Chapter 624: Correspondence

Nobody in the palace had noticed when Anastasia began reading her father’s letters, which was the point.

It had started in the winter, a month after she came home. The Emperor did not read the Household’s dispatches. He had not read them for years. They arrived every morning in a locked case, and every morning a secretary unlocked the case, sorted the contents into three piles on a side table in the north gallery, and every evening another secretary carried all three piles away again untouched, to be filed in a room where nobody ever looked at them twice. Anastasia had simply begun arriving early and offering to do the sorting herself. The secretary, an elderly man with arthritic hands and a terror of the Emperor that had lasted forty years, had been pathetically grateful.

So she read everything. She had read Ormond’s spring intake report before her father refused to look at it. She had read the request for Greywater. She had read the clerk’s figures from Carrow, and Holloway, and the Marrin valley, and had sat with them in her rooms at night, and had written one word on a sheet of plain paper and sent it east by hands she had paid not to know her.

She did not know if it had arrived. She had no way to know.

This morning there was a dispatch from Holloway.

She broke the seal with her thumb, standing at the side table with her back to the gallery, and read it twice.

Majesty. The Usurper is in Holloway. He came to the yard alone at my invitation and was offered terms. I do not expect him to accept them. His companions are not all accounted for; I believe some have gone upriver. I do not consider this a difficulty. The first installations will proceed on the first day of the month as planned. Her Radiance the High Saintess Sylvaris has consented to attend and bless the floor. I request a further two riders for the convoy escort, as a courtesy. — O.

Anastasia folded the paper very carefully along its original creases and laid it on the pile nobody would read.

The Usurper is in Holloway.

She found that her hands were perfectly steady. She was a little surprised by that.

Her Radiance the High Saintess Sylvaris. Anastasia had seen that woman once, at a winter gala in her first year at Zenith, standing at the edge of the ballroom beside her silent, pale-haired daughter, the way a jeweler stands beside a stone she has already decided is flawed. Later that night the daughter had been led onto the floor by a commoner with a spear-calloused hand, and half the room had stopped breathing. Anastasia had been one of them.

At the long table behind her, her father was laughing.

It was not a sound she heard often. She turned. The naval officer from the Hesket station was back, salt-stained and grey with exhaustion, standing at the end of the table with something wrapped in sailcloth at his feet. It was large. It was so large that two Wardens had carried it in between them. Her father had pulled back one corner of the cloth and was looking at what lay underneath with the expression of a child on a feast day.

It was a scale. One single scale, dark and faintly iridescent, curved like a shield. It was taller than the officer.

"Where?" her father said.

"Caught on the anchor chain, Majesty. Ninety fathoms below the Hesket shelf." The officer swallowed. "The divers say it was shed. Not torn off. Shed. The way a snake leaves its skin."

"It’s growing," her father said softly, almost tenderly. "It’s waking up, and it’s growing." He put out a hand and laid it flat against the dark curve, and Anastasia felt the Domain shift in the room, very slightly, the way the air shifts before a storm. "How long since the last one like this?"

"There are no records of the last one, Majesty."

"There are always records." Her father did not take his eyes from the scale. "Find them. The Academy will have them. Evangeline keeps everything, and she won’t want to give it to me, which means it’s worth having." He smiled. "Write to her. Be polite."

Anastasia walked down the length of the gallery and stopped at his shoulder.

"Father."

He did not look up. "Yes."

"I’d like to go west," she said. "To Greywater. On your behalf."

That made him look at her. It was the same look he had given her the morning she came home: two seconds, perhaps three, a measurement taken and filed.

"Why?" he said.

"Because Ormond is opening a site in your name, and nobody from this family has ever seen it. Because the High Saintess is attending, and someone of rank should receive her." She kept her voice even. "And because you won’t go yourself."

"No," he agreed. "I won’t."

He looked at her for a moment longer. She held his gaze and did not let anything move in her face. She had learned that from him.

"Is this about the boy?" he asked.

It was the first time in a year he had mentioned Lancelot.

She thought about lying. She thought about the scar on his cheek, the faint line that lifted when he smiled, and a clearing two hours past the eastern boundary, and a flat, careful voice saying it was the only thing anyone from her world ever managed to do to him.

"Yes," she said.

Her father considered that. Then, to her astonishment, he laughed again: quietly, without any cruelty at all, the way he might have laughed at a clever move in a game he was not playing.

"Then go," he said. "Take whoever you like. Tell Ormond I sent you, if it helps. Tell me afterward if it was interesting." He had already turned back to the scale. "It probably won’t be."

She left the capital at dawn the next day with twelve of her own guard, a letter of authority in her father’s name that she had written herself and that he had signed without reading, and a blade at her hip. A year ago, in a compound on the eastern continent, she had told a table of strangers that her sword was missing. It still was. It had gone north.

The road west ran along the coast for the first three days. On the second evening she stopped at a cliff above the sea and stood for a long time looking down at the water. It was dark and very calm. Far out, so far she could not be sure she was seeing it at all, something moved under the surface and was gone.

She thought about two hundred and eleven children, and fourteen small circles, and a woman in white coming to bless a floor.

She thought about a young man with a spear, standing in a walled yard at a Peak Master’s invitation, alone.

I do not expect him to accept them.

"Neither do I," Anastasia said aloud, to no one, and went back to her horse.