Read Chapter 3: The Whisper of the Whistle

The chamber they’d given her was too beautiful to trust.

Maeve stood in the center of it, turning in a slow circle, her bare feet cold against flagstones that shimmered like river stone. The walls were hung with tapestries of gold and rust, autumn leaves embroidered in thread that seemed to move when she wasn't looking at them. A bed stood against one wall, piled high with quilts in shades of amber and wine. On a carved table near the window, someone had laid out a clean shift, a woolen dress the color of oak bark, and a pair of soft leather shoes.

Her clothes from home were gone.

The panic hit her like a wave of river water, sudden and cold. Her hand flew to her collar—still her own shirt, her own skirt, she was still wearing them—but her satchel. Where was her satchel? The one with Declan's letters, her mother's rosary, the photograph of them all outside the pub on her father's birthday.

She crossed the room in three strides and wrenched open the chest at the foot of the bed. Empty. The wardrobe too. She was turning toward the door, heart rattling against her ribs, when something metal clinked against the stone floor.

The silver whistle.

It lay on the flagstones where she'd dropped it, rolled out of a fold of her skirt when she moved. Ciarán's whistle. The one he'd pressed into her palm at the standing stones, his fingers cool against hers, his voice already fading like mist: *One silver breath, Maeve. That is all I can give you.*

She crouched and picked it up. It was warm despite the cold air of the chamber, warmer than anything else she'd touched in this place. The silver was worked with patterns that looked like wind moving through reeds, and when she held it to her ear, she heard something beneath the silence.

Not a whistle. A hum. Like a string plucked far away and still trembling.

Maeve wrapped her hand around it until her knuckles went white. Ciarán had warned her not to trust promises made in this court. But this whistle was hers, given freely, and if the queen intended her to be an agent in the mortal world—if she was to leave and return, to work in the world that kept moving without her—then she would need to hide it well.

The door opened without a knock.

Maeve shoved the whistle up her sleeve, pressing it against her forearm, and turned. A woman stood in the doorway, tall and slender, with hair the color of pale ash and a face that looked carved from winter frost. Servants' livery, gray and unadorned, but her eyes were sharp with something that wasn't servitude.

"My lady sent me to attend you," the woman said. No bow. No courtesy beyond the words themselves. "I am to help you dress and present you at the evening hall."

Maeve kept her hands clasped in front of her, the whistle hidden against her arm. "I have a satchel. Small, brown leather. It was with me when I arrived."

The woman's expression did not change. "I was told you brought nothing."

"Then I was robbed."

"Or you are mistaken." The woman stepped into the room, her gaze sliding over Maeve like a blade checking for flaws. "The Court of Autumn does not steal from its guests, little mortal. It only takes what is given."

Maeve's jaw tightened. "Then I'm not mistaken. I gave nothing. I want my satchel."

For a long moment the woman simply looked at her. Then, something shifted in her face—not warmth, not kindness, but a flicker of interest, like a fish turning just beneath dark water.

"You have courage," the woman said. "That will serve you or kill you here. I have not yet decided which."

She turned and gestured sharply at the dress laid out on the table. "Wear that. The queen does not receive guests in rags."

"I don't take orders from servants."

"I am not a servant." The woman's mouth curved, thin and cold. "I am the queen's hand. Trusted to arrange all she touches. Including you."

Maeve's blood went cold. She'd hidden the whistle a moment before this woman entered. But had the queen known it would be here? Did she know everything that happened in her court, in her stones, in her halls?

The silver whistle pressed against her arm seemed to heat in answer, a pulse of warmth against her skin. And in that pulse, Maeve felt something else. A thread. Taut and alive, stretching out of the chamber, out of the court, into some deep and distant dark.

Not a tune. Not a call. A *presence*, waiting at the end of the line.

Ciarán.

She pulled her sleeve down further and forced her face to smoothness. "Fine. I'll wear the dress. But I'll keep my own clothes when I return."

"If you return." The woman said it lightly, like a wish. Then she turned and glided out of the room, leaving the door open.

Maeve stood frozen in the silence. When she was certain the footsteps had faded, she pulled the whistle out of her sleeve and held it up to the pale light coming through the window.

The magic hummed against her palm—not louder, but clearer. Like it was recognizing her touch now, learning her grip. She turned it over and saw something she'd missed in the chaos of the standing stones. On the underside, almost invisible against the pattern of wind and reeds, were etched tiny words.

*When the breath runs out, the truth will follow.*

Maeve's heart stumbled.

"Truth about what?" she whispered aloud.

The whistle did not answer. But the thread at the edge of her awareness pulsed once, twice—like a heartbeat, or a knock at a door she hadn't known she stood behind.

She slid the whistle into the bodice of her shirt, pressed flat against her sternum where its warmth felt less like comfort and more like a promise. And she crossed to the table, lifted the woolen dress, and began to dress as the queen's hand had ordered.

But as she pulled the garment over her head, she caught movement in the corner of her eye. The tapestry on the far wall. One of its embroidered leaves had shifted. No—not shifted. It was *watching* her. A single thread of gold, curved like an eye, angled toward the place where she'd hidden the whistle.

The queen's spies.

Maeve turned her back to the tapestry and dressed quickly, her mind racing. She couldn't hide the whistle in the room. She couldn't keep it on her. If the queen saw it, asked about it, Ciarán's warning would mean nothing.

But the whistle had warmed her when the chamber was cold. It had pulsed when the queen's hand had entered. It had shown her words that Ciarán had never spoken aloud.

She finished dressing and stood before the mirror. The woman looking back at her was a stranger—brown hair braided too tight, face too pale, eyes too wide in the candlelight. But beneath her collar, against her skin, the whistle lay warm and still, like a second heartbeat.

She would find out what the truth was. Even if she had to fake her way through seven years to do it.

The door opened again. The queen's hand stood in the threshold, her pale eyes sweeping Maeve from head to foot.

"The queen will see you now," she said. "Try not to disappoint her. She dislikes it when her new toys break before she's finished playing."

Maeve followed her out of the chamber, her hands still, her step measured. And she told herself, over and over, the same silent prayer she'd said at the standing stones when Death had come for Declan and she'd refused to let him in.

*I won't break. Whatever she wants, whatever she hides, I won't break.*

And beneath her collar, the whistle pulsed in time with her heart.