Chapter 70: Luna

Vivienne Ashgrave woke before dawn, as she always did now, and the hound wasn’t there.

She lay in the narrow bed and looked at the empty place on the stone floor where it had slept every night since the Festival. The blanket she had folded for it was flat and cold. The door was still barred from the inside. The window was shut.

Not that it needed a door. She had learned that in the first week. It went where it wanted, through stone, through wood, through the walls of her tower at the Academy, and it always came back before she woke.

It had never once stayed out all night.

She got up and dressed in the dark, plain grey wool and riding boots. She was pinning her braid when the air beside the door turned cold and pale, and the hound came back through it as if the wood were mist.

It was wet, though not with water, exactly. Its moonlight was beaded with something like dew, there was grass caught in it, and it smelled faintly of the river.

"Where have you been?"

The hound sat down in front of her and looked up with its two small pale moons. It didn’t seem sorry. If anything, it seemed thoroughly pleased with itself.

She hadn’t wanted to name it at all. For weeks after the Festival, she couldn’t look at it without seeing a black seam in the sand. Then, on her second visit to the healer house on Salt Lane, the small serious girl in the bed by the window had looked at the hound lying across her blankets and asked what it was called.

"It doesn’t have a name."

"That’s sad," Nell had said seriously. "Everything should have a name. Call her Luna. It means moon. My brother told me that once."

Vivienne hadn’t answered immediately. But that night, alone in her tower, she had tried it out loud, and the hound had lifted its head.

Now she crouched and pulled a stem of grass out of the light along its back.

"You went to the river." She said it slowly. "Why?"

Luna didn’t answer, because Luna never answered. But Vivienne thought of the corridor yesterday: the water boy with the dirty hair, pressed against the wall, and the hound sitting at his feet, staring at his side, whining like a puppy at a closed door.

She had never heard it make that sound before.

Her father didn’t want to hear about the arrows.

She told him at breakfast anyway, in the cold stone room the Ashgraves had been given on the third floor, with the shutters open on the grey valley and two servants pouring tea. She told him about the burned caravans on the North Road, which every merchant in Highcrest had been screaming about for a month. About the black Imperial arrows the King’s patrols had found in the frost beside them. About how strange it was that the Empire, which wanted this treaty as badly as Aldermere did, would send raiders to burn wagons three weeks before the Summit.

"Strange," the Duke of Ashgrave agreed, and calmly buttered his bread.

"Someone wants the treaty to fail, Father."

"Many people want the treaty to fail. Half the lords in this tower, for a start." He didn’t even look up. "That’s what treaties are for. You make them in spite of the people who want them to fail."

"And if it isn’t a lord? If it’s someone else?"

"Then the King’s men will find them." He set down his knife. He was a tall, silver-haired man with a face made for statues, and when he looked at her, it was like watching a man study a map. Carefully, and without warmth. "You’re here to stand beside me at the signing and be seen. The heir of Ashgrave, Rank D at seventeen, who survived the Rift at the Festival. That’s your task, and it isn’t a small one. Do it well."

She would. She always did everything perfectly well.

’And I’ll keep everything else to myself. As always.’

She didn’t tell him about Brother Ansel, who had vanished from the cathedral on the night of the Festival and was last seen leaving by the North Gate. She didn’t tell him about the low stone door behind the Measure, or the Headmaster’s tired voice saying that one of the nails had failed, that someone had made it fail. And she didn’t tell him she’d sent Corwin and two of her own men up the North Road three days ahead of the column, to stop at every inn and ask every innkeeper about a man with grey eyes and a silver box.

Two of them had seen him. Both said he was going north.

Across the room, by the window, a group of young men from the lesser houses were laughing over their plates. One of them was telling a story about a horse.

Aldous Penrose.

She watched him coldly: the weak chin, the clean hands, the Penrose badge pinned in silver at his throat. He felt her looking, glanced up, smiled, and lifted his cup.

She didn’t smile back.

She had told no one about the edge of the seam. Not her father, not the Headmaster, not the Royal Knights. She had seen his boot. She had kept it to herself because the Penroses held their lands at her father’s word, and she hadn’t wanted it to end in a hearing and a fine.

’So what do I want it to end in?’

She still didn’t know.

Kaela found her at noon.

It wasn’t arranged, and it never was. They had met ten years ago, at the last Summit, in this same fortress: two girls of seven and nine sent to sit at the back of the great hall and keep quiet while their fathers argued. Vivienne had kept quiet. Kaela had stolen a knife from the Imperial table, walked across the hall, and asked if she wanted to learn to throw it.

They hadn’t liked each other then, and they didn’t particularly like each other now. They had written perhaps six letters in ten years, all of them short. But nobody else in either kingdom had grown up quite the way they had, and they both knew it.

Kaela came up the back stair in plain clothes, with no officers and no lance, and stopped in the doorway of the corridor outside the Ashgrave rooms. One look at her face, and Vivienne knew something was terribly wrong.

"Walk with me."

They walked along the top of the wall, where the wind was loud enough that nobody could listen. Kaela said nothing for a while. Her hands were wrapped in clean linen. Vivienne didn’t ask about them.

Then Kaela told her.

She told it flatly, as she told everything, like a report of somebody else’s defeat. The Pools at midnight, ninety-seven percent, the masked man in the dark. The thing that came out of his side.

"White. Long. Six legs. No face." She stared out at the valley. "Its head opened, and there was writing inside. And it drank, Vivienne. It drank four months out of me while I sat there and felt it go!"

Vivienne said nothing at all. On the wall beside her, Luna had stopped moving entirely, ears forward.

"Less than half of what I had. Eight days. You know the law."

"I know the law."

"Then you know what happens on the day of the treaty." Kaela’s jaw tightened. "And you know who’s signing for the Empire."

Vivienne knew. She had met the Crown Prince once. He’d been perfectly polite to her for an hour, and she couldn’t remember a single thing he’d said.

"You fought him? The masked man?"

"I fought him." Something crossed Kaela’s face, very fast, and was gone. "He won. With one touch. My feet went out from under me as if the floor had turned to ice."

"One touch?"

"One." A pause. "And he fought me with his eyes closed. The whole time."

Vivienne turned to look at her.

"Why," she asked carefully, "were his eyes closed?"

Kaela didn’t answer. She kept staring at the valley, and after a moment, the back of her neck turned a very dark red.

’I’m not asking that again. Ever!’

She thought about it instead, walking back along the wall with Luna at her heels. A thing with six legs and no face, that came out of a man’s side, something white.

She thought of the corridor, and the water boy against the wall. Luna sitting in front of him, staring not at his face but at his side, whining as if she wanted to go to him.

And then there was the river. Luna had come back from the river at dawn, wet and pleased with herself.

She stopped on the stairs.

There were a dozen water boys in the Aldermere camp, perhaps two dozen. They were farm boys from the valley, and nobody looked at them or counted them.

But somebody wrote down their names, so they could be paid.

The quartermaster’s clerk was a nervous little man with ink on his fingers, and he nearly dropped his tally book when the heir of House Ashgrave walked into his tent and asked to see it. He didn’t ask why, because people rarely did.

She ran her finger down the column of names. Most were only a first name. Some weren’t even that, just a mark.

"There was a boy in the tower yesterday. Third floor. Thin. Dirty hair with a pale streak in it."

"The new one, my lady." The clerk leaned over and pointed. "Started four days ago. Works hard. Doesn’t talk much."

She looked at the name.

Ren.

There was no family name, and nothing else.

"Is that all?"

"That’s all he gave, my lady. Half of them don’t give that much."

She kept looking at it. Three letters in the clerk’s cramped hand, in a column of farm boys’ names.

There had been a boy at the Academy once who had no family name either. He’d stood in the Great Hall on a cold grey morning while she ruined him, and Professor Crane, reading the charges, had paused at the place where a family name should have been and found nothing there.

’Don’t be a fool. He’s dead. You watched the ground close.’

She closed the book and handed it back.

"Thank you."

She walked out into the grey afternoon with Luna trotting after her, and neither of them looked back. But that evening, when the water boys came down to the cistern with their buckets, the heir of House Ashgrave was standing in the shadow of the central gate with her hood up, watching the stair.