Chapter 128: The Last One Is Free

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

Declair turned her back on two classes and faced mine.

Nadia was still holding Lucan’s collar.

She let go of it. She put herself at the front of Greywall, in front of thirty-six people who had just been hit and were waiting to be told what to do next, and she had nothing in her hands and nothing coming.

I could not send her anything. She knew that. Everyone on that bank knew it, because they had all watched three cards land in her hand inside twenty seconds and then nothing.

A class whose leader is finished is a class that can be read.

Declair had worked that out before she started walking. I am fairly sure of it. She looked at Nadia’s hands for a long moment before she opened her mouth, and people do not look at hands unless they are counting.

She talked for some time.

I could not hear one word of it.

I have spent this whole term finding that irritating. I have spent today finding out what it actually is.

There is a thing about being at the top of a glass wall with the whole basin laid out in front of you. You see everything and you understand almost nothing. I could see Declair’s shoulders and Nadia’s chin and the way Brightvale had gone quiet behind them, and I could not tell whether my class was being offered something or being managed.

I have never in my life had to take somebody else’s word for anything.

Nadia looked up at the rim once.

Not for instructions. She knew there were none.

I think she was checking that I was watching.

Then she turned back and said something short, and Greywall lowered their hands.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

Marta wasn’t having it.

You could tell from the shape of her from four hundred paces up, arms folded, head on one side, doing that thing where she lets somebody finish and then takes the whole thing apart in about six words.

And honestly? Good.

I mean it. I’m not being loyal, I mean it properly. Somebody had to say it out loud and it wasn’t going to be Penelope, because Penelope was the one asking, and it wasn’t going to be Greywall, because Greywall had just been hit by us and were being very polite about it in a way that made me feel ill.

So Marta said it, whatever it was, and then she pointed at the island, and then at Penelope, and then back at the island, and I didn’t need to hear it.

You’re asking us to open a hundred points in front of three classes who’ve all just watched exactly what happens when you do that.

Because that’s the whole thing, isn’t it. That’s the actual thing.

This morning three classes stood round a white Wellspring in a square and did the good and sensible cooperative thing and one of them walked off with all of it while everybody was busy being moved by Vanguard. And everyone in that basin saw it happen. And there is no version of the rules, none, not one line on that sheet, that stops it happening again.

I’ve read the conditions four times. I read them again in bed last night which is a very sad thing to admit.

There is nothing in there about agreements. There’s no clause for it. You can promise anything you like on that riverbank and the parchment doesn’t care.

And the worst bit, the actual worst bit, is that I know exactly what Marta thinks about promises. She told Roth his plan was stupid on the fourth day and she was right, and she says no to everyone, and the reason I picked her is that she doesn’t believe things just because people say them nicely.

I picked the one person down there least likely to agree to this.

I was so proud of that on Saturday.

***

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

Tristan walked in between them.

Not fast. He’s never fast unless someone’s swinging.

He stood in the gap with Brightvale on one side and Greywall on the other and Declair in the middle of it, and he said something, and then he held up four fingers.

Four.

Took me a second.

Four Wellsprings left. The white ones. Square’s gone, Concord’s got it. That leaves the one in the ruin, the island, the ridge, and the one in the wood.

Four white Wellsprings.

Four classes standing on that bank.

I sat forward so fast I cracked my knee on the desk.

One each.

That’s the whole idea. Everyone opens all four. Each class seals one. Nobody fights, nobody gets robbed, four classes walk out with a hundred apiece, and Concord gets nothing out of any of them.

It’s the only way anyone catches Concord. Only way. I’d done that arithmetic myself an hour ago and put it down again because it needed everyone to behave.

Down there they were doing it anyway.

Then Marta said something short and Tristan’s hand came down, and I saw his shoulders go.

Because there’s a problem and it’s obvious and I hate that I spotted it at the same time as everyone else.

Order.

Whoever goes first gets paid and then has to keep turning up to three more openings where they get nothing. Whoever goes last has to trust three classes who’ve already been paid to walk all the way across a basin and stand in the right place for nothing at all.

And there’s worse.

Last round, there’s nobody left to punish anybody. Three classes already paid. One class about to be. You put a hand on that stone before they do and you take a hundred points off people who can’t do a single thing to you afterward, because the day’s over.

The last one’s free.

I know that because I’d have taken it.

Two weeks ago I’d have taken it without blinking and called it winning.

***

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

Concord took its sixth small Wellspring out of the wood while the river was arguing, and our figure went to one hundred and sixty, and I watched it change without any feeling at all.

I had been locked out.

I want to be exact about this, because I have spent the last hour being exact about it and it has not helped. A Major requires three classes. Four are standing on that bank. Concord is not required. Concord cannot be included, because including us would mean a fifth share of nothing, and because not one person down there would open a hundred points in front of the class that took the last hundred points.

Petra did that. On my instruction, in the sense that I spent a weekend making her into somebody who would.

And the consequence is that my class is now the only one in this basin that nobody will stand beside, and we are winning, and I cannot decide whether those two facts are in tension or whether they are the same fact.

The arithmetic is not close. If that riverbank holds together, four classes take four hundred points between them and the best any of them manages is a hundred and ten. Concord will finish the day above two hundred on small Wellsprings alone, because there are twenty-four of them and nobody else has had a spare hour to take one.

We win by doing nothing. We have won by doing nothing since about ten this morning.

I have three cards and no use for any of them.

I made a promise to myself on Saturday night that I would not spend a single one, and I have kept it all day without effort, and I had assumed the difficulty would come when Concord needed help.

It has not come at all.

That is what I have been turning over up here for the last hour, while a hundred and forty-five people on a riverbank try to build something that has no clause to protect it.

I have not been tested once today.

I have simply been correct, and alone, and ahead.

***

( Alash Vortex’s POV )

I was watching Penelope’s hands.

She does a thing when she’s about to say something she has already decided to say and would rather not. Her left hand goes flat against her leg. Not a fist. Flat, fingers together, pressed down, like she’s holding a page still in a wind.

She did it once when she was thirteen, in her father’s study, about four seconds before she said something I only heard about years later.

She did it on that riverbank.

’She’s going to offer something,’ I said.

[Yes.]

’Something expensive.’ 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

[Almost certainly.]

***

Here is what I could see and could not hear.

Tristan held up four fingers. Everybody understood. Four white Wellsprings, four classes, one each, and it works or nothing works.

Marta asked the question that breaks it. I know it was that question because Tristan’s shoulders came down when she asked it.

Order.

Somebody has to be last. And last is the only place on the whole board where betrayal is free, because after the fourth one there is no fifth, and nobody can punish anybody, and a hundred points is a hundred points.

They stood there for a while with that between them.

Then Penelope put her left hand flat against her leg.

And pointed at herself.

***

Sanctuary goes last.

I knew before she finished the gesture. I knew from the hand.

She was putting my class in the one position on that riverbank where everybody else has already been paid and walked away, where three classes have to come all the way back across a basin in the evening for nothing, and where if even one of them decides not to bother, Sanctuary gets a hundred points of absolutely nothing.

Thirty-six people. Minus thirty on the board. Last in the order.

And she did it without being able to ask me.

That’s the part I sat down about.

She could not ask me. She has no way to ask me. There is a wall and a mile of air and a pen and ten words, and all of that only goes one direction, and she stood on a riverbank and gambled thirty-six people on what I would do this evening without one word from me about it.

’She’s betting on me.’

[Yes.]

’She has no reason to.’

[She has approximately five years of reasons. You were present for most of them.]

***

And then the bank turned round.

Not all at once. A few first. Brightvale near the water. Then Vanguard along the rise. Then Greywall, then the rest, until a hundred and forty-five people standing on a riverbank in the middle of a basin were all facing the same direction.

Up.

At the rim.

At a long strip of glass with five boxes in it.

Because Marta’s question doesn’t actually get answered by Penelope. It can’t. A stand-in can promise anything she likes and it isn’t worth the air, because at any moment in the next six hours her leader can put ten words through a brass slot and overrule her entirely.

Every promise made on that bank is worth exactly as much as the person in the glass box above it.

They were not looking at Penelope.

They were looking at me.

***

I have been looked at by a great many people this month and I have disliked all of it, and I would like to state that this was worse than every previous occasion combined.

A hundred and forty-five faces. From half a mile. I could not make out a single one of them and I could feel every one.

Nobody could hear me. I could have said anything. I could have screamed the whole thing down and not one person would have known.

So I did the only thing available in a sealed box.

I stood up, so they could see there was somebody in it.

And I put both hands flat on the glass where they were.

I don’t know what that looked like from down there. Probably nothing. Probably a small dark shape behind a window, half a mile up, doing something pointless.

Tristan turned round first.

Then Marta.

Then, after a moment, Nadia.

And then they all went back to the water, and Penelope’s left hand came off her leg, and she started walking toward the island.

***

I sat back down and my hands were not steady.

Two cards. Sixty points. And a day that now ends with Sanctuary standing at the last white Wellspring in the basin with three classes who have already been paid, and one very simple, very cheap thing I could do about it.

I put my hand in my jacket.

You will want to use all three.

Keep the last one.

Not for them.

And I sat there in a warm glass box and thought, well.

There it is.

He knew. Somehow, four days ago, in a room I have never been in, he knew that the whole of this day would come down to whether I could sit still at the end of it and not take a hundred points off people who trusted me.

Not for them.

Don’t spend the last one on my class.

I felt something in my chest come loose that had been tight since Friday, because for the first time since a man I have never spoken to left me four lines in an unsealed envelope, I understood exactly what he meant.

I was completely wrong.

I did not find that out for another five hours.