Chapter 181: The Princess Alone

( Elizabeth Aurelius POV )

I slept until the sun was fully up, which had not happened since we left Zenith.

When I opened my door, the implementation schedules were waiting on the floor outside it in a neat stack. Someone had tied them with a piece of string that had clearly been borrowed.

The steward on the landing cleared his throat. "Lord Vortex left those with me last night, Your Highness. With instructions."

"What instructions?"

He looked as though he would have preferred not to say. "That they were not to be read before breakfast, under any circumstances, and that if you asked, I was to tell you he said so."

I looked at the string. It was a bootlace. I decided not to ask whose.

I ate breakfast first. I want that recorded somewhere, because it was a small act of obedience and I would like credit for it.

***

The old records room was at the top of the west tower, up a stair so narrow that my two guards had to climb it one behind the other.

It was a long, low room full of garrison ledgers. Two hundred years of supply counts lived there, along with the names of soldiers who had stood on these walls before any of us were born.

I checked for wards out of habit. The old council chamber had them, but there was nothing of the sort here, only ledgers and the smell of paper.

I sat down at the long table, untied Alash’s bootlace, and began.

The schedules were exactly as dull as I had hoped. The first pages set the dates for the first joint patrols and named the officers who would sit on the border commission.

Then came the procedure for reporting a missing person on either side of the border. I read that clause three times. I had fought harder for it in the spring than for anything else in the treaty, and I wanted to see it in ink.

A paragraph about the thirteen had been added overnight, in the official’s quick hand. I initialled that one more slowly than the rest.

On the ninth page there was a map.

It showed the country west of Halden, where the patrols would walk. Two marks sat on the ridge beyond the wall: the old western lookout, and a signal cairn further along. Beside them, in the same confident hand, someone had written Cairn visible from lookout. Confirmed.

It did not say who had confirmed it.

I looked up. The room had three narrow windows on its western side, and through the middle one I could see the lookout itself.

It was a stone platform on the near ridge, a few hundred paces beyond the wall, built when Halden still expected its enemies to come out of the border country. Past it, the land fell away into brown hills and dry valleys. Past those rose the far ridge, bare against the sky.

Before the month was out, soldiers from both sides of that border would walk those valleys together, because I had initialled a page.

I found that I wanted to stand on that platform once before they did.

***

I gave the finished schedules to the Foreign Office official, who received them the way some people receive newborns. I kept the map.

Commander Renn was in the gatehouse at the west gate, reading reports with the expression of a man who expected each one to be worse than the last.

"I’d like to walk out to the old lookout this afternoon," I said.

He looked up. "No."

"You haven’t heard why."

"I don’t need to."

I put the map down in front of him and laid my finger on the note. "The first joint patrols start from that ridge. I’ve just approved routes I’ve only ever seen on paper. And the Foreign Office says the signal cairn can be seen from the lookout."

Renn read the note. Then he looked out of his window at the ridge.

"I would like to know," I said, "whether anyone at the Foreign Office has ever stood there."

He was quiet for long enough that I began to prepare my second argument.

Since the night we arrived, he had doubled the watch on every approach to Halden. The east worried him most, because that was where our route had been sold. The west had been quiet for three days, and he had doubled it anyway.

"Six guards," he said.

I blinked. "Six?"

"You’ll take the others."

"Why?"

"Because I’d rather count five of you on one ridge than four of you in the keep and one of you on a ridge."

He looked at me over the map. "And because I don’t trust any of you to stay where I put you if you think one of the others is in trouble."

He picked up his pen again. "Two guards for you. Two for each pair of the rest, because they’ll pair off. You keep to the path between here and the cairn, and nothing past the cairn. Back before the light goes."

"And you?"

"I’ll be on the gate." He went back to his reports. "That’s what the gate is for."

I thanked him twice, which was once more than necessary. He didn’t look up either time.

***

I told the others at midday, in the small room at the end of our corridor where we had been eating since we arrived.

"I’m coming," said James, before I had finished the sentence.

Sophie looked up from her bread. "Is there a view?"

"There’s a view."

"Then I’m coming. Tomas says you can see three valleys from up there, and one of them has a river in it if it’s rained."

"Has it rained?"

"No," said Sophie happily. "But I’d like to see where it would be."

Daphne didn’t answer. She had turned the map round on the table to read it the right way up, and now she was looking out of the window toward the ridge.

Alash was lying along the bench under the window with Dream Haven beneath his head and his eyes closed.

"No," he said.

"I haven’t asked you."

"You were about to."

"It’s a few hundred paces."

"Each way."

"Yes."

"That’s twice as far as it sounds."

"I’m going," said Daphne.

She said it to the window, not to anyone in particular. Alash opened one eye and looked at her for a moment. Then he sat up.

"Then I’m going," he said.

I had spent the better part of a year trying to make Alash Vortex walk anywhere he hadn’t chosen to go. Daphne had managed it in two words, without appearing to try.

I decided that was none of my business. I noted it anyway.

***

We went out through the west gate an hour after midday.

Renn was on the wall above the gate when we passed beneath it. He didn’t wave, which I took as a sign that he was paying attention.

Six guards came with us, two of them mine. The rest arranged themselves around the others with the quiet efficiency of people who had been told exactly who to watch and had no intention of being asked twice.

The patrol path was old. It ran along the top of the near ridge, worn into a groove by two centuries of boots, with dry grass leaning in from both sides.

A steady wind was coming out of the west. It smelled of dust and sun-dried grass, and of the long empty country beyond the ridge.

Sophie walked ahead with one of the guards, asking him the names of plants. He didn’t know most of them, and she didn’t seem to mind. Alash and Daphne walked behind us, saying nothing, which was ordinary for Daphne and very unusual for Alash.

James walked beside me.

Partway along, his hand drifted to his chest.

He didn’t notice he was doing it. I did. I had been in the room at Zenith when Lena Arkwright was asked whether the damage to his channels was permanent, and answered probably.

"Stop it," I said.

"Stop what?"

"Checking."

"I wasn’t checking."

"You were asking them whether they’d answer."

His hand dropped. "They always answer."

"That’s what worries me."

He gave me the look he had been giving me since we were children. It meant that I was being unreasonable and he intended to enjoy it.

"You worry more than Lena," he said.

"Lena worries in tables. I worry in person."

"Is there a difference?"

"Yes. Mine is better informed."

He laughed, and the guard nearest us pretended very hard not to have heard any of it.

"Fine," said James. "I’ll stop. Since you’re watching."

"I’m always watching."

"I know," he said, and he didn’t sound as though he minded.

Someone in this engagement had to keep count. It had always been me. I had never once resented it, and I had no intention of telling him so.

***

At the old sentry stand halfway along the ridge, Alash stopped walking.

It was a low wall of fitted stone, waist high, the remains of a post that had been abandoned before the lookout was built. He considered it with the expression of a man who had found exactly what he was looking for.

"This is far enough," he said.

"It’s halfway," I said.

"Halfway is a place. People have built inns at less."

Dream Haven unfolded along the top of the wall, white against the grey stone, and he lay down on it as though he had been born there.

Daphne stopped beside him.

She didn’t sit. She stood with her hands at her sides, looking along the ridge, in the way she stands when she is waiting for somebody to speak. Two of the guards drifted to a respectful distance behind them.

Whatever she was waiting for, it was not mine to wait for. I walked on.

The path split below the lookout. One branch climbed to the stone platform. The other dropped along the inner side of the ridge, below the crest, toward the far end of the approved ground where the signal cairn was supposed to be.

I stopped at the fork.

"The schedule says the cairn can be seen from the lookout," I said to James. "I’d like to know whether the schedule is lying."

He looked at the lower path, then at me. "You want me to go and stand next to a pile of rocks."

"I want you to stand next to it and wave."

"I’m not waving."

"Then stand very visibly."

"I’ll wave," said Sophie, who had come back to see why we had stopped.

James looked at me a moment longer, the way he does when he is deciding whether to argue and finds he would rather not.

"Don’t fall off anything," he said.

"I’m going to stand on a platform and look at grass."

"Don’t fall off that."

"I’ll try to resist."

He went with Sophie, and two of the guards followed them down the lower path. At the bend, James looked back once. I lifted a hand.

Then the path took him behind the shoulder of the ridge, and he was gone.

***

The steps to the platform were shallow and very old. At the top I turned to my guards.

"I’d like to think for a while," I said. "Would you stay at the foot of the steps?"

The older of the two hesitated, which was his job. I waited him out, which was mine. Eventually, he nodded, and they stopped about thirty paces back, where the platform met the path. It was close enough to see me and far enough to pretend they weren’t listening.

I hadn’t asked it lightly. The steps were the only sensible approach to the platform, and both guards stood at their foot.

Behind them, Renn’s doubled watch covered the lookout and the patrol path from the wall. Anyone coming up that path would have to pass two armed men first.

The lookout was wider than it had seemed from the tower. The flagstones were worn smooth in the middle and cracked at the edges, and a low parapet ran along its western side.

Beyond the parapet there was only the lip of the ridge, and below that, a steep broken slope falling away toward the border country. I could hardly imagine anyone climbing it unnoticed.

I stood at the parapet and looked out.

It was very beautiful, in the way that empty places are. The valleys lay folded together in the afternoon light, brown and gold, with the old patrol routes running through them like threads somebody had dropped.

The far ridge stood beyond them, bare and pale. Nothing grew on it at all.

I looked along the near ridge for the signal cairn.

I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see James either. A shoulder of the ridge stood in the way, a fold in the ground that the map had not troubled to draw.

Either James was standing in the wrong place, or someone at the Foreign Office had confirmed the sightline from a chair. I knew which I believed.

I took a pencil from my sleeve and wrote NOT VISIBLE across the confident little note, in capitals.

***

Below the Western Lookout

It had come down from the far ridge in the dark.

It had not meant to come closer. It had meant to wait, as it had waited for two nights.

But the pull had grown too strong to be watched from a distance, and in the last hour before dawn it had crossed the open ground and climbed the broken face of the near ridge, and lain down among the loose stone below the lip.

All morning the pull had been everywhere above it, behind walls, too close to point.

Then it had come out along the ridge. It had come nearer, and then it had stopped directly overhead.

It had never been this close. It was one pull, and it was here.

Hunt the Akashic Key.

The first command closed on it like a hand.

Around the creature, the air changed. It did not intend this, and it did not notice.

***

(Elizabeth Aurelius POV)

The wind stopped.

I noticed because the wind had been the only sound on the platform. Then it wasn’t there, and the silence it left was so complete that my own breathing seemed loud.

It hadn’t died. Below the lip I could still see it combing the grass on the slope. Further out, it lifted little curls of dust along the patrol roads.

It had simply stopped here, around me, as though it had met a wall it couldn’t feel.

Air is the attribute nobody watches. Fire is bright, and water is loud, and earth is heavy enough that people respect it.

Air is simply there, until you learn to listen to it. Then it is everywhere, telling you things.

I let my attention go out the way my first tutor had taught me when I was six.

The air around me was still, from the parapet back toward the steps. Beyond that, it moved. I could not find the place where one became the other.

I turned to call my guards.

They weren’t where I had left them. They had come three paces closer, both of them, and they were looking at the parapet, at the exact place where I was standing.

They were looking straight through me.

The older one spoke to the younger. I saw his mouth move, and I didn’t hear a word.

"I’m here," I said.

Neither of them turned.

"I’m here," I said again, louder, in the voice my tutors had spent years teaching me to use in large rooms.

The younger guard ran to the edge of the ridge beside the steps and leaned out over it to look down the slope. He was looking for me among the rocks below. From where he stood, I had simply vanished.

When he straightened, his face had gone the colour of the flagstones.

I did not panic. I would like that recorded too.

I considered it in order, the way I consider anything that matters. I had not moved. They had not gone blind. Whatever now lay between us had arrived in the last few seconds, and it worked in one direction only.

I could see them. They could not see me.

I took a step toward them.

Behind me, the air moved in a rhythm that wasn’t mine.

It was slow and long, in and then out, rising from below the parapet where the ridge fell away. It was breathing, and it was very close.

I turned around.

It came over the lip of the ridge the way water comes up a beach, all at once and without hurry.

It was long. That was the first thing I understood about it. It was longer than a horse and low to the stone, and it moved as though it had more joints than it needed and had not yet decided how to use them all.

Its hide was dark and wet-looking, like slate after rain. Thin pale lines ran beneath it, and the lines moved. They shifted as I watched, the way cracks run across ice when there is light underneath.

I looked for its eyes and couldn’t find them. I couldn’t find anything I would have called a face.

There was a long head, and the head turned toward me.

It did not turn toward my face. It turned toward the centre of my chest.

I have read every bestiary in my father’s library. I read them as a child, by lamplight, long after I was meant to be asleep, because a princess should know the names of everything that might want to eat her.

Nothing in any of them looked like this. Nothing in any of them looked at a person like that.

I felt it there, under my breastbone, as clearly as I had felt the wind stop. It was attention, pressing on me like a hand that hadn’t touched me yet.

I didn’t run. I had no idea how fast it could move, and I wasn’t going to give it my back before I knew what it could do.

I called on all four elements instead. Water gathered above my left shoulder, turning slowly. Fire woke above my right. I drew a fist of earth up out of the flagstones behind me.

Air was everywhere, as it always is.

The creature came forward.

I tested it with air first, because air tells you the truth about weight.

I pushed a wall of it across the platform. It wasn’t meant to hurt, only to weigh. A wolf leans into a push one way, and a man leans in another way that is entirely his own.

The creature leaned into it like neither of them. Its weight sat low and far forward, much heavier than its size, and it came through the push without slowing.

I tried earth.

I tore three flagstones up from the platform and drove them into its forelimbs from the side. Stone struck hide with a sound like a door slamming in an empty house.

It didn’t flinch or favour the limb. It simply adjusted, the way a river adjusts to a rock, and kept coming.

I tried water.

I sent the sphere above my shoulder at its forelegs as a thin, hard stream, aimed at the joints, to slick the stone under it and take its footing away. It slipped. For one moment its long body swung sideways and its weight went wrong.

It recovered as though slipping were simply another way of walking.

None of it hurt the creature the way it should have. Pain makes a living thing hesitate. It makes it guard the place that hurts, or back away.

This did neither. It had not looked away from my chest once.

It was close now. I could hear its breathing clearly, slow and even, as if none of what I had done had cost it anything at all.

Then it reached for me.

It didn’t lunge. It ignored my throat, and every other soft place the bestiaries say a hunting animal learns to find first.

One of its forelimbs unfolded instead, longer than it had any right to be, bending in three places where there should have been one. It reached toward the centre of my chest. It moved slowly, with a care that was worse than violence would have been.

I threw myself sideways on a gust of my own air. The limb closed on nothing.

The long head followed me. It didn’t follow my face, or the fire still burning above my shoulder.

It followed the place under my breastbone, steadily, as if nothing else about me mattered at all.

I understood it then, standing on a platform that looked empty to everyone outside it, thirty paces from two men who could not make out my voice.

It had not come for the First Princess. It had come for whatever it believed I was carrying.

And I had no idea what that was.