The Queen's Rising(42)

“Would you want to join your father’s House?” Jourdain asked, very carefully, as if we were standing on ice. “If you do, I would honor your wishes. We can revoke the adoption after our mission. And I would not hold any ill will toward you for it.”

I couldn’t drown the small glimmer of desire, of hope. I couldn’t deny that I did want to see my blood father, that I wanted to know who he was, that I wanted him to see me. But all the same . . . I had grown up with the belief that illegitimate children were burdens, lives no one wanted. If I did ever come across my father, he most likely would turn his back on me.

And that image drove a blade into my heart, made me pitch forward slightly in the chair.

“No, monsieur,” I said once I knew my voice was steady. “I want nothing with the Allenachs. But I do ask for one thing.”

He waited, cocked his brow.

“Whatever plans you forge,” I began, “I want a voice in them. After the Stone of Eventide is found, it remains with me. I am the one to give it to the queen.”

Jourdain seemed to hold his breath, but his eyes never broke from mine. “Your input will be needed and appreciated in the plans. As for the stone . . . we need to wait and see as to what is the wisest strategy. If it is best for it to remain with you, it will. If it is best for it to remain with another, it will. All that being said, I can promise that you will be the one to present it to the queen.”

He was crafty with words, I thought as I picked apart his response. But my greatest worries were for the plans to proceed without my input, that the stone would fail to be given to the queen. On these two matters, I had his word, so I finally nodded and said, “Very well.”

“Now,” Jourdain said, glancing back to the Dowager as if I had never doubted his intentions. “The legality of this must wait. I cannot risk putting my name or hers through the royal scribes.”

The Dowager nodded, although I could tell she did not like this. “I understand, Aldéric. As long as you hold to your word.”

“You know that I will,” he replied. And then to me, he said, “Brienna, would you accept me as your patron?”

I was to become this man’s daughter. I was to take his name as my own, without knowing what it meant, what it had bloomed from. It felt wrong; it felt right. It felt dangerous; it felt liberating. And I smiled, for I was accustomed to feeling two conflicting desires at once.

“Yes, Monsieur Jourdain.”

He nodded, not quite smiling, not quite frowning, as if he was just as disharmonized as I was. “Good, very good.”

“There is one last thing you should note, Aldéric,” the Dowager said. “Brienna has not yet received her cloak.”

Jourdain cocked his brow at me, just now realizing I wore no passion cloak at my collar. “How come?”

“I am not impassioned yet,” I responded. “My master was going to provide me with my cloak when I took a patron.”

“I see.” His fingers thrummed along the armrests. “Well, we can work around that. I take it that every precaution has been extended to this arrangement, Renee?”

The Dowager inclined her head. “Yes. No one will know Brienna has departed in your care. Not even her grandfather, or her master.”

“Well, we can replicate a cloak for you,” Jourdain said.

“No, Monsieur, I do not think that wise,” I dared to say. “For you see . . . you would have to choose a constellation to also replicate on the cloak, and that constellation would need to be registered in my name at the Astronomy Archives in Delaroche, and—”

He held up his hand in peace, a mirthful smile quirking the corners of his lips. “I understand. Forgive me, Brienna. I am not well versed in your passionate ways. We will think of an explanation for this tomorrow.”

I quieted, but a lump formed in my throat. A lump that emerged whenever I thought of my cloak, of Cartier, and what I was having to leave behind. The past fortnight, I had lain awake in bed, my room unbearably quiet without Merei’s snores, and wondered if I had just applied seven years of my life for nothing. Because it was very possible that Cartier might disown me in this space of time when I could not contact him.

“Are you packed, Brienna?” my new patron inquired. “We should leave at dawn.”

I did well at concealing my surprise, even though it flared in me like breathing on a flame. “No, Monsieur, but it will not take me long. I do not have much.”

“Get some rest, then. We have a two-day journey ahead of us.”

I nodded and rose, returning to my room, hardly feeling the floor beneath my feet. Kneeling, I opened my cedar chest and began to gather my belongings, but then I looked to my shelves, at all the books Cartier had given me.

I stood, let my fingers caress each of their spines. I would take as many as I could fit in my chest. The others I would place in the library, until I could return for them.

Until I could return for him.





THIRTEEN


AMADINE



“You need a new name.”

I had been riding in his coach for an hour, the dark slowly blushing into dawn, when Aldéric Jourdain finally spoke to me. I was sitting opposite him, my back already sore from the bump and jerk of the cab.

“Very well,” I conceded.

“Brienna is a very Maevan-inspired name. So you need to sound as Valenian as possible.” A pause, and then he added, “Do you have a preference?”