A Vow of Steel and Shadow

The chandeliers dripped fire over the marble, each crystal catching the candlelight and flinging it back in fractured spears. Natalie stood where she always stood—half-shadowed by a column whose gilt had been applied two centuries earlier to flatter a long-dead duchess’s vanity. From here she could see every entrance, every exit, every throat bared by laughter or by jewels. The court moved below her like a single organism: silk scales, perfume breath, the wet flash of teeth when someone risked a joke about the Queen’s health.

She watched her brother.

Alistair was easy to find even in that crush; the crowd rearranged itself around him the way water parts for a swan’s prow. He was twenty-two, newly broad in the shoulders, still stupidly kind. A woman in silver lamé had his arm and was speaking into the shell of his ear; he bent to her politely, but his gaze drifted over her coiffure as if he had already forgotten what she looked like. When he straightened he found Natalie across the room. The smile he gave her was small, almost apologetic, the one they had used as children to acknowledge that the tutor was drunk again. It did not reach his eyes. His eyes said: get me out.

She could not, of course. A princess did not cross a ballroom to rescue the heir; the heir was supposed to rescue her. So she lifted her champagne—untouched, flat—and tilted it in ironic salute. He answered with the same, and for a moment the noise of violins and gossip collapsed into the old private silence they had shared before crowns became relevant. Then Mauricio stepped between them.

Uncle Mauricio moved like a man who had memorised the choreography but cared nothing for the music. Tailored black velvet, no orders or medals, only the single ruby stick-pin that had belonged to their father. The candlelight loved his cheekbones; the court loved his anecdotes. He touched Alistair’s elbow with two fingers, exactly the pressure required to remind a prince that protocol demanded he greet the ambassador from Valmont. Alistair’s spine straightened. The woman in lamé melted backward, already replaced.

Natalie saw the way Mauricio’s thumb brushed the inside of her brother’s wrist as he steered him—an intimacy too brief to be accidental, too proprietary to be paternal. She had seen that same thumb rest on the neck of a falcon the day before the bird was found hooded and limp, its heart stopped by something no one bothered to diagnose.

She set the champagne on a servant’s tray and started a slow circuit of the mezzanine, skirts whispering against the balustrade. Below, Mauricio had installed Alistair before the Valmont delegation. The ambassador bowed; Mauricio bowed deeper, the loyal uncle facilitating. Yet his shoulders were angled so that only Alistair could see his face, and what Alistair saw made his own expression stiffen. Mauricio’s lips moved—three words, maybe four. Whatever they were, they drained the colour from the prince’s cheeks. The ambassador straightened, confused; the moment passed; Mauricio’s smile returned, warm as mulled wine, poisonous as lead.

Natalie felt the bird-shaped weight in her pocket—the little cedar carving Alistair had pressed into her hand that afternoon. Keep an eye on the snakes. She had laughed then, because snakes were obvious: they hissed, they coiled, they announced themselves. Mauricio did not hiss. He stood absolutely still when he was not moving, and that stillness was what frightened her most, because it suggested the calculation had already finished and the strike was simply waiting for the music to swell.

A couple stumbled past her, drunk on brandy and each other. The woman’s laughter caught on a chandelier and shattered into high, bright shards. Natalie used the distraction to descend the curved staircase. She did not hurry; haste drew eyes. She simply placed one foot after another until the parquet received her heels and the smell of beeswax and sweat replaced the cooler scent of stone. By the time she reached the circle of light where her brother stood, Mauricio had vanished—into the crowd, into the walls, wherever predators went when they were done measuring the distance to the jugular.

Alistair felt her approach without turning. He extended a hand, palm up, the way he had when they were seven and nine and crossing a stream. She slid her fingers across his. His skin was damp.

“Dance,” he murmured, already pulling her into the set forming for a polonaise. It was not a request; it was camouflage. They stepped apart, came together, stepped apart. The violins sawed a cheerful lie.

“How long?” she asked when the figure brought them shoulder to shoulder.

“Tomorrow,” he breathed. “He says I’ll thank him later.”

The dance separated them before she could ask what “it” was. She marked time, turned, advanced. Her smile was automatic, the one painted on every princess from birth. Inside, she was counting windows, doors, guards. She was measuring the distance between Mauricio’s ruby pin and the artery it hovered over every time he bowed.

The library doors shut behind them with the soft finality of a vault. Outside, the ballroom’s roar dulled to a seashell murmur; inside, the air tasted of dust and vellum and the ghost of their father’s pipe. Alistair crossed to the nearest shelf and pressed his forehead against the cracked leather spines as if they could absorb whatever poison Mauricio had poured into him. Natalie stayed by the door, hand still on the bronze latch, counting the seconds until the latch cooled—proof that no one had followed.

“He wants me to name him Lord Protector at the coronation oath,” Alistair said without turning. “Publicly. Before the altar and the relics and every camera in the capital.” His voice was steady, but the candle-flame on the lectern shivered when he exhaled. “Says it will reassure the council that my youth has ‘prudent scaffolding.’ His phrase.”

Natalie walked the central aisle, skirts brushing parchment wrappers that had waited decades for a sovereign’s signature. “You could refuse.”

“I could die,” he answered, matter-of-fact. “He reminded me that Uncle Reynard died of ‘summer flux’ the year I turned ten. And that cousin Leander’s hunting accident was ‘such a pity.’” Alistair pivoted, letting the shelf support his weight. “He didn’t threaten me, Nat. He simply recalled events. The way a historian recalls dates.”

She reached him. At this distance she saw the tremor he hid from the ballroom: a minute twitch at the corner of his left eye, the same twitch that had appeared the night their father’s physicians announced there was nothing more to be done. She lifted her hand, hesitated, then placed it over the pulse hammering beneath his collar. The skin was hot, damp with ballroom sweat, but the beat was rabbit-fast and afraid.

“I keep dreaming the crown is too heavy for my neck,” he whispered. “In the dream it snaps the vertebrae one by one—click, click, click—while the organ plays. I wake up tasting iron.”

“You’re twenty-two,” she said. “Your neck is fine.”

“Is it?” He caught her wrist, not roughly, and guided her fingers to the base of his skull. There was a tiny scar, no wider than a needle, still pink and fresh. “I found it this morning. No idea how it got there. Maybe a spider. Maybe a splinter from the ceremonial robe fitting. Maybe something that rides in Uncle’s pocket.”

Natalie’s stomach folded in on itself. She thought of the pin Mauricio had presented at dinner—ruby head, needle point, the way he had angled it so the candlelight slid off the metal like oil. She withdrew her hand, resisting the urge to wipe it on her skirt.

Alistair reached into his waistcoat and produced the cedar bird. It was smaller than she remembered, the wing-tips rounded by childhood handling, the grain darkened where their palms had once clutched it during thunderstorms. He set it in her open hand and closed her fingers over it. “Keep an eye on the snakes,” he said, repeating words he’d carved into the wood with a penknife the day they buried their father. “If anything happens to me—”

“Nothing will.”

“—give that to the Lord Regent. Tell him it’s evidence. Tell him Uncle keeps poison in stick-pins. Tell him whatever you have to, but make him listen.”

She stared at the bird’s beak, sharp as a blade despite the years. “I could go to the guard tonight. Captain Harrow owes our line—”

“Harrow kneels to whoever signs the payroll,” Alistair cut in. “Right now that signature is Mauricio’s.” He stepped back, straightening shoulders that would carry a kingdom tomorrow. “I need you alive, Nat. Not heroic. Alive and watching.”

The candles guttered; a draft slipped under the door, carrying the faint scent of rosewater and gunpowder from the ballroom. Somewhere a clock chimed the quarter. Alistair smoothed a stray lock of hair from her temple, the gesture tender and final. “One more dance, then bed. Tomorrow we wear armour nobody can see.”

He turned toward the door. Natalie stayed a moment longer, rolling the wooden bird between her palms, feeling the grain bite softly into skin that had never known calluses. When she followed, she left the latch unlatched—just enough for a draft, just enough to hear footsteps that had no business being there.

The banquet hall smelled of roasted peacock and melted wax. Twenty-four branch candelabra threw gold across the long table, glinting off crystal and the polished breastplates of the ceremonial guard. Natalie sat between the Duchess of Lyre and an under-secretary whose name she had already forgotten; her spine held the same perfect angle it had held since childhood, but inside she was counting heartbeats. Alistair was directly opposite, the high collar of his doubleter forcing his chin up, the candlelight catching the faint sheen of perspiration at his temple. Between them, salt cellars and epergnes rose like small fortifications.

Mauricio waited until the second course—truffled teal—had been cleared. He rose without scraping his chair, a trick Natalie had never mastered, and lifted a small velvet box from his pocket. The court quieted in layers, conversation falling away from the head of the table downward until the only sound was the fire snapping in the marble hearth. He did not speak at once; he let the silence stretch until it became its own form of address.

“Tomorrow,” he said, voice carrying the easy cadence of a man who had never needed to shout, “our prince will swear the ancient oath. A coronation is a chain of moments, each link forged by loyalty.” He opened the lid. Inside, on a bed of black satin, lay a pin: a single ruby-headed falcon, wings folded, gold beak pointed like a dart. “This clasp once fastened the cloak of King Edmund the Steadfast before he rode against the northern rebels. I offer it to my nephew, that the same steadfastness attend him.”

Polite applause rippled outward. Mauricio circled the table. The ruby caught every flame and threw it back in splinters of red. When he reached Alistair, he did not simply hand the box; he lifted the pin between thumb and forefinger, holding it so the needle point angled directly at the prince’s throat. A servant stepped forward with the crimson mantle that would be buckled tomorrow. Mauricio’s fingers hovered, letting the moment stretch.

Natalie saw it then: the micro-movement at the corner of Mauricio’s mouth, a twitch so brief it might have been a trick of light—except his eyes held the same stillness she had seen in the falconer’s yard the day the hood came off and the bird did not move, already broken. Triumph, cold and absolute, flickered there and vanished behind the mourner’s mask he wore for the court.

Alistair lowered his head the required inch. The pin slid through velvet and skin alike; Natalie watched the gold shaft vanish into the fold of the mantle, watched her brother’s throat contract as the point pricked the hollow above his collarbone. A single bead of blood appeared, black in the candlelight, absorbed at once by the wool. Mauricio’s thumb pressed the clasp shut, sealing fabric to flesh, gift to wound.

“May it serve you long,” Mauricio said, stepping back. The court applauded more loudly this time; knives struck goblets in approval. Alistair lifted his wine with the hand that did not tremble, toasted his uncle, drank. The droplet of blood had already dried, but Natalie could not stop staring at the place where metal met skin, the way the ruby sat directly over the pulse she had felt racing the night before.

Servants swept in with syllabub and candied orange. Conversation resumed, bright and brittle. Across the table Alistair smiled at some compliment, the expression stretching too wide, like cloth pulled to tearing. The pin winked at his throat, a second mouth, red and closed for now. Natalie tasted iron under the sugar on her tongue.

She set her spoon down. The duchess beside her spoke of tomorrow’s procession route, how the balconies had been reinforced for flower girls. Natalie nodded at intervals, but her mind followed the invisible path of the pin: through wool, through skin, into blood, into heart. She pictured the hollow shaft she had once seen in an apothecary’s drawer, the kind that could be filled with a drop of essence of nightshade, sealed with wax the colour of garnets. She pictured Mauricio’s thumb pressing the release, the wax cracking, the poison entering her brother with the same ease that courtesy entered conversation.

The knot in her stomach cinched tighter, pulling grief and fury into a single hard core. She smiled at the duchess, excused herself, and walked the length of the hall beneath music and laughter, feeling the wooden bird knock softly against her thigh through the pocket of her skirt. Tomorrow Alistair would wear the pin again beneath the crown. Tomorrow the chain of moments Mauricio spoke of would close around his neck. And she would be watching, alive, ready to break the link before it snapped shut.

The corridors were colder at night, the torches burned lower, and the stone seemed to breathe. Natalie moved barefoot, her soles registering every ridge of mortar, every draft that slipped beneath tapestries. She had left the bird on the pillow; its weight had begun to feel accusatory, as if it might crack the feathers open and scream. The palace clock had struck two when she abandoned her bed. Sleep was a country whose border guards had turned her away.

She passed the gallery of ancestral portraits. Candle-glow slid across varnished faces, making the old kings blink. Halfway down the length she heard voices—male, measured, the cadence of men who believed themselves alone. Instinct dropped her into a crouch behind a plinth that supported a marble Diana. The cold nudged her spine through the linen of her nightgown.

“—say the physicians are ready with the statement,” came the first voice. Lord Pemberton, she thought, Keeper of the Seal. “Sudden fever, weakness of the heart. All very tidy.”

A dry chuckle answered. Chancellor Haverford. “And if the boy surprises us? Grows a spine?”

“Then we remind Mauricio that accidents attend surprises.” Pemberton’s tone was mild, as though discussing crop rotation. “Either way the transition is served. A month, six at most, and the regency council becomes the crown council.”

Natalie’s knees began to ache but she did not shift. The word transition hung in the air like incense, thick, cloying, impossible to wave away.

Haverford again: “The prince’s father lasted longer than expected. We cannot afford another twenty-year reign.”

“Mauricio understands patience. A pinprick here, a whisper there. The lad will falter; they always do when the room smells of fresh paint and old blood.”

Footsteps resumed, soft slippered scuffs on stone. She risked a look. The two councillors walked shoulder to shoulder, robes hitched over their arms, gray heads inclined like conspirators in a chapel. Their shadows merged on the floor, one elongated shape that swallowed Diana’s marble feet.

She waited until the sound died, then stood. Her pulse beat so hard the collar of her nightgown fluttered. She thought of Alistair’s twitching eye, the bead of blood absorbed by wool, the way Mauricio’s thumb had lingered on the clasp. The corridor seemed narrower now, ceiling pressing down, air thinned to ribbon.

Back in her chambers she barred the door with the back of a chair. The bird waited where she had left it, beak pointing at the window. She climbed into bed still standing, knees drawn up, covers over her head like a child hiding from thunder. In that cocoon she rehearsed sentences she would speak to Alistair at dawn: You are in danger. They have already buried you in their minds. We must go to the guard together, must—

But even as she shaped the words she felt them crumble. Harrow’s face appeared, apologetic and immovable: Hysterical accusations, Your Highness. She saw the council’s polite smiles, the way they would close ranks like a wall of silk.

She pressed the wooden bird against her sternum until the wing edges dented her skin. Tomorrow the crown would touch her brother’s head; tomorrow the pin would pierce him again. She could not let the link close. She would not.

The candle drowned in its own wax sometime before first light, and Natalie remained awake, counting heartbeats, planning a language that had no words yet, only the taste of iron and the shape of a link snapping open.

She sat on the window-seat until the sky paled, knees tucked under the linen shift, bird cupped in both palms. The carved wingtips pressed half-moons into her skin; she shifted them, let the pain sharpen, then eased off, a private metronome of penance. When the palace bells tolled six she was still there, nightgown damp with dew that had condensed on the glass, hair sticking to her cheek like wet silk.

Alistair’s face kept superimposing itself over the courtyard below: the way his brows had lifted when the pin went in, the small indrawn breath only a sister would notice. She rehearsed the warning she would deliver, trimming it shorter each time, stripping away adjectives, away anything that sounded like fear. Fear would make him kind; kindness would kill him.

She washed in cold water, dressed without summoning her maid, laced the stays herself, tighter than usual, until her ribs took on the hard curve of armor. The bird went into the pocket of her skirt, a weight that swung against her thigh as she walked the servants’ corridor to avoid the early courtiers. She would catch him before prayers, before Mauricio could appear with another helpful suggestion, before the council assembled their patient smiles.

The prince’s antechamber smelled of beeswax and orange rind. A page blinked at her, startled by the hour, but she lifted two fingers—wait—and he stepped aside. The inner door stood ajar; she saw Alistair’s reflection in the standing mirror, shirt open, candle in hand, examining the puncture on his collarbone. A bruise had bloomed around it, purple-brown, the size of a copper coin. He touched the swelling, winced, then touched it again, as if proof of pain were necessary.

She pushed the door without knocking. “You need a physician.”

He startled, turned. “Nat. God, you’re pale.”

“You need a physician,” she repeated. “And you need to listen to me.”

He set the candle down, began fastening the shirt with shaking fingers. “I’m listening.”

She closed the door, leaned back against it. Words backed up in her throat, thick, bitter. She chose the simplest. “The pin was poisoned. Mauricio meant it. Last night I heard Pemberton and Haverford planning your—” She stopped herself before transition could leave her mouth. “Planning an accident. The physicians are bribed. The guard won’t help. You have to flee. Tonight.”

He stared, eyes bloodshot, and for a moment she saw the boy who had once hidden with her inside the draperies during thunderstorms. Then the prince-mask slid down. “Slowly,” he said. “Start again.”

She told him, voice low, everything except the tremor in her knees. She omitted only Easton’s future existence, the guild, the impossible geography of revenge still unmapped. When she finished the room was silent except for the candle guttering.

He rubbed the bruise, looked at his fingers as if expecting color to come off. “If I run, I forfeit the line. Mauricio becomes regent by law. Half the council wants it.”

“Better a regent than a corpse.”

“And you?” His gaze sharpened. “He’ll marry you off within the week, some border baron who smells of sheep. I won’t leave you to that.”

“I’d rather a husband who smells of sheep than a brother who smells of embalming oil.” The sentence cracked out harder than intended; she saw him flinch.

He walked to the window, shoulders drawn. Outside, the first banners were being hung for the procession, crimson streamers snapping like fresh blood. “Give me proof,” he said. “Bring me the pin, a vial, a signed confession. Something I can show the Privy Chamber. Without it I’m a frightened boy seeing ghosts.”

“You’re a boy who’ll be a ghost by dusk.”

“Then fetch me armour, Nat. Not smoke.”

She felt the conversation slipping, the way small boats slide from moorings. “I will get proof,” she said. “But you will wear a steel gorget under your collar tomorrow. Promise me.”

He turned, managed a tired smile. “I promise.”

She stepped closer, took the candle, tipped it so wax pooled on the tabletop, then pressed the wooden bird upright into the soft mound. It cooled instantly, bird perched like a sentinel. “Keep it in sight,” she said. “When the wax cracks, remember that I’m cracking too.”

He touched her shoulder, thumb tracing the bone. “We’ll survive this day. Then we’ll survive the next.”

She wanted to stay, to bar the door with her body, but time was already thinning. She left him dressing for chapel, the bird watching him from its wax pedestal. In the corridor she pressed her forehead to cool stone, whispered the rest of the promise she had not spoken aloud: If I cannot save you, I will avenge you. And then nothing.