Chapter 620: The First One

Nyx went through the circled entries one at a time, slowly, reading each name aloud and then the line Father Cray had written beneath it, and by the fourth one Vane could see her hands had started to shake again.

Edda Marsh, eleven. Carrow. Made the candle flame lean toward her without touching it. Very quiet. Thanked me.

Corin, no family name given, ten. Found in the hills above Fordham. Clerk said the rod "sang." I did not hear it sing.

Lio Fenn, nine. Holloway. Wanted to know if his dog could come.

The circles were small and neat and exactly alike, as though whoever drew them had drawn a great many.

When she had read all fourteen, Nyx closed the book and sat back against the vestry wall with her eyes shut.

"A handful each generation," she said quietly. "That’s what the files said. That’s what I told you in Ossara. Four cases in sixty years where the record even lasted long enough to name what came out." She opened her eyes. "Fourteen since the thaw. In one province."

Nobody spoke.

"He isn’t running the old program," Nyx said. "He’s running it like a harvest. As many as he can take, as fast as he can take them, because he only needs one of them to hold." Her voice did not rise. That made it worse. "He’s trying to make another Lancelot. And he doesn’t care how many of them it eats before he does."

Father Cray had gone grey. He sat down heavily on the vestry bench and looked at his own handwriting.

"Lancelot," he said. "The Academy boy. The one who—" He stopped. "I heard about the graduation. Everyone did. I thought he was a noble’s son."

"He was a child someone took," Nyx said. "And the man who took him is the man drawing these circles."

Mara had stopped copying.

She was not looking at any of them. She was looking down at the open book, where the fourteen small circles sat in their column like a row of closed eyes. Vane watched her count them with her finger, without touching the page, the way she counted everything. Then he watched her other hand move, very slightly, to the inside of her own wrist, the place where the silver rod touched.

She did not say anything. She did not ask.

He moved his chair a little closer to hers, and she leaned until her shoulder rested against his arm, and went back to copying.

Ormond came to Holloway the next afternoon.

They knew he was coming an hour before he arrived, because the town changed. The wagon yard’s gates were dragged open and the forty empty wagons were drawn up in two neat lines along the river road. The Household agents who had been lounging at the tannery corner were suddenly standing very straight. Two riders came in from the west at the gallop and went straight through the yard gate without slowing, and Nyx, who had been lying on the bed above the tannery with her eyes closed, sat up all at once.

"Master," she said. "Peak. Coming down the west road with an escort." She swallowed. "I know the shape of it."

Vane knew it too, before he ever saw it. He felt it at the very edge of his senses, the way he had once felt it in a clearing two hours past the eastern boundary: a weight that did not press so much as hold, the patient, settled density of a man who had spent his whole life closing things around other people.

They went up to the bell tower of Father Cray’s chapel, he and Ashe, because it was the only place in Holloway that looked down into the yard. The priest gave them the key without asking why.

The tower was narrow and smelled of pigeons and old rope. They lay flat on the boards beneath the bell, under the slatted louvers, and watched the west road.

The escort came first: fourteen riders in the long dark coats of the Household, riding in pairs. The Usurper read them as they passed beneath the tower, one after another. Mid Expert. High Expert. Mid Expert. High Expert. Each had an Authority, none above A. Fourteen of them, together, could pin a party of six by sheer numbers, if they were allowed to choose the ground.

Behind them rode a single man on a grey horse.

He was exactly as Vane remembered him from the clearing: lean, grey at the temples, the dark coat bare of anything a stranger could measure him by. He rode the way he did everything, with no wasted motion at all, and he did not look at the men riding ahead of him once.

The Usurper did not have to search for the reading. It had kept it from the clearing.

[Target Analysis: Ormond]

[Rank: 7 — Peak Master]

[Authority: Sovereign Binding (SS)]

[Danger: Catastrophic]

Beside him, Ashe had stopped breathing.

Vane thought of the clearing. He thought of Sovereign Binding closing around Lancelot like a hand. He thought of the moment it failed, and of Lancelot standing over this man, saying Go home. Tell him what you saw. He had told him. And the Emperor, according to a sheet of plain paper folded inside Vane’s coat, did not care.

So Ormond had come back to the west, to do it again.

"He’s the one," Ashe whispered. "The one who made the first one."

"Yes."

"We can’t fight that."

"Not yet," Vane said. He was surprised by how calm his own voice sounded. "Not like this."

Down in the yard, Ormond had dismounted. He walked along the double line of empty wagons slowly, the way a man walks through a workshop he designed, checking that everything was where he had left it. He paused at the end of the line, said something to the clerk who had come out to meet him, and the clerk opened a ledger and turned it toward him. Ormond read it standing, without touching it.

Then he raised his head.

He did not look at the town. He did not look at the river, or the road, or the chapel’s long shadow lying across the wall. He looked straight up at the bell tower, at the slatted louvers where two people were lying very still in the dark, and he went on looking.

Vane held everything in. The wings, the Usurper, the Warlord’s base layer, all of it, folded down until he was nothing but a body on old boards that smelled of rope. Beside him, he felt Ashe do the same, and felt what it cost her.

Ormond looked at the tower for a long time.

Then he lowered his eyes, said something else to the clerk, and walked into the yard. The gates swung shut behind him.

Ashe let out a breath so slow it hardly moved the dust.

"Did he see us?" she whispered.

Vane watched the closed gates.

"I don’t know," he said.