Chapter 196: Do you hear yourself?

Meanwhile...

Milda walked into a round room with a long table at the centre, having a dark stone in the middle.

Ten chairs stood around it. Nine of them were already filled when Milda came through the door, and every head turned at once.

She did not hurry. She walked down the length of the room with her golden hair loose on her shoulders and her hands folded in front of her, and the light that followed her across the floor was soft and warm, as though she were carrying a lamp.

She took the empty chair at the head of the table, drew it back, and sat down.

"Good evening," said Milda.

Nobody answered her.

She looked around the table. She knew every face. She had sat among these nine people for many years, and she had never once seen them so silent.

Old Ruvan Ashgrove sat on her left with his white beard on his chest and his eyes half closed, looking like a man at the edge of sleep.

Beside him, Dessa Kyrn was drumming her long fingers on the stone in a slow and angry rhythm.

Hollin, the youngest of them, had pushed his chair a little away from the table, and he kept glancing toward the door as though something might come through it.

And at the far end of the table, with his chin resting on one hand, sat Thokas.

His hair was half black and half white, as though a line had been drawn down the middle of his head.

His eyes were two pits of unlit coal. His lips were cracked and dry, and when he saw her looking, they curled into the faintest smile.

"You are late," he said.

"I was busy."

"So we heard."

"Then you know why." Milda let her hands settle on the table. "I think that we should begin."

Dessa Kyrn stopped drumming her fingers.

"I think," she said, in a voice like a knife being drawn across a whetstone, "that you owe this table an explanation."

"I am about to give you one."

"You went to meet that boy alone."

"I did."

"Without telling any of us."

"I told Thokas," said Milda.

"Thokas does not count."

"That is hurtful," Thokas murmured.

"You promised him a rank." Dessa leaned forward.

"I have just come from the tower floor. I have seen the state he left the S-ranks, and yet... you stood there, in the middle of it, and you let a child dictate terms to the Association."

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because I thought that it was the wisest thing to do."

"The wisest?"

"Yes."

"Explain it," said Ruvan Ashgrove gently, without opening his eyes.

Milda took a breath.

She had rehearsed this on the stairs. She had gone over it several times in her mind, and had decided on the order in which she would say it.

She would be plain and level and not let a trace of feeling into her voice. These were not people who forgave weakness, and she had not become one of them by showing it.

"Leon Allistar is level twenty," she said.

A murmur ran around the table.

"He is level twenty, and he walked into the council hall alone, and he did not draw a weapon. Ten S-ranks attacked him with everything they had... and yet, none of them landed a blow. Not one."

"That is impossible," Hollin whispered.

"It is exactly what I saw."

"Level twenty cannot..."

"I know what it cannot do. I am telling you what it did." She kept her voice even.

"He has a shield. I do not know what it is. It returns whatever strikes it at ten times the force, and it chooses where to put the damage."

"And he... at least didn’t kill all of them."

"So, you see that as his mercy?" Dessa said, with a sneer.

"A demonstration," said Milda. "He could have ended every one of them. He simply chose not to."

The silence that followed was a heavy one.

Hollin had gone pale.

"And you," he said slowly. "You were in the room. You were watching. Did he... did he know that you were there?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"He told me. He looked at the place where I was standing, and he asked me to show myself."

"Under the veil?"

"Under the veil."

"Nobody has ever seen through your veil."

"Evidently," said Milda, "that has changed."

Hollin made a small, strangled noise, and his hand crept up to his collar.

She did not tell them the rest. She did not tell them that she had stood in the middle of the shattered chamber and watched a boy look her in the eye and say that she was stronger than all ten of the people she had been sitting with, in front of them.

She did not tell them that he had invited her to strike him, and that her whole body had gone cold at the thought of what might happen if she did.

She did not tell them how her knees had felt when she walked up the stairs afterward.

"What does he want?" Ruvan Ashgrove asked quietly.

"He wants the rank of SSS."

This time the murmur became a roar.

"Impossible!"

"The seat has been empty since White..."

"He is a boy!"

"He is a murderer!"

"He killed his own..."

"Enough."

It was not loud. Milda had not raised her voice. But the golden light in the room brightened by a single shade, and the shadows on the walls shrank back, and the table fell silent as if a hand had been laid across its mouth.

"I did not say that I liked it," she said. "I said that it was the wisest thing. He told me that he would take the rank whether or not we agreed, and that if the Association tried to stop him, he would crush it."

"So he threatened us," said Dessa, her eyes flashing. "And you accepted it."

"Yes, he did... but what choice do we have?"

"Do you hear yourself?"