Chapter 133: Everyone Got Up

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

Nadia stood up about four minutes after Declair went into the trees.

Greywall did not ask her anything. Thirty-six people on a rock in the last of the light, and she got to her feet, and they got to their feet, and nobody said a word that I could see.

She had been waiting for that. I understand it now. She sat them down on that ridge because she did not intend to leave and did not intend to say so, and she waited until the only thing left to wait for had happened.

Vess said something to her.

Nadia said something back.

Whatever it was, it was short, and Vess did not answer it.

Then Greywall went north off the ridge.

***

I want to set down what that costs, because nobody down there will and it should be somewhere.

We were paid at noon. We have thirty on the board and there is nothing in that wood for us. A white Wellspring needs three classes and the fourth of them gains nothing at all, and we have already been the fourth twice today, at the ruin and on this ridge, and both times we went because we said we would.

The agreement is finished. It finished when Rhael sealed the ridge.

There is no version of the rules where Greywall owes Sanctuary one more step.

It is a mile across that basin. It is nearly dark. Two of ours are limping and one has been carrying water for other people’s classes since the river.

Nadia took them down the slope anyway.

***

I put my hand near the partition and took it back before it touched.

The pale line inside the glass is longer than it was on the ridge.

It runs from somewhere near the floor to about the height of my shoulder now, thin as a hair, and it is not a crack, and I have stopped telling myself things about it.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

Marta said no. Twice at the river, and once more on the ridge when Tristan asked her again, and she was right every single time and I want that written down before anything else.

She was right.

Concord’s promises come out of a box on the rim. Everybody watched it happen. You do not take thirty-six exhausted people into somebody else’s wood in the dark on the word of a class that has already robbed you once, and if you do it and it goes wrong then that is on you, and Marta is the only person down there who has been carrying that arithmetic all afternoon instead of feelings.

So she said no.

And then Greywall stood up.

***

She watched them go.

She stood on that ridge with her arms folded and watched thirty-six people who owe nobody anything walk down a slope in the dark for a hundred points that go to somebody else, and she did not move for about a minute and a half.

I know it was about a minute and a half because I counted. And I counted because I could not do anything else, and my hands were pressed so hard on that glass I had marks on them afterwards.

Come on.

That is what I was saying. Out loud. In a sealed box where nobody in the entire world could hear me, over and over, like a person at a race.

Come on, Marta.

*** 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

She turned round.

She said one sentence to Brightvale, and thirty-six tired people got up off a rock without a single argument, which took about four seconds, which for my class is genuinely the most extraordinary thing that happened all day.

They went down the slope after Greywall.

And she did not look up at the rim. Not on the ridge, not on the slope, not once the whole way across that basin.

Because she was not doing it for me.

She has not done one single thing all day for me, and that is exactly why she was the right person, and I have never been so glad to be irrelevant in my life.

***

I sat down on the floor of my box and laughed with my hand over my mouth, which is a very strange thing to do alone in a glass room, and then I got up and wiped my face and went back to the window.

Because Vanguard were still sitting up there.

And I wanted to see.

***

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

We were the last ones on that rock.

Everybody else had gone and we hadn’t, and I was in a box half a mile away with a pen and two cards and no way to say one word about it.

Tristan didn’t move for a while.

He’d asked twice. He was the one who wanted to go in, and Marta said no twice, and he let it go, because that is what he does. He pushes twice and then he stops. I have watched him do it to me since we were nine.

So when Greywall went, and then Brightvale, he was the only stand-in on that ridge who had already argued for it and lost.

He could have sat there. Nobody would have said a word. He’d been proved right twice over and he was entitled to sit on that rock and let everyone find out.

***

I’ve done that.

I’ve done it a lot. I’m good at it. Six years of being right and sitting on the rock about it, and it has never once made me feel the way I felt watching him stand up.

He didn’t say anything to them.

He picked his blade up off the stone and slung it and started walking, and thirty-six people came after him without being asked, and that was the whole of it.

***

They’d been on their feet since before dawn. Six of them carrying Kell. Half of them wet from a river and all of them under that wall this afternoon.

And they walked a mile across a basin in the dark for nothing.

I put my hand flat on the glass, which is stupid, because nobody down there can see it and I have done it four times today.

I did it anyway.

***

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

I watched three classes come across my basin toward my wood in the dark, and there was no way for me to tell a single one of them that they were welcome.

Concord has been in those trees since nine this morning. Ten small Wellsprings. One hundred and seventy on the board and a lead that cannot be closed. And for the last three hours we have been the only class in this examination that nobody will walk beside, and I have had a great deal of time to consider the sequence of decisions that produced that, and every single one of them was mine.

Petra has not looked at the rim since two o’clock.

She has not needed to. She has been in a wood for three hours with thirty-six people who trust her, and I have been in a glass box with two cards and an excellent view.

***

Declair went into the trees at the western edge twenty minutes before Greywall came off the ridge.

I lost her at once.

That is the thing about a wood. This gallery was built to see everything in this basin and it does. Every gate, every ridge, every stretch of that river. Under a canopy it sees nothing whatsoever.

There is a clearing at the centre where the white Wellspring stands. Perhaps forty paces across. From up here it is a pale coin in a great deal of black.

That is the only part of that wood I can see.

So I watched a coin, and waited for somebody to walk into it.

***

At some point Petra crossed it.

Not toward Declair. Across. A dozen of Concord with her, moving east, and then gone out of the light again.

I did not know what it meant. I have spent today learning that I do not know what things mean.

Four minutes later she crossed it again, going the same way, with more of them.

And then a third time.

She was moving Concord. Out of the middle of that wood, group by group, east, toward the far edge, in the dark, without any fuss at all.

Standing clear.

***

She said she would.

At two o’clock this afternoon she walked twenty paces out onto open ground in front of four classes and offered exactly this, and nobody believed her, and the reason nobody believed her arrived in her hand with my handwriting on it.

And she is doing it anyway.

Nobody asked her. Nobody down there can make her. There is no arrangement and no clause and no enforcement, and the only person who has said a word to her about it walked into those trees alone twenty minutes ago and has not come out.

I have two cards on this desk.

One of them has ten words on it that I wrote an hour ago and did not send.

I picked it up and read it again and understood, rather later than I should have, that it had never been a card for Petra at all.

It was a card for me.

***

( Alash Vortex’s POV )

Twenty minutes.

I want to talk about twenty minutes, because I have been alive for a length of time that does not convert usefully into years, and I do not believe I have ever had twenty minutes like those.

She went in at the western edge and the trees closed over her.

Gone.

I have spent this whole day being able to see everything. Every gate. Every stretch of that river. A boy’s hands going red from half a mile. A wall about to come down, because a man walked a yard twice and I followed his eyes.

I have watched an entire basin full of people all afternoon with a completeness that is frankly obscene, and I have hated it, and I did not understand until this evening that I had also come to lean on it.

Then the one person I actually wanted to see walked under a canopy.

***

’Can you find her.’

[No.]

’You found her in a dream.’

[That was not me.]

I did not have an answer to that. I am going to have to come back to it, because I have a suspicion about what it means and there was no room for it at the time.

***

Here is what twenty minutes of that is like.

You do the arithmetic first. Twenty minutes in. Twenty back. And however long it takes to do the thing she went there to do, which is the one number you cannot have. So the earliest she could reasonably come out again is three quarters of an hour, and probably a good deal longer, and it has been nine minutes, and you know that, and you look anyway.

Then you start watching the clearing. The pale coin. Because it is the only part of that wood the glass can reach.

Then you notice you have been staring at an empty piece of ground for four minutes without blinking.

Then you begin making arrangements with things you do not believe in.

***

Greywall came down off the ridge and I barely saw them go.

Brightvale went after them and I registered it the way you register weather.

Vanguard stood up and I did not notice until they were a third of the way across, with Tristan at the front and his blade slung, walking a mile in the dark for a class that has nothing.

On any other evening of my life that would have taken the roof off me.

I was watching a coin.

***

Then people came into it.

Concord. Crossing the other way. A dozen, then more, then more, and I came forward so fast the chair went over behind me and I left it where it fell.

They were leaving.

Petra Halvern was taking her own class out of the middle of her own wood in the dark, group by group, until there was a white Wellspring standing alone in an empty clearing with nobody inside forty paces of it.

***

And then two people walked out of the trees on the western side.

I knew the shape of one of them before the light was anywhere near good enough for a sensible person to be certain, and I was certain anyway.

They stopped in the middle of the clearing.

They stood there together beside a hundred points that neither of them could touch alone, with Concord still filing out behind them and a mile of dark basin between them and three exhausted classes who were walking across it anyway.

I put both hands on the glass.

And the glass was too hot to hold.