Chapter 83: Seventy-Two Hours Until the Auction

Touching the reins to the mare’s neck, Kōya turned the wagon out of the plaza, leaving the crimson banner behind.

Half a mile south of the commercial avenues, the polished limestone facades gave way to a cramped, older ward of crooked timber gables and narrow cobbled lanes that smelled of damp slate and boiled cabbage.

Kōya checked three inns along the canal road. The first had six drunken mercenaries brawling on the porch steps; the second demanded three gold crowns a night at the door; the third smelled of rot and dead rats from twenty paces down the street.

Near the end of a quiet cul-de-sac wedged between a cooper’s warehouse and a shuttered alehouse, Lyra pointed up at a weathered oak board swinging from an iron bracket. "Try that one."

Nearly all the paint had flaked off the wood, leaving only the pale scar of a carved crescent moon.

Kōya eyed the sagging porch roof. "You’re sure?"

"It has a stable yard and nobody is bleeding on the steps," Lyra said. "At this hour, that’s luxury."

"Fair point."

After unharnessing the mare in the narrow stable shed out back, they carried their packs into a low-ceilinged lobby lit by a single tallow candle. Behind the scarred pine counter sat a stooped old man with spectacles perched on the tip of his nose, totaling columns in a grease-stained ledger.

He looked up without moving his chin. "Room?"

"One for three nights," Kōya said.

"One room?" The innkeeper’s eyes shifted from Kōya’s twin sword hilts to Lyra’s travel cloak, then back again. "Only one bed in it."

Kōya frowned. "You don’t have a double room?"

"Full."

"Two singles?"

"Full. One room on the third floor, one narrow bed. Take the key or try the street. Makes no difference to me."

Beside Kōya’s elbow, Lyra studied the tips of her boots.

Kōya let out a slow breath and laid four silver pieces on the pine counter. "We’ll take it."

The old man swept the coins into his palm and slid an iron key across the wood. "Top of the stairs, end of the hall."

They climbed three flights of creaking pine treads in silence.

When Kōya unlocked the door at the end of the garret corridor, the room inside proved barely wide enough to swing a cat. A single rope-strung bed frame sat jammed against the sloped plaster wall opposite a rickety washstand with a chipped pitcher, a tiny square table, one narrow casement window overlooking the lane, and a solitary three-legged stool with a cracked backrest.

Kōya halted on the threshold. He looked at the narrow mattress, looked at the corner by the table, and looked back at the mattress.

"That isn’t a chair."

Lyra peered around his shoulder into the room. "What?"

Kōya pointed a thumb at the listing wooden seat in the corner. "That is three pieces of kindling pretending to be furniture."

Lyra clapped her hand over her mouth, a bright snort of laughter escaping through her fingers.

Kōya turned his head to glare at her. "Something funny?"

"Nothing."

"Your shoulders are shaking."

"It’s a draft from the stairs." Walking past him into the room, she set her leather satchel down at the foot of the bed.

Kōya crossed the floorboards and lifted the rickety chair by its backrest; the left front leg wobbled half an inch in its socket. "I’ll take the chair."

Lyra turned around, staring at him as if he had lost his mind. "You’re going to sleep sitting up on that?"

"Yes."

"Your spine will lock into a knot before midnight."

"I’ll live."

"The leg will snap and dump you on the floor."

"I’ve slept on worse ground than pine planks, Lyra."

She stood with her hands on her hips, eyeing the six-inch gap between the chair’s narrow seat and the width of his shoulders, before letting out an exasperated sigh. "Don’t be ridiculous. Share the bed."

Kōya froze with his hand on the chair back. "What?"

"The mattress. It has two edges."

"I heard the words."

"Then stop staring at me like I challenged you to a duel."

"Look at the frame," Kōya said, gesturing toward the bedstead. "There’s barely thirty inches of ticking between the wall and the floor."

"Then sleep straight and don’t roll over."

Kōya stared at her.

Color climbed up Lyra’s neck into her cheeks, though she kept her chin up. "You take the outside edge, I’ll take the wall. It isn’t complicated."

"In theory."

"In practice, too."

"That mattress shrank three inches since we opened the door."

Lyra bit the inside of her lip to keep from laughing again. Stepping up to the bedside, she tapped the strip of blanket nearest the plaster wall. "My side."

She pointed to the outer wooden rail. "Your side."

Kōya set the wobbly chair back in the corner. "Fine."

"Stay on your half."

"Agreed."

"Agreed."

Having settled the treaty with the solemnity of two generals dividing a province, neither of them looked remotely relaxed when the candle was blown out twenty minutes later.

Lying flat on his back on the outer six inches of the mattress with his boots off and his coat folded under his head, Kōya stared straight up at the water-stained plaster ceiling. Eighteen inches to his left—separated by a gulf of untouched blanket—Lyra lay curled on her side facing the wall.

Beyond the thin casement glass, Slane’s night traffic rumbled on without pause. Iron-shod carriage wheels clattered over the cobbles below; drunken laughter spilled out of the tavern next door; two streets over, the heavy, unmistakable clank of a chain-wagon echoed between the stone warehouses on its way to the underground vaults.

"This city," Kōya murmured into the dark.

Over by the wall, the blanket rustled as Lyra glanced back over her shoulder. "Hm?"

"It makes my skin crawl."

She stayed quiet for two breaths. "Mine too."

"How did you keep your head straight when they brought you through here?"

Lyra turned onto her back, staring up at the dark rafters alongside him. "When the bailiffs first put the collar on me in my village, I didn’t see the whole picture," she said softly. "I thought my father and I had drawn a bad hand of cards. An ugly accident in an otherwise normal world."

She drew the thin wool blanket up to her collarbone. "Then the broker drove our cart through Slane’s eastern gate. Seeing the registration booths, the clerk stamps, and the shop windows full of iron collars..." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "That was when I understood nobody had had an accident. The whole territory is a net built to catch people the second they stumble."

Kōya kept his eyes on the ceiling.

"There were always cruel men and kind men," Lyra said into the gloom. "Here, the cruel ones wrote the laws so the kind ones can buy cheap bread and look the other way."

Kōya turned his head on his folded coat to look at her profile in the pale light leaking around the window frame. "Worse for everyone under the roof."

"Yes," she whispered.

Silence settled back over the narrow room while the tavern noise downstairs faded into the late watch.

"Tomorrow morning," Lyra said, her voice growing heavy with exhaustion, "we find out how the auction hall is guarded."

"First thing after sunrise," Kōya said. "Someone in those VIP boxes knows where the border captives are routed."

Within ten minutes, Lyra’s breathing slowed into the deep, even rhythm of sleep on her side of the mattress.

Kōya stayed wide awake on the outer edge, one hand resting beside the Hero Sword leaning against the bedpost. Down in the lane below the window, iron wheels ground across the cold cobblestones as another midnight transport rolled toward the central district—carrying fresh stock for a stage that would open its doors in seventy-two hours.