As the Crow Falls | ✔

Chapter Eighteen

Isaiah's room was on the second floor of the palace. Something clinked at the bottom of the door as he shut it. Niccola looked down to find a smaller trapdoor pinned open in its bottom corner, no doubt for Pekea. Isaiah motioned Niccola away from it. She complied, puzzled, and he crouched and flipped it shut without latching it, so that it could swing freely. Niccola immediately identified his motive. Their conversation would be less audible from outside without an open hole in the door.

"I presume you heard about the death in the lowlands," said Niccola as soon as he straightened up again.

"In full detail. How much do you know?"

"I saw the body."

He fell silent for a time. When he moved again, it was away from the door. "Where would you prefer to sit?"

Niccola glanced critically around the room. "You have only one chair."

"I have asked my parents for a second one before, but my mother is of the opinion that it would be wasted on me for as long as I live alone. Pekea does not count, despite her love of robbing me of this one."

"I'm fine with the floor if you are."

He responded by pulling a pillow from behind the dragon on the chair—she chirped in protest—and tossing it to Niccola with unnervingly accurate aim. He himself took a reading pillow from his bed and set it against the wall. Niccola dropped hers on the carpet and sat facing him as he picked his way down the buttons of his formal vest. He pulled it off and discarded it with little ceremony.

Niccola could not resist a tease. "Stripping down for me already?"

His grimace drove home the commonality they had discovered last night. It lightened Niccola's heart to see it, despite all the mixed feelings that ought to take precedence. Those feelings were not gone, but there was something humanizing about seeing the crown prince of Calis in plainer clothes. They were more equal that way.

Isaiah tipped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Niccola's eyes darted to his throat, where she could easily lunge with a knife if she meant him harm. He was trusting. Perhaps too trusting, to be sitting like this alone in the presence of someone who had already professed to mean his family harm.

"You are awfully calm for someone hosting a potential assassin," she said.

"You presume I am unable to defend myself."

That answer caught her off guard. Her startled silence surely gave it away, but Isaiah's expression had not changed when he opened his eyes and looked down again. Removing his vest, Niccola realized, was not just for informality. He was more free to move this way.

"In the market, you said you suspected a Talak for the disappearances," he said.

It was half a question. Niccola answered both the spoken and unspoken halves. "I still do, but no longer a Talak alone."

"Is this connected to the lead you said you had on your sister's disappearance?"

He remembered every word they'd spoken at the ball. Niccola expected to feel a flare of distrust towards him for hoarding that information, but what struck her instead was an odd kind of reassurance. It was not trust, but she was glad not to have to explain everything to someone on whom her cover rested. It also showed he thought her worth listening to.

"It might be," she said. "When my sister went missing, I took a possession of hers to a diviner, in search of any clue regarding her whereabouts. What he gave me in return was the name of your realm and the face of a woman who has something to do with my sister's disappearance. I do not know what role she played, if any; whether she was an innocent bystander, or whether she had an active hand. I suspect the latter."