Noa looked up as if startled. “Oh no! I knew I forgot something. Papa will be so angry—”
“No, he won’t,” the woman said gruffly. “Come along. I’ll find you a spare. Just mind you remember it next time, all right?”
Noa nodded, brushing away a tear.
The guard shook her head. “I don’t know what your papa was thinking, buying you that cloak. Black cloaks are banned in Florean City. You’ll have people thinking your family are Marchenans.”
“Marchenans?” Noa said, turning wide eyes of innocence on the guard.
“You know. Supporters of the Dark Lord. Come on, don’t dally. I’m supposed to be on duty.”
This was interesting. Did Julian have supporters in Florean City? Noa knew she couldn’t ask questions without arousing suspicion, so she filed the information away.
Twenty minutes later, she was striding purposefully along one of the servants’ corridors, her new red cloak billowing behind her and her old clothes stuffed into her pack.
She had no intention of attacking Xavier or anything like that. No, she was here to gather information about his plans, particularly how they concerned the Lost Words. She would find out if he’d recovered any magical languages himself, and if so, what they were and how he planned to use them against Astrae. Then, Noa thought smugly, she would take that information to Julian, and show him just how valuable her newfound powers were.
She spent the morning wandering the palace, eavesdropping. She knew that nobody paid much attention to pages, most of whom were the second or third children of unimportant nobles, and that as long as she acted as if she knew where she was going, people would leave her alone. She knew every room and hallway, and she knew which parts of the palace to avoid in order not to arouse suspicion. Sometimes she recognized a guard or ambassador who had served under her mother, but none of them recognized her. Noa wasn’t surprised—she had been barely eleven when they’d fled, and she looked different now, being a head taller and skinny rather than round-faced and plump. Her freckles had faded and been replaced by a smattering of pimples, which she had never been grateful for until now. Grown-ups didn’t seem to change much in two years, she noticed, apart from sometimes getting fatter.
A strange sense of unease hung over the palace. Noa often found herself eavesdropping on conversations held in hushed whispers in shadowy corners. If anyone saw her listening, she hurried up to them and nervously asked for directions somewhere, as if she had been waiting for them to notice her.
After a few hours of this, one thing had become clear: people were almost as afraid of Xavier as they were of Julian. They whispered about the executions of dark mages, and even about the new king going too far. Noa didn’t understand it—most people disliked dark mages. Why would they be so upset about Xavier killing them? Then she glanced out a window.
Queen’s Step didn’t have any beaches, just a stretch of rocky shore that disappeared at high tide. Down on that shore was a row of skeletons chained to the rock. At least, they were skeletons now, the bones picked so clean they gleamed in the sunlight. It was low tide, and crabs scurried hither and thither. It took Noa a moment to put those two things together, and to realize that everyone in the palace—all Xavier’s mages, servants, and soldiers—would have been able to watch as the crabs devoured the dark mages.
Noa drew back from the window. She had to sit down for a while after that, because her knees had turned into pudding. She had seen animal skeletons—dead whales and seals sometimes washed up on Astrae—but never people. A servant asked if she was all right, and she forced herself to answer normally, concealing her clenched fists beneath her skirt.
After another hour of spying, she knew that she couldn’t stay in the palace much longer—she was beginning to attract frowning looks from some of the guards she had walked past more than once. Yet she couldn’t leave without finding out more about the Lost Words.
She rubbed her clammy hands against the red cloak and took a deep breath. Then she set out for the royal wing of the palace.
Noa hadn’t wanted to go there. Partly because pages weren’t normally allowed in that part of the palace. But also because the royal wing had been her home.
Her heart thudded in her ears. She felt like a ghost herself, retracing the path she had often taken all those years ago—past the councillors’ offices, up the black marble staircase, past the courtyard with its flowering vines. She worried briefly that the finches would recognize her and raise a fuss. There was the banister she and Julian used to slide down. She forgot all about being mad at him. She just wished he were with her.
She lost her nerve at the sight of the guards standing at either side of the huge doors. Her old bedroom was beyond those doors. What would it look like now? Was it still a bedroom, or had Xavier turned it into something else? She doubled back and slipped into a small garden, folding herself onto a bench between two trellises crowded with climbing roses.
She brushed away her tears. She hadn’t realized how hard it would be to come back to the home that had been stolen from her. Last night, she had tried to think of everything that could go wrong, but she hadn’t thought about this. She hadn’t come up with a contingency plan for her own memories.
Voices murmured behind her. Several people were approaching. Noa tried to press herself into the trellis, but the roses were prickly. Her thoughts were too jumbled to remember any of the excuses she had invented for her presence in the royal wing. She jumped to her feet, but before she could dart away, three people rounded the corner.
Two of
