Chapter 86: The Man of the Hour

They walked him through the middle of the city and Theo asked questions the whole way, because that was what Theo did when he did not know where he was.

"How long has the wall been there?"

"Which wall, sir?"

"The sixth one."

The bronze-skinned soldier laughed as though that were a joke, and kept laughing for a step and a half before he noticed that nobody had started with him.

"There is only one wall, sir. It has been there since the founding."

’One wall.’

’Right. So there was never a first, second, third, fourth or fifth. Somebody built five extra walls in a story and then took them away again in the morning.’

Theo looked at the avenue in front of him. Fountains at every crossing, running clean, the water loud enough that people leaned in to hear each other over it. A boy selling something hot out of a covered basket, walking backwards ahead of the crowd so he could keep shouting into it. Two women arguing pleasantly about the price of cloth in a doorway, one of them holding a bolt of green up to the light while the other shook her head at it and did not stop smiling.

Four nights ago he had killed something in that doorway. He had put his sword through the base of its skull and left it in the road, and the road had been wet for a long way in both directions.

There was a flower box under the window now, and the sill under it was dark where somebody had watered it that morning.

"Is Captain Dunn still commanding?"

Both soldiers stopped walking.

"You know the Captain?"

"...We met."

"Captain Hessa Dunn commands the Keep Guard, sir," the second one said, with the particular stiffness of a man who has just found out he is talking to somebody important. "She has for nine years. She will be at the palace."

Theo let out a breath he had been holding since the gate.

’Alive.’

’She’s alive. She went into that thing with her sword in it and she is going to be standing in a room today.’

He asked one more question and he asked it lightly, and the lightness cost him a good deal.

"Is there a smith on the wall? Old fellow. Leather apron, bad eye, hammer he made himself."

The two soldiers looked at each other.

"There is no smith on the wall, sir," said the bronze-skinned one. "There is nothing on the wall but the wall."

Theo thanked him for that, and for the rest of the avenue he asked nothing at all.

The palace was white stone and it had been built by people with a great deal of time. Vines in the stonework, faces in the vines, and every face wearing out at the nose first.

Theo went up ninety steps between two lines of guards, in the hoodie he entered the tower with, with the left sleeve of it burnt off at the elbow and the arm underneath still shiny and red from wrist to shoulder, and his eyebrows had not grown back. The new skin pulled every time he took a step and swung the arm, so by the fortieth step he had stopped swinging it. Every helmet he passed turned a few degrees to follow him and turned back.

He had been given the chance to bathe and change. He had bathed. He had declined the clothes.

And then the doors opened.

The hall was full.

That was the first thing. Ninety or a hundred people down both sides in colours that cost money, and a raised floor at the end of it with three chairs on it, and Theo walked the length of that room in a burnt hoodie with every eye in the building on the left side of his face. His shoes made a soft flat sound on the marble that nothing else in that room was making.

Captain Hessa Dunn was standing at the foot of the dais in a clean cuirass with her arms behind her back.

She looked far younger than she had and she was not exhausted and there was no blood on her, and she looked at Theo the way you look at a stranger who has been described to you, politely and without one single flicker of recognition, and Theo had to stop and breathe once, halfway up the hall, and pretend it was the burns. He put his good hand flat against his ribs while he did it and let the room decide what that meant. Somewhere behind him a woman made a small sympathetic noise.

King Ordwin of Alderkeep was about sixty, broad through the shoulders in a way that suggested he had been useful once, and he did not sit down for the whole audience.

"The Sky’s Husband."

"Your Majesty."

"You will forgive me. I had expected somebody older."

Theo gave a rather sheepish smile.

"I would understand that."

Somebody in the second rank of nobles laughed and turned it into a cough.

The King came down two of the three steps, which several people in that hall clearly found remarkable, and he looked at Theo’s arm for a moment and then at his face.

"For eleven years, we have watched the fate of our nation be decided over and over again, the old gods have opened the doors but all that have entered, none have been able to save our intended doom. None except you, Lord Sky..."

The hall was very quiet. Ninety or a hundred people, and the loudest thing in the building was the fountain outside.

Theo kept his eyes on the King’s collar and kept his face where it was.

’They know about the trial, does that mean, the trial was supposed to help save their kingdom. And they knew about it too? This is confusing...’

As Theo thought about this, the King looked to a man and nodded.

The Chancellor read something off a board and it took four minutes. He read it the way men read things that have been written down for them by somebody else, evenly, with a small pause at the end of every line, and Theo caught about one word in five of it. The rest of him was watching Captain Hessa Dunn’s hands behind her back, and the thumb of the right one moving slowly over the knuckles of the left.

[Citizenship of the First Rank has been conferred upon you by the Crown of Alderkeep]

[Note: The First Rank is hereditary, unrevokable, and grants right of entry, right of trade and right of petition on this floor]

[Land grant recorded: the Merrow holding, north bank]

[Household recorded: staff of nineteen, standing]

[Treasury grant: 400,000 Tower Gold]

[Title conferred: COUNT OF THE KEEP]

[Reputation with ALDERKEEP: Exalted]