Chapter 665: The Longest Night Ends

The Accord sat until the stars began to go out, and then it simply stopped, the way old things do, without anyone deciding it should.

Bastien Oro picked up his black glass chair and carried it out over the bridge, singing something tuneless and very loud. Ilario Thane walked out with his clouded eyes on the fading sky, talking to his hourglass. Ysra went down to the Lark, where Sarai Vell was waiting to carry her home to the sea, and before she went she stopped at Valerica’s desk and laid one bent hand on the pile of written pages, very gently, as if blessing it. The High Saintess left alone, in white, and did not look back.

Vane stayed in his plain wooden chair until the Hall of Wind was almost empty. Then he went out onto the bridge, and found Thessaly there, leaning on the rail and looking down at the sea.

"You’ll be wanting to know," she said, without turning round, "why Isadora hates me."

He came and stood beside her.

"Forty years ago," Thessaly said, "the next voice was due. I knew it was due. I was the only one left who remembered. I went looking." Her old hands were folded on the rail. "There was one child in all the Palaces with the right kind of voice. Only one. A girl of nine, in the Glacial Palace. She sang to herself in the corridors, and the ice sang back to her." She was quiet for a moment. "Isadora’s little sister."

Vane did not say anything.

"I went to their mother and asked for her. I explained. I explained very well. I was very old and very sure." Thessaly’s voice did not change. "Isadora was barely more than a girl herself. She stood in front of her sister in the throne room of Boreas and told me that if I wanted to take that child to the bottom of the sea, I would have to freeze her first. Her mother agreed with her." She looked down at the water. "And I would not take a child by force. Not even for this. So I went home, and went up my tower, and I didn’t try again. And the voice went unpaid."

"Forty years," said Vane.

"Forty years. And the ice began to thin, slowly, and when it finally broke open this autumn, Isadora went down onto it every night alone, because she knew why." Thessaly closed her eyes. "She has spent forty years believing she let the world drown to save one girl. And I have spent forty years believing I nearly drowned one girl to save the world." She opened them again. "And then you walked onto a road, and into my hall, and told my Stewards that there was a third way, and that nobody would ever have to choose." The mismatched eyes turned toward him at last. "Tell her she was right. When you see her. Tell her I said so."

"Where’s the sister now?"

Thessaly smiled. It was small, and very tired, and real.

"In a house by the ice," she said. "With grandchildren. She sings to them, I’m told."

The others were waiting for him on the terrace below the Hall of Wind, in the grey dawn light, in a cluster that Vane had long since stopped trying to describe to anyone.

Valerica was sitting on the low wall with her stack of written pages in her lap and her eyes closed, not asleep, simply resting them, with her head on Isole’s shoulder. Isole was very quiet. Ashe was standing with her back to the wall and her new sword across her shoulders, and Nyx was leaning against Ashe, and Isaac was leaning against the wall beside them writing, inevitably, a letter.

"Weather," he said, without looking up. "Cold. Historic."

"You can’t put historic under weather," said Ashe.

"I can put anything I like under weather. It’s my letter."

Isole lifted her head when Vane came down the steps. She looked at him for a long moment.

"She looked at me," she said. "My mother. When I asked." She seemed to be examining the words as she said them, as though they might turn out to be untrue. "She actually looked at me."

"I saw," said Vane.

"She still abstained."

"She still looked."

Isole nodded slowly. Then she leaned her head back against Valerica’s, and closed her eyes, and something in her face that had been held very tight for as long as Vane had known her let go, just a little.

Anastasia came down the steps a moment later, in her riding coat, with her father’s paper folded small inside it. She stopped in front of them. For a long moment she did not seem to know what to say.

"I’m going back," she said. "To the capital. Someone has to make sure the Household’s bureaus actually get the news." Her mouth moved. "And someone has to be there when my father finds out what he signed."

"Will he care?" asked Ashe.

"No," said Anastasia. "That’s what I’m counting on." She looked at Valerica. "Thank you. For checking the wording."

Valerica opened her eyes. "You knew it would hold."

"I hoped it would. I’m not you." Anastasia hesitated. Then, unexpectedly, briskly, the way Valerica herself might have done it, she bent down and hugged her, once, hard, and straightened up, and walked away up the steps toward the stables without looking back.

Valerica stared after her.

"I’m writing that down," said Nyx.

"You can’t write anything down. You don’t own a pen."

"I’ll borrow Mara’s."

Mara was at the edge of the terrace, looking out at the sea.

Ilario Thane had stopped beside her on his way to the bridge. He stood there with his clouded eyes on the brightening sky, saying nothing, and Mara, beside him, said nothing either, and the ice falcon on her shoulder looked from one of them to the other.

"Another day," the astronomer said at last. It was not quite a question.

Mara considered it.

"Spring," she said.

Ilario Thane smiled his small, delighted smile, as though a star had just done something it should not, and nodded once, and walked on.

Vane came and stood beside his sister. The sun was coming up over the cape behind them, and its light went out across the Abyss, gold on grey, all the way to the edge of the world. Somewhere out there an old woman was singing in the dark, and a Master-at-Arms was sitting on a ledge beside her, waiting for the nights when the singing thinned. Somewhere inland, in a gallery full of charts, the Emperor of Aurelia was planning his spring. And far to the east, across the sea, past a sealed letter in black lacquer, the Sovereigns of the East were deciding what to do about all of it.

Mara opened her ledger on the wall.

She turned past the page headed North, past the list of ten names with the line beside the last one, past the page that said Holloway, the first. Everyone went home. She found a clean page, and wrote at the top of it, in her careful hand:

Aelstrom. The longest night.

And underneath, after a moment’s thought:

Everyone sat down.