Chapter Two: The Longest Four Days
The next morning, Lyra found a sword on her bed.
Not a servant's blade — not the short, functional thing she'd been issued when she first arrived. This was something else entirely. The hilt was wrapped in dark leather, worn smooth as though it had been handled for years. The steel caught the pale morning light and scattered it like broken glass. Along the fuller, etched so finely she had to tilt it to see, ran a single line of Old Faeric script.
She didn't read Old Faeric particularly well. But she recognized the word protected.
She brought it to breakfast. Set it on the table beside her plate with a deliberate clank.
Caelindor didn't flinch. He turned a page of whatever document he was reading, lifted his tea, and said, "Good morning."
"Explain."
"It's a sword, Lyra. I assumed you'd recognize one by now."
"I recognize it. I want to know why it's spelled in Old Faeric and why it appeared on my pillow in the middle of the night like some sort of deranged courtship ritual."
He looked up at that. One dark brow arched with infuriating elegance. "Courtship ritual."
"You know what I mean."
"The Shadow Court made a second attempt last night," he said, setting his document down. "Two scouts in the east corridor. I dealt with them." A pause. "You sleep deeply."
She stared at him. "You stood in my room while I slept."
"I stood in your doorway," he said, with the tone of a man who found the distinction very important, "and dealt with two assassins, and left you a blade so that the next time something comes for you, you are not unarmed."
The matter-of-fact delivery was somehow worse than if he'd been tender about it. He said it the way someone might say I fixed the latch on your window — practical, impersonal, as though it had cost him nothing to stand in the dark and keep watch over her sleeping form while enemies crept through his own halls.
Lyra looked down at the sword. Then back at him.
"Three days," she said.
"Three days," he agreed, and returned to his document.