37 | The Letter

Soren got back to the estate at half past nine on legs that were not entirely his own.

Peak Apprentice sat behind his sternum like a held breath, and Deepwell was still settling it, and he had not slept properly in three nights, and he had left a nine-year-old girl on a boat that did not stop until Corvane without her father.

He had not let himself think about that part yet. He was aware of not letting himself, which was its own kind of thinking about it.

<<Loraine: You are walking wrong.>>

I'm tired.

<<Loraine: You are walking like a man carrying something and pretending he isn't. I would rather you set it down than trip over it in front of her.>>

Not now, Loraine.

<<Loraine: I did not say now. I said eventually, and I am telling you in advance so it does not arrive as a surprise.>>

He came through the yard gate expecting Marda, or nothing, or the particular silence of a house that had not yet noticed he was back.

What he got was Sera, standing at the top of the servants' stair, arms folded, watching the gate like she had been watching it for a while.

"You're late," she said.

"I'm exactly on time."

"You're late for what she's expecting, which was you back last night. Doesn't matter now. Get inside. Something's happened."

Loraine.

<<Loraine: I cannot read a closed door, Soren.>>

The study smelled of hot wax. Vesper was standing rather than sitting, which she never did, with a broken seal in one hand and a single sheet of paper in the other, and she looked up when he came in and her face did something complicated that was not, for once, aimed at him at all.

"Where have you been," she said. It came out flat, not really a question.

"The labour estate, my lady. Hask needed a second man."

"Hask has needed a second man for six weeks apparently. Read this."

Sera's eyebrows went up a fraction. Slaves did not get handed correspondence.

Soren took it anyway.

It was written in a hand too careful to be a clerk's, on paper too plain to be a house's, and it said, in polite and entirely unhurried language.

It essentially read that Brannick Sallow of Greyfen had become aware of certain irregularities touching a number of unfortunate incidents on the river road.

That he had every confidence Lady Callowmere would wish to attend to the matter personally at her earliest convenience, and that he looked forward, with the greatest respect, to hearing from her before things became regrettable for anyone involved.

There was no threat in it anywhere. That was the threat.

Loraine.

<<Loraine: He has done to her exactly what she did to Vail. A letter with no content, aimed at the one weapon she cannot pretend not to understand.>>

"Well?" Vesper said.

Soren set the letter down.

"He can't prove anything, my lady," he said carefully. "If he could, this would be a magistrate's summons, not a letter."

"I know that. That is not the part that concerns me. The part that concerns me is that a river-town thug has just written to a Callowmere as though we are equals in a negotiation."

She let out a sigh and rubbed her eyes like she was tired, the ink smear on her jaw a constant mark of when she was swamped with work and no way out of it.

"And worse, he is not wrong to think so, because I do not currently have an answer for him that does not involve admitting I don't know what my own slave has been doing for six weeks."

Sera said nothing. Sera had gotten very good at nothing.

"I sent to the Reeve's office this morning to have it looked at properly," Vesper added, not quite to either of them.

"For all the good it will do. Bewick's had his desk buried since the Hand moved into the square, every petty dispute in Greyfen landing on him at once, and he's the sort of man who does the thing that benefits him first and the thing that's urgent whenever he gets to it. Which means never, unless I make it worth his while."

Bewick was the name of the one managing the town affairs, a corrupt official who did his best to stay out of trouble and in wealth.

Loraine.

<<Loraine: Note that. A second cause for any delay, entirely independent of anything you have done. Useful, if it holds.>>

Vesper turned, finally, and looked at Soren properly, and for one long second he thought the inspection was simply going to happen right there, standing up, in front of a letter that had ruined her morning.

Then she waved a hand, sharp and irritated, and the moment passed.

"Not now," she said.

"I don't have time for you today. I have to deal with a river-town enforcer who thinks he can write to me like I owe him an explanation," she spat, her voice cold and mildly exhausted.

"...and I intend to spend the rest of it deciding what I'm sending back. Sera, get me the Hallow Ford correspondence, the real one, I want to see exactly what the Guild has actually opened before I decide how hard to lean on it."

"My lady." Sera moved.

"Soren." Vesper didn't look up. "Go. Wash, eat, sleep, I don't care. We'll do the rest of it properly when I've dealt with this."

He got out.

He got to the bottom of the stair and stood there for a moment with his back against the cold stone, and the relief that arrived was so large and so immediate that it took him a second to notice the other thing sitting underneath it.

<<Loraine: You are allowed to feel that.>>

Feel what.

<<Loraine: Relieved that you are not, this morning, being inspected. And underneath it, something else, which you have been declining to examine since Corvane.>>

Soren stood in the yard for a while.

He passed a hand over his face, pulling his hair back as he staired at the sky, his thoughts churning while his stomach felt heavy.

Even though he couldn't say he has the best relationship with his father, he could understand how it felt for her, a little child, desperately calling for her father.

He thought about how they may never see each other.

She wanted to go with her father.

<<Loraine: She did.>>

I told her no.

<<Loraine: You told her yes, and gave her a reason that was true, and she went, because the alternative was staying in a house with a man eating an apple on the wall opposite until Brannick decided she wasn't useful anymore.>>

That's not the same as it being right.

<<Loraine: No. It is not.>> A pause. <<I do not know if it was right, Soren. I calculate odds. I do not calculate that.>>

I don't even know if Petrin's still alive.

<<Loraine: Neither do I.>>

He stood there a while longer, and then he went and washed, because there was nothing else to do with the morning.