Chapter 666: Come Home

Winter at Aelstrom was long and loud and full of letters.

The first voices went down to the Court beneath the water a month after the longest night. There were three of them: a fisherman’s widow from the north coast who had sung to the sea all her life and never known why, a quiet scholar from the Meridian, and one of Bastien Oro’s smiths, a broad, red-armed woman named Dagny who sang, as promised, appallingly. Sarai Vell flew them out to the green water in the Lark. When she came back, she brought a note in Ysra’s spiral hand.

All three are well. Wren likes the smith. She says the deep likes her too, which is a mystery to everyone.

Under it, in a hand so cramped and shaky that it took Valerica twenty minutes to read, was a single further line.

It is very warm up there. Please tell the boy. W.

Mara copied it into her ledger. Then she wrote it out again on a separate sheet, folded it small, and sent it by Aelstrom courier to a cottage in the Fordham hills.

The letters to Vane began in the second month.

They came by courier and by ship and once, memorably, tied to the leg of an extremely annoyed gull. Most were short. Some were not letters at all, only names on scraps of paper, folded and sent to the Usurper, at the Palace of the wind, because the senders did not know what else to call him or where else to send it.

My girl woke with frost on her hands last week, one said. The table’s not come back. The priest says the law is gone. Is it true?

It’s true, Vane wrote back. Keep her warm.

He answered every one. It took most of every evening, at the narrow table in Valerica’s room with the four empty rooms down the corridor, while the others found reasons to be nearby.

"You realize," Valerica said one night, watching him write, "that you’re now the only member of the Accord who actually corresponds with the people he represents."

"Is that unusual?"

"It’s unheard of." She leaned over and read his reply to a farmer in the hills above the Marrin, whose son had been tagged in the spring and had come home in the winter. "You’ve spelled harvest wrong."

"I’m tired."

"You’re a Master and a member of the Accord, and you’ve spelled harvest wrong." She took the pen out of his hand, corrected it neatly, and gave it back. "There. Now you’re a statesman."

Across the room, Nyx, lying upside down on the bed with her feet against the wall, said, "He was a statesman before. He just couldn’t spell."

Anastasia wrote in the third month.

The bureaus are in uproar. The Household’s western office has sent eleven appeals to my father asking whether the pedigree statute has truly been revoked. He has not read any of them. I have answered all of them, in his name, with the same sentence: The Throne has spoken at the Accord. Three of the regional governors have resigned. One has asked to be transferred to the Hesket station so that he can, I quote, be somewhere that makes sense.

My father leaves for the coast again in a week. He says the spring tides will bring the big ones up. He has had a harpoon made. It is the size of a tree.

Tell Valerica I’m reading the statute’s amendments. All of them. She was right. They’re horrifying.

Isaac went home at the first thaw.

He had stayed through the winter, sitting in the chair of Boreas at every session of the Accord. But the ice falcon had come one morning with a letter in Isadora’s sharp slanting hand, and he had read it at breakfast, and gone quiet.

"She’s tired," he said. "She won’t say so. But the falcon’s been slow."

Vane went with him to the landing terrace, where a Glacial ship was waiting, glowing pale blue against the grey spring sky.

"Tell her," Vane said, "that Thessaly says she was right."

Isaac looked at him for a long moment.

"About my aunt," he said.

"Yes."

Isaac was quiet. Then he nodded once, slowly, and something in his stiff, careful face eased in a way Vane had not seen since the night on the ice.

"She’ll pretend it doesn’t matter," he said. "She’ll say something cold about Thessaly. And then she’ll go and sit in her rooms by herself for a day." He drew a breath. "Thank you. For carrying it."

"You carried it the rest of the way."

"I’ll write," said Isaac. "Every week. With the weather." He paused at the foot of the gangplank. "And Vane? If you ever need me, for anything, send the falcon. I’ll bribe it myself."

Ashe hugged him so hard he made a small noise. Nyx drew a falcon on the back of his hand. Isole checked his pulse. Valerica gave him a sealed list of instructions for the Accord that he was to open only if the Silent Palace ever wrote back. Mara shook his hand very formally, and then, after a moment’s thought, also patted his arm.

Then the ship rose into the north, and the terrace felt larger without him.

The letter from the East came the next morning.

It came in a knot of moving air that fell out of a clear sky onto the terrace below Valerica’s window, where Ashe was sitting in the sun with her sword across her knees.

The paper inside was rough and brown, eastern paper, the kind they used in the compound at Korreth. The hand on it was small and precise and perfectly even, every stroke placed once, the way a man places his feet who has spent his life eliminating every unnecessary motion.

There was one line.

The coast is burning. Come home.

It was not signed. It did not need to be. Vane had seen that hand on a note sent down from the sanctum, settling an argument in two lines.

Ashe read it twice. Then she folded it, very carefully, along its creases, and sat holding it in both hands without saying anything at all. Vane came out onto the terrace and sat down beside her, and after a long while she held it out for him to read.

"Your father," he said.

"Yes." Ashe was looking east, toward the cape and the sea and the long curve of the world beyond it. "Ryuken doesn’t write letters. Notes down the stairs, yes. Not letters. When I’m away, he tells Kaito what to say, and Kaito writes it. He’s never once sent me anything in his own hand." Her hands had tightened on her sword. "If he’s done it now, with his own hand, it’s worse than burning."

The others had come out behind them. Vane heard Valerica’s pen stop. He heard Isole set down her satchel.

And he heard Nyx, very quietly, say, "East of the Aurelian core."

Everyone turned.

She was standing at the top of the terrace steps with her arms wrapped around herself, though it was not cold, and her opal eyes were fixed on the same eastern horizon as Ashe’s.

"The road east goes through Verath," Nyx said. "What’s left of it." She did not look at any of them. "I haven’t been back since I was nine." A pause. "I’d like to go through it. On the way. If nobody minds."

Nobody minded. Nobody said anything at all. Ashe simply reached up without looking and caught Nyx’s hand and pulled her down onto the step beside them, and Nyx sat, and leaned her head against Ashe’s shoulder, and the three of them sat there in the spring sun at the edge of the Palace of the wind, looking east.

"Spring," said Mara, behind them, as if reminding someone. "I said spring."