Eleven Books

So hush and hark my words

She never thought much of reading- it was hard to when there were no books.

That's unfair. There were textbooks, educational material, that she had to study. But they weren't available to anyone outside the palace. Servants had to know how to write to communicate with each other and send to-do lists around, and reading and writing were rather obviously useful to anyone who would someday be writing laws and directing military affairs. If enough people died, that would be Ailsa, hence her literacy. But not a single common person in Anerah could read. Not one. It had been that way forever. And just to make sure- of what, Ailsa had never considered- every book that could possibly be found that wasn't government-sanctioned was burned. The Burnings were every month, and because Ailsa's grandparents were the first to go so far as to burn books, there was still a lot of material out there that needed to be eradicated. Ailsa had never been to a Burning; they were public affairs, and she'd only been outside the palace grounds a few times.

So it came as a surprise, to say the least, when on her seventeenth birthday the twilight blue dress that Rhiannon had tailored just for her contained a piece of paper tucked into the bodice. Open it tonight, Rhiannon had whispered. Let no one know it's there. Ailsa was not the trusting type, but she trusted her nurse unconditionally. So she followed the instructions after the celebration, when Rhiannon helped her out of the dress, gave a solemn nod, and left the room. Her hands, so steady when riding (although a bit brutalized from the aforementioned activity), started to shake when she read the words on the paper. Beautiful, slanted, deadly writing greeted her.

Are you going to sit and watch while your kingdom is dying? Midnight. One week's time. Alone.

It would be the height of idiocy to comply. Anyone could see that. But there was one thing keeping her from setting the note aside from her mind completely, or throwing it into the fireplace, or ripping it up, or something, anything to get that strange, heavy piece of paper to stop burning a hole through her eyes.

The note had been given to her by Rhiannon. Rhiannon, the woman who had cared for her for seventeen years, who had assured her that her hair was beautiful, who had never forced her into makeup, who had concealed her bruises rather than reveal to her family that she hadn't just been safely riding sidesaddle, who had snuck her down to the kitchen for chocolate once, when she was twelve and her—ah—feminine cramps had gotten bad enough that they kept her awake and silently crying, who had, again and again, picked her up when she fell.

She trusted Rhiannon with her life. And so Ailsa Danton forced herself to memorize the contents of the note before burning it. She didn't think too long about the fact that whoever had penned the note had specified no meeting place. Nobody who knew Rhiannon wouldn't know that her heart was in the palace stables. It was the question of who that kept her awake that night, because that opened up a chasm of possibilities that threatened to swallow her—and maybe her entire kingdom—whole.

The handwriting in the note was very different from the elegant script she'd been taught. As far as she knew, everyone who was palace-educated learned that cursive style. Which meant that whoever wrote those seventeen words had not been taught to write at the palace. Someone could read and write who wasn't government-taught.

Whatever this was, it was big.