Chapter 259: Seal Lifted

"Young lord, why are you smiling at the mule?"

Encrid did not stop smiling.

He was sitting on the back of the cart with a blanket around his shoulders. The morning was grey and damp, and the road ahead ran north between empty fields. Brindle stood in the traces, chewing on nothing, with the look of an animal who had been asked to do too much for too long.

It was the thirtieth morning.

He had counted every one.

For thirty days, the skill he had used almost every waking hour for two years had been gone. Sealed, as the price of a Wall he had not been able to save. He had read the Sage by his frowns. He had read the Reaper by the stillness of his hands. He had read Sera by the way she hovered at the door before she knocked.

It had worked, mostly. He had done it in another life with nothing else.

But it had been like walking through a familiar house with a blindfold on. He knew where the furniture was. He still kept bumping into it.

And this morning, when he opened his eyes, something behind them had unlocked.

[ Appraisal « ★★★★★ » - D (0%) ]

[ Seal lifted. ]

He had not trusted it at first. So he had picked the safest target he could find.

[ Name: Brindle ]

[ Species: Mule ]

[ Age: 11 ]

[ Condition: Offended. Cold. Afraid of the canvas. ]

Encrid looked at the last line.

He looked at the mule. Then at the canvas sheet tied over the back of the cart, which flapped a little every time the wind moved it.

Brindle’s ears went flat.

Encrid laughed.

It came out of him all at once, helplessly. He bent forward over his knees and laughed until his ribs reminded him that the Sage had told him not to, and then he kept laughing anyway, holding his side.

The Reaper set down the reins.

He came around the side of the cart very quickly and very quietly and took Encrid’s wrist between two fingers.

"Are you having a fit?"

"No." Encrid wiped his eyes. "No. I’m fine."

"You are making quite an odd sound I have not heard from you before."

"It’s called laughing."

"I know what it is called." The Reaper did not let go of his wrist. "I was not aware you did it."

Encrid looked at the mule again and nearly started over.

The Reaper looked at Brindle. He looked at the canvas. Then he looked at Encrid with the expression of a man revising several of his opinions at once.

? ? ?

Encrid waited until the Reaper had gone back to the reins.

Then, slowly and carefully, he looked at the back of the Reaper’s head.

On the Wall, every line of the Reaper’s window had been hidden behind question marks. Encrid did not expect anything different now. But he was curious, and he was careful.

[ Name: Merek Vaun ]

[ Age: ? ]

[ Realm: ? ]

[ Star Level: ? ]

[ Talent: ? ]

[ Condition: ? ]

Encrid went very still.

Every other line was hidden, exactly as before. But the first line, the one that had always been blank, now held a name.

Merek Vaun.

It was a plain name, the kind a cooper or a rope-seller might have. Nothing about it sounded like the head of the Blue Moon.

Perhaps that was the point.

Encrid did not know why it showed now when it had not before. Perhaps something between them had changed over these weeks on the road.

But he knew one thing very clearly.

In fifteen volumes of The Last Age of Radiance, the Reaper’s real name had never been revealed. Not once.

And now Encrid knew it.

He might be the only person alive who did.

He looked at the Reaper’s back, bent over the mule’s hoof, and closed the window gently.

A name like that was not something you took from a man. It was something he gave you, if he ever chose to. Until then, Encrid decided, it would stay exactly where it was. Unspoken.

The Reaper straightened up and glanced at him.

"Something is wrong, young lord?"

"No," Encrid said, and meant it. "Nothing’s wrong."

? ? ?

At noon, when they stopped to rest under a row of bare poplars, Encrid looked at the strongbox.

He had been putting it off all morning, because he was afraid of what it might say.

He looked anyway.

[ Pillow of the Sleeping God ]

[ Grade: Divine Relic ]

[ Deferred consequence: Dragon’s Breath ]

[ Containment: 86% ]

[ Warning: When containment falls below 30%, the seal will fail entirely. ]

Thirty percent.

He did the sum in his head, the way he had once counted grain for eleven thousand people. Eighty-six down to thirty was fifty-six points. Since leaving the garden, it had been dropping by about one point every two days, and that was with the dragon drinking the leak each night.

A little over a hundred days.

Three months, more or less, before the Pillow broke and whatever was left of the dragon’s breath came out all at once.

It was more time than he had feared. It was a great deal less than he would have liked. But at least now it was a number, and Encrid had always been better with numbers than with fear.

He lifted his eyes from the box to the canvas over the back of the cart, where something long and invisible lay stretched out in the thin winter sun.

Without really thinking, he began to look.

{ Do not. }

The voice was very quiet. It was not angry. Somehow, that made it stronger.

The window that had started to open in front of Encrid’s eyes folded shut before a single word appeared.

{ Looking at me in that way is a kind of touching. } A pause. { I have been touched enough by men who wished to know what I was. }

Encrid thought of the man with the ringed staff. Fingers forcing open its jaws while it slept. Silver poured down its throat.

"I’m sorry," he said, and he meant every word. "I wasn’t thinking. I won’t do it again unless you tell me I can."

The dragon did not answer.

But that night, when they stopped in the shelter of an old stone sheepfold, Encrid felt the familiar weight come down out of the dark sky. It did not settle on the wall, or on the hill above them, as it had every other night.

It settled right beside the cart. So close that, if he had reached out from under his blanket, he could almost have touched it.

? ? ?