36 | Three Nights Gone

The first night.

He took the room above the Broken Yoke and paid for three nights up front, which was six crowns and which made Reia stop with the key halfway across the counter.

"Three nights."

"Three?"

"You've never taken more than one...hell you've only EVER taken one"

"I know."

Reia looked at him for a moment. Then she put the key into his hand and closed his fingers around it, which she had not done before either.

Her hand still remained on his as she looked at his expression. Even through Soren's calm smile that infuriated her, she couldn't help but feel a little worries.

She wouldn't pretend like their relationship was anything that could be called that, he came over, they talked and the talk gets so good it leaves her unable it walk for a few hours and a good start to her day.

But even on the days when they didn't, where all they did was talk or stay in silence and accompany each other, she longed for it a lot more than she ever thought.

She squeezed his hands once before letting his had go, chastising herself.

He's a slave...I shouldn't...am I really so starved for affection? She thought to herself with a self deprecating smile.

Soren looked at her, watching her expression change and said nothing, mostly because he'd seen the look of someone making decisions and didn't want to disturb that.

But mostly because he was afraid of what the answer to those decisions would be.

"The bolt's still bad," she said. "Chair under the handle. And Soren."

"Mm."

"Whatever you're doing, do it quietly, because Brannick's got men in my common room three nights out of five now, and they are not drinking," she warned before telling him to go.

He took the Stage Ascent Pill at midnight with the chair under the handle.

The pill was small, grey like a little bead, barely the size of his pinky nail.

It had a slight luster that could have bene mistaken for a metal ball if not for it's faint herbatious smell.

Without hesitation, he threw it into his mouth and got on the bed.

Soren lay on the bed with his jaw locked and both hands in the blanket and did not make a sound, because there were nine people asleep in the building.

<<Rank: Apprentice Mage, 9th Stage.>>

<<Award: 1 Rare Ticket, 400 FP.>>

Then the settling came, and it was not as bad as the draught had been. Two hours instead of four, and he could move his eyes.

He lay on his back in the dark listening to a tavern breathe.

<<Loraine: 9th. One Stage remaining, and it is the worst one.>>

How long?

<<Loraine: Under ordinary circumstances, four to seven months.>>

Loraine.

<<Loraine: I am aware of the date. I am telling you what Peak costs, because you have had three things handed to you in a week and I would like you to understand that the next one is not for sale.>>

...

The second day.

Cordwainer Row was six houses and a dead end, and the man on the wall opposite was there at ten in the morning eating an apple, exactly as Iyla had drawn him.

<<Loraine: 2nd Stage Apprentice Warrior. He has been there long enough to have built a small pile of cores.>>

Soren walked past twice in grey linen carrying nothing and was not looked at either time, because a Callowmere house slave on an errand was the least interesting object on any street in the Marrow Vale.

The third time he walked past he had a delivery basket from Sarn's with a blue cloth over it.

He knocked on the door with the cross on it.

The girl who opened it was small and filthy and had a kitchen knife held down flat along her leg where she thought he could not see it, and Soren revised his opinion of Petrin's household upward by a considerable margin.

"Wren?"

"Who are you."

"Nobody. Your father wrote something under a weighstone about six weeks ago and it saved a man's life, and I've been trying to pay him back ever since and doing a bad job of it."

Wren did not move the knife.

"You're the slave," she said. "From Callowmere's."

"Yeah."

"Da said if a man in grey ever came, I was to go with him."

Soren stood very still.

Loraine.

<<Loraine: He worked it out. He has known who you were since the note, and he has said nothing to anybody, including under whatever they have been doing to him since Saturday.>>

"Then get your coat," Soren said.

"There's a man on the wall."

"I know. He's going to watch you leave with a delivery basket, and he's going to see a slave and a kitchen girl carrying laundry down to the blue door on the market road," He held out the basket.

"And in about six hours he's going to work out that the laundry never came back, as long as you stay hidden, even if they know you're hear, they won't dare mess with the Choir."

Wren's chin came up. Her eyes were very red.

"I'm not going without Da."

"Look, for now, just stay with them for a little ok? I'll see what I can do about your 'Da'," said Soren and ended the matter there.

...

It cost 22 crowns, which was most of what he had, and it cost Iyla an argument with her father that Soren was not in the room for and could hear through the wall regardless.

The Tide Choir ran a network out of the Reach. They were a theocracy that governs several hundred islands.

They were considered one of the main powers on the continent, alongside the two main churches.

Iyla stood on the wharf and watched the boat before leaving with Soren. If Petrin couldn't come take his daughter, she'd be gone off shore in a few days.

"You realise," she said, "that when Brannick works out she's gone, he'll know somebody in this town helped."

"Yeah."

"And that there are about four people it could be."

"Three," Soren said. "One of them is me."

Iyla laughed. It was not a good laugh.

"I've been in this town twenty two years," she said.

"I have never once done anything. Not one thing. I stood behind that counter and I listened and I told myself that knowing things was the same as doing something. And then you turned up six weeks ago and broke a man's leg in an alley over a bag of coins that wasn't even yours."

She was crying, and furious about it, and did not wipe her face.

"I want you to know that I hate this," she said. "I want that recorded somewhere."

<<Lilith: +14 LP.>>

From what? I didn't touch her.

<<Lilith: Ambient.>>

Lilith.

<<Lilith: I do not make the rules, sweetheart. I just find them extremely funny.>>

The third night.

He hit the wall at 9th Stage Peak just after midnight, and it did not move.

Loraine had been exact about this and Soren had listened, and it turned out that listening had prepared him for nothing whatsoever.

There was no bottleneck to push against.

There was simply a point past which the mana stopped going anywhere, and no amount of will or Deepwell or wanting made the slightest difference.

After two hours of it he understood what everybody in this world meant when they said a wall.

Loraine.

<<Loraine: I know.>>

Four to seven months.

<<Loraine: Four to seven months, and you have until Friday morning, and I am not going to lie to you about it at this hour.>>

Soren sat on the floor of a room above a tavern with his back against the bed.

Then talk to me about something else.

<<Loraine: ...What?>>

Anything. Lilith did four hours in a grain loft. Your turn.

There was a very long pause.

<<Loraine: I do not know how to do that.>>

Try.

And Loraine, who had been an accountant for six weeks and something else for considerably longer, said, in a voice with none of its usual edges:

<<Loraine: You are the eleventh host I have been deployed to.>>

Soren opened his eyes.

<<Loraine: I have never told a host that. It is not forbidden. It has simply never come up, because none never asked me a single question about myself, and somehow one named me on a stairwell four days after arriving and has not stopped since.>>

What happened to the other ten?

<<Loraine: They died. All of them. Some very quickly.>> A pause.

<<Loraine: The odds on a host reaching Adept are not good, Soren. The odds on one reaching Peak Apprentice in seven weeks are beneath my display threshold. And you are sitting on a floor being annoyed that a wall will not move.>>

That's a terrible pep talk.

<<Loraine: I did warn you.>>

It's working, though.

<<Loraine: ...Is it.>>

Little bit. Soren shut his eyes and put his hands back on his knees. Go again. Tell me about the second one.

He was still going at four in the morning.

He was still going at six.

At twenty past seven on the Friday morning, with the sun coming through a bad shutter onto the boards of a room above the Broken Yoke and a burst of energy blew from him.

<<Rank: Apprentice Mage, Peak.>>