40 | The World

Soren tried the Ledger on Reia nights later, half by accident, in the quiet after, with her head on his arm and her breathing gone slow.

<<Lilith: Look properly. Not just at her. At what I'm showing you.>>

The panel came up soft, unlike anything Loraine ever produced, more felt than read.

<<Affection: 58%>>

<<Rank: Unranked>>

<<Physique: N/A>>

<<Root: Ice. Clouded.>>

Soren went very still.

Ice Roots? What are roots? More importantly she has Ice?.

<<Lilith: Ice.>>

She's never mentioned it. Never been tested?

<<Lilith: Who would have tested her? Her father can't afford a reading stone and wouldn't have thought to borrow one for a barmaid. Clouded roots don't announce themselves. You have to actually be looking, and nobody who owned the means to look has ever once been in this room.>>

Soren looked at the number sitting above her sleeping face. Fifty-eight percent.

<<Lilith: Sweetheart. There's a Bound Sigil sitting at four hundred right there, if you wanted it. I'm not hiding the door. I want you to see it.>>

I want to.

<<Lilith: I know you do.>>

I've got 309 to close before the choker's even in reach, and if I spend 400 tonight I'm further from it than I am right now, with a Consortium blade sitting in a tannery I still don't know how to get past.

<<Loraine: This is the correct decision.>>

<<Lilith: I didn't ask you.>>

<<Loraine: I am aware. I am telling him anyway. He is being logical instead of letting emotions get in the way, if he can deal with all his problems, making the Bond with her wouldn't be an issue.>>

Soren lay in the dark with Reia's breathing even against his shoulder and a root she didn't know she had sitting in a panel only he could see.

Not yet, he said with a small sigh.

Not because I don't want to. Because if I do it now and Kolm finds me in three weeks, she's bound to a man who's dead, and everything the Sigil would have given her stops exactly where it started.

<<Lilith: ...>>

<<Lilith: That's a good reason. I hate that it's a good reason.>>

Does she ever find out I looked?

<<Lilith: Not unless you tell her. This isn't a thing she'd or almost anyone would feel happening.>>

Soren could only hum in response

...

The pessimism arrived on the cart home, and once it arrived it did not leave.

309, Soren thought, watching Greyfen shrink behind him.

And I don't actually know how long I've got. The inspection's delayed. Delayed isn't cancelled. It could be tomorrow.

<<Loraine: It could.>>

And I've got no plan that closes 309 in a week that doesn't involve something reckless.

<<Loraine: Correct.>>

So what's the actual smart move.

Loraine. If I wanted to leave. Actually leave, tonight, not fight anybody, not wait for anything. What would I take?

<<Loraine: ...>>

<<Loraine: The purse under the flagstone behind the feed store, which is more coin than you've openly held since you arrived. Anything portable and unmissed for a day. A Choir boat, if you could get to one before anyone noticed you gone.>>

The same boat Wren is on.

<<Loraine: The same route. Not the same boat.>>

He sat with that for the rest of the ride, and he was most of the way through actually planning it, coldly and carefully, when he came through the yard gate and found Sera waiting for him again.

"You look like a man doing numbers he doesn't like," she said.

"Long trip."

"Mm." She fell into step beside him, which she didn't usually do.

"Inspection's delayed again. Properly this time. Bewick's finally moving on the registry step, but slowly, which means whatever Vesper's waiting on is stuck and he'd rather be paid to expedite and hasn't been."

Soren stopped walking.

"How long."

"Weeks, at the rate he's going. Maybe longer if the Hand keeps giving him more to be distracted by."

Sera glanced at him. "That's good news. You look like it's bad news."

"It's not bad news."

It wasn't.

I was about to run, he thought.

Tonight, based on nothing except being frightened, and I was going to leave Reia behind not knowing anything, and Nessa, and Ottilie, and I didn't even think about them until this exact second.

<<Loraine: You are allowed to have been frightened.>>

I nearly threw away everything I've built because I was doing arithmetic on a number I made up.

<<Loraine: You have built only two things so far, and one of those you've been avoiding.>>

Soren stood there for a long moment and pushed her statement to the side mentally.

Loraine. Honest question. What do I actually know about this world?

<<Loraine: State it and find out.>>

Three faiths. I know the names. I don't know what any of them actually believe past what Iyla's mentioned in passing.

I know there's a kingdom I live in and I couldn't tell you what's north of it, what's stronger than it, or who's actually in charge above a woman who sells slaves out of spite.

He shook his head slowly. I nearly ran tonight with no idea where I was running to, past the name of a place on a chart that isn't even mine.

<<Loraine: It is correctable. Ask someone who knows.>>

Iyla.

<<Lilith: Iyla.>>

He stood in the dark yard a while longer, and then he went inside, and for the first time since he'd arrived on Ariyas, the thing he wanted most wasn't a ticket, or a technique, or an escape route.

It was a map of the actual shape of the trouble he was in.

...

Iyla shut the shop early, and sat him down at the workbench with two cups of something bitter and started talking.

"First, the three faiths," she said.

"Go."

"Radiant Concord. That's us, officially, whether we believe it or not. Says the world's exactly as it should be, emperor at the top, farmer at the bottom, and a slave underneath even that. Cardinal Houses run it under the Luminarch, and they're not elected, they're born."

"And the Choir?"

"Opposite end. They believe souls are borrowed, not owned, and a bind mark is the worst thing a person can do to another. They don't put themselves out politically making them weak in that regard, that's how Wren's on a boat right now." She turned her cup.

"And the Ash Vigil, which you don't say loudly. Outlawed. Say the world's a cage and someone's coming to crack it. Concord hunts them for it."

Loraine.

<<Loraine: All correct. I would add only that the Vigil's belief is closer to true than any of them currently know, and I am not going to elaborate on that tonight.>>

Although Soren wanted to ask why she asked him to ask someone else when she knew, he guess she was making him become less reliant on them for information.

"And next, where we live."

"Solvane Ascendancy. They rule based on Magocracy, your title's tied to your strength. Capital's Aurenhall, a almost a month east, and the man technically running it is a boy propped up by a council, because his father died before he was fit to rule." Iyla shrugged.

"That's the whole kingdom, in the shape that matters to you. Above Vesper there's the crown. Above the crown there's the Cardinal Houses, who mostly are the crown when it counts."

"What else is out there? Bigger than a river town."

"Academies, for one," Ilya had a dreamy look on her face as she mentioned them, making Soren's brow raise.

"Every noble child of any promise gets sent to one. They're city-sized, politics as vicious as anything at court. Then the Iron Consortium, which is where your friend Kolm crawled out of, nine cities, one currency, no loyalty to anybody. And the Ozhan sects, further east, who'd laugh at everything you've learned here and be right to." She looked at him. "That help?"

"More than you know."

Iyla studied him for a second too long.

"You've never once asked me any of this before," she said. "Six weeks, and tonight's the first time you wanted the shape of the whole thing instead of just the next Friday."

"I know."

"Why now?"

Soren didn't answer that one directly, because the true answer was because I nearly ran tonight without knowing where to, and that wasn't hers to carry.

"Because I got lucky for six weeks," he said instead, "and I'd like to stop needing to."

...

Two hundred miles east, in a city Soren had never heard the name of and would not hear for months yet, a courtyard filled slowly with people who did not want to be there.

They came in a line, roped loosely at the wrist, forty of them, sorted by a steward with a ledger and no patience for anyone who slowed the count.

At the head of the yard, on a raised step out of the mud, a girl stood with her arms folded and her face arranged into the boredom and annoyance.

"Cassia," her father said, from somewhere behind her, not looking up from his own papers.

"The academy will expect you to have retainers. Choose well. It reflects on the House..."

"It reflects on you," Cassia said, not quietly enough.