Chapter 179: What We Signed ( Magic Castle Bonus )

They gave James his knives back at the door. He counted them, all three, out loud, while the soldier watched, and then put them back exactly where they had been, which included the boot.

The courtyard outside the keep was full of people who didn’t seem to know whether they were allowed to celebrate yet. Beastkin and soldiers stood about in uneven groups, and officials hurried between them with papers, and somewhere near the gate a Rabbit guard was being hugged by Sophie, who had apparently found Tomas. I left them to it.

Lyssairia was standing alone by the wall, watching all of it. I went and stood next to her, because that was where my feet went.

"You signed first," I said.

"Someone had to."

"He gave it to you."

"He gave it to the Cat faction. I happened to be holding it." She didn’t look at me. "You answered him."

"I was told to stay where I was put."

"You did." The corner of her mouth moved. "You just answered from there."

We stood for a while. The fires in the camps beyond the walls had gone out for the day, and the smoke from them was thin and grey in the clear sky. I thought about three envelopes, and about Nyra and Caelum and Vessa walking beside me through the trees to deliver them. I thought about thirteen names folded inside two different coats.

"Does this mean it’s over?" I said. "The border. Is it peaceful now?"

Lyssairia finally looked at me. It was the look she had given me at twelve, when I had asked whether the training was nearly finished.

"It means the factions who signed are bound by it," she said. "The Tigers and the Bears didn’t sign. Tavrek doesn’t sign anything. He sells roads, and there will be someone on your side of the border buying them next month, and the month after." She looked back at the courtyard. "It means that when the next Saera disappears, someone on your side has to answer for it in writing. That isn’t peace, but it’s a place to stand while we build it."

I thought about that. A month ago I would have said it wasn’t enough. Today I had spent nearly three hours on my feet in that chamber and the room behind it, and watched an old man lay down a pen and pick it up again, and watched Elizabeth hold her father’s seal as though it weighed more than it did. I had seen what it took to get even this far.

"It’s still worth celebrating," I said.

"Yes." Lyssairia pushed herself off the wall. "That’s why I’m going to go and find a drink. You can come if you promise not to lie down."

"I never promise that."

"I know." She walked away. Then she stopped, and looked back over her shoulder. "Al."

It was the first time she had called me that in four years. "What?"

"Good answer," said Lyssairia, and left.

I stayed by the wall a little longer. The treaty didn’t stop Tavrek or whoever was buying his roads, and it didn’t bring anyone back out of that forest. It only meant that somewhere in a fort on the border, a piece of paper now said that people mattered, and four names and a seal had agreed to be held to it. It was a very small thing, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had wanted anything more.

Upstairs, inside a book, there was a letter with one blank line in it. For the first time since I had left that space, I thought I knew what it was for.

***

The first thing I did when I got back to my room was take off the collar.

The second thing I did was lie down, which lasted eleven minutes, because the third thing that happened was Sophie.

"There’s a dinner," she said through the door.

"There’s always a dinner."

"This one’s for the treaty. Both delegations. The whole courtyard. Tomas says the Rabbit cooks have been working since yesterday." A pause. "Elizabeth says you have to come."

"Elizabeth isn’t my commanding officer."

"Renn says you have to come."

I lay there and considered the ceiling, which had been very supportive all week and was now offering nothing. "What time?"

"Sunset."

"Then I have hours."

"You have five," said Sophie, "and I’m coming back in four, because I know you."

She went away. I spent the next four hours asleep, so it was a victory of sorts, and when she knocked again I was already sitting up, which surprised both of us.

***

They had put the tables in the great courtyard of the keep, long ones, end to end, so that by the time the sun went down behind the western ridges there was a single line of them running from the gate of the human side to the gate of the beastkin side, and nobody had been seated by delegation. That had been Lyssairia’s doing, I learned later, and the Foreign Office had argued against it for most of the afternoon and lost. People sat where they sat. A Crown captain was wedged between two Rabbit cooks, both of whom were explaining a recipe to him with their hands. Three of Dunmore’s soldiers were sharing a bench with a Deer guard who was taller than all of them sitting down. Lanterns hung on lines strung between the walls, and the beastkin had built a cooking fire at one end and the garrison had built a bigger one at the other, out of what I assumed was professional pride.

It wasn’t grand. It was a fort, and a fort is mostly stone and the smell of horses. But it was loud in a way I hadn’t heard Halden be loud before, and nobody in it was shouting orders.

Colonel Dunmore made a speech. It lasted forty seconds. He said his garrison had been honoured to keep the peace while the treaty was signed, and that if anyone damaged the courtyard he would personally hold them responsible regardless of species. Then he sat down to the loudest applause of the evening, most of it from his own soldiers.

I found James at the end of a table near the wall, with his back to the stone and a cup in his hand he hadn’t touched. He had the expression of a man who had been congratulated against his will several times in a row.

"How many?" I said, sitting down next to him.

"Nine."

"Congratulations on what?"

"Standing." He glared into the cup. "One of them said I stood with great dignity."

"You did."

"I stood. That’s all I did. I stood for three hours in a room without my knives while other people did things."

"That was the job."

"It’s a stupid job."

A man in Foreign Office grey was approaching along the table with a cup raised and the determined face of someone about to be gracious. James saw him. I watched James calculate the distance to the nearest exit, discover that he was against a wall, and arrive at acceptance.

"Lord Vellaroux," said the man. "On behalf of the Office, may I say..."

"I stood," said James.

"With great..."

"I know."

The man looked at him, then at me, and then, very wisely, lifted his cup a little higher and went away. James put his own cup down.

"Ten," he said.

***

Sophie had found Tomas within the first five minutes, and by the time I reached her she had also found Tomas’s cousin, Tomas’s cousin’s friend, a Deer archer who wanted to know how Ice worked, and a very old Rabbit woman who had taken a firm hold of Sophie’s wrist and was explaining, at length, in a language Sophie didn’t speak, what appeared to be a family history.

"Do you understand any of that?" I asked.

"No," said Sophie happily. "But somebody in it married a fisherman. I can tell by the hands."

Tomas looked at me over her head. He was young and round-faced, with ears that kept turning toward whoever was talking. "She learned the greeting," he said, sounding almost betrayed. "In one day. It took my sister’s husband a year."

"She does that."

"Is it a human thing?"

"It’s a Sophie thing."

He thought about that, and nodded as though it explained a great deal, which it did.

Across the courtyard, Daphne had taken the one seat at the end of the long table with a clear view of both gates. I knew without asking that she had counted the guards on each and the number of people between herself and either one, and that she wasn’t worried about any of it. Daphne counted things the way other people breathed. She had a plate of food she was eating slowly and a cup of water she hadn’t refilled, and she was watching the whole courtyard with the calm attention of somebody reading a long book she was enjoying.

I didn’t go to her yet. I told myself it was because I was looking for Elizabeth. That was partly true.

***

Elizabeth was easy to find, because she was the only person at the dinner holding paper.

She was sitting near the middle of the long table with a small stack of documents beside her plate, and every few minutes someone came to congratulate her, and she put the paper down and was gracious, and then picked it up again as soon as they had gone. I sat down across from her. She didn’t look up.

"You’re working," I said.

"I’m reading."

"What are you reading?"

"The implementation schedules. The Foreign Office wants them initialled tomorrow. I’m going through them in the old records room in the morning, but I thought if I read them tonight..."

I reached across the table and took the papers out of her hand. She looked up at last, astonished.

"Alash."

"Not tonight."

"Those are Crown documents."

"And they’ll still be Crown documents tomorrow. I checked. Crown documents are very reliable that way." I put them on the bench beside me, on the far side, where she would have to climb over me to reach them. "You signed a treaty today."

"My father’s envoy signed a treaty. I set a seal."

"You stopped it from failing."

"The Speaker..."

"Asked a question," I said. "You answered it. I was there. I was standing for most of it."

Elizabeth opened her mouth, and closed it again, and looked at the papers on my far side, and then at me. Whatever she had been holding very carefully since before sunrise came loose in her face. It didn’t happen all at once, because she was too well trained for that, but enough of it went that I saw it.

"I did, didn’t I," she said quietly.

"You did."

She laughed. It was short and surprised and entirely unprincesslike, and three people at the next table turned to look, and she didn’t care. She picked up her cup, which she had apparently been ignoring all evening, and drank from it, and made a face.

"What is this?"

"I think the Rabbit cooks made it."

"It’s very strong."

"You’re allowed," I said. "It’s a celebration. Apparently they’re traditional."

"You’d know about tradition?"

"I’m an expert in everything I’ve been told about in the last ten minutes."

She laughed again, and this time she put her elbow on the table, which I had never seen her do in her life, and rested her chin on her hand, and looked down the long line of tables at the people sitting where they sat. For a while she didn’t say anything at all. She didn’t need to. She was finally allowed to look at the thing she had done.

***

Mia found us there. She came along the table without hurrying, the way she did everything, and people moved out of her path without quite realizing they were doing it. She stopped beside Elizabeth.

Elizabeth started to rise, and Mia put one hand lightly on her shoulder, and she stayed sitting.

"I went to the western rooms after the signing," Mia said. "I told them what happened in the chamber. All of it, including the clause about testimony."

Elizabeth went very still. "What did they say?"

"Most of them said nothing. They are not used to being discussed in rooms they cannot see, and they did not know what to do with it." Mia looked down at her. "Saera asked me whose clause it was. I told her."

"And?"

"She said, ’Good.’"

Elizabeth didn’t move. I knew she was remembering the same room I was: the east guest rooms in Merrow’s house, and a princess who did not want to leave being told by Saera that she should go anyway.

"There are many people on your side of the border," said Mia, "who would have spent them today. Thirteen witnesses, brought into a chamber to make a treaty look kind. It would have worked. Everyone would have felt better, and the thirteen would have paid for it." She paused. "You did not spend them."

"They weren’t mine to spend."

"No," said Mia. "That is why I am telling you."

She took her hand off Elizabeth’s shoulder, and turned to me, and the conversation was apparently over. Elizabeth sat looking at the table for a moment. Then she looked up at Mia’s back, and her eyes were bright, and she very carefully didn’t do anything about it.

"Al," said Mia. "Walk with me."