Chapter 175: One More Line

I slept for five hours. It was the first thing anyone had made me do in days that I completely agreed with.

When I woke, the light through the window had turned the color of old brass, and somebody had left a tray on the table by the door: bread, cheese, a pot of tea that had gone cold, and a folded note in Sorel’s handwriting. It said Eat this, and underneath, in smaller letters, as though she had come back to add it, You may use Barrier again. Please don’t.

I ate the bread. I considered the tea, and decided it had suffered enough.

Then I looked at the clothes hanging on the back of the door, and lay down again. Penelope had packed two formal outfits. I had worn one of them to Lord Merrow’s dinner, where it had sat through three forks and a great deal of polite lying. The second had apparently been waiting for this. I didn’t know how she had known. I suspected the answer was that she always knew, and that this was one of the more frightening things about her.

[You are awake.]

’I’m resting with my eyes open.’

[There is a briefing in forty minutes.]

’There is always a briefing in forty minutes.’

[That is not accurate.]

’It feels accurate.’

The System let that go, which I took as agreement.

***

The briefing was held in a long room on the ground floor of the keep, with a table in the middle that had clearly been built for maps and was now covered in seating plans. The thin official from the Foreign Office was there, the one who wrote faster than anyone I had ever seen, and today he was talking just as fast. Renn stood at the end of the table. Sorel sat by the wall with her arms folded, watching the five of us as though one of us might faint and she had already decided who.

"The signing will take place in the council chamber at the third hour after sunrise," said the official. "The King’s envoy signs for the Crown. Her Highness sets the royal seal as witness. The beastkin delegation signs for the Cat, Deer and Rabbit factions. Each party will make one statement. Each statement has been agreed in advance."

"All of them?" said James.

"All of them."

"Then why make them?"

The official looked at him the way a man looks at a crack in a wall he has just finished painting. "Because they will be recorded, my lord."

"So it’s a speech nobody can disagree with."

"That is the purpose of a treaty, my lord."

James opened his mouth to argue with that, and Elizabeth said his name, quietly, and he closed it again.

The official unrolled a chamber plan. Elizabeth would sit at the signing table beside the envoy, with the seal. The other four of us were to stand in the second row of the Crown’s side, directly behind her, for the entire ceremony. There would be no weapons in the chamber. There would be no magic in the chamber either; the old council room had been warded long before any of us were born, and the wards had been checked twice that afternoon and would be checked again at dawn.

"We stand," I said, "for the entire ceremony."

"Yes, my lord."

"How long is the entire ceremony?"

"Approximately two hours."

I looked at Renn. Renn looked back at me with no sympathy whatsoever.

"I’d like to register an objection," I said.

"Noted," said the official, and did not write anything down.

"And where exactly in the row do I stand?"

The official checked his papers. "At the end nearest the beastkin side. The beastkin delegation asked for that specifically."

Everyone in the room looked at me. I looked at the plan.

"Why?"

"They didn’t say, my lord."

"They never say."

"No, my lord. I’ve noticed."

That was the first thing he had said all evening that sounded like a person. I almost liked him for it.

Renn took over after that, and the room got quieter, because what Renn had to say wasn’t about chairs. Since the night we arrived, the garrison had doubled its watch on every approach to Halden. The beastkin delegation had brought its own guards and was keeping them close. Lyssairia’s scouts had swept the eastern approaches as far as half a day’s ride and come back with nothing, which Renn thought was either good news or very careful people, and he wasn’t prepared to say which. The riders she had sent toward Merrow’s estate wouldn’t be back for days yet. Whoever had bought the route had bought it for a road we never took. That didn’t mean they had stopped wanting what was at the end of it.

"Tomorrow," said Renn, and he was looking at the four of us who would be standing behind the table, "you stay where you are put. If anything happens in that chamber, you do not decide what to do about it. You let the people whose job it is do their jobs, and you stay with Her Highness. That is the whole of your job. Is that clear?"

"Yes," said three of us.

Renn looked at me.

"Yes," I said. "I was going to say it. I was just doing it efficiently."

"Doing it later isn’t efficient."

"It is if you get to skip it entirely."

Sorel made a sound that might have been a laugh. Renn rolled up the plan.

***

Daphne and I walked back to the residence together, because our rooms were on the same corridor and because, apparently, that was what we did now. The sun had gone down behind the ridges. The fires in the camps outside the walls were coming up one by one, and somewhere below us a company of soldiers was changing the watch with a great deal of shouting.

Daphne’s hands were bare. The last of the wrappings had come off two days ago. I looked at them, and she noticed without turning her head.

"Still attached," she said.

"I know."

"You keep checking."

"It’s a habit."

"It’s a new habit."

That was true, and I didn’t have a good answer to it, so I didn’t give one. We climbed the stairs. Halfway up, she stopped, and I stopped one step above her, which made us almost the same height for once.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Two hours of standing."

"If something happens."

"Renn said we let the people whose job it is..."

"I heard Renn." She looked up at me. "If something happens, I’ll cover you."

I stood there on the stair and couldn’t think of a single thing to say. It wasn’t a joke. Daphne didn’t make jokes, or if she did, she made them so quietly that nobody had ever caught one. She was simply telling me what she was going to do, the way she would have told me the weather, and the way she had simply done it in Merrow’s courtyard when I asked.

I should have told her then. I knew it, standing on that stair. Whatever had happened between us in that courtyard, neither of us had chosen it and the System couldn’t explain it, and she had a right to know it was there before she promised to stand in front of me again. I opened my mouth to say it.

"Then I’ll stand very still," I said instead, "and make it easy for you."

That was not what I had opened my mouth to say. Daphne looked at me for a long moment, as though she knew that too. Then she nodded once, as though I had agreed to something, and went on up the stairs.

I would tell her after the signing. I decided it there on the stair, and then I decided it again at my door, and I noticed that a thing you have to decide twice is usually a thing you aren’t looking forward to. I let it go anyway. After the signing, she would hear all of it, including the part where neither I nor the System could explain it.

***

I found Elizabeth on the balcony at the end of our corridor, the same one where Lyssairia and I had sat the night before. She had a lamp beside her and the treaty in her lap, a copy of it at least, and she was reading it with the expression of someone who already knew what every line said and was checking that none of them had moved.

"How many times is that?" I said.

She didn’t look up. "Three."

"It hasn’t changed."

"I know."

"Then why read it?"

"Because tomorrow I put my father’s seal beside it," said Elizabeth, "and I would like to know exactly what I’m sealing."

That was a better reason than mine had been for most things. I sat down against the wall, at a polite distance from the lamp, and she went on reading. The camps below had gone orange. For a while neither of us spoke, and it was the comfortable kind of not speaking, the kind I had only recently discovered existed.

Eventually she turned the last page over and set the treaty face down on her knees.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You usually do."

"What do you think happens tomorrow?"

"People sign things. Someone makes a speech that has already been agreed. I stand for two hours, and suffer."

"And if it goes wrong?"

I thought about it, which she deserved. "Then it goes wrong in a warded room, in front of a great many people who are paid to stop things going wrong."

"That’s your reassurance?"

"It’s the most honest one I have."

Elizabeth looked out at the fires. "Petra would have said that."

"Who’s Petra?"

"The person I left in charge of my class." She almost smiled. "She would have told them that worrying won’t improve the signatures."

"She sounds sensible."

"She’s unbearable," said Elizabeth, with great affection. "I chose her because she argues with me."

I hadn’t known that about her, and I found that I liked knowing it. We sat a while longer. Below us, somewhere in the beastkin camp, someone had started singing, low and slow, in a language I didn’t know.

"Thank you," said Elizabeth.

"For what?"

"Now I know their names." She said it quietly, the way I had said it to her at the foot of Merrow’s stairs. "I keep thinking about it. I’ve been reading this treaty for three days as though it were about borders. It isn’t. It’s about whether the next Saera gets taken off a road and nobody asks where she went."

I didn’t have anything to add to that. It was already right.

Three of the four, I thought, and then I made myself stop thinking it. I was getting very good at not thinking about the fourth one. I wasn’t sure that was a skill I ought to be proud of.

"You should sleep," I said.

Elizabeth looked at me with deep suspicion. "You’re telling me to sleep?"

"I’ve recently become an expert."

"You’ve slept twice in three days."

"Which is why I can speak with authority on how much I missed it."

She laughed, and picked up her lamp, and stood. At the door, she paused.

"You’re writing to Penelope tonight," she said.

I stared at her. "How do you know that?"

"You keep touching your pocket where the paper is. And you’ve been sitting next to a lamp you haven’t needed for half an hour."

Princesses were dangerous. I had always known that, but I kept finding new ways to learn it.

"Goodnight, Alash."

"Goodnight."

***

The third letter took longer than the other two put together.

The first had been easy, because nothing had happened yet. The second had been easy too, until the last line, and I had crossed that one out. I had a feeling she had found it anyway. Penelope found everything eventually; it was one of the reasons I had never been able to lie to her properly, and one of the reasons I had stopped trying. So this time I decided I wasn’t going to cross anything out. If I wrote it, it stayed.

That made it much harder to write.

I sat on the floor of my room with Dream Haven behind me and the paper on a book across my knees, and started four times. The fourth time, I kept going.

We reached Halden. Nobody died. You will notice this is becoming a theme. I would like it to continue.

There was trouble at the estate where I wrote my last letter. I can’t tell you about it yet, because it belongs to the Crown now, and because some of it isn’t mine to tell. I will tell you when I’m home, all of it, in order. You can count the words.

I met thirteen people there. They are safe now. One of them knew people I knew when I was twelve.

I stopped there for a while. The pen sat in my hand and didn’t move. I thought about Saera at the window with the child asleep against her side, and about a balcony where Lyssairia and I had said three names out loud. Then I wrote the next line.

Some of those people are here.

The rest was easier, because the rest was true in the ordinary way.

The signing is tomorrow. I have been told where to stand, how long to stand there, and that sitting is not permitted under any circumstances. I raised an objection through the proper channels. The proper channels wrote nothing down.

Everyone is fine. Including me. I mean it this time.

I read that line three times. It was the one she would read longest, and I knew it, and I left it exactly where it was.

Then I did something I had never done in a letter before. I left a space. One line, blank, above my name. I wasn’t going to fill it tonight. Tomorrow, after the signing, I would know what it ought to say, and I would write it before the letter went.

I signed it, and folded it, and put it inside the book so it would stay flat. It wasn’t finished, which felt strange. It also felt right, in a way I didn’t have a word for. Somewhere in Zenith, I suspected, there was a drawer with room left in it for one more letter. I had no reason to think that. I thought it anyway.

[You did not cross anything out.]

’No.’

[That is new.]

’Don’t make it significant.’

[It is already significant.]

’You’ve been talking to Elizabeth.’

The System didn’t answer that, which was worrying.

I let Dream Haven expand across the bed and lay down. Tomorrow I would stand for two hours at the end of a row where a beastkin delegation could see me, for reasons nobody would tell me, while a princess set her father’s seal beside a treaty she had read three times. After that, I would fill in one line. For now there was a pillow and a quiet room, and for once, both of them were enough.

***

Far to the west of Halden, on a ridge where nothing grew, the creature had stopped moving.

It had been moving for days. It did not count days; it had not been made to. It had been made with two commands, and for all those days only the first had mattered. It had carried that one across stone and the dry beds of rivers, always toward the pull, which had grown stronger the further it went, until the pull had become the only direction there was.

Hunt the Akashic Key.

The second command lay behind the first, where it had always been.

Return at all cost.

That one would matter once the Key was found and confirmed, and after that, nothing would matter more. The moment had not come yet.

Now the pull was below it. It came from inside the walls, from somewhere among a great many fires, and it was closer than it had ever been, but close was not the same as certain. Between the creature and the pull there were walls, and on the walls there were people with steel and torches, more of them than it could count, because it did not count. Some of them were walking. Some were looking out into the dark, in its direction, without seeing anything there. Past them, behind stone and among all that light, was the thing it hunted, and the creature could not yet tell exactly where it lay.

A hunter that walks into a lit camp before it knows where its quarry sleeps is not hunting. So the creature lay down on the bare stone of the ridge, very still, the way a thing lies when it is waiting for a door to open. Below it, the watch changed with a great deal of shouting. The fires burned down. The pull went on, steady and close, and the creature did not take its attention from it once.

It did not go down, not yet. The Key was not going anywhere the creature could not follow, and it had been made patient, if it had been made anything at all, and so it watched.