The smell of smoke woke me before the sound did.
It wasnt the warm familiar smoke of hearthwood and tallow candles, the smell I had fallen asleep to every night of my sixteen years.
This was different, it was kind that catches in the back of the throat and stays there which means choking you. It was something that was burning that was not meant to burn.
I was sitting upright before I was fully awake, pulled from sleep by some deep animal instinct that understood the difference long before my mind caught up.
Outside my window, I saw several torchlight moved across the grounds.
I knew immediately, that those were not our torches. Our house guards carried lanterns, not torches and they moved in pairs on a rotation my father had designed himself, a pattern I had memorised without meaning to simply from years of watching it from this window when I couldn't sleep.
What moved below me now had no pattern. It spread across the grounds like water finding the lowest point, filling every corner, and there were too many of them, far too many, for anything that was meant to be routine.
I pressed my palm flat against the cold glass and counted.
There were thirty, at least, possibly more beyond the treeline.
I heard my father's voice from a distance but it was muffled by walls. The one thing I learnt from this man who has commanded armies and learned that the most dangerous thing you can do in a crisis is let your voice betray you.
For one thing, I didn't know what was going on yet but I knew that tone. I had heard it in the stories he told about campaigns, about the moments before something terrible became something survivable.
You buy time and you think and do not let them see that you are afraid because the moment they see it they stop negotiating.
I dressed hurriedly in the dark to make my way out of my room.
I have thought about this moment many times since. If I should have gone to him instead, would the outcome be different.
A daughter who loved her father the way I loved mine should have walked down that staircase and stood beside him and faced whatever was coming with her chin up and her shoulders high the way he'd taught me.
I think about it and then I think about what he would have said if I had.
You are the Cavanth that survives this. Go.
He would have said that. He was the kind of man he who spent his whole life protecting the things that mattered most.
He would have looked at me in the dark of that hallway and he would have said go without hesitating, because he was already thinking three steps ahead of the moment we were standing in and three steps ahead meant me somewhere safe and far away.
The back staircase was narrow and unlit and I knew every step of it by memory the third one creaked if you put your weight on the left side, the seventh didn't creak at all, a small miracle I had been grateful for a hundred times as a child sneaking down to the kitchens after bedtime.
I wasn't sneaking now, I was moving as fast as i could, one hand on the wall, the other gripping the banister.
The kitchen was empty and warm, the cook's fire banked for the night, the air thick with the smell of bread and dried herbs hanging from the ceiling in bundles. I walked out the scullery through the low door at the back that led to the kitchen garden, and t I was outside and everywhere was cold.
The early spring air came at me like a wall and the shock of it forced a breath I hadn't meant to take and I pressed flat against the outer wall of the house and held it.
The voices were closer now. My father's still among them, still buying whatever time he had left and another voice was one I didn't recognise, the voice of a man reading from something rather than speaking freely.
The words came to me in fragments through the cold.
—charges of conspiracy—
—against the crown and the person of the Emperor—
—the Cavanth clan, found guilty in absentia—
The garden wall was rough stone against my back. What I was hearing could not be real. My father, who had given thirty years of his life to this empire's military, who had buried men he loved in its service, who had taught me that the Cavanth name meant something.
—sentence to be carried out immediately, by order of—
My mother's voice then came in suddenly. She wasn't screaming. My mother never screamed but something in it that I had never heard before broke open in my chest and has never fully closed since a sound that was the opposite of screaming, compressed and small, the sound of someone who has just had something taken from them that they will never get back.
I ran as fast as my legs could carry me.
I went over the garden wall at the far corner, the one closest to the treeline,I had climbed it a dozen times as a girl for no reason other than that I could. I dropped down on the other side and I ran into the dark and I did not look back.
I have never stopped being ashamed of that.
I have also never stopped believing it was the only reason I am still alive.
******
The city was three miles from our estate. I reached the outer edges of it as the sky was beginning to grey at the horizon.
I had no money, cloak or a name I could safely use. I had the clothes on my back and the skills my father had spent sixteen years quietly installing in me without either of us ever acknowledging that he was preparing me for something.
I found a doorway deep enough to shelter in and I sat down in it and I let myself feel everything.
The Cavanth name was gone. Everything it had stood for, everything it had built, dragged through imperial announcements like something shameful.
Traitors.
The word would be in every broadsheet in the city by midmorning. People who had attended our dinners and accepted our hospitality and shaken my father's hand would read it and shake their heads and say they had always thought something was not quite right about that family.
I knew the truth and everything that happened was a lie. You do not spend sixteen years as the daughter of a man like Bryn Cavanth without knowing his character and his character had no room in it for what they were accusing him of.
I would prove that, I did not know yet how long it would take. I also did not know that five years later I would be inside the very palace that had signed my family's destruction, folding linen with hands that remembered a different life, waiting for the moment, I only knew one thing,
A Cavanth does not kneel to grief, fear,to the people who think that destroying a name is the same as destroying the people who carry it.
My name was Elowen Cavanth and I was still here