Chapter 621: The Yard

The invitation came to the chapel at dusk, carried by a Household runner who handed it to Father Cray on the vestry step, bowed politely, and left without waiting for a reply.

It was a single card, heavy and cream-colored, with no crest. On it, in a hand so even it might have been printed, were nine words.

The Usurper is welcome in the yard. Come alone.

Father Cray brought it up to the room above the tannery and gave it to Vane without a word. He looked as though he had been handed something alive.

"No," said Valerica, before Vane had finished reading it.

"He knows we’re here."

"He knows you’re here. He may suspect the rest of us. That card is designed to find out how many of us there are and how we move." She took it out of his hand and turned it over, as if there might be a trap on the back. "If you go, you go alone, and you walk into a walled yard with a Peak Master and fourteen Experts."

"He could have walked into this room with a Peak Master and fourteen Experts."

Valerica opened her mouth and then shut it again.

"He’s not hiding," Vane said. "So I’m not going to either."

Ashe was standing at the window with her arms folded. She hadn’t said anything since the card arrived. Now she turned around.

"I’m walking you to the gate," she said. "I’ll wait outside it. If you’re not out in an hour, I’m coming in, and I don’t care how many Experts he has."

"That’s fair."

"It’s not fair. It’s what’s happening."

Mara had put down her pen. Vane crouched beside her chair.

"You stay with Nyx," he said. "Tonight Nyx is me."

Mara looked at Nyx, who raised a hand from the bed without opening her eyes.

"Nyx is asleep," Mara said.

"I’m extremely awake," Nyx said. "I’m just horizontal about it."

Mara looked back at Vane. She did not argue. She took his sleeve between her finger and thumb, the way she had when she was twelve, and held it for a moment.

"One hour," she said. "I’ll count."

The yard gates stood open when he reached them.

Ashe stopped at the threshold, as she had said she would, and put her back to the wall outside with her hood pulled low. She did not touch him or say goodbye. He felt her watching him all the way in.

Inside, the forty wagons stood in their two lines, shafts down, their canvas covers tied back, waiting. Lanterns hung from posts along the wall. The fourteen riders of the escort were nowhere to be seen. There was only one man in the yard, standing alone between the lines of wagons with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, looking up at the evening sky.

"You came," Ormond said, without turning. "Good. I disliked the idea of sending for you twice."

"You didn’t send for me. You invited me."

"I did." Ormond lowered his gaze and looked at him at last. His eyes were pale and very steady. "The difference matters to me. I hope it matters to you."

Up close he was smaller than Vane remembered, slighter and older, with fine lines at the corners of his eyes. It made no difference at all. The pressure of him filled the yard the way water fills a vessel, without effort, without strain, holding every edge. Vane kept the wings folded and the Usurper quiet, and stood in it.

"You were in Carrow," Ormond said.

"Yes."

"Seven children and a fisherman, out of my ship, with two of my men asleep at the rail and a third put down with a sword hilt." He nodded slowly, like a craftsman inspecting a joint someone else had cut. "Clean work. Not a drop of blood. I admired it."

"You took seven people for it."

"I did." Ormond did not look away. "I take seven people every time something is taken from me. It’s the only arithmetic a town like Carrow understands, and the only one that stops it from happening again." He tilted his head slightly. "You understood that by noon the next day. I could see it in the way you’ve moved since. You stopped hiding."

Vane said nothing.

"Do you know what the statute was, before me?" Ormond asked. "Ask your priest. Ask him how many funerals he held in Holloway in the years before this yard was built. Children who woke up with frost on their hands, or a shadow that did something it shouldn’t, and were dead by the end of the week, because an Authority in the wrong blood was a crime and a crime had to be removed." He spoke without heat, as though describing the weather. "I don’t remove them. I keep them alive. I give them a structure strong enough to carry what they were born with. Most of them would have been buried."

"Most of them die anyway," Vane said. "Most of the records just end. No discharge. No death notice."

For the first time, Ormond looked interested.

"You’ve read the files."

"Someone I trust has."

"Then you know about the one that held." Ormond’s voice did not change, but it slowed. "I spent his whole childhood on him. You saw what he was in that clearing. He took my binding apart with his hands. There is nothing in the Blessed World like him, not in the Academy, not in the Palaces, not in the Household." He paused. "He was the best thing I have ever made, and I am going to make another."

"He wasn’t made," Vane said. "He was a child someone took."

"Every child is something someone made," Ormond said. "Usually by accident."

The lanterns hissed on their posts. Somewhere beyond the wall a dog barked twice and was quiet.

"Here is what I’ve invited you to hear," Ormond said. "The convoy leaves on the first. On the first, the seven from Carrow will be released and sent home, unharmed and unnumbered, on one condition: that by then, you and whoever you’ve brought with you are on a boat going east, and that you never set foot in the western provinces again."

Vane felt the offer settle on him like a weight on a scale.

"And the rest?" he said. "The two hundred."

"The rest are not yours."

"And if I say no?"

"Then the seven go where the others go." Ormond’s eyes were very calm. "And so, in time, will you. I could close a binding on you right now, you know. There is a space in you between deciding and moving. It’s narrower than most. It’s still wide enough." He let that sit for a moment. "I don’t do it because I don’t need to. Nobody is coming to stop either of us, Usurper. Not the Academy. Not the Throne. No one up there cares what happens in this valley. It is just you, and me, and eight days."

He turned away and looked up at the sky again, as though the conversation had been concluded to his satisfaction.

"Your friend at the gate has been counting the minutes," he said. "So has someone else, I think. Go and tell them what I said."