Chapter 199: Five Out, Five Home

(Alash Vortex POV)

The walk back from the compound was longer than the walk there. That isn’t how distances are supposed to work, but my chest had kept count of every step, and by the courtyard I was breathing more carefully than I wanted anyone to notice.

Mia noticed. We stopped near enough to the carriage that I could have sat down in it, and I would have, except that she had taken hold of my sleeve.

She did it without comment, as she might have steadied a cup, and searched my face for whatever I wasn’t telling her.

"Can you travel?" she said.

"Two healers say I can."

"I did not ask them."

"I can travel," I said. "In a carriage. With my feet up. I’ve been sentenced to it."

"And your chest?"

"Is being looked after by two healers and everybody else in this fort who can count. Mia, they’re all treating me like a child."

"You are a child," said Mia.

Lyssairia made a noise that she turned, too late, into a cough.

"I’m a healer," I said, with dignity. "And a duke’s son."

"Those things can be true at once," said Mia.

It was what she had said the last time we had this argument, the other way round. It hadn’t improved since.

She was quiet for a while. She still had my sleeve.

"I am not going to ask you to promise that nothing will happen to you again," she said. "I am too old to want promises from people I cannot follow."

"I wasn’t going to make one."

"Good." She looked at me. "What I want is smaller. When something does happen, and it will, you do not carry it out of the forest by yourself because you think nobody else is left to carry it."

I didn’t say anything for a moment.

I could have told her I wouldn’t. It would have been easy, and she would have known it wasn’t true, and so would I.

"I’ve got people," I said instead. "More than I know what to do with. They follow me down corridors. They take things out of my hands. One of them threatened to make my pillow heavier, and I lay down, because I believed him." I glanced toward the carriage. "I don’t always like it. I’m letting them anyway."

Mia looked at me for a long time.

"That," she said, "is a better answer than a promise."

She let go of my sleeve.

Lyssairia had been enjoying all of this far too much to interrupt it. Now she looked at my coat. My hand was on the pocket again, a habit I hadn’t known I had until Elizabeth caught it, and Lyssairia counted it on the night of the signing.

"Another letter?" she said.

"A different one. It isn’t finished."

"Then finish it here. You’ll never finish anything in a carriage. You’ll sleep." She looked at Dream Haven under my arm. "And when Mia’s road is safe enough, bring her. I want to meet the woman who agreed to the pillow."

"She didn’t agree to it. She puts up with it."

"Then I want to meet her more."

Over Mia’s shoulder, I saw Valerian. He had stopped talking to Sorel some time ago. He stood by the carriage wheel with one hand on it, watching the three of us.

Two days ago, on the wall, he had told me that in five years he had never once seen me wake anybody for help. He was looking at me now like a man checking a bone he had set a long time ago, and finding that it had begun to bear weight.

He didn’t come over. He didn’t say anything. When he saw me looking, he went back to his conversation with Sorel, as though there had been nothing to see.

***

The letter was where I had left it, in the book, two pages before Theoran’s report.

The third letter was true when I wrote it.

I sat on the carriage step with the book on my knee and the pen in my hand, and read the line four times, which was three more than it needed.

I had tried to finish it every night since. Every version had been either too much or too little.

Too much was everything I couldn’t tell her: the ridge, and the gold, and five people’s memories, and a voice in my head that had called the thing on that platform demonic.

Some of that wasn’t mine to tell. None of it belonged in a letter that would pass through a relay office and a rider’s bag and a clerk’s ledger before it reached her.

Too little was another letter like the third. Everyone is fine. Including me.

She would hold that one up to a lamp and find exactly what I had left out of it.

So I wrote neither. I wrote what was true, which I have found is usually somewhere between the two, and shorter than either.

Things went wrong after I wrote it. Everyone is alive. That isn’t the same as fine, and I’ve learned the difference this week. I’m one of the ones who isn’t, quite. It will mend.

I was frightened, Penelope. I’m still frightened, a little, which is new.

I’m still counting the days home. There are more of them now.

I’ll tell you what I can when I see you. When there’s something I can’t, I’ll tell you that too, instead of making you find it under the lines.

I read it over once. It was the shortest letter I had ever written her, and the hardest, and I didn’t cross out a word of it.

I signed it.

It didn’t make what was waiting for me at Zenith any easier. She would read this, and then she would wait, as she always does, until I said the rest. But for once I had written something I didn’t mean to hide behind when I got there.

I folded it and sealed it, and turned two pages on, to Theoran’s report.

Three mornings ago it had been a date and nothing else. It was considerably longer now, because Theoran had asked for that, and most of it was about the other four. I added a paragraph at the end about my own chest. It was accurate. It was the first report I had ever written in which I appeared as a patient.

The relay office by the north gate was a small stone room with a lamp in the window, as it had been on the night of the signing, and the same tired clerk was behind the counter.

He looked at the name on the outside of the letter, and at the destination, and wrote both in his ledger without comment. The report went in after it.

"Zenith Academy," he said. "Same as the last."

"It goes after the last," I said. "Not before."

He looked at me with the patience of a man who has been asked that question by lovers, generals and at least one princess. The last one, he told me, had gone with the dawn rider on the morning after the signing. This one would go with the noon rider. In his experience, letters did not generally overtake one another on a straight road.

I thanked him. He wrote something else in his ledger that I suspected was about me.

Five days, perhaps six, he had said on the night of the signing. If the road had been kind, the third letter was reaching her about now. If the relay ran as it should, the fourth would reach her days ahead of us, at a walk.

I still didn’t know where she would put it. I suspected she would find somewhere. She usually did.

***

The north gate was further away than it had been on the night of the signing. By the time I got back, my chest had an opinion about the walk, and I stood with one hand on the carriage wheel until it had finished giving it.

I thought about not mentioning it. It was a small thing, and everyone was busy. I mentioned it anyway, mostly because Valerian was already looking at me. He checked, and told me it was what he’d expect after a morning like mine, and that I was to stop having mornings like mine.

Renn gave the order an hour before noon.

There was a small difficulty at the start. Elizabeth had to get onto her horse, and she had one working arm and a great deal of pride, and the courtyard was suddenly full of people pretending not to watch.

I was nearest the mounting block. I stepped forward without thinking about it, and my hands were already out when Daphne said, from somewhere behind me:

"No."

I stopped.

Daphne didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to. She simply looked at my chest, and then at me, and then, pointedly, at James.

James was already there. He lifted Elizabeth into the saddle with one hand under her good elbow and the other flat at her back, careful of her ribs. He set her down, and stepped away before she could object to any of it.

"I would like it recorded," said Elizabeth, gathering her reins in her good hand, "that I could have done that myself."

"You couldn’t," said James.

"I’d like it recorded anyway."

I put my hands down. It was harder than it should have been, and it was also, I noticed, perfectly fine. Elizabeth was on her horse. Nobody’s chest had been strained. A guard took her bridle, and another moved to her stirrup, close enough to touch.

I went and sat in the carriage, as sentenced.

Sophie climbed in after me, because Sorel had sentenced her too, and arranged herself on the opposite bench with a blanket and what looked like a second bread roll. Daphne came last, wrists wrapped, and took the seat by the window that faced back toward the gate. James rode beside Elizabeth, his left hand closed on the reins.

I felt the four of them settle into place around me: two close, two a little ahead. It didn’t tell me how any of them felt. It only told me where they were. That morning, it was enough.

Valerian rode on one side of the carriage, as the western command had agreed he could, as far as Zenith, with his camp under Healer Izabella for as long as he was away.

Sorel rode beside Elizabeth, as promised, near enough to the carriage to put her in it. She was coming all the way too. She had started this, and she meant to hand it over herself.

[You are currently supervised by two healers, a commander, a princess and Lady Spinster.]

’I’m aware.’

[This is the most supervised you have ever been.]

’I’m going to sleep through it.’

[That will also be supervised.]

I didn’t argue. It was probably true.

***

At the east gate, Renn reined in, turned his horse, and looked back along the line.

I watched him do it from the carriage window. He looked at the outriders, and the wagons, and the guards. He looked at Elizabeth on her led horse, sitting very straight, and at James beside her. He looked at the carriage, at Sophie’s blanket and Daphne’s face at the window and, I suspect, the top of my head.

He was counting. He had counted us on the platform, and again from the infirmary doorway. Two days ago he had walked out of the infirmary without doing it, for the first time since the ridge. Now there was a road in front of him, and he did it again.

He got to five.

He turned his horse to the road and gave the order, and the convoy moved out through Halden’s east gate at a walk.

I looked back, once, while I still could.

The fort sat on its rise in the morning light, smaller than it had looked on the way in. Somewhere in its western rooms, a six-year-old was beating a Rabbit at stones. Mia and Lyssairia were on the wall above the gate. They didn’t wave. They didn’t go in, either.

Past the fort, the near ridge ran along the western sky. On it stood the old lookout, small and square, with Colonel Dunmore’s men at its lip.

Somewhere beyond that, the thing from the ridge was still out there, in country none of us could follow it into. I knew more about it than I had told anyone, and it still wasn’t enough to say what it was, or what had sent it.

There were five of us in this convoy, and none of us was going home the same, or going home well. Theoran was waiting at the end of this road with an order I had broken. Penelope would be waiting with four letters. Neither conversation was going to be short.

Every one of us was going home.

The road bent, and the fort went behind a hill.

I put Dream Haven under my head, put my feet up on the bench as instructed, and closed my eyes. Across from me, Sophie had already started telling Daphne about the bread. Outside, Valerian’s horse kept pace with the wheel. Somewhere ahead, Elizabeth was arguing with the man leading her horse about whether a walk could be slightly faster, and losing.

Five out, I thought. Five home.

For once, I let other people watch the road.