Chapter 626: Healer

When Isole finally spoke, she spoke as though she were giving a diagnosis.

"Thirteen children in a dormitory built for fourteen. A round hall at the base of the tower, with a silver floor laid in the pattern of a measuring rod, almost finished. Church wards on every door." She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap, left over right, and Vane saw her notice it and separate them. "The High Saintess of the Church of the Eternal Light arrived this morning to bless the floor on the first. The High Saintess is my mother."

Nobody said anything clever. Even Nyx.

"I’m going back," Isole said. "On the first. Before she can finish."

"Not alone," said Ashe.

"Ormond will be at the convoy." Isole looked at Vane. "You said it yourself. He invited you. He’ll want to be where you are. Whatever is at Greywater on the first, it won’t be him."

"It’ll be your mother and a company of Church Wardens," Valerica said. "And whatever the Household leaves to guard the building."

"Yes."

"And you want to walk in there by yourself."

"I don’t want to," Isole said. "I’m going to."

Vane looked at her for a long moment. He knew that tone. He had heard it from her once before, in a library, over a band message about broths.

"We can’t split six ways," Valerica said, already pulling the map toward her. "If Isole goes upriver, the convoy has four of us against Ormond and sixteen riders, and Mara doesn’t fight—"

There was a knock on the door.

It was soft, two taps, the way Father Cray knocked. But when Ashe opened it with a blade in her other hand, the priest was not alone. Behind him on the dark stair stood someone in a long riding cloak, hood up, mud to the knees.

The figure pushed back the hood.

"Good evening," said Anastasia Aurelia. "I’m told you received a letter."

She had ridden from the coast in four days with twelve guards, and she had left all twelve at an inn on the far side of the river with orders to be loud and conspicuous and to tell anyone who asked that the Princess had retired early with a headache.

"Nobody ever questions a headache," she said. She had accepted a cup of Father Cray’s terrible tea and was sitting very upright on the room’s only chair, as though it were a throne she disapproved of. "It’s the most useful thing I ever learned at court."

"You wrote it," Vane said. "The letter."

"I did." She looked at him steadily. "I didn’t know whether it would arrive. Or whether, if it did, you’d come. I hoped you wouldn’t, a little. It would have been simpler."

"Simpler for who?"

"For me." She set the cup down. "My father knows I’m here, more or less. I told him I was going to inspect Greywater on his behalf. He told me to tell him afterward if it was interesting." Her mouth twisted. "He didn’t read the letter of authority before he signed it. He doesn’t read anything that isn’t about the sea."

"The sea?" Nyx said sharply.

"Later," Anastasia said. "It isn’t your problem this week." She turned to Isole. "I’m going to Greywater tomorrow. Officially. I can halt the floor for a day on my father’s name. Perhaps two. Ormond won’t argue with the seal, not in front of his own men." She paused. "Your mother will."

Isole met her eyes. Something passed between them that Vane could not follow, two women who had both grown up in houses where love arrived in the form of an assessment.

"Then I’ll come as your healer," Isole said. "Princesses travel with healers."

"They do," Anastasia agreed. "Mine is usually much older and far less frightening."

It was the first time Vane had ever heard Anastasia make a joke. Judging by her face, it was the first time Anastasia had heard it too.

She stood to go before midnight. At the door she stopped and looked back at him.

"Have you heard anything?" she asked quietly. "From the north."

He knew what she meant. "No."

"Neither have I." She pulled her hood up. "I keep thinking he’ll know what we’re doing. That somehow he’ll hear." She shook her head. "That’s foolish. Goodnight."

After she had gone, Valerica laid out the river road one last time.

The convoy would leave the yard at first light on the first and follow the Marrin north. The clerk rode in the second wagon with the ledger in a locked box at his feet; Mara had watched him carry it in and out of the yard for a week. A mile out of town, the road narrowed between the river and a long stone wall. That was where Vane would stand. Ashe, Valerica and Nyx would hold the riders. Brynn and Mara would take the second wagon.

"And Ormond?" Ashe asked.

Valerica looked at Vane, and for once she had nothing written down.

"Ormond is his," she said.

Nobody slept much after that.

Brynn took Mara down to the tannery yard to teach her a fisherman’s knot, the one Marta Rusk had taught Brynn at six, and Vane could hear them through the floor, Brynn’s low voice and Mara’s careful questions, the creak of rope. Ashe sat by the window sharpening a blade that was already sharp. Valerica worked through the convoy plan one final time with the map on her knees. Nyx lay across the foot of the bed with her boots on and her head propped on Vane’s ankle, which she claimed was the only comfortable surface in the building.

"For the record," Valerica said, not looking up from the map, "if anyone intends to make a solemn speech tonight about how much this has all meant, I would like a few minutes’ warning so I can leave the room."

"No one’s making a speech," Ashe said.

"Nyx is thinking about it. I can tell."

"I’m thinking about lunch," Nyx said. "That’s different. That’s spiritual."

Isole came and sat down beside Vane on the bed. She was leaving at dawn with Anastasia’s party. She had already packed. She did not say anything for a while. Then she took his hand, turned it over, and pressed her thumb into the center of his palm the way she did when she was checking how tired he was.

"You’re going to stand in front of that convoy," she said quietly. "On the road. Where everyone can see you."

"Yes."

"And I’m going to stand in front of my mother." She did not look at him. "I don’t know which of us is going to find it harder."

"You are," said Ashe, from the window, without turning around. "He’s only got a Peak Master."

Isole laughed, a short, surprised sound, and leaned her head against Vane’s shoulder. Ashe went on sharpening her blade. Valerica turned a page. Nyx, at the foot of the bed, sighed in deep contentment and pretended to be asleep.

Down in the yard, Mara pulled a knot tight and said, very clearly, "Again."

Vane closed his eyes. For a few minutes, in a room that smelled of tannery and lamp oil, with the people he loved all around him, the first of the month felt very far away.