Chapter 371 - 371: The Idea of a Seal

Siena got Miena off the floor and onto the bed and kept her there with both arms, not gentle, because gentle had just been used against them.

Miena's hands were still trying to be useful.

They plucked at cloth, at Siena's sleeve, at the empty air where the bird had been.

"I can stop if I do not see it, I think I can stop, do not let me look under the bed, if I see the wings I will hear the rest of the sentence."

Siena pressed Miena's face into her shoulder.

"Then you will not look, you will breathe, you will hate me for holding you this hard, I do not care, you are not kneeling again in this room even if the house falls in."

Dolly came back from the side door at a pace that was almost a run and shut the inner latch, then the second latch that nobody used except during drills.

"He is gone, there was never a proper letter, only cloth rubbed to look like a mark in bad light, I opened a door for a rumor with manners, that is on me, it will not happen twice tonight."

Siena's head snapped up.

"Tonight, you say tonight as if morning is safer, he is in the walls or the garden or the servants' stair, you cannot stand there counting latches while she is still listening to a voice that wears his mouth."

Dolly did not argue the point.

She tore a strip from the extra sheet, bound Miena's wrists in front, loose enough for blood, tight enough that those hands could not finish an order they did not want.

Miena watched the knot with wet eyes and a terrible patience.

"He will tell me to ask you to untie it, he will tell me to say I am comfortable, I can feel the shape of that sentence already, when it comes you must not believe the comfort."

"I will not."

Dolly went to the window, checked the court, saw nothing but hedges and a lamp that should not have been left burning at the outer hall and had been.

"I can send to the gate, I can send to the Marquis if he is in the west wing, I can keep this room closed until a real seal arrives, what I cannot do is pretend that collar is only metal after what I just watched."

Siena laughed, short, wrecked.

"It was never only metal, he made sure of that, and now some filthy copy has learned the trick, if Rigel were here he would be interested, that is the worst part, he would ask how cleanly it copied him."

Miena's throat moved against the collar.

"Please do not talk about him as if he is a lesson, please just stay where I can feel you, if you leave the bed I will be asked to follow the door."

Dolly put her back to the door anyway, because someone had to.

She drew the sleeve knife at last.

"If a voice comes through the wood sounding kind, I answer it with this, if it sounds like Lord Rigel I answer it with this faster, Lady Siena, you will shout if her mouth starts offering service again, I do not care how shy the wording is."

From the corridor, a steward's knock, ordinary, three taps.

"Dolly, the side lamp is lit and the watch asked who admitted a merchant after last bell, I have no name on my board."

Dolly opened only the speaking slit.

"You will double the inner court, you will not send men into this chamber, you will tell the Marquis the young master's name is being worn by a guest who left no cart, and if anyone below stairs starts asking how the sisters sleep you will take them off the floor before they finish being curious."

The steward was silent long enough to be frightened in a useful way.

"Understood, I will wake him."

Rigel heard none of that.

He heard Erna's chalk snap in the linen passage, and Cynthia's voice from the conference room forcing Blade through another sentence about quarry tracks, and Pell's heels finally going still, which was not the mercy it looked like.

Calden came to the annex threshold and stopped short of the broken plaster.

"The post rider will not reach Gousel before tomorrow night at best, Lady Mesterica will be at the first station by now if the road is only road, and the sentry from the postern has remembered one more line, he says the merchant asked whether the little foreign girls in the Marquis house were kept on the same floor."

Rigel's hand closed on the packet until the cloth creaked.

"He asked that here."

"Yes, before he went into the wall, the sentry thought it was gossip about war prizes, he is now aware he is an idiot, awareness is late."

Cynthia appeared behind Calden, Blade's flask still in her fist.

"Say you are sending me after Mesterica, I am faster than your guilt and I know the post road, if this thing is already speaking in your house then letters are a joke you are telling yourself to stay in my father's chair."

Rigel looked at the hollow seam, at the pale smear, at the woman who wanted a horse and a holy blade and a simple enemy.

"If you leave, the lining gets your father and the passage, if I leave, the same, so Mesterica keeps riding and you keep the Count saying no, and the joke is that the house I should be locking is the one I already taught how to kneel."

Erna's shout rolled down the corridor, raw, not polite.

"Found another hollow, and it is breathing on my lamp, if nobody with a sword is coming I am nailing a board across a nobleman's memory and going home to any job that does not talk."

Rigel moved.

The packet stayed cool against his ribs, finished with being a bell, and that coolness felt like a message already delivered, already answered, already using a girl's mouth in a room he was too far away to ruin in person.