Chapter 88: The Price of a Flower

He went up to the manor on the third day, before the evening show, in the hood and scarf he had worn on Lantern Street, as neither the fool nor Ren but simply a nobody.

The guards at the gate didn’t want to let him in, and he didn’t bother to argue. He took one black petal out of the pouch under his shirt, wrapped it in a clean cloth, and handed it to the youngest guard.

"Take this to whoever runs this house, and tell him the man who brought it is waiting."

The guard looked doubtfully at the cloth, then at him, and went, and a few minutes later he came back running.

’There it is, right on time. That never fails!’

They led him through three courtyards and up a long stone stair to a room at the top of a tower, with a fire, a table, and a window looking down over all of Grimholt. A man stood at the window. He was tall and broad, perhaps fifty, with short grey hair and a plain dark coat, and the petal in its cloth lay open on his palm.

He turned around slowly, and the air in the room changed.

Aren couldn’t see it, but he could certainly feel it: weight, as if the stone ceiling had dropped a hand’s width, then another, and was pressing down on his shoulders and the top of his head and the inside of his chest. His knees bent and his heart stumbled badly. He had felt something like it from the Prince’s sword stroke across the yard at Kharn, except this wasn’t aimed at a crowd. It was aimed squarely at him, and it wasn’t even trying.

[Halvard Rusk. Steward of House Varken. Rank B.]

’Oh, come on, another one? Does everyone up here come in Rank B?’

Aren locked his knees stubbornly and refused to go down.

His heart beat once, slow and heavy, and the heat of his Perfect blood flowed out into his arms and legs, and he stood. It wasn’t easy, and his jaw ached with how hard he was clenching it, but he stood, and he met the steward’s eyes over the top of his scarf and held them.

After a long breath, the weight lifted just as suddenly as it had come.

"Interesting," Halvard Rusk murmured mildly. "Most Rank D men simply fall over, you know." He glanced at the petal on his palm. "Where did you get this?"

"Where they grow."

"Nobody goes where they grow."

"Then nobody gave it to you."

One corner of the steward’s mouth moved, and he closed his hand around the petal.

"I’ve already sent a piece of it to her. If it’s false, you’ll leave this room by the window. If it’s real, we’ll talk about the rest of the flower." He gestured at a chair. "Sit."

Aren politely stayed on his feet.

They waited while the fire cracked. Somewhere in the manor a door opened and closed, quick footsteps came up the stairs, and a servant burst in, out of breath, and whispered something urgently in the steward’s ear.

Halvard Rusk’s expression didn’t change, but the hand holding the petal closed a little tighter.

"The mark on her wrist is smaller," he said quietly, "smaller than it’s been since the summer." He looked straight at Aren. "What do you want for the whole flower?"

"Five hundred gold!"

The steward laughed, a short and genuine laugh that seemed to surprise him.

"You do know what that flower’s worth?"

"Two thousand, maybe more, to you."

"And you’re asking five hundred."

"And two other things."

The steward waited patiently, his face giving nothing away.

"House Varken will sponsor a candidate for the Iron Trial this year. One place, for a candidate I choose. You don’t ask who, you don’t ask why, and you don’t withdraw him, whatever he looks like." He paused. "And I want everything your house knows about the White Hollow, the notes from eight years ago, all of them."

For a few seconds the room went very quiet.

"You’re not selling me a flower," the steward observed slowly.

"No, I’m selling you your heir."

Halvard Rusk studied him in silence, then went to the window and stood with his back to the room, gazing down at the town, the mine and the black mountain.

"Her name is Sigrid, and she’s seventeen. She went down into the deep shafts last year because three boys in her class said a Varken would be too scared to go where the miners go." He sighed. "She wasn’t scared, of course, the little fool..."

He turned around abruptly.

"Done."

He didn’t hand over the gold himself. A servant brought it in a plain leather bag that was much heavier than it looked, and another brought a flat wooden case tied with cord. The steward watched closely as Aren took a whole lily out of the eel-skin bundle and laid it on the table, black and thin and soft, its petals stirring very slightly in the warm air.

The steward didn’t touch it. He looked at it with the careful wonder of someone who had heard about such a thing all his life and never really expected to see it.

"Your candidate, then. How exactly will I know him?"

Aren picked up the bag and the case.

"Oh, you’ll know him. He’ll be the one you’re embarrassed to be seen with."

He went down the long stair and through the three courtyards toward the gate, and halfway across the upper courtyard he glanced up without meaning to.

There was a window in the east tower, high up, with a lamp behind it. A girl stood in it, pale and thin and wrapped in a blanket, with dark hair cut short like a soldier’s. She was holding her left wrist in her right hand and looking down at it. Then she looked up and out, and finally down into the courtyard, at the hooded figure walking out through her family’s gate.

He kept walking steadily and didn’t look back.

[Hidden aid detected: Sigrid Varken. Her life.][Investment cannot be recorded. Anchor slots full (3/3).]

He stopped halfway down the hill and stared at the window until the words faded.

’Are you serious? The best deal since Kharn, and you file it under nothing?’

A dying heir, a Rank B house, and a debt they didn’t even know the size of, and the System had looked at it and thrown it away, because he had no room left to hold it.

He thought about the three names in his slots: a girl with silver hair who had ruined him, a criminal in the lower city who didn’t know he was still alive, and a captain who wanted to put him in chains.

He had never once thought about which of them he would let go, and he realized now that he would have to, eventually.

’And I’m certainly not thinking about it tonight either.’

That night, after the last show in Grimholt, Naught the Fool sat in the back of the wagon with a needle and thread and sewed five hundred gold marks into the lining of his checkered trousers, ten coins at a time, in little pockets, so they wouldn’t clink when he fell down.

Mother Grell came round the side of the wagon while he was doing it. She looked at the trousers, then at the needle, and then at the flat wooden case beside him with the Varken crest burned into its lid, and she went away again without a word.

’She knows. She doesn’t know what, exactly, but she knows. Everyone in my life is like that!’

He opened the case after she had gone. Inside were a sheaf of papers and a map drawn in careful ink: the lake, the ice, the rows of soldiers marked with small crosses, and in the center a circle labeled in a neat hand: The stone that does not fall, five hundred paces, Varken, Ivo, Perfect.

He looked up from the map, frowning.

At the edge of the camp, in the dark beyond the firelight, something was moving across the snow, and then another, and then a whole line of them, low and white and silent, walking north in single file past the wagons without a glance. Rimewolves, frost hares, and something much bigger behind them with antlers made of ice.

They didn’t stop and they didn’t hunt; they simply walked north, toward the White Hollow.

The beasts walk north before the Hollow breathes.

’Well, that’s definitely not good. That’s really not good at all!’