Chapter 3: Four Days Too Early
The attack came on a Threnody day, which is the day the realm accounts its dead.
Delary was on the marble steps when the first scream cut through the garden. She thought it was laughter. It sharpened, and kept sharpening, and became something else.
A servant ran at her, face grey. "My lady. Your chambers. There has been an incident."
"What incident?"
The servant's eyes went past her shoulder and stayed there. "It is not safe."
The birds went silent. The afternoon sun dimmed as if a cloud had been drawn across it by hand. Delary had felt that exact pressure once before, on the night of her birth, and her body remembered it before her mind did. She was already moving when the west wing went up.
Stone. Fire. The ground punched upward and threw her down the steps. Burning oil, and under it a smell she recognised from her first life and had hoped never to meet again, the copper sweetness of a ward being broken mid-sentence.
"Protect the lady."
"Assassins. Seal the gates."
Spencer was running before she had finished falling.
No coat. No stillness. His face stripped of the calm she had watched for three days like a wall being taken down brick by brick.
"Do not move," he said.
Something whistled. He turned, took her against his chest, and a blade buried itself in the stone where her head had been.
"I told you not to move." It came out not angry but frightened, and fear in a man like that is its own kind of alarm.
Delary listened, with her ear against his coat, to the rhythm of his breathing. It was not the breathing of a man in a fight.
It was the breathing of a man in a familiar fight.
A second blade came. Spencer raised one hand and the air around the blade went wrong. It thickened, slowed, thickened again, until the steel hung in the air like a fly in amber, trembling, and then shattered into filings that rang on the flagstones and lay still.
Delary had read every treatise on magic her house owned, twice, out of boredom and hunger. There was no school in the Registry that could do that. There was no school in the Registry that could name it.
"What was that?"
He took her wrist and pulled her into the garden at a run. Past the hedge line, past the second fountain, past the ornamental turn that had no path and led nowhere. He did not stumble. He did not slow. He did not look.
He ran it like a man running a route he had already run.
Masked figures came out of the smoke at the stone arch, and one of them raised a staff and began to chant. The chant was wrong in a way Delary could hear. Syllables that belonged to no rite she had ever studied.
Spencer put her behind him. "Close your eyes."
"No," she said.
He looked back at her, and for half a second the stillness was gone entirely and there was only exhaustion on his face, and grief, and something that looked almost like relief.
"Then do not forget what you see," he said.
He stepped forward. The air snapped. The pressure that came off him was not bright and it was not elegant. It was heavy the way deep water is heavy, the way an ending is heavy. The chanting stuttered. One attacker dropped his staff and pressed both hands to his skull.
Spencer spoke one word.
It was not loud. That was the horror of it. It was barely above conversation.
The world leaned. The masked men fell where they stood, all at once, like men whose strings had been cut at a single stroke. The survivors ran.
Guards poured into the garden. Spencer stepped back from her as though distance were a wound he was keeping clean.
Delary caught his sleeve. "Do not disappear again."
His breath caught. Then he said, quietly, "Every time I interfere, it resists harder. This attack was not due until the sixteenth."
"Due," she repeated. "Until."
"Yes."
"You have lived this."
"Yes."
"And me." Her voice failed for a moment and she made it work again. "Was I here before?"
He looked at the ground. "That is the part I do not know. You were not meant to exist like this. You were not in the flow."
"Then what am I to you?"
The guards were close. Her father's voice was already calling her name across the lawn, frantic and furious, arriving for the second time in three days just as the truth came into reach.
Spencer leaned in, said it fast, and was gone into the smoke before the last word had finished leaving his mouth.
"You are the reason I broke time, and I have four days to find out what you are."
In her chambers, with the door barred and her hands still shaking, Delary laid out everything she knew on the bed like cards.
The attack was four days early.
The runes in her garden had been cut by a hand that knew the estate's wards.
The correction on her birth record was dated four days after she was born.
Four. Everywhere, four.
Delary sat with that for a long time. Then she did what she had never once done in nineteen years in this house. She wrote it down, in her own small hand, in the back of a book no one would think to open.
Rule one. Nothing in this house happens by accident. Find the hand that counts.