Chapter 125: The Narrow Sea

Nell was the one who told him to go.

She said it on the fifth morning, sitting up in the infirmary bed with her legs crossed under Mira’s blankets and the river stone on its cord around her neck. She had been breathing properly for five days, and she had spent most of them talking, with twelve years of sentences saved up and every intention of spending them before lunch.

"Roddy says there were soldiers at the Salt Bridge last night," she announced. "Imperial ones, with a drawing. He says it looks like you if you squint."

"It’s a very good drawing."

"Then you have to leave today!"

He didn’t answer right away. He had been sitting on the windowsill since dawn, watching the river turn from black to grey, and trying to find a way to say the same thing to her. She had said it first, in six words, without her voice shaking at all.

’Thirteen years old, and she’s throwing me out of the city for my own good.’

He knew where she got it. She got it from years in a bed, watching everyone around her decide things on her behalf, and deciding somewhere along the way that she would rather do it herself.

"Classes start tomorrow," he reminded her.

"I know when classes start!"

"I wanted to see it."

"You’ll hear about it." She lifted her chin, which was a thing she had learned from Mira and did not know she had learned. "If I set fire to anything, the whole city will know by noon. Roddy will write it down for you in letters so big you can read them from the boat."

"And if you hate it?"

"Then I’ll hate it, and I’ll read my book under the desk, and I’ll still be breathing." She shrugged. "That was the only part I wanted."

He studied her. The silver scars ran up her arm under the sleeve of her nightgown, thin as thread, and her color was good, and her eyes were the same serious, narrow eyes that had weighed him every day since she was four.

[Nell. Status: Healthy. Class: Unawakened.]

[Anchor slots: 3/3. No slot available.]

’I know. You don’t need to tell me twice.’

"The Headmaster will be there," he told her. "Crane too. If anyone laughs when they read your name, you look straight at the Headmaster, not at them."

"I know how to stand in a room, Aren."

"I know you do."

She made him promise to come back when it was safe, and he asked her to define safe, and she said when nobody wanted to hang him, and he said that might be a while. That part, at least, was true.

He climbed out the window at noon, because he had never once used the door in that building and saw no reason to start.

The docks were loud when he came down to the river in a grey hood with his hands in his sleeves and his pack on one shoulder, a tall shape nobody bothered to see, and found the whole quarter standing still. The long pier was lined with guards in Aldermere blue, and at the end of it, where the deep water was, a ship with three masts lay at anchor with the silver tree of Ashgrave painted on her sails.

"Envoy to the Emperor in Solvane," a voice remarked at his elbow. "Leaves on the tide."

Rook was leaning against a bollard in his patched black coat, with a book under his arm and Tiller cracking nuts beside him. He didn’t look at Aren, only at the pier, where a line of porters carried chests up the gangway under the eyes of a thin woman in black.

"The Crown is losing the war at Kharn," Rook went on quietly. "Aldermere has been a vassal of Solvane for two hundred years, and it has never once asked its master for anything. It is asking now. It is sending the one thing it has that the Emperor might want to look at."

A carriage came down the quay with the silver tree on its door.

She stepped out of it into the noon light with her hair bound in silver and a travelling cloak over the white and gold, and the dock went quiet around her. Vivienne Ashgrave had been an S-rank Awakened for a year, and she had learned to wear it. She walked down the pier between the guards without looking at anyone, and the hound of moonlight walked at her heel.

The hound stopped in the middle of the pier and turned its head and looked back along the quay, past the porters and the fishwives and the guards, at a tall figure in a grey hood standing beside a bollard. Its ears went up, and Vivienne stopped too. She followed the hound’s gaze for three breaths, exactly as she had once looked at a servant in a cold grey hall, and Aren stood motionless inside his hood and didn’t breathe.

’A dead man. She’s looking at a dead man, and she knows it.’

Then the thin woman in black said something at her shoulder, and Vivienne turned away and went up the gangway, and the hound went after her with one last look over its shoulder.

[Primary Anchor: Vivienne Ashgrave.]

"Well," Rook said. "That’s inconvenient."

"For whom?"

"We’ll find out." He pushed himself off the bollard and started down the quay toward the smaller pier, where a low dark ship with no flag at all was taking on water. "Ours leaves at dusk."

"Ours?"

"The Crown’s clerks walked into my warehouse this morning with a list of names, and mine was at the top of it." Rook didn’t slow down. "A man who hid the Blood Thief for a week doesn’t get to keep a quiet life, stone-seller. Eleven years of ledgers, and Tiller gets the lot. He’ll ruin it in a month." He shifted the book under his arm. "Besides, the woman who runs that crew owes me a favor and three fingers, and she doesn’t take strangers. She takes the people I bring her myself."

"And what will you tell her about me?"

"That you’re a liar, a thief, a gambler, a murderer and a fool, and that you make people grow." He glanced sideways. "She works for people who don’t have a country, stone-seller. Don’t ask her who they are until she tells you. She’ll tell you when she’s sure you’re worth it."

Aren laughed out loud, which he hadn’t done since the ice.

[Rook. Hostility: 71% → 68%.]

They sat on the end of the pier until the sun went down over the river, and when it had, they stood and picked up their packs and walked up the gangway of a ship with no flag, one behind the other. Behind him, on the hill above the city, the windows of the Academy were lit, and in one of them a thirteen-year-old girl was learning to breathe.

The ship cast off, and the lights of Highcrest grew small behind it.

He was standing at the stern an hour after midnight, watching the last of them go out, when the System spoke.

[Anchor out of range. Investment already recorded. Return honored.]

[Anchor progressed: Kaela Voss. Rank D: Marrow (Perfect).]

[Source: Investment recorded. Five seconds inside the Hollow’s mouth.]

He read it twice. Then he understood, and he had to hold the rail.

She had stood at the Hollow’s teeth when it breathed its last, the breath that froze Ansel’s arm to the shoulder, alive only because his Ward had held the jaw off her a moment before. Marrow asked for extreme cold, and she had been given it, a few paces from the last lung. It had simply needed time to set, as Rook’s bones had needed a month, and tonight it had finished.

[Mirror Return triggered.]

[Return 1/2: Perfect Marrow, x1,000.]

The deck went out from under him.

It began in his bones. Everything in him that was only Tempered, the skin he had hardened in the Old Quarry and the flesh and bone he had earned at the bottom of the Abyss, went white-hot all at once and started again from the beginning. He went down on his knees at the rail with his teeth locked and his hands full of splinters, and he didn’t make a sound, because Rook was asleep in the cabin below with his book on his chest, and the sailors ten paces away, and he would rather have died.

[Rank D: Skin, Flesh, Bone: Tempered → Perfect.]

[Rank D: Heart: Tempering.]

His heart stopped.

It stopped for one long second, long enough for him to notice. Then it struck once, so hard he felt it in his teeth, and settled into a slow, heavy beat that shook the planks under his knees.

[Rank D: Heart (Perfect).]

[Rank D complete. Six stages, all Perfect.]

[Strength: 413 → 1,520. Agility: 313 → 1,310. Endurance: 470 → 1,760.]

’Sir Bram had fourteen hundred. A Servant just outbid a knight of the Measure.’

It wasn’t finished, because everything he had tempered had been poured into a body that was now too small for it, so it had to break through!

[Host has reached Rank C.]

[Core Condensation.]

He felt it form behind his breastbone, where Rook’s pearl of night had formed on a butcher’s table. His didn’t gather; it opened. A ring of something that wasn’t light drew itself slowly around an empty center, and the essence of his whole body began to turn around that emptiness, in and in, without ever reaching it.

[Core: a ring around nothing.]

[Color: none. Quality: unmeasured.]

[Anchor slots: 3/4. One slot available.]

He knelt there with his forehead against the rail and felt the bowl inside him grow. Five crescents, it had held, on a good day. He would need to test it to know how it stood now.

’That was one. Here comes the second.’

[Anchor progressed: Kaela Voss has looked into the Void.]

[Source: Investment recorded. Five seconds inside nothing.]

He remembered her face through the dark, on her small disc of ice with the world gone on every side, looking at something far away that he couldn’t see. She had seen it for five seconds. She had understood a sliver of it, as a man understands the sea after falling into it once.

[Mirror Return triggered.]

[Return 2/2: Comprehension of the Void, x10,000.]

The pointer had found the thin last segment for the second time in his life, and this time he had expected it to feel like money.

It felt like a door opening in the back of his skull.

Something came through it that was far too large for the room. He felt his thoughts being pushed aside to make space for it, one after another, the names of streets and the prices of cores and the rules of a trading floor in another world, all shoved against the walls of his head to make room. He tried to hold on to one of them and couldn’t. Blood ran out of his nose, and then out of his ears, warm on his cold neck.

[Warning: the Host’s mind cannot hold this.]

[Restructuring.]

[Do not resist.]

’I’m not resisting, I’m just...’

He never finished the thought. The stern tilted up and hit him in the face, and the dark came down.

He woke in the cabin with his mouth full of the taste of copper and a lamp swinging over his head.

Rook was sitting on the opposite bunk with his book closed on his knee, which Aren had only ever seen when Rook was about to say something he meant. His face was grey.

"A day and a night," Rook told him, before he could ask. "You screamed for the first hour. Then you stopped breathing, twice, and I had to put my fist on your chest and hit you until you started again." He opened the book again, slowly, and found his page. "If you ever do that on her ship again, stone-seller, I’ll throw you over the side and save myself the trouble."

Aren lay still and listened to his own heart, slow and heavy, once every two seconds.

Then he listened to the ship.

He could hear the water moving along the hull, and under the water, the nails in the keel, every one of them, as he had always been able to hear iron. But he could hear the spaces between the nails too, now. He could hear where the hull was and where it wasn’t, and for one dizzy moment, lying on his back in a swinging bunk, he understood that the second thing was the more important of the two.

[Restructuring complete.]

[Talent acquired: Comprehension (Perfect).]

[The Host no longer learns a skill. The Host sees what it is.]

[Moonlit Step: 55% → 62%. Street Fighter’s Instinct: 82% → 85%.]

[At 100%, a borrowed skill is remade in the Host’s core element.]

[Core element: Void.]

’Fifty-five percent after a year on the rooftops with the moon, and seven more while I was lying unconscious.’ He almost laughed, and his head punished him for it. ’And now I can see the rest of it. All right. That’s not a headache. That’s a gold mine.’

’Ten years of reading cultivation novels, and I finally get to be the genius. It just comes with a headache.’

He climbed to the deck slowly, with his hand on the wall, and it felt different under his feet, lighter, and he knew the ship hadn’t changed. He looked back at the dark where Highcrest had been, at the place where a girl had walked into her first lesson without him, and at the sea ahead, where another ship with a silver tree on its sails was already a few hours ahead of them, bound for Solvane.

He stood at the stern and looked back toward the place where the city he had woken up in, ten years ago, in a stranger’s body, had gone into the dark.

He grinned into the wind.

’This time, I’m going to make a fortune.’