Her foot trembled as she started up the staircase. If she closed her eyes, she could just as easily be climbing the stairs in the stables again, fifteen years ago. The stables she and William had always run off to, where there was nothing but the two of them and the stars through the hole in the roof. But the last time she climbed those stairs at her family’s estate, it was to wait for him. He never came. Not the first night, nor the second, or the third. On the fourth, men loyal to William’s father Lord Beneger found her there, and told her their orders, and gave her one chance to flee.

She took it.

As she started the second set of stairs up to Roger’s office, she saw herself fleeing down in the other direction, as she had back then. She and William had been so young and so naïve to think their love was a match for that amount of hate. No, not so young, not so naïve. They had been ignorant.

No, not they. Because William had figured it out.

She was the one who waited in a stable loft for three days, concocting increasingly elaborate tales for his delay. It was a girlish sort of hope—the same one she felt all this week. That same young and stupid ignorant feeling that had blinded her years before.

At the top of the third stair, she glanced down the hallway. Two Guardsmen now always stood outside the room halfway down, what was once an empty salon for the widow Murdac. If they’d let her pass, Arable could knock on that door and get whatever answers she needed from its sole inhabitant.

Lady Margery passed this room every day. The Earl of Warwick was still housed in the solar at the end of the hall.

Arable knew exactly where Margery had heard the rumor.

She didn’t want to climb further. But her legs kept moving. At the top of the fourth stair she felt as if tears might come, but they didn’t. And by the top of the fifth stair, she realized why. She had cried it all out already. The months of feeling worthless that had turned into years, years of hating the sound of her own name. Years of seeing his face when she closed her eyes and wanting to drown herself to stop it. Until eventually it died. William could still make her happy, yes, but she had cut out that part of herself long ago that allowed him to hurt her.

And by the time she opened the crooked little door that led to Roger’s office, the rumor had ceased to be funny. After all, William had proven to Arable fifteen years ago exactly where she lay in his priorities.

William was at Roger’s desk, his back was to her, and something closed inside of her.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”