Chapter 130: A Perfectly Sensible Instruction

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

Concord came down the slope out of the trees in one piece and everybody on that riverbank got ready to fight.

Nobody gave an order. That’s the thing about it. Brightvale was strung out along the water and Vanguard was still up on the rise and Sanctuary was somewhere in the middle and Greywall was two hundred paces north on their way to the ruin, and all four of them turned at once and closed up without one word going between them.

Two hours ago three of those classes were hitting each other.

Now they were a line.

I’ve seen grown soldiers take longer.

Thirty-seven people in navy walking down a slope toward a hundred and forty-five who all lost something this morning because of them. Petra Halvern at the front of it, not in front, a few paces inside, the way she’s walked all day.

Tristan brought Vanguard down off the rise at a walk. Slow. Hand up. Keeping the pace down, because the speed you arrive at tells people what you came for.

Concord stopped about forty paces short.

Nobody drew anything. There isn’t much to draw. But there’s a thing a class does with its hands when it’s about to stop being a crowd and start being a problem, and both sides did it, and for about six seconds it could have gone either way.

Then Halvern walked out on her own.

Twenty paces ahead of her class. Alone. Onto open ground, in front of four classes, with her hands out.

Second person to do that today.

I’ll say this for Concord. They don’t lack for nerve.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

Marta went out to meet her, which of course she did, because somebody had to and Marta is physically incapable of letting anyone else be the one who says the hard thing.

And I sat there in a glass box half a mile up with absolutely no idea what either of them was saying, which is how I have spent the entire day, and I would like someone to understand that this is a very specific kind of awful.

Here’s what I could tell.

Halvern talked first, and she talked for a while, which surprised me, because everything anybody has ever said about Petra Halvern is that she is short with people.

She pointed north-east twice. At the wood.

And then she made a gesture I actually understood, because it’s the same one my aunt used to make about her kitchen when she’d had enough of everyone. Both hands, flat, pushed out and away.

Take it. It’s yours. Go on.

She was offering them the wood.

The white Wellspring in the trees. The only one of the three left that sits on ground Concord actually holds.

And Marta stood there and did not move a single muscle, and I knew exactly what she was thinking, because I’d have been thinking it too if I were a person who thinks before she feels.

Why.

***

Because it doesn’t work. That’s the horrible bit. It’s a lovely offer and it does not work and everyone on that bank knew it inside about four seconds.

A white Wellspring needs three classes standing there. If Concord’s in the wood, Concord is one of the three. Concord can put a hand on it the moment it comes up, and nobody could do anything about it, and that is precisely and exactly what Concord did the last time anyone opened one in front of them.

For the offer to mean anything, Concord has to not be in the wood. At all. They’d have to leave their own ground, and give up the small Wellsprings still up there, and go and stand somewhere useless while four classes take a hundred points out of their forest.

Halvern said something else.

And she pointed north, past the wood, at the top of the basin.

I think she was saying they’d go. Actually go. All the way out.

And Marta said something short.

And I have watched that girl say no to people for twelve days and I knew it before her head finished moving.

***

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

I could not hear a single word of it.

I want that understood before anything else, because every judgement I made in the following ninety seconds was made from posture and distance and the movement of hands, and I have spent my whole life being told that I read people well, and I have never once had to do it through half a mile of air with no sound at all.

This is what I saw.

Petra walked out alone, twenty paces from her own class, onto open ground, in front of four classes who have every reason to loathe us.

She talked. At some length, which is not like her.

Vess came out to meet her and stood with her arms folded and did not move.

Then Concord’s line shifted behind Petra. Not far. Perhaps three paces. Whatever that was, Vanguard answered it, and I watched a hundred and forty-five people close up around one girl standing on her own with nothing in her hands.

And Petra did not step back.

She stayed there, alone, in the middle of it, and did not come back to her class, and did not raise her hands, and did not move at all.

***

I have thought about those ninety seconds a great deal.

What I believed was that she had gone out to attempt something, that it had failed, and that she was standing in front of four hostile classes without an exit, and that in another minute it would stop being a conversation.

What I believed was that my class had put itself in an unsurvivable position on open ground for no gain whatsoever, having spent the entire day in a winning one.

What I did not consider, at any point, in ninety seconds, was that she might be in the middle of something and simply not finished with it.

I picked up the pen.

I had told myself on Saturday night that I would not spend a card, and I had kept that promise for the whole of a day without effort, and I had been quietly congratulating myself about it since roughly ten o’clock.

I discovered that the promise had never been about restraint.

It had been about never having been frightened.

I wrote:

Disengage. Return to the wood. Take the remaining Wellsprings.

Nine words that any instructor in this academy would have called correct.

I put it through the slot.

Concord went from one hundred and eighty to one hundred and fifty, which does not matter, and has never mattered, and is not why I am writing this down.

***

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

I saw the card arrive.

Greywall had stopped two hundred paces north and turned round when Concord came out of the trees, so I was watching that piece of ground the whole time.

Halvern was standing alone in front of four classes.

Vess was three paces from her with her arms folded.

And a small cream rectangle appeared in Halvern’s hand.

***

Everybody saw it.

That is the whole of it. There is nothing else to say about what happened next, and it took about two seconds, and I have not stopped seeing it since.

A hundred and forty-five people were standing in a half circle watching one girl from Concord make them an offer. And in the middle of her making it, a card from her leader arrived in her hand.

Vess looked at it.

Then she pointed at it.

Then she turned round and walked back to Brightvale.

***

Halvern did not read it at first.

She stood there holding it with her arm down at her side, not looking at it, watching Vess walk away, and then she looked at the rim.

Then she read it.

Then she looked at the rim again, for longer.

***

Here is what it looked like from where I was standing, and I was the only person in that basin with no way to say anything to anybody, so I have had a great deal of time with it.

It did not look like an instruction arriving.

It looked like proof.

Every class on that bank has spent today trying to work out whether a promise from a stand-in is worth anything when there is a leader in a glass box who can overrule her at any moment with ten words. That is the only question anybody has asked all day. Rhael could not answer it. Declair could not answer it. They settled it in the end by looking up at a wall and deciding to believe what they saw there.

And then Concord’s leader answered it for all five of us, in writing, in front of everybody, at the exact moment her stand-in was giving her word.

Nobody had to decide whether to trust Halvern after that.

They had seen the wire.

***

( Alash Vortex’s POV )

I did not understand what I was looking at for about four seconds, and then I did, and I sat down.

Not because of Elizabeth. I don’t think anybody in this room gets to judge Elizabeth Aurelius for spending a card in the ninetieth second of watching her own class stand in the open in front of a hundred and forty-five people. I’ve spent two today. One of them was for a boy whose hands were going red and I’d spend it again this evening.

I sat down because of the wood.

***

Here is the arithmetic, and I had it done before Petra had finished reading her card.

Three white Wellsprings left. The ruin. The ridge. The wood.

Four classes in the agreement, one of them already paid. Greywall took the island. So the ruin and the ridge go to Brightvale and Vanguard, in whichever order they’ve settled between them.

And the wood goes to Sanctuary.

Because Sanctuary goes last, and last means the one that’s left, and the one that’s left is the wood.

Penelope stood on a riverbank two hours ago and put my class in the last position in the order, in front of everybody, without being able to ask me, and she did it knowing that last is where you get robbed.

She did not know that last was also the wood.

Neither did I. I worked it out while I was watching her do it and I let myself not finish the thought, because I was busy being moved about it, and because the man in the glass box has been doing that all day.

***

Concord holds the wood.

Concord has held it since about nine this morning. Twelve small Wellsprings out of those trees, one at a time, in the most efficient line anyone has walked today. It is their ground, they know where every root is by now, and the only way Sanctuary opens that white Wellspring is if Concord agrees not to be standing in it.

Petra Halvern walked twenty paces out onto open ground on her own to say exactly that.

And nobody believed her.

And nobody is ever going to believe her now, because in the middle of her saying it, ten words arrived in her hand from a box on the rim with a hundred and fifty points behind it.

***

’Run it again,’ I said.

[The arithmetic has not changed.]

’Run it again anyway.’

[Sanctuary is last in the order. The last Wellspring in the order is in the wood. The wood is held by a class that the other four have just collectively decided cannot be trusted.]

’So Sanctuary gets nothing.’

[Sanctuary gets nothing.]

***

Down on the bank, four classes started moving north toward the ruin, because that is the next one and the day does not stop.

Concord went back up the slope into the trees.

And Penelope walked at the back of Sanctuary with her hands in her sleeves, looking at the ground, doing the thing she does when she is working something out that she does not want to be right about.

She’ll get there. She’s quicker than me at everything except this.

I looked at the two cards on my desk.

Sixty points. Twenty words.

And not one arrangement of them that puts thirty-six people anywhere except last, in a wood, in front of a class that nobody will stand beside.