Chapter 26: The Breath of the Moon

They buried Hob on Tuesday, in the paupers’ field outside the north wall.

Very few people came: a few old scavengers who had worked the burned houses with him, a fishwife who said he used to bring her scraps of copper wire for her husband’s nets, and a priest of the Light who was bored and in a hurry and kept glancing impatiently at the sky as if he expected rain. The Church didn’t bury anyone for free, not even in the paupers’ field, so someone had paid, and nobody knew who.

Aren stood at the back by the broken wall with his hood up.

The night before, he had given Old Mag two gold crowns and asked her to pay the priest without saying where the money came from. It was most of what he had saved, and it would put him another month behind on Rook’s loan. Mag had taken the coins, looked at him with her one eye, and not asked a single question. He was starting to think that was the most valuable thing about her.

The grave was very small, because Hob had been a small man.

Aren didn’t pray, because he hadn’t prayed once in either of his lives. He stood by the wall and looked at the fresh earth and made himself remember the name, and the bandages, and the runes cut into an old man’s chest because a stranger on the other side of the river had needed a story that sounded normal.

’Next time I invent a person, I check that he doesn’t already exist.’

It was a cold, practical lesson, the only kind he had ever known how to learn, and he was beginning to suspect it wasn’t nearly enough.

On the way back he passed the old rope shed behind the dye house, and there was a small boy sitting on its wall, swinging his legs and eating a stolen apple. It was Pip, alive and filthy, and Aren stopped beside him.

"You shouldn’t sleep here anymore."

Pip gave him a deeply suspicious look. "Why not?"

"Because the men who gave you that silver might come back." Aren set three coppers on the wall. "There’s an old woman behind the fish stall by the docks. One eye. Tell her a stone-seller sent you, and she’ll find you somewhere warmer."

Pip looked at the coins, then at Aren, then snatched the coins and was gone before Aren could say another word.

’You’re welcome! Really. Don’t mention it.’

That night, while he was lying awake, the window opened.

[Primary Anchor progressed.][Vivienne Ashgrave: Essence flow improved. Internal blockage reduced.][Source: Investment recorded. Hidden aid.][Mirror Return triggered.]

He sat up so fast his scar pulled.

She had read it. She had found the Chapter on breath and tried it, alone in her tower room or under the glass dome of the observatory, and somewhere deep inside her the knot had loosened, if only a little, just enough for the System to notice.

The small wheel spun in the dark. It slid past x10, past the wide edge of x100, crept toward the narrow red sliver at the end, and stopped just short of it.

[Result: x100.][Return: Essence flow improvement x100.][Crescent Moon Blade (Grade S). Mastery: 18% → 31%.]

He felt it happen, like a door he had been leaning on for weeks suddenly swinging open. The silver power that had always sat heavy and wild in his chest, refusing to go where he sent it, started to move, clumsily, but it moved. He raised his hand in the dark and thought about the crescent, and for the first time he could feel its exact size before it formed. He didn’t let it form. He just held the shape of it, the weight of it, like a coin in a closed fist.

’Thirteen percent. From one book left on a desk. Best investment I’ve made all year.’

He lay back down and hardly slept at all.

She found him on Thursday, on the third floor of the library, while he was shelving ledgers. He knew her footsteps by now, slow and even, and he calmly kept stacking.

"Servant."

He turned around. Vivienne stood a few steps away holding the thin grey book up between them.

"This was on my desk last week." "On top of my notes, open to the Chapter I needed." Her grey eyes were perfectly steady. "The head librarian says it belongs in the Chronicles room, on the fourth floor, behind a locked gate. He says nobody goes up there except him and the boy who carries Professor Crane’s ledgers."

Aren looked at the book, then at her, and let his face go a little confused and a little scared, which wasn’t hard at all.

"I carry whatever Professor Crane gives me, my lady. Sometimes the stacks are very tall, and sometimes things fall off." He hesitated as if he were trying to remember. "I might have dropped it. I’m sorry if it got in your way. I can take it back up."

She didn’t hand it over. She looked at him, not quite at his face but at all of him: the dust on his sleeves, the ink on his fingers, the way he was standing with his weight slightly off his left side. He had been looked at like that before, across tables in his old life, by people trying to decide whether he was a fool or a liar.

"So you’re telling me that a Servant with a combat aptitude of zero dropped the one book in this entire library that I needed, open to the one page that mattered, on my desk. By accident."

"I’m very clumsy, my lady."

"You’re many things. I’m starting to think clumsy isn’t one of them."

The silence lasted long enough for him to hear the old clock on the wall.

Then she lowered the book, and something in her face closed abruptly like a door. "It doesn’t matter. Accident or not." She turned away. "I’m keeping it."

"Of course, my lady."

She walked to the stairs and stopped at the top without turning around, as if there was something else she meant to say. Then she went down without saying it.

[Vivienne Ashgrave. Hostility: 98% → 96%.]

Aren stood among the shelves and stared stupidly at the number. He should have been worried, because every percent she lost was a percent off his returns, and in his old life he would have called this a bad week. Instead he found himself thinking about how she had stopped at the top of the stairs.

He went back down to the basement and didn’t let himself think about it for the rest of the day. He very nearly managed.

On Friday morning, a new notice appeared on the great doors of the hall.

The Founders’ Festival will be held in thirty days. All students will take part in the exhibition duels. In honor of the Academy’s three hundredth year, the Measure will be brought from the Headmaster’s tower and displayed in the Great Hall, where the instructors and the Rank D students of Highcrest will be measured before the public.

The courtyard buzzed excitedly. Nobody in Class D had ever seen the Measure, and most of the upper years hadn’t either. People said it was a mirror of black glass as tall as a door, and that when you stood in front of it, six lines of light rose beside your reflection and showed exactly what you were.

Aren was still Rank E, and in thirty days he would still be Rank E, so he wasn’t going to be standing in front of anything this time. But one day he would break through, and when he did, there would be a machine in this Academy built by the cleverest minds in the Free Cities for the sole purpose of seeing exactly what a person was. False Face had fooled a crystal, Darius’s men, Pip, and a barracks full of hired swords. He had never once tested it against something made to look through lies.

’And I really, really don’t want to find out in front of the whole Academy!’

Behind him, someone laughed. "Maybe they’ll measure Zero too. Six lines of nothing!"

Everyone around them laughed, and Aren laughed with them, still looking at the notice, while the cold settled slowly and heavily into his stomach.