Chapter 180: Counting the Days

Lyssairia was already on the wall.

There was a stretch of the inner wall above the courtyard where the walkway was wide and the guards didn’t bother to patrol very closely, and she was sitting on the parapet with one leg drawn up and a cup in her hand, looking down at the lanterns.

Mia went up the steps to her, and I followed, and we sat with Mia on one side of me and Lyssairia on the other.

Below us the long tables ran from gate to gate, and somebody on the beastkin side had started to sing again, the same low slow song I had heard from the balcony the night before, and a few voices from the Crown’s side were trying, badly, to follow it.

For a while none of us said anything. It wasn’t that kind of silence. It was the other kind, the kind I had spent years not having and had only learned this year that I wanted.

I had sat between these two women once before, at twelve, in the mouth of a cave, with my legs aching from Lyssairia’s training and my head full of three envelopes I didn’t want to carry.

I had not expected to do it again. Somewhere between the cave and Zenith, I had stopped letting myself expect it. That was easier than missing them. It had been easier for four years.

It was not easier now. Now it was simply true that they were here, and that I was here, and that the night was warm, and that nobody on this wall wanted anything from me except that I sit on it.

"You’ve gone quiet," said Lyssairia.

"I’m resting."

"You’re thinking. I can hear it."

"That’s not possible."

"It’s very loud."

Mia didn’t say anything, but the corner of her mouth moved.

"The Speaker," I said after a while. "Down there. At the Deer fire."

"Hadrin," said Mia. "His name is Hadrin."

"He looked at me after he signed."

"He did."

"Why?"

Mia was quiet for long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. "Caelum was Deer," she said at last.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t be wrong.

"Every Deer at that table knew which human child Caelum died bringing home," said Mia. "Until this week, that was all they knew about you."

She looked down at the lanterns. "Now Hadrin knows what you say when someone asks you a hard question in a room that wants an easy answer. I think he wanted to see what Caelum had spent himself on."

Down at the Deer fire, the old man with the crooked antlers was sitting with a cup between his hands, listening to the singing. He wasn’t looking up at the wall. I looked at him for a long time anyway.

"Who are you writing to?" said Lyssairia.

I turned my head. "What?"

"You keep reaching into an empty pocket." She nodded at my coat, where my hand had, apparently, gone again. "Six times since you sat down. That’s an unfinished letter or an unpaid debt, and you’ve never paid for anything in your life."

Princesses were dangerous, and cats were worse. "Penelope," I said. "My fiancée."

Lyssairia nearly dropped her cup. "You have a fiancée?"

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"Long enough."

"Does she know about the pillow?"

"She’s met the pillow."

"And she agreed to marry you anyway?"

"She didn’t have much say in it at first." I thought about it. "She’s had plenty of chances to change her mind since, and she keeps not taking them. I don’t understand it either."

Lyssairia looked at me with deep suspicion, as though I were joking and she couldn’t find where. Mia, on my other side, was looking at me with a quieter kind of attention.

"What is she like?" Mia asked.

I thought about how to answer that. About Penelope counting words, and running from a Wellspring worth a hundred points because I had spent thirty to bring her, and running Sanctuary in my place while I was gone, probably better than I ever had.

"She notices everything I don’t say," I said. "And then she waits, until I say it."

Mia nodded slowly, as though that told her everything she needed.

"Bring her, one day," she said.

I looked at her, and she held it. "To us," said Mia. "When there is a road that is safe enough to bring someone on. You will know when." She looked down at the courtyard, at the long tables and the people sitting where they sat. "Perhaps that road starts today."

I didn’t answer. I didn’t trust my voice to do it properly. Lyssairia, on my other side, nudged my shoulder with hers, once, hard enough to be deniable.

"Go and write your letter," she said. "Before you start leaking on my wall."

***

I didn’t go straight to my room. I meant to. But the way back led past the end of the long table, and Daphne was still sitting there in the one seat with a view of both gates, and when I came down the steps she looked up at me, and I found that my feet had stopped.

I sat down across from her. She pushed a plate of bread toward me without being asked. I took a piece.

"You were on the wall," she said.

"With Mia and Lyssairia."

She nodded. Down the table, Sophie was trying to teach Tomas a Brightvale song and Tomas was trying to teach Sophie a Rabbit one, and the result was a song neither of their peoples would have wanted to claim. Daphne watched them for a moment.

"On the stair," she said. "Yesterday." I didn’t move.

"You were going to say something. Before the signing." She looked back at me. "Then you didn’t."

She had put it in front of me as plainly as she put everything. She wasn’t pushing. Daphne never pushed. She was simply setting it on the table between us, the way she had set down the bread, so that I could pick it up if I wanted to.

I could tell her now. The signing was done. There was nothing standing between us but a plate and a few feet of wood.

I could say: since Merrow’s, there has been a connection between us that neither of us chose, and I don’t know how it formed or what it means, and you have a right to know.

I had the sentence. I had had it for days.

I looked at her across the table, calm and patient and entirely unafraid of whatever I might say, and I thought about the lanterns, and the singing, and Elizabeth laughing with her elbow on the table, and how rare a night like this one was.

I thought: not tonight. Let her have one night where nothing is wrong.

"Tomorrow," I said. "It isn’t bad. At least, I don’t think it’s bad. But it’s long, and I don’t fully understand it, and I’d like to tell it to you properly. Tomorrow."

Daphne looked at me for a long moment. I couldn’t tell what she saw.

"Tomorrow," she agreed, and went back to watching the gates.

That was the third time. I knew it was, and I counted it, the way Penelope would have, and I let it go anyway, because it was a good night and I wanted to keep it.

***

The book was where I had left it, on the table by the door. I sat down on the floor with my back against the bed and Dream Haven behind me, and unfolded the letter, and read it through from the beginning.

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

All of it was still true. Even the parts I had worried about had stayed true. I read down to the line she would read longest, Everyone is fine. Including me. I mean it this time, and then to the empty space below it, one line, blank, above my name.

In the second letter, in that same place, above my signature, I had written how many days were left until the signing, and then crossed it out. I knew she had found it.

I didn’t know how; I only knew Penelope, and that she would have held it up to a lamp, and counted the words I hadn’t wanted her to see.

There were no days left now. The signing was done.

I dipped the pen and wrote, and didn’t let myself stop to think about it, because if I thought about it I would make it clever, and she deserved better than clever.

It’s signed. Now I’m counting the days home.

Eight words. She would count them. I didn’t cross out any of them.

[You did not cross it out.]

’No.’

[That is the second time.]

’I’m aware.’

[I am recording it as a pattern.]

’Don’t.’

[It is already recorded.]

I folded the letter, and sealed it, and wrote her name on the outside in the careful letters I only used for her, and then I put my coat back on and went downstairs, because I didn’t trust it to a courier tonight.

The Crown relay office was by the north gate, a small stone room with a lamp in the window and a tired clerk inside it, and when I put the letter on his counter he looked at the name and the destination and wrote both in his ledger without comment.

"Zenith Academy," he said. "Goes out with the dawn rider. Five days, perhaps six."

"Thank you."

He looked up at me, at the formal clothes I hadn’t bothered to change out of, and at whatever my face was doing. "Important?"

"Yes," I said. "It’s the third one."

He didn’t ask what that meant. He just took it, and put it in the leather bag that would go east in the morning, and buckled the strap. I watched him do it, and felt a knot in my chest that had been tight since Waystation Nine come undone.

[Third letter dispatched.]

’You don’t have to announce it.’

[It is a completed objective.]

’It isn’t a quest.’

[I have recorded it as one.]

I didn’t argue. For once, I didn’t mind.

***

The courtyard was still loud when I walked back across it, but it was a softer loud now, the kind a party becomes when it is no longer trying. Somebody had found a drum.

Sophie and Tomas had given up on each other’s songs and invented a third one.

James had at last been persuaded to sit at the long table proper, between a Deer guard and one of Dunmore’s sergeants, and all three of them were arguing about something, and James looked, for once, as if he were enjoying himself.

Elizabeth’s papers were still on the bench where I had left them. She hadn’t climbed over to get them.

Renn was standing by the inner gate with a cup in his hand. I had a suspicion it was the same cup he had been holding when the dinner began, and that it was still full. He nodded at me as I passed.

"Letter?" he said.

"Gone."

"Good." He looked out over the courtyard, at the long tables and the people sitting where they sat. "We leave when the Foreign Office releases Her Highness. Two days, perhaps three."

"And tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," said Renn, "you have nothing scheduled at all."

I stared at him. "Nothing?"

"Nothing."

"No briefing?"

"No."

"No standing?"

"Vortex," said Renn, in a voice I had never heard him use before, one that might in a different man have been warmth, "go to bed."

On my way upstairs, I collected Elizabeth’s papers from the bench and handed them to the steward, with strict instructions that she wasn’t to read them before breakfast. Then I went to bed.

Dream Haven spread itself across the mattress the way it always did, and the window was open a little, and through it I could hear the courtyard going on without me: the drum, and someone laughing who sounded very much like James.

Tomorrow Elizabeth would read her papers in the old records room, and Daphne would wait for me to tell her what I had promised. Penelope’s letter would already be on the road east. Tomorrow I had nothing scheduled at all.

For the first time since Zenith, nobody needed me anywhere in the morning. I closed my eyes, and believed it.