Underneath, it said,My sweet Ollie, overflowing with smugness after this morning’s Great Donut Incident.
Ollie. I couldn’t imagine anyone referring to the seneschal that way, and I had no idea what a donut incident was, much less a great one, but clearly, we’d struck gold. This book had belonged to the Lady Marche. No one else could have transmuted love into each sweep of the charcoal like this.
“Ky.” Urgency slanted my voice upward. “This is it.”
I turned pages, revealing flowery handwriting, plus more drawings: the ancient oak at the heart of the swamp, then Zephyrine, dark-eyed and brown-skinned, wearing her usualattire of palmetto leaves. Something about the goddess looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. And?—
My pulse jumped. There was the dagger, in crisp and perfect detail. And a few pages later, a sketch of a baby who could only be Amryssa.
“We found it,” Kyven said.
I grinned up at him.
“And,” he said softly, “you finally called me Ky.”
My brow wrinkled. I had, hadn’t I? “It just...came out. I don’t know why.”
His mouth tilted. “Probably because of that whole familiarity business we discussed. Accompanied by a commensurate amount of contempt, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure,” I echoed, faint.
Something in his eyes shifted. “Would you like to read this alone? Or together?”
I considered. “Alone” was the obvious answer, and I opened my mouth to tell him so.
But something else came out.
“Together. If you want.”
Apparently, he did want, because he stripped to his usual nighttime breeches and stretched out on the bed with the diary while I ducked into the bathroom to change. When I reemerged in my nightgown, Kyven—Ky?—opened his arms, gesturing for me to join him.
I drifted toward the bed, contemplating how best to refuse him. And then I just...
Stopped.
Seven hells, I didn’t have it in me right now. Not when all Ireallywanted was to nestle against his side. To let the thud of his heartbeat assure me that while he’d almost died—trying to save me for athirdtime, no less—we’d both come out of that room alive and no matter what this diary said about Zephyrine, or Amryssa, everything would be okay because we’d make it okay, and tonight I just wanted to forget that I still didn’t know Ky’s secrets, and that he’d soon marry Amryssa and desert me, because couldn’t I worry about all that in the morning?
So I gave in. I crawled across the mattress and settled in the circle of his arms, my head pillowed on his shoulder.
He didn’t move. When I glanced up, pure shock was splashed across his features.
“What?” I said.
“I just...didn’t think that would work. Not for one single second did I think that would work.”
“Are you complaining?”
“No.” He cinched an arm around me and propped the book on his chest, where we could both see it. “Complaining is the last thing I’d dream of doing right now.”
“Okay. Good.”
“Are you ready, then?”
“Probably not,” I admitted. “But it’s now or never.”
The Lady’s Marche’s story started out innocently enough. The diary’s early entries detailed her marriage and subsequent move to the house—“happy events,” in her words—followed by paragraphs about her hopes for a baby. But when pregnancy eluded her for a year, then two, her optimism lapsed into despair.
Ky turned pages. In them, the Lady chronicled how, in her third year of marriage, she turned to Zephyrine. She made routine treks into the marsh, armed with cakes and wine she left beneath the holy oak.
