Chapter 129: Nobody took it

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

There’s a causeway under that water.

You can’t see it from the bank. You can see it from up here, a pale line about a hand’s width under the surface running from the shore out to the island, crooked in two places where something collapsed a long time ago.

Sixty paces of it.

Wide enough for one person.

Marta found it first, which tells you Brightvale actually did their scouting job this morning, or else she just walked into the river and got lucky and I’m not going to be generous about it either way.

They went single file.

That’s the part I want on the page. Four classes, one line, one person wide, over sixty paces of water with a hundred points standing up white at the end of it.

Ten from each. The rest stayed on the bank.

You put forty people on a strip of stone a hand’s width under a river and every single one of them is holding the shoulder of somebody from a class that was hitting them two hours ago.

Nobody pushed anybody.

I want that written down somewhere, because I spent the entire crossing waiting for it, and I know exactly what that says about me.

***

Halfway out, the second break.

The stone drops off for about four paces. Chest deep and the current is faster there than it looks, and the third person in line went in sideways and came up coughing.

Grey uniform.

Two people got a hand on her before she was under properly.

Neither of them was Greywall.

***

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

The island is forty paces across and flat and there is nothing on it but grass and the light.

Forty people. Ten from each class. Nadia at the front of mine.

The four of them stood at the Wellspring. Declair, Rhael, Vess, and Nadia.

Then it opened.

I have seen one open before this morning, from a mile away, through glass. Up close it must be something. The light stands straight up out of the ground and does not flicker and does not move, and the grass around it goes very slightly grey, and the whole island turned the colour of five o’clock.

One hundred points. Standing there. Six paces from four people who could all reach it.

Greywall was to seal it.

Ours. First. Because Declair made an argument about it on that bank, and because we were at minus seventy, and because everybody could see I had no cards left.

That last one is the real reason. I know it and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I was chosen because I am the only leader in this room who has been disarmed.

Not trusted. Disarmed.

***

Nadia did not move at once.

She looked at the light. Then she looked at the three people standing at it with her.

Then she said something and stepped back, and put her hand out toward Vess.

Offering it.

***

I did not understand.

That is not a sentence I use. I understood most of what happened on that bank today from half a mile away with no sound at all. I did not understand this.

She was giving it away.

A hundred points. On a class at minus seventy. On the first white Wellspring anybody has agreed to share all day, and my second-in-command put her hand out and offered it to the girl whose class broke our left line and put two of us on the ground and one of us in the water.

I put both hands flat on the desk.

I have no cards. I could not have said anything even if I had known what to say, and I did not know what to say, and both of those things were true at once and I have never had to hold them together before.

Vess shook her head.

She said something short and stepped back herself, and pointed at the ground by Nadia’s feet.

And Nadia put her palm on the light.

***

Greywall went from minus seventy to thirty.

I watched the figure change on the board above the glass and I did not feel what I expected to feel.

I have spent the whole of today writing instructions for people, and spending everything I had on people, and standing in a box watching people do things I could not reach.

That was the first thing all day that happened without me.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

I have to tell you what nearly happened, because from up here I could see it and I don’t think anyone down there could, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

Marta was closest.

When the light came up she was standing on the north side of it, about four paces off. Nadia was on the south side with the water behind her. Tristan and Penelope were both further back than either of them.

Four paces.

Nobody moves in four paces. Not against somebody with Nadia’s legs.

But nobody was moving at all. That’s the thing. Everyone was standing still because the whole point of standing still was that everyone else was standing still, and Marta was four paces from a hundred points with her hand loose at her side, and Brightvale was on nothing.

Nothing! All day! We opened one in the square and got robbed, and we ran at Greywall for scraps and got one small one out of it, and my class had ten points on the board at midday and every single person out there knew it.

And I had three cards.

And my hand was on the pen, and I had written the D of *Don’t* before I even knew my hand was moving.

***

Here’s what stopped me.

Not being noble. I want to be very clear, it was not noble, I’ve had hours to be honest about it and I’m going to be.

It was James.

I watched him spend a card this morning telling Tristan not to do something Tristan had already decided not to do. I watched the number drop. I watched Tristan read it halfway across a square and stop and look up at a wall he couldn’t see through.

And I thought: if I write this and she wasn’t going to do it, she will know I thought she was.

And she’ll be the only person in this basin who’s been told, in writing, by her own leader, in front of everybody, that she couldn’t be trusted with it.

On the first day she’s ever led anything.

So I put the pen down with one letter on the card.

And I stood there with my hands flat on the glass and I watched a girl I have known for twelve days decide what kind of person she was going to be, and I could not help her, and I could not warn her, and I could not even tell her I was watching.

***

She shook her head.

I saw it. From half a mile up, that small movement, and I knew what it was because I have watched Marta Vess say no to people for twelve days and she says it with her whole head.

Then she stepped back and pointed at the floor by Nadia’s feet.

Nobody took it.

***

I sat down on the floor of my box and put my head against the glass.

I had absolutely nothing left. I don’t mean cards. I had three cards. I mean the other thing.

And then I laughed, which is what I do, and then I cried a bit, which is not, and then I got up again and wiped my face with my sleeve before anybody looked over, and went back to the window.

I picked her because she says no to people.

She said no to the one thing that would have got us a hundred points and lost us everything else.

I did not teach her that. Nobody taught her that. She came like that.

***

( Alash Vortex’s POV )

Penelope was the furthest away from it.

I want to talk about that for a moment.

When four people stand around something worth a hundred points, where you stand is a sentence. Marta stood close, because Marta stands where the thing is. Tristan stood between people, because that is what Tristan does. Nadia stood with the water at her back, which page two of Daphne’s instructions probably has an opinion about.

Penelope stood six paces off, with her hands where everyone could see them.

Further from it than anybody.

She did that on purpose and she did it before the light was even up, and I think she chose that spot while she was still walking across the causeway.

Because Sanctuary goes last. And a class that goes last spends the entire day being the class that might take it at the end. So she spent the first round making herself the least reachable person on that island, in front of forty witnesses, so that later, when it matters, somebody will remember where she was standing.

That is the most Penelope thing that has ever happened.

***

The light folded down and Greywall’s number went to thirty and forty people on an island did absolutely nothing at all for about four seconds.

Then Tristan put a hand on Nadia’s shoulder.

And Brightvale, who had got nothing out of it, who had run four hundred paces along a riverbank two hours ago to take those Wellsprings by force, started clapping.

I could not hear it.

I watched a class applaud somebody else being paid and I could not hear one second of it, and I stood in a warm glass box with my hands on the window like an idiot and found that my eyes had gone unreliable.

[Your heart rate is elevated.]

’Shut up.’

[Understood.]

***

One down.

Three white Wellsprings left. The ruin, the ridge, and the wood.

Greywall paid. Brightvale, Vanguard and Sanctuary on nothing, minus ten, and minus thirty.

And the whole thing now depends on a class that has already been paid walking away from a river and across a basin to stand in three more places where they get nothing whatsoever.

Nadia turned and started moving her people off the island.

I watched the bank tense.

I watched Tristan not move, deliberately, so that nobody behind him would.

And Nadia took Greywall down the causeway, and up the far bank, and turned north.

Toward the ruin.

Ahead of everybody.

Going to the next one first.

***

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

Concord took its eighth small Wellspring while a hundred and forty-five people were standing in a river being decent to one another, and our figure went to one hundred and eighty, and I did not look at it.

I was looking at the wood.

Petra had stopped.

She had been moving through that northern woodland all afternoon in the most efficient line I have ever watched anybody walk, taking small Wellsprings one after another, and somewhere around the moment the island opened she stopped walking and turned and looked south toward the river.

She stood there for a considerable time.

I could not see her face. I have never in my life wanted so badly to see somebody’s face.

Then she said something to the people around her, and Concord came out of the trees.

Not north, toward the two small Wellsprings still sitting unclaimed at the top of the wood, which is where I would have sent them, which is where the arithmetic says they should go, which is the decision that wins Concord this examination by a margin nobody could argue with.

South.

Down the slope. Toward the river.

Toward four classes who will not open anything in front of us and have no reason on this earth to let us near it.

I had three cards on that desk and I had not touched one of them since dawn, and I discovered that my hand was already on the pen.

I do not know what she is doing.

That is the entire problem. I spent a weekend building somebody who would not wait for my permission, and I have spent the day being quietly proud of it, and it has never once occurred to me until this exact moment that the price of that is not knowing.

There is a white Wellspring in that wood.

It is the only one of the four that sits on ground Concord holds.

And Petra Halvern has just walked away from it.