Chapter 132: Nobody Was Watching

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

The ridge is a bad climb at any hour and it was the ninth hour of the day.

Loose stone the whole way up. Not cliff. Worse than cliff. The kind of slope that moves under you a hand’s width at a time and takes four steps to give you one.

A hundred and forty-odd people went up it at about the pace of a funeral.

Kell was stable by then. Arkwright had him strapped flat on two spears and a cloak and four of ours carrying him and two more walking alongside doing nothing except being there, which she’d told them to do and which none of them argued with.

So we went up a hill six people short and everybody wet to the knees from a river and covered in tower dust, and about half of Brightvale was limping, and Greywall had been on their feet since dawn with no points until noon and nothing since.

Nobody complained.

That’s the thing I keep going back to. I’d have complained. I’d have complained on the second slope and made it everybody else’s problem and called it keeping morale up.

***

The white one on the ridge sits in a scoop near the top where the wind has hollowed the stone out.

Tristan put the openers in a ring facing outward instead of inward.

I didn’t understand it until the light came up and half of them had to look away from it. Then I did. He wasn’t worried about the Wellspring. He was worried about a hundred and forty exhausted people standing on loose rock round a bright thing in a high wind.

Nobody went over the edge.

***

Then he sealed it.

I watched my oldest friend put his hand on a hundred points and Vanguard went from minus thirty to seventy, and I want to write down what I felt, because I’ve been wrong about myself several times today already and I would like to get one of them on the page correctly.

I was glad.

Not the way I’m glad when I win something. I’ve won a lot of things. This wasn’t that. This was the other thing, the one where it’s got nothing to do with you and you’re pleased anyway, and I don’t think I’ve had it before and I don’t entirely know what to do with it.

He didn’t look up at the rim.

Not once, not this time, and I understood that too. He’d looked up this morning because I’d sent him something. There was nothing to look at now.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

It was Marta who said it.

Of course it was. It’s been Marta all day, every time, every single time there’s been a thing nobody wanted to say out loud, and I don’t think one person down there has worked out yet that she’s the reason any of it held together.

The light had folded down and Vanguard had their hundred and everybody was just standing about on a ridge getting their breath back, and Marta turned round and said something to Tristan and pointed north.

At the wood.

And the whole ridge went quiet.

***

Because here’s the thing, and I’d known it since the river and had been very carefully not thinking about it since the river.

Four classes. Four white Wellsprings. One each.

Greywall had the island. We had the ruin. Vanguard had the ridge.

That’s three.

And Sanctuary goes last, and last is the one that’s left, and the one that’s left is in the wood.

Which Concord has held since nine o’clock this morning and will hold until the day ends.

***

Everyone had known it for hours. I know they had, because I watched them not look at each other about it on the climb.

But nobody had said it, and once Marta said it there was nowhere for it to go.

Sanctuary kept every single part of that agreement. Every one. They walked to the island for nothing. They came up to the ruin for nothing and their healer spent the whole opening on somebody else’s boy. They climbed this horrible hill for nothing, at the back, and Penelope put them at the back on purpose so nobody would have to look at her.

And there is nothing left for them.

There was never going to be. Not since about two o’clock, when a card arrived in a girl’s hand at the worst moment anybody has ever chosen for anything.

***

Marta said something else.

And then Tristan said something.

And then a lot of people said things at once, which is when you can’t read anything from up here at all, and I sat with my hands flat on the glass for about a minute and a half wanting very badly to hear four hundred paces of noise.

Then it stopped.

Somebody had settled it.

I could not tell who.

***

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

They will not go into the wood.

I could see the shape of it from up here. Rhael suggested it. Vess said no. Rhael suggested it again and Vess said no again, and this time she pointed at the rim while she said it, and I did not need to hear her.

The last time we believed Concord, their leader put it in writing that Concord could not be believed.

She is not wrong.

She is not right either. Both things can sit in a person at once. I have got used to it today.

***

Nadia did not say anything for some time.

Greywall was paid this morning. Greywall owes nobody anything. We came north when we said we would and stood in a yard while Brightvale took a hundred points and climbed a hill while Vanguard took a hundred points, and the agreement is finished, and we have thirty on the board and a long walk back to a gate.

She could have taken them home.

She stood there instead with her hands at her sides while three classes argued about a wood, and then she said something short, and Greywall sat down on the rock.

Not leaving.

Waiting.

For what, I do not know. Nadia does not usually know either. She waits and then she catches somebody.

***

The glass is too hot to touch.

I am not exaggerating. I put the back of one finger against the partition to check and took it away, and there is now a thin pale line running up the inside of it that was not there this morning.

It is not a crack. I have looked. It does not go anywhere and it does not move.

It is in the glass.

There are five of us in this room and I am the only one who appears to have noticed, and I have no cards, and there is nobody I can tell.

***

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

I wrote it out four times.

Stand clear of the wood. Let Sanctuary Class take it.

Ten exactly. I counted, and then recounted, because it seemed important to be precise about a thing I had already decided I would not do.

I could fix it.

That is the part I would like somebody to understand. I have two cards and one hundred and seventy points and an unassailable lead, and ten words would put an entire class of thirty-six people into a wood that my class has no use for, and Concord would still win by sixty.

There is no strategic reason not to send it.

There has not been a strategic reason for anything I have done since two o’clock.

***

I did not send it.

At about a quarter past two this afternoon I learned something that I had been taught four separate times by three separate tutors and had never once understood, which is that the instrument and the message are not the same thing.

Whatever I write on that card, what arrives on the ground is a card.

It arrives in Petra Halvern’s hand, in front of a hundred and forty-five people who have spent today learning to distrust exactly that object, and it says, before anybody reads a word of it, that Concord’s promises come from a box on the rim.

I could give them the wood and, in the giving, prove again that we cannot be trusted with it.

There is no version of the sentence that survives the envelope.

***

So I stood in a glass box above a basin holding a card with ten words on it that would solve the problem, and put it face down on the desk, and did not send it.

That is the entire useful thing I did today.

I would like to record that I am aware of how that compares with everybody else in this room, and that I have been aware of it for some hours, and that awareness has not improved a single thing about it.

***

( Alash Vortex’s POV )

Sanctuary was sitting down when it happened.

That’s the picture I’m going to have for a long while. A hundred and forty people up on a ridge in the last of the light, and Vanguard with their hundred, and Brightvale with theirs, and Greywall sitting on the rock waiting for something, and thirty-six people in the wrong colour sitting a little apart at the back of all of it with absolutely nothing.

Not sulking. Not complaining. Sitting down, because they’d been walking since dawn and somebody had finally stopped.

And Penelope stood up.

***

I knew before she’d finished straightening.

I’ve had an entire day of knowing what she’s about to do from the way she holds herself and I am beginning to find it unbearable.

She said something to Cedric. He stood up fast, the way he does, and she put a hand flat on his chest and said something else and he sat down again.

Then she said something to Roland, who looked north, and then at her, and then said something back that she did not appear to enjoy.

Then Lena. Longer. Lena shook her head twice and then stopped shaking it.

Then Mira, which took about four seconds and no visible words at all.

And then she walked off the ridge on her own.

***

North.

Down the loose slope, alone, at the end of the ninth hour of a day that had already taken everything anybody had, toward the trees where Concord has been since this morning.

Nobody went with her.

I watched thirty-six people on a rock watch her go and not one of them followed, and I know exactly why, because I could see her hand go out flat behind her when Cedric started to rise a second time.

She was going in with nothing.

Because a class arriving in a wood is a class arriving. One person walking in on their own is a person asking.

***

Whoever you choose, choose them for what they will do at four in the afternoon when everything has gone wrong and nobody is watching.

She said that to me in a corridor on Monday morning at half past nine, about somebody else, and I have been carrying it around all day like a stone in a shoe.

It was past four.

Everything had gone wrong.

And there was not one person left on that ridge who could see where she was going once she was in the trees.

***

’How long is that walk.’

[Twenty minutes. Longer in the dark.]

’And if they say no.’

[Then she walks back.]

I sat with my hand in my jacket and the last card on the desk in front of me and watched her go down a slope in the last useful light of the day, getting smaller, on her own, to go and ask the one class in this basin that nobody will speak to for the one thing my class needs and cannot take.

Ten words.

I could put ten words in her hand before she reached the treeline.

And there is not one arrangement of ten words in any language I have ever known, mortal or otherwise, that says *I am here* without also saying *do it my way*.

So I did not write anything.

And she went into the trees.