Chapter 178: Names Behind the Treaty ( Magic Castle Bonus )

(Elizabeth Aurelius POV)

I had wanted him to lie.

I was honest enough to admit that to myself standing by the fire, and not honest enough to admit it to anyone else. For perhaps three seconds, while the old man waited and the whole chamber waited with him, I had wanted Alash to give them the careful sentence. I had read the treaty three times and carried my father’s seal for nine days, and I had wanted, very badly, for one person in that row to say the thing that would let me open the box.

He hadn’t. He had said no, and then he had said exactly why, and every word of it had been true. I had been in that house. I knew how close the carts had come.

I had chosen Petra because she argued with me. It had not occurred to me until this morning that I might need to make that choice again, in other rooms, with people I hadn’t chosen at all.

"Your Highness." The man in grey had recovered. "We have three options."

"Tell me."

"We sign with the Cat and Rabbit factions now. The Deer will follow within the month. They cannot afford to be left outside."

"A treaty with the beastkin that the Deer refused to sign," I said, "is a treaty with two factions and an argument. Every Tiger warband on the border would read it as an invitation. The second?"

"We give him what he wants in substance, but not at the table. A letter, sent after. The Crown cannot be seen to concede in the chamber."

"The Crown has already been seen." I looked at the door to the chamber. "They wrote down the pen. The only thing left to decide is what they write next. The third?"

He hesitated, which told me I would like the third one least.

"The woman," he said. "Saera. We bring her in. One statement from her, in her own words, that she is safe and well treated. The Deer can hardly object to the survivors speaking for themselves."

"No."

"Your Highness, a single statement..."

"No," I said again, and the room went quiet. "They spent months being moved without being asked. I will not have them carried into a chamber full of strangers to reassure us that we are kind."

I hadn’t known I was going to say that until I said it. It was Mia’s sentence, nearly. I had heard her say it in a courtyard the day before, and apparently it had stayed.

The envoy hadn’t spoken through any of this. He was sitting at the head of the table with his hands folded, looking at the leather folder Renn had put down in front of him. My father had chosen him because he could stand in a room for six hours and never once look tired. He looked tired now.

"Your Highness," he said. "May I have the room?"

It took a minute to empty. Renn stayed, because nobody would have dared ask him to leave, and so did the Foreign Office official with his pen. The other four stayed too. The envoy looked at them and then at me, and I didn’t ask them to go, and he didn’t ask again.

"His Majesty sent me," he said, "with authority to sign a treaty. Not to amend one."

"I’m not asking you to amend it."

"The Speaker is."

"No, he isn’t." I sat down across from him, which I had not done all morning. "He read his statement exactly as it was agreed. He didn’t ask for a word of the treaty to change. He asked what happens to thirteen people when the delegation goes home. That is a question about whether the treaty will be kept, and he asked it because the last time anyone on our side promised to protect beastkin on a border road, they ended up in a cellar."

"Merrow was one man."

"We found copies of our route in his house, among the Tigers’ things, and we still don’t know who sold it to them. His whole household knew which wing to avoid." I kept my voice level. "He was one man the way a fire is one spark."

The envoy said nothing. Renn opened the leather folder and turned it round so that it faced him.

"Protection orders for all thirteen," Renn said. "Issued the evening they arrived. Guard rotation at the western rooms, four men at every change, two of them Academy. Colonel Dunmore has signed every page."

"I know the orders exist, Commander."

"Then you know they cost the Crown nothing to repeat," said Renn, and I could have hugged him, which would have caused a diplomatic incident of an entirely different kind.

I put my hand flat on the folder. "We sign a separate commitment," I said, "beside the treaty rather than inside it. The thirteen remain under the Crown’s protection at Halden until each of them has chosen where to go. No one moves any of them without their own consent and the agreement of a beastkin representative. That representative is named by the three factions, not by us, and the thirteen may refuse whoever is named and ask for someone else. Whoever they accept has access to them at any hour, without asking permission at the door." I took a breath. "And none of them is ever made to give a public account of what was done to them. If the magistrates need their testimony against Merrow, it is taken in private, with their representative present, and it is never read aloud before any chamber or any chronicler."

The official’s pen had started moving at the word separate. It hadn’t stopped since.

The envoy looked at me for a long time. Then he looked at the official. "My warrant. The exact words."

The official didn’t need to search for them. "To conclude the treaty in His Majesty’s name," he said, "and to give such undertakings in that name as its conclusion requires."

"As its conclusion requires," the envoy repeated. He was quiet for a moment. "And if His Majesty asks why his envoy decided that this one was required, at the table, while the beastkin watched?"

"Tell him the beastkin didn’t decide it. Tell him his daughter did." I held his eyes. "And tell him that if we sign this treaty by brushing aside a fair question about whether we will keep it, we will have signed a document that proves the Speaker right."

Nobody spoke. Somewhere behind me, very quietly, I heard Alash breathe out.

The envoy unfolded his hands. "Write it," he said to the official. "Plainly. Then Her Highness will take it across."

"I’ll take it?"

"It’s your sentence, Your Highness." He almost smiled. "I would like the Speaker to hear it from the person who meant it."

***

The beastkin delegation had withdrawn to a room on the other side of the chamber. Two of their guards stood at the door, a Cat and a Deer, and they looked at me, and at the paper in my hand, and stepped aside without being asked.

The old man was sitting by the window. Lyssairia stood at the table with her arms folded. The Rabbit representative was perched on the edge of a chair as though she might need to leave quickly. Mia was not in the room.

I gave the Speaker the paper. He read it slowly, all the way through, and then he read it again, which I respected more than I could have said.

"Who verifies?" he asked.

"Whoever you name."

"Not the Crown?"

"Not the Crown alone. The Crown keeps its guards at the door. You name who walks through it, and they decide whether to let that person in." I paused. "I would suggest someone they have already accepted."

The door opened behind me, and Mia came in. She had been gone, I realized, since the recess began, and she was slightly out of breath, which I would not have believed possible.

"I have been to the western rooms," she said, to the Speaker, not to me. "All thirteen are where they were. They are eating. The children are asleep. The guards let me in without asking my name, and asked it afterwards, and wrote it down correctly." She looked at me then, for the first time. "Saera told the guard at the door that his boots were too loud. He apologized."

"That’s verification?" said the Rabbit representative.

"That," said Mia, "is the best verification there is."

The Speaker looked at the paper again. "And when you go home, Elder?"

"When I go home," said Mia, "they will have decided where home is. Or I will not go." She looked at the paper in his hand. "They accepted me at the estate. They may change their minds. I have told them so."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he looked up at me. "Why are you doing this, Your Highness? You could have waited. In a month, perhaps less, I would have signed."

"Because you asked the question I should have asked myself," I said. "Someone asked me yesterday whether I had checked the rooms she was being sent to. Then she asked whether I had checked them myself." I met his eyes. "I had. I’d like to keep being able to say so."

The old man folded the paper along its crease, and put it inside his coat, against his chest, and kept his hand flat over it for a moment after it was there. I didn’t know whether that was a beastkin custom, or simply what people did with paper that mattered.

"Then we are ready," he said.

***

(Alash Vortex POV)

The ceremony resumed at the end of the hour exactly, which I respected even more the second time.

Nobody read the statements again. They stood in the record as they had been read, unchanged, every word. The Foreign Office official rose and read the separate commitment into the record instead, plainly, the way Elizabeth had asked for it to be written, and the chroniclers’ pens followed him line by line. When he reached the last clause, about testimony taken in private and never read aloud before any chamber or any chronicler, the pens hesitated for a moment, as though the chroniclers had just noticed they were being talked about. Then they kept writing. The envoy signed the commitment first, alone, at the signing table, in front of everyone. Then the clerk carried all three copies of the treaty back across the floor.

The Speaker didn’t pick up the pen.

"The lot gave the Deer the first signature," he said. "I set it down. The Cat faction may take it up."

Lyssairia looked at him for a moment. Then she rose, walked to the end of the beastkin table, and took the pen out of the clerk’s hand before he could offer it. She signed fast, once on each copy, a sharp hard line of a name that looked as though it had been cut rather than written. Then she held the pen out to the old man, and waited.

He took it. He signed all three slowly, with a perfectly steady hand, and when he had finished he looked down the room, past the signing table, to the end of the Crown’s second row where I was standing, and nodded once. I didn’t know what to do with that, so I stood very still, which had been my plan all along.

The Rabbit representative signed third, all three copies in turn, quick and neat, with her silver-tipped ears straight up.

Then the clerk carried the three copies to the signing table, and the envoy signed each of them for the Crown.

And then it was Elizabeth’s turn.

She opened the box. Inside, on dark cloth, lay the seal of the Aurelius kings, heavier than it looked and older than the fort. A clerk had warmed the wax. Elizabeth lifted the seal in both hands, and for a moment she simply held it, and I watched the back of her neck and thought about a balcony, and a treaty read three times so that she would know exactly what she was sealing.

She pressed the seal down beside the four names on the first copy, and held it there. When she lifted it, her father’s mark lay on the page in dark red. She did the second the same way, and the third, without hurrying any of them, and when the last impression had set, the treaty was signed.

The chamber didn’t cheer. It wasn’t that kind of room. What happened instead was quieter and much better. On the Crown’s side, people stood up. On the beastkin side, people stood up. For a moment nobody seemed to know what to do next, and in that moment the only sound was every pen on the chroniclers’ bench moving at once, all of them writing the same sentence.

I watched Lyssairia while it happened. She wasn’t smiling. She stood with her hand still resting on the edge of the beastkin table, looking at the treaty as though she were already reading the parts of the border it didn’t reach. Behind her, Mia wasn’t smiling either. Their faces were the same face, for once: two people who had worked for this for years, and understood better than anyone in the room that it was the beginning of the work and not the end.

I found that I understood it too. I also found, somewhat to my surprise, that my eyes were stinging, and I decided that was the collar’s fault.

Beside me, Sophie was crying openly and didn’t care. James was staring straight ahead with his jaw set, which on James was the same thing. Daphne let out one long breath, very slowly, as though she had been holding a great weight all morning and had only just been allowed to put it down.

[Elapsed time: two hours and fifty-one minutes.]

’Don’t.’

[You objected to the duration yesterday. I recorded the objection.]

’That objection was for the official.’

[He did not write it down. I did.]