dream. Too slow and too clear. Alistair turned Ryden so his back was half to him.
His hand drifted down to the fold of his coat. He was going to kill Ryden. She tried to warn him, but she could only lie there, frozen. No, she thought.
Something rose up in her that she had never reached before. Past the poison. Past the fear. Past years of silence.
“Ryden! ” she screamed. Two things happened at once. Ryden wheeled toward her, so Alistair’s blade drove into his side instead of his back.
His face contorted with recognition. He knew this voice. Then the room broke apart. Ryden turned into the strike, caught Alistair’s knife arm, and forced him down.
Guards poured through the door, and the fight was over. “You were supposed to die painlessly in your sleep,” Alistair spat. “The crown was never going to be yours to give, was it? I held this kingdom together for a month, and they called it stewardship.
I would have been a better king. ”
“You would have been alone,” Ryden said quietly. “As you are now. ”
Fauna was carried to safety.
As the door closed between them, she did not know what he was thinking, only that he had heard her voice at last. And there was no taking it back. She slept for twelve hours. By the time she woke, the palace knew the whole story.
The kitchen girls swarmed her with questions. Fauna sat down among them and could not find a single word. Her voice worked fine now, if she wanted it. But she had never quite been able to use it.
Not since she was thirteen and no one believed her. That was the day she learned it was safer to stay quiet. She spent the next days making herself smaller than she had ever been. Twice she heard that the king was asking for her, and she slipped out of sight.
She could not face him. The best she could hope for was that he forgot her. Then she was in the gardens, gathering herbs in the last of the light, and his voice came from behind her. “Fauna.
”
She froze. He stood a few feet away, too beautiful to look at. He told her he knew she could speak. She set down her basket and walked away.
He followed, telling her he was not angry. “It was you, wasn’t it? ” he said. “The woman who came to me while I was ill.
”
She nearly broke into a run. His hand closed around her arm. “Let me thank you at least. You saved my life twice.
You nearly died for it. ” He told her he had been trying to find her since he woke. “I fell in love with you twice,” he said. “First with the voice in the dark, the one that kept me from going mad.
And then with the only person in this palace I could trust, the one who made me laugh when nothing else could. ” He caught her fingers loosely, giving her every chance to pull away. “I love you. ”
She stared at him.
She could not move. She was not even sure she was breathing. The hope drained out of his face. He said she had told him she loved him too, if she had imagined him differently, or grown tired of him.
He would not blame her. “Say something,” he whispered. “Please. ”
She tried.
She truly tried. But her throat had closed, and nothing came. His face fell. “Right,” he said quietly.
“Of course. ” His hand slipped from hers. He turned and walked away. She watched him go and slowly it sank in.
Everything he had said. He knew it was her. He was not angry. He thanked her.
He said he fell in love with her twice, looking right in her eyes. And she said nothing. “Go after him,” she told herself. “Go now.
For once in your whole life, just say something. ”
“Wait. ”
It came out thin and cracked. Half a whisper.
But it came out. Ryden stopped. He stood there for a heartbeat. Then he turned slowly and looked at her as she took a few stumbling steps toward him.
He watched her face, and whatever he found there was enough. He closed the distance in a few quick strides. “I love you, Fauna,” he said. She opened her mouth.
She wanted to say it back so badly it ached. But her tongue tied in knots. So she did the only thing she could. She took his hand in both of hers and held it tight against her chest.
His breath caught. A smile broke across his face. He lifted his free hand and cupped her cheek. “I’m going to kiss you now,” he said.
He leaned in unhurried. “Last chance to say no. ”
She made a small frustrated sound, fisted her hand in his collar, and pulled him down and kissed him. He laughed softly against her lips, surprised and delighted.
Then he was kissing her back, and there was nothing careful about it. His arms came around her, and he kissed her like a man who had spent weeks searching and had finally found what he was looking for. For the first time in her whole life, Fauna was not watching from the shadows.
