Chapter 164: Seven Hundred Loaves

Aurelix slept all day.

I’d never seen her sleep before. She curled up in my coat pocket as a little gold lizard, tail over her nose, breathing slow and shallow, and every time I checked on her she was a shade paler.

*I’m only a little dim, darling,* she’d murmured at dawn. *It’ll pass. Don’t hover.*

I hovered anyway. I skipped breakfast to do it.

That left me with a rib that hurt, a fire spirit who couldn’t fight, a guard I wasn’t allowed to open, and one night to figure out what a bread god was planning for the Founders’ Feast.

"Where do you hide a bread god’s supply?" Castor asked.

We were in the back of the library, in the potions loft, around a table covered in Lyra’s notes. Casper slept on a cot in the corner with Lyra’s coat over him, and Lyra wouldn’t leave his side, so she’d handed us a map of the kitchens and a bottle of salt-breaker and told us to go be useful.

"In the bread," I said.

"In the bread." Castor nodded, pleased. "Pell ran the kitchens. His staff baked every roll in this Academy for six years. Casper ate eleven. A god doesn’t need an altar when it has an oven."

"So the Feast..."

"Is two thousand people sitting down to the same loaf." He tapped the map. "I don’t like the arithmetic."

"I like the *fight,*" Pollux said from the windowsill, polishing her shield with a sleeve. She’d been grinning since dawn. "When do we start?"

"Midnight," Castor said.

"I vote now."

"You always vote now."

"And I’m always *right!*"

---

The Academy kitchens sat in the lowest wing, under a long vaulted ceiling black with a century of smoke. At midnight they should have been dark. They weren’t.

Light poured from the great doors. Warm light, orange, flickering. Inside, a dozen ovens roared, and the air was thick with flour and heat and that smell, honest, golden, ordinary, that I’d started to hate.

We crept along the wall on our bellies behind a stack of flour sacks. I wore the staff as a surveyor’s rod, which was a joke, and nobody laughed.

Six bakers worked at the long table. They wore white aprons and white caps, and their hands moved without stopping, kneading, folding, shaping. Every loaf that came off the board had a thumbprint pressed in its top. Behind them, on iron racks that went all the way up to the ceiling, hundreds of loaves sat rising, rank on rank, like a silent crowd waiting for a speech.

I counted rows. I got to seven hundred and stopped.

"Seven hundred," Castor breathed. "That’s the day’s batch. The Feast is two thousand."

"They’ll finish tonight," I said.

"Mm." He turned his head slowly. "I make it six. Six civilians with nothing in their hands but dough."

"Civilians don’t bake like that."

"No. They don’t."

Pollux made a small, happy sound in her throat.

"Pollux," Castor said, very gently. "Please wait for the signal."

"What’s the signal?"

"I’ll cough."

"That’s the worst signal I’ve ever heard."

She went anyway.

---

I’ll say this about the Terza twins. They’re a pair of lunatics, and they’d never let anyone else say so.

Pollux rose out of the flour sacks like a thrown spear. She hit the nearest baker with her shield before he’d turned his head, a flat, brutal strike that spun him across the table and into a rack of loaves. The shield sparkled. Red light ran over its rim, thick as paint, and I recognized it. Blood Art. A Ter Sanguis shield-form, her blood hardened and spread over the steel until it became a wall.

"HI!" she shrieked, laughing. "WE’RE HERE TO RUIN YOUR FEAST!"

The other five turned as one. Their faces went slack. Black veins crawled up their wrists under the white sleeves, and in their hands, the kneading paddles became weapons, long wooden things edged with iron.

"Valen! Left!" Castor’s voice came calm and flat, like a man calling a card game. "Flour. Don’t breathe in."

He rose behind me with his mattock on his shoulder. I rolled. A paddle hit the stone where my head had been.

"That’s rude," I said.

The baker lunged. His mouth was too wide. I caught his wrist, turned it over, and put the rod across his elbow, and the joint folded with a wet crack. He didn’t scream. He came on swinging with the broken arm.

*Great,* I thought. *The unfeeling kind.*

Castor’s mattock came down on a baker’s shoulder. It was a beautiful, heavy, boring stroke, no spin, no flourish, just a man moving his weight in the right order. Crimson light bloomed down the haft as it struck, a Ter Sanguis art called, I’d later learn, Falling Star. The baker folded into the floor like a dropped sack. He did not get up.

Pollux was laughing and bleeding and hitting people. She’d taken a paddle across the ribs and hadn’t noticed. She slammed her shield into another face, then pivoted and caught a third in the throat with the rim, and he went over the table into the dough.

"Pollux!" Castor said. "Stop *enjoying* it!"

"I can’t!"

"At least pretend!"

I went for the last two. One had a dough hook the length of my arm. He swung it flat, and I ducked, and the hook bit into a flour sack, and the whole bag exploded in a white cloud.

I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. Somewhere in the white, I heard the twins roaring and a body hitting the floor.

*Careful,* I thought, and for a second I desperately wished Aurelix were awake.

Then a hand grabbed the front of my coat and a wet, whispering voice said, right in my ear:

"Seventh."

I stabbed.

The rod went through the baker’s palm, through the wood of the table under it, and pinned him there. He didn’t scream. He smiled with all his teeth.

"You can’t stop it," he whispered. "It’s already baked."

The flour began to settle. When it cleared, five bakers lay on the floor in bruised heaps. One lay pinned to the table by my rod. One was sitting up against a rack of loaves, dazed, with a cracked skull and blood running down his neck.

Pollux had a boot on someone’s chest, and she was panting, grinning, and bleeding from three places.

"That," she said happily, "was *wonderful.*"

---

"Talk," Castor said.

The baker pinned to the table smiled at him. He’d stopped bleeding. That wasn’t right.

"Seven seats," he said, in a dreamy, empty voice. "Seven at the head. Seven hundred at the hearth. Two thousand at the feast. All of them, all of them, all of them hungry, and all of them *fed.*"

"What happens when they eat?"

"They sit." He giggled. "They *all* sit."

"Sit where? In the hall? What does that mean?"

"The seven open the door. The loaves bring the rest. When the table is full, the Giver *stands.*" His eyes rolled to me. "It’s so lonely, Seventh. It’s been so lonely for so long."

The black veins in his neck suddenly bulged. His whole face went grey. A thin, soft sound came from his chest, like a loaf splitting.

"Let go of him!" Castor snapped, but I’d already yanked the rod out.

Too late. The baker fell back, mouth open, a dark thread spooling out of it, and went still. The same with the one sitting against the racks. Two bodies. No answers.

"He’s gone," Castor said grimly. "They’re all marked. When they tell too much, the mark takes them."

"That’s what Pell did," I said slowly. "He told me what he wanted me to know. He never told me the rest."

"The rest," Castor repeated, thoughtful, and began to walk down the length of the kitchen, his big boots crunching through flour. "Pollux, check the pantry. Valen, the back office."

"The office?"

"Every kitchen has one. It’s where the clerk’s lists go."

---

The office was a little stone room off the pantry, with a desk and a lamp and a cork board. I’d been in a hundred like it, in a hundred places, in two lives. I knew what they smelled like. Ink. Old paper. Warm dust.

There was a long white card pinned to the board.

It was a seating chart. Seven chairs at the head table, drawn in neat ink, with a name by each. The chairs were numbered, one to seven, in a clean upright hand.

Four names were crossed out with a long white stroke of salt.

Number five read: *CASPER.*

Number six read: *MIRAIN.*

Number seven read: *VALEN.*

I stared at it.

The handwriting was mine.

Not close. *Perfect.* The loop of the *V,* the way I cross a *7* with a little tail, the tiny hook I put on the end of every line when I’m tired. I’d drawn the real head-table chart three weeks ago, in the library, on Gareth’s orders. Seven chairs. Different names.

I hadn’t written this one. But anyone holding it would swear on their mother’s grave that I had.

Somebody had a sample of my hand. Somebody had a *very* good forger. And they’d put my name on the last chair, in my own writing, where the Tribunal could find it.

"Valen?" Castor said, from the door. "What is it?"

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

Somewhere deep in the walls, very faintly, something laughed.