The Beast's Vow

The Collegium bell rang four times, and Sol Maren did not look up.

She was on the third rung of the library ladder with a stack of new books pressed against her hip. The air smelled like dust, candle wax, and old paper going soft at the corners. Somewhere below, a first-year scratched a quill across a page, stopped, and scratched again, probably fixing a mistake he did not want anyone to see.

Sol knew the feeling.

She slid the next book onto the shelf. It was a fat blue volume with gold lettering. The Veshti Laments. A New Translation by Professor Aldous Brandt.

She stopped.

Her thumb rested on the gold letters of his name. She pulled the book back out and opened it near the middle, where the third Lament began, the one about the drowned fishing fleet, the one her grandmother used to hum while gutting herring. Her eyes went straight to the line she was looking for.

The sea gave back our men as salt.

In the old Veshti, the word was not salt. It was sorrow. The two sat almost on top of each other in the dialect, and only someone who had grown up on the Saltmere docks would hear the difference. Sol had changed it on purpose, years ago, in the first draft she handed to Brandt. She had changed it in every draft since.

It was a thumbprint in the wet clay of someone else’s work.

Her words, she thought. His name.

She closed the book and rubbed at the ink smudge her fingers had left on the gold cover until it was gone.

“There she is.”

The voice came from the foot of the ladder, warm and a little rough, like a favorite blanket.

“Professor,” she said.

“Ysolde. I have been hunting for you all afternoon.” Aldous Brandt stood with his hands folded over his round belly, silver hair combed back, smiling the smile of a man who had never once been in a hurry. “I see you found our new edition.”

Our.

The word came out a half-beat slow, like a missed step on a dark stair. Sol had noticed that years ago and never worked out what it meant.

“It looks lovely,” she said, coming down the ladder.

“The printer outdid himself.” He took the book from her and admired the binding. “Three years of work, and here it is. We should be proud of this one.”

We. Slow again.

Sol opened her mouth. The words were right there. I did the translation. You signed it. Or the smaller, safer one: Could my name go on the inside page, just once? She had practiced both in the mirror.

“The Laments are beautiful,” she said instead. “People will love them.”

“And that is thanks to you, my dear. Do not think I do not know it.” He patted her shoulder. “You have the best ear in the Collegium. I tell the others that all the time.”

Then tell them in print, she thought. She smiled instead.

That was the problem with Brandt. He was kind. He had pulled her out of a scholarship line when she was seventeen, a fisherman’s daughter with salt in her accent and one good dress. He had fed her, taught her, and written to her when she was sick. Every time she tried to be angry, the anger turned into guilt.

Her room was a narrow box on the fourth floor, with one window and one candle. Sol sat on the edge of her bed and dumped her purse onto the blanket, sorting the coins the way she did every week. Copper pennies. Silver halves. Two silver crowns she had been saving since spring.

Thirteen crowns. Seventy-seven short.

The letter from the moneylender sat folded beside her pillow. Master Hob Maren owes the sum of ninety crowns on the vessel Gull’s Mercy. Payment in full is due on the last day of the month, or the boat passes to the lender.

Her father’s boat. The only thing he had ever owned that was worth anything.

She could ask Brandt for an advance, but asking meant telling him why. Then he would be kind about it, and she would owe him again.

She sat there until her candle burned a thumb’s width lower. Then someone pounded on her door.

“Miss Maren! The Professor wants you in his study. Now, if you please.”

It was a first-year, breathless, with ink on his chin. Sol scooped her coins into the purse and followed him down.

Brandt’s study was behind a green door with a brass lion for a knocker. It smelled of pipe smoke and lemon oil, and the fire was always lit. She had always thought of it as the safest room in the world.

Tonight a stranger was inside: a tall man in a long red riding coat, mud to the knees, a leather satchel across his chest. A silver badge was pinned to his collar, a crowned key. Every child in Aurenne learned it before they learned their letters.

A royal courier.

“Ah, Ysolde,” said Brandt. “Come in. Close the door.”

He stood by the fire with a thick cream parchment in his hand, sealed with black wax stamped with the seal of the Queen Regent.

“The courier arrived an hour ago,” Brandt said. “It seems we have been honored with a commission.”

We. Half a beat too slow.

The courier met Sol’s eyes for a moment, then looked away toward the fire, as if he had already guessed how this evening would end.

“What kind of commission?” she asked.

“A very grand one.” Brandt cracked the seal and began to read aloud, his voice almost cheerful. “By order of Her Majesty the Queen Regent, a scholar of the dead tongues is summoned to travel to the palace at...”

He stopped.

The color drained from his face like water out of a basin. His lips went the shade of old candle wax.

“Professor?” said Sol.

He swallowed. “To the palace at Nocthorne,” he read, very quietly. “And there to read aloud, in full and with true understanding, the Treaty of Hollow Vows. This must be done before the Ninth Midwinter. The scholar will be given safe passage, and the Crown’s gratitude.”

The fire popped. The courier glanced at Brandt’s shaking hands with something that was not quite pity and not quite boredom. He had the look of a man who had delivered this letter before, to other studies, other fires.

Sol had heard of Nocthorne. Everyone had. It was a black palace in the northern woods, behind the stones where the Hollow began. Mothers used it to frighten children into bed.

She had seen Brandt tired, and she had seen him old. This was neither. This was the look of a man who had walked into a room and found something waiting for him in the dark.

“Sir,” said the courier, his voice flat, worn smooth by repetition. “I will need an answer by morning.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” Brandt folded the parchment. His hand shook, a tidy little tremble from the wrist that started a moment after he looked down at it. “Forgive me. My hands have not been what they were. The cold, you understand.”

The study was warm enough to sweat in. The courier’s eyes flicked to the fire, then back to Brandt, and his jaw tightened, though he said nothing.

“I am afraid I cannot go,” Brandt went on. “My health, you see. The roads, the weather, at my age.” He lifted his wet eyes to her. “But we cannot refuse the Crown, Ysolde. Not without consequence.”

We. Slow.

“Professor,” Sol said carefully, “you are the one who has studied the old treaties. You wrote the book.”

“Did I?” Brandt smiled, and it did not reach his eyes. “I wonder.”

He crossed the room and took both of her hands in his. His palms were cold and damp. The tremble was gone.

“Ysolde. My dear girl. I need to tell you something I should have said years ago.”

Her heart began to thud.

“You are better than I am,” said Brandt.

The words landed in the room like a dropped plate.

“You always have been. I have known it since the day you walked through our door, a skinny girl with a salt-stained coat and an ear that could hear a word breathe.” He squeezed her fingers. “There. I have said it.”

Sol’s throat closed up.

For nine years she had waited to hear those words. She had imagined them in a hundred different rooms. Now they were here, from his mouth, with the fire crackling and a stranger watching.

He sees me, she thought. He finally sees me.

Then a thought crept in behind it, cold and quiet. Why now?

She pushed it away.

“I want you to go in my place,” Brandt said softly. “The Crown will pay well. A commission like this could settle a great many debts.”

He knew about the boat. She had told him once, years ago, on a bad night. He had kept it the way he kept everything.

“It would be dangerous,” she said.

“It would be an honor.” He kissed the top of her head. “And I would not trust it to anyone else. Not anyone, my dear. Only you.”

Only you. Not slow at all.

She thought of the boat rocking at its mooring, of the thirteen crowns on her blanket, of Brandt’s hand resting warm on her shoulder for the first time in nine years. She thought of the courier’s eyes sliding away from hers, and of the strange, hollow pause before the professor had said we.

“How long would I be gone?” she asked.

“Weeks, perhaps. A season at most.” Brandt did not quite meet her eyes. “You would be home before you knew it, my dear. Home, and the boat saved, and your name finally spoken of in the halls the way it ought to be.”

Sol closed her eyes. Seventy-seven crowns. The name on the spine of a blue book.

And here was Brandt, holding her hands, finally saying she was worth something.

“I’ll go,” she said.

“Wonderful.” His whole body sagged with what looked like relief. “Courier, she accepts. Ysolde, you are a treasure.”

The courier drew a second sheet from his satchel. He hesitated, his gaze resting on Sol a moment longer than courtesy required, as though he meant to say something and thought better of it.

“The terms of the commission, Miss,” he said. “For your records.” He did not let go of the paper right away. When their fingers brushed, something flickered across his face, there and gone, before he stepped back and would not look at her again.

Brandt turned away to the fire and stood with his back to her, his shoulders rising and falling in long, quiet breaths.

Sol sat down in the chair by his desk and read the way she always did, line by line, with her finger under each word. It had saved her from bad leases, bad loans, and one very bad marriage proposal.

The first paragraphs were what she expected. Duties. Payment. Safe passage.

Then she reached the bottom of the page.

No person shall enter the palace of Nocthorne except by royal commission, and no person shall leave it until the commission is complete.

She read it twice. Then a third time, her finger shaking against the paper.

No person shall leave.

Her eyes slid to the line below it.

Ysolde Maren.

Black ink in a neat, looping hand. She knew the way the tail of the y curled under, because she had spent nine years copying that handwriting into her own notes.

Brandt’s writing. The ink had already dried.

Behind her, the fire crackled. Brandt did not turn around. The courier stood very still by the door and made no move to leave.

He had signed her away before he ever asked.

Sol did not sleep.

By the time the sky went grey, she had made a decision. The contract sat folded in her coat pocket, Brandt’s forgery of her name still burning in her mind. She could have knocked on his study door and said it plainly: Why is my name already on this?

But then he would have smiled. He would have used the word we. And the worst part was that she would have wanted to believe him.

She needed the money. The boat was seventy-seven crowns away from lost.

I will take their coin first, she thought. Then I will be angry.

The man at the Collegium gate was not a courier.

He sat on a tall bay horse with a leather case across his knees. His coat was dark blue and plain, but it fit the way only good tailoring fits. His hair was going grey at the temples. A thin scar ran through his left eyebrow.

Sol knew that scar. She had kissed it once.

“Hello, Sol,” said Lord Dain Co