Chapter 150: The Glass Wing

Seren boiled the prince’s Marrow with her sleeves pushed up, and she cursed him at every stage.

The order on her bench was in green ink. ’Benedek signs his dice debts in green. Coin showed me a whole page of them.’

It had come up with a new basket boy, Dunn, a thin, polite Sarkhane clerk working off a House debt.

No copies today. The rib still caught on every breath, and he wanted this boil under his own eyes. Aren was the goose himself, grinding lily at the window bench with his head down over the mortar.

Dunn came and went with the baskets. Once, while Seren was fighting a stuck lid on the back furnace with her back to the room, he set a basket down by the press bowl, where the cooled mix waited.

She pressed without the old wince the Rot used to give her. The furnace flared gold, and she carried the pill to the glass.

Twenty-one.

"Twenty-one!" She stared at the number. "Damn it, goose, twenty-one! Yours was nineteen, but this one’s mine!"

’A Sarkhane boy, a basket, and a press bowl with nobody watching it.’ He looked at the pill.

’Fault Line.’

A thin dark line came up through the pill, straight through its heart.

He followed it in. It ran to a dark grain at the center, no bigger than a flea. ’One hard push at the heart, and it splits there.’

’Buyer’s blood. A leash.’

The pestle stopped in Aren’s hand for half a breath. ’Lucan wants her to be a puppet.’

Across the room, Dunn was stacking empties by the door. There was a little dark dust in the crack of his right thumbnail, where water didn’t reach.

’Lucan’s man.’ Aren kept grinding. ’Tell Seren, and she breaks his hands, and Lucan learns somebody here can see a leash, and he will try again. The pill has to go up as it is.’

Seren sealed it in a pine box with her mark in brown wax, for Coin’s runner in the morning.

Coin was cutting carrots when Aren came down after dark.

"Your new basket boy has a dirty thumb."

Coin laughed so loudly that the pot boy dropped a ladle. "You’ve met Dunn."

"You knew."

"My friend, I know everyone’s debts." Coin wiped his eyes with his apron. "His Highness’s steward bought that boy a place in my house, and I let him in, because sooner or later someone would pay me to know what he did. I was going to sell it to you tomorrow." He sighed. "And you found it yourself. That’s terribly rude."

"Who carries Seren’s box to the Glass Wing?"

"A runner off my roster. Whoever is on the outer court at noon." Coin’s knife went on. "Or my girl up there could take it up the back stairs, with her lovely quiet hands."

’One of his pretty maids. Whatever she carries, she reads, and whatever she reads, Coin sells.’

"Nil is on the outer court at noon."

"Is he?" Coin looked up over the carrots, and his little eyes went bright. "Then the House will need paying for the change of plan."

Aren paid without arguing. Coin counted it twice anyway, then went back to his knife. "The Treasurer reads the bride the day after tomorrow. His glass leans on a pill till it squeaks. Cheap ones have split on his stand."

Nil walked the outer court with Kesh again. Kesh was on his mother’s cooking by the second lap, and he had not finished it when the noon bell rang once. Nil took the pine box from the gate clerk and carried it across the gravel to the inner door.

One of the two Lamp Guard knights stepped out to meet him and held up one hand, flat.

[Unknown. Rank B. Hostility: 0%.]

"Hired?"

Nil nodded.

The knight opened the shutter a finger’s width. A thin white light came out and went into Nil, through the plate. Aren felt it search briefly and find a ring with no color in it, like every pill-fed boy in Aurem.

"Colorless. Rank C." The knight wrote it in a small book on a string: Nil, hired, colorless, C, one box, Veil seal, one note, sealed in plain wax. "Deliveries go hand to hand under my eye. Walk in front of me, slowly."

The room beyond was long and quiet, with a glass roof and the noon light coming down through it onto a writing desk. Vivienne Ashgrave sat at the desk in a plain grey dress, with her silver hair in a loose braid down her back and ink on the middle finger of her right hand. She put her pen down so that it would not blot the page, and looked up at the grey plate and the helm with no face.

Aren kept his hands still and his mouth shut.

At her feet, Luna lifted her great white head. The hound looked at the armor, then past it, and laid her head back down on her paws.

Nil set the pine box on the corner of the desk, with the folded paper under its cord. On the outside, it said FOR THE BRIDE.

Vivienne read the outside without touching it.

"Ser Hollin, wait outside."

"My lady, the hire stays under my eye."

"Then leave the door open. Somebody in this city has written to me in capitals. I would like to know who before the Church reads it aloud."

The knight hesitated. "Five minutes, my lady. The door stays open, and I can hear." He went, and the door stood open a hand’s width with his white sleeve beyond it.

Vivienne looked at Luna, and then at the helm. "You’re the one who fell over in my court," she said. "On dry gravel."

Her left hand came up, open. A crescent of white light rose off the palm, the size of a sickle blade, and held still in the air between them, ready.

She broke the wax with her other hand and read it with her lips moving and no sound. This time he had printed it left-handed.

TWO MARROWS. BOTH READ GRADE SIX. THE PRINCE ORDERED ONE FOR YOU. HIS BLOOD IS AT ITS CENTER. A LEASH. WHOEVER TAKES IT TURNS TOWARD HIM FOR LIFE. NO GLASS WILL SEE IT. THE OTHER ONE IS CLEAN. HIS WILL CRACK WHEN SOMEONE LOOKS AT IT HARD ENOUGH.

Her eyes went to the shelf behind the desk, where a box of white jade had stood shut since the day she came.

He moved so that she could see his hands the whole time. He broke Seren’s seal, tipped the Marrow into his steel palm, crossed to the shelf and opened Lucan’s box. The Heart Pill sat inside on blue silk, beside a small folded card in a prince’s hand. He laid the leashed Marrow beside it and closed the lid. Then he set a twist of white paper beside her pen, and put the empty pine box back on the desk.

The crescent went out. She opened a drawer and took out a hand glass in a silver frame worn smooth at the edges.

"My father sent this with me. A bride who eats what she doesn’t know doesn’t stay a bride for long."

She took Lucan’s Marrow out of the jade box with a small silver spoon, without letting it touch her skin, and set it on the glass. Then she did the same with the pill from the white paper.

Twenty-one. Nineteen.

’Two points cleaner than the prince’s. Seren is never hearing about this.’

She tilted the frame to the light, and sat back.

"Grade six, both of them, and my father’s glass finds no poison in either." She tapped the frame with her inky finger. "But it can’t see this." She touched the word LEASH on the note. "So I can’t check the only part that matters." She spooned the prince’s pill back into the jade box and shut the lid.

Her eyes stayed on the black mesh. "And yours could have your blood in it." She waited, and he gave her nothing, no nod and no shrug. "But a leash is for a man who wants to be found. He signs his gifts and writes me cards. You came in a suit with no face, and you’ll leave the same way. You don’t want me to find you."

She folded the paper round the clean pill and put it into a silk pouch at her belt. "So yours is clean. What do you want for it?"

He took the note back, and wrote on the back of it with a pencil, left-handed and badly. She read it upside down.

"’Nothing.’" She nearly laughed. "Nothing, for a grade six Marrow, in this city? Then you’re the worst merchant in Aurem."

’Second worst. I paid Coin for the right to give it away.’

"I will take it when I choose," she said. "And it won’t be because a suit of armor told me to."

He dipped the helm. ’Still ungrateful as ever’

Under the grey silk, against her breastbone, he could see the outline of something as long as a finger, on a fine silver chain.

On the left side of his chest, under the plate, the Scar moved.

It lifted inside him and pulled hard toward her throat.

’It wants to eat the key. The System said it won’t feed. It didn’t say it can’t.’

’If it eats the key, the merchant gets nothing, and Mira never gets her memory of me back. And whatever hunts that key kills her for one she no longer has.’

He stepped back, and held the Scar where it was.

Ser Hollin’s sleeve moved behind the door. Nil turned and walked out past him, and the knight wrote one more line in his book.

On the gravel, he sent Iron Sense back through the open door to her desk. It found the pen nib, the frame of the glass, and the fine silver chain round her neck.

It followed the chain down to where its weight should hang. Nothing was there.