Chapter 200: A Man Who Wasn’t There

(Alash Vortex POV)

The carriage found a rut, and my chest told me about it before I was properly awake.

I lay still with my eyes shut and waited for it to finish. It didn’t take long. The pull behind my breastbone had grown a little smaller every day since the ridge, and every day it found a new way to remind me it hadn’t gone.

Dream Haven was under my head. Dream Haven had done its best. Its best had not been designed with the Halden road in mind.

I had slept through the whole of the night at our first stop, without once waking to listen for anybody. Then I had climbed into the carriage after breakfast and fallen asleep again before we cleared the gate. As far as I was concerned, both of those counted as medical progress.

When I opened my eyes, Sophie was eating.

She had a bread roll in one hand and another in her lap, wrapped in a napkin, which meant she had planned ahead. I didn’t ask where she had got them. On the road west she had waved at strangers from this window. Today she watched the ditches go by, and ate, and didn’t seem to notice she was doing either.

"Good morning," she said. "You snore."

"I don’t."

"You whistle, then. Daphne timed it."

I looked at Daphne. She sat by the window with her wrapped wrists resting in her lap, palms up, where nothing would ask anything of them. She didn’t take her eyes off the road.

"Forty minutes," she said.

"That isn’t snoring. That’s sleeping well."

"It whistles," said Sophie.

I didn’t need to look outside for the other two. James was a little ahead of the carriage and to the left, where he had been since Halden. Elizabeth was just beyond him.

That was all the sense ever told me: where they were. It didn’t tell me whether James’s hand had gone to his chest again, or whether Elizabeth was paler than she had been an hour ago. I had stopped wishing it would somewhere around the second day, which was either progress or tiredness.

I looked anyway.

Elizabeth sat her led horse very straight, with her left arm in its sling and her reins in her good hand. A guard walked at her horse’s head. Another rode at her stirrup, close enough to touch. Sorel rode on her other side, and every so often looked at Elizabeth’s hands.

We had stopped every hour since dawn, as ordered. Elizabeth had argued about every stop, and lost every argument, and from the look of her she was beginning to suspect that Sorel enjoyed it.

James rode on her near side. His left hand was closed on the reins. I didn’t think he knew.

Further up the line, Renn reined in and let the column come past him. He looked at the sun, and at Elizabeth, and at the road ahead. He didn’t say anything to anyone. He had wanted to be at the waystation an hour ago, and he said it to the road instead, with his jaw.

Ahead of him, the outriders rode out of sight round a bend and came back again. Two men walked their horses along the verges, looking down into the ditches and behind the banks. On the road west, nobody had looked at a ditch. Now everybody did, even Sophie.

It was a quiet road, and a slow one, and for the first time in a long while I didn’t mind either.

***

The waystation came into sight a little before noon.

It was a proper one, square and stone-built inside a low wall, with stables along one side and a deep arch over the gate. Renn’s advance riders had been through it already. One of them stood at the gate with a list in his hand and checked us in one by one, like strangers, which I approved of.

James lifted Elizabeth down from her horse. I stayed where I was. Nobody had to tell me.

Sorel took Elizabeth into a side room off the hall with Valerian behind her, and closed the door. Before she did, she pointed at me.

"Chair. Feet up. If I hear you’ve walked anywhere, I’ll know who told me."

"Who?"

"Everyone."

The hall was long and low, with a table down the middle, a hearth at one end and two doors: the one we had come in by, and the one Sorel had just closed. A guard stood inside each. Renn’s men had been through every room before we arrived. They knew which rooms were ours, which doors were barred and who was expected.

There was a good chair by the hearth, high-backed with arms, the kind of chair a waystation keeps for whoever outranks everyone else. I looked at it with real longing.

It was nine paces away, and Sorel had said feet up, not walk nine paces. I took the nearer one instead, put my feet on a stool, wedged Dream Haven behind my head and closed my eyes.

A supervised rest stop, I decided, might be one of humanity’s better inventions.

Sophie sat at the table and unwrapped her second roll. James sat down across from her and put his left hand flat on the wood and left it there.

"How many days, do you think?" said Sophie.

"Renn won’t say."

"I asked the cook last night. The cook said ’depends.’"

"That’s what Renn says."

"I know. I think Renn told him to."

Daphne took the chair at the far end that could see both doors, because she always does. She sat with her back to the wall and her hands in her lap.

Through the side door I could feel Elizabeth, close, and not moving. The other three were where I could see them. Nothing in that sense had changed since breakfast.

Nothing warned any of us. I have gone over it since, more than once, and nothing did.

***

Renn came in from the yard a quarter of an hour later.

"The horses want an hour," he said, "and so does Her Highness, so we’ll..."

He stopped.

I opened my eyes. Renn was standing just inside the door with his hand on his sword hilt, and he was not looking at any of us. He was looking at the hearth.

Somebody had taken the good chair.

He was a man of perhaps thirty, with long dark hair loose about his shoulders and a plain grey robe that a wandering mage might have worn, if the mage had been short of money.

His feet were stretched out toward the fire. In one hand he held a bread roll wrapped in a napkin, and he was turning it over and examining it as though somebody had brought it to him for an opinion.

"That’s mine," said Sophie.

"It’s underbaked," said the man in the chair.

Nobody moved.

That isn’t quite true. Daphne was already on her feet, with her hands half raised. She stopped them there, because Sorel had said not a spark and she knew exactly what it would cost her wrists. James had come up out of his chair with his right hand on his sword and his left closed. Sophie had frozen with her mouth open, and there was frost spreading across the table from under her cup.

I didn’t move at all. My feet were up. I knew who it was.

The last time I had seen him, he had been standing on the stage at Zenith, telling a hall full of first-years that all five of their leaders had failed. Before that, he had put the whole year to sleep in their seats and woken us inside a world he had made up: roads, monsters, wounded strangers who bled convincingly, and five golden seals over the gate of a Citadel that wasn’t there.

None of it had been real. All of it had felt real. He had seemed to find most of us faintly disappointing.

’Did you know he was there?’

[No.]

At Zenith’s orientation, the System had warned me before he appeared. Today it hadn’t said a word. I put that aside with everything else about this morning I didn’t like.

"Who let you in?" said Renn.

"Nobody," said the man.

Renn didn’t take his hand off his sword. He didn’t draw it either. He looked at the guard by the door, and the guard looked at the chair, and his face went grey.

"Sir. That chair was empty. I looked at it."

"He did," said the man in the chair. "Twice. He’s very thorough."

"I’d have heard him breathe," said Sophie, to nobody. Her voice had gone thin. "I hear everybody breathe."

"You did," said the man. "You decided it was the fire."

Sophie shut her mouth.

"Commander," I said. "That’s the Mirage Hermit."

Renn’s eyes didn’t leave him.

"Is it," he said, and it wasn’t a question.

***

The side door opened. Valerian came out first, fast, with Sorel behind him.

He stopped two paces into the room and looked at the man by the hearth for a long moment, as he looks at a wound he has never seen before and doesn’t intend to touch until he understands it.

"Long hair," he said quietly. "Looks thirty. And I can’t feel a thing off him, at three yards." He let out a breath. "I’d always assumed the stories were exaggerated."

"They aren’t," I said. "They leave things out."

The Hermit glanced at me, then at Dream Haven behind my head.

"You still have that."

"It’s a pillow."

"So I was told."

Sorel had gone to stand in the side doorway, where nobody could get past her to Elizabeth without going through her first. She didn’t look frightened. She looked like a woman who has just found a stranger in her clean infirmary and is deciding where to start.

Renn sent the guard out to check the gate book. Nobody spoke while he was gone. The Hermit put Sophie’s roll back on the table, not quite where it had been, and folded his hands into his sleeves.

The guard came back.

"Nothing since our own riders, sir. Nobody’s come through the gate."

"I didn’t come through your gate," said the Hermit.

"Then how..."

"Commander." The Hermit sounded almost patient. "You can ask me how, or you can ask me why. I’ll answer one of them."

Renn looked at him for a long breath. I watched him decide that the first answer wouldn’t help him, and that the second might.

"Why are you here?"

"Halden."

"What about Halden?"

"A princess was hurt on a ridge by something nobody can name, behind a wall nobody could see. Five children went up two stages in an afternoon. Cores don’t do that." The Hermit looked at the five of us, one at a time, and lingered on none of us. "I’d like to know why."

"How do you know about the cores?"

"Half the western road knows a princess was hurt. Rather fewer know about the cores. Your men talk, Commander. So do healers, in their letters home, and so do the people who keep inns."

Renn’s jaw set. Somebody had sold our route to the Tigers before Merrow’s, and the magistrate still didn’t know who. I saw the word talk go in, and stay.

"Have you seen the Crown’s report?"

"No."

"My notes?" said Sorel.

"No."

"You won’t."

"I didn’t ask to."

"You were going to."

The Hermit considered her. "Yes," he said.

"Has the Crown appointed you to look into this?" said Renn.

The Hermit looked faintly insulted, as though Renn had asked whether he did his own laundry.

"No."

"Then on whose authority are you here?"

"My own. Curiosity has never needed a seal."

"It needs one in this room," said Renn.

***

I had wondered, on the road, what Renn would do if something came at us that he couldn’t fight. I hadn’t expected it to be sitting by a fire, complaining about bread.

He didn’t try to fight it. He didn’t threaten it with anything he didn’t have. He took his hand off his sword, which cost him something, and he spoke to the Hermit as he might have spoken to a general who had wandered into his camp: politely, and without giving up an inch of it.

"You’re beyond me," he said. "I know that. My men know it, now. If you want to walk out of this room with any of them, I can’t stop you."

"No."

"But I’m responsible for the First Princess and four other injured students until I hand them over at Zenith, and that doesn’t stop because you’re strong." He didn’t raise his voice. "So here’s what happens. Whatever you ask them, you ask in front of me. Whatever they don’t want to answer, they don’t. And if either healer says stop, you stop."

"And if I don’t?"

"Then I can’t make you," said Renn. "I’ll write it down instead. Every word. The Crown will read it, and so will the Headmaster, and they’ll write to you about it, and then they’ll want answers to their letters."

The Hermit was quiet for a moment.

"That," he said, "is a genuinely unpleasant threat."

"It’s the one I have."

"Hm."

Sorel spoke from the doorway. "And nobody demonstrates anything. Not a spark, not a frost, not a ward. I don’t care who asks. Their channels are mine until I hand them on, and I’m not handing them to you."

Sophie looked down at the frost spreading from her cup, guiltily, and put both hands in her lap.

Sorel crossed the room in four steps and took her wrist without asking.

"Pain?"

"No." Sophie’s voice was small. "It just comes out when I jump."

Sorel held the wrist a moment longer, with her eyes half closed, reading whatever she reads.

"Warm," she said. "Not hot. If your hands start to ache, or that happens again without a fright behind it, you tell me at the time, not afterwards."

"Yes, Healer."

Sorel let go and went back to the doorway. She hadn’t looked at the Hermit once while she did it, which I suspect was the point.

"I don’t need a demonstration," said the Hermit. "I’ve seen them work."

"Then you know what they can do when they’re well," said Valerian. "They aren’t well. You’ll have a quarter of an hour, and you’ll have it sitting down."

The Hermit glanced at him. "And you are?"

"Their healer, this week. One of them."

"Hm," said the Hermit again, and I couldn’t tell whether that was respect or boredom. With him I suspect it can be both.

***

"Commander." Elizabeth’s voice came from behind Sorel. "May I?"

Sorel didn’t move out of the doorway. She looked at Elizabeth, and at the Hermit, and at Valerian. Valerian nodded once. Sorel stepped aside, with one hand at Elizabeth’s good elbow, and brought her out and put her into the chair nearest the side door, so that the door was at her back.

Elizabeth sat very straight. She looked at the Hermit as she had looked at the delegations across the signing table, measuring.

"This is a request, Your Highness," said Renn. "Not an order. Nobody here has the right to order you, least of all him."

"I know." She hadn’t taken her eyes off the Hermit. "You saw something on that ridge that the Crown’s officers didn’t. Or you think you might. That’s why you’re here."

"I’ve seen nothing on that ridge. I heard about it."

"Then you think you might notice something they missed."

"Yes."

"Then I’ll answer your questions," said Elizabeth. "Mine, and only mine. I won’t be examined by anyone except Healer Sorel and Master Alzette. Neither will they." She tipped her head toward the rest of us. "And I’d like to know what you mean to do with what we tell you."

"Think about it."

"That isn’t an answer."

"It’s the only true one I have."

Elizabeth considered that. She seemed to like it better than a polite one.

"If she’s answering," said James, "so am I."

"Fine," said Sophie. She still hadn’t picked up the roll.

Daphne hadn’t sat down again. She stood at the end of the table with her back to the wall.

"Some," she said.

The Hermit looked at her. "Some?"

"Some."

He seemed to accept that as a complete sentence. I don’t think many people manage to tell him no in one word. Daphne has had practice.

Then everyone looked at me.

"I’ll answer what I can," I said.

"Everyone says that."

"Some of us mean it more than others."

"We’ll see," said the Hermit.

***

He didn’t ask any of us to tell it from the beginning. I had braced myself for that. I had told the ridge to Sorel, and to Renn, and to Valerian, and to the Crown, and every time I told it the platform got a little smaller and the creature got a little less real. I didn’t want to tell it again to a man who would listen to every word.

He didn’t want the story. He knew the story. He wanted the parts of it that only one of us had.

He started with Elizabeth.

"Before anyone reached you," he said. "What did it want?"

Elizabeth didn’t answer at once. I had seen her do that at the signing, when a question was simpler than the man asking it.

"I can’t prove what it wanted."

"I didn’t ask you to prove it."

"It reached for me," she said. "Slowly. Carefully. Always for the same place." She touched two fingers to her breastbone, over the sling. "Here. It never went for my face, or my throat. I don’t think it was trying to cut me. I thought, at the time, it was trying to hold me still."

"And when you hurt it?"

"It hurried. That was all. It still went for the same place."

"And when the others came through?"

"It stopped choosing." She frowned faintly, at the memory rather than at him. "It looked at Alash. Then at Daphne. Then back at me. After the others came, it looked at all of us, one after another, and it never settled."

"Where on them?"

Elizabeth was quiet for a moment.

"The same place," she said.

The Hermit didn’t look at anybody’s chest. He didn’t need to. I felt the rest of the room try very hard not to look at each other’s.

I kept my eyes on the fire.

I knew where it had looked. Since the day of the ridge itself, lying in an infirmary bed while Sorel wrote down that she couldn’t explain our cores, I had been as sure as I could be of why. It had looked at exactly the places where the five of us carried the one thing we had in common, and only one of us knew what that was.

Being sure of what it wanted wasn’t the same as understanding it. I didn’t know how it had found us, or how it had known to wait under that lookout, or who had made a thing that could. I knew one piece of the answer. I had no idea how big the rest was.

I didn’t say so. I hadn’t said so to Sorel, or Renn, or Valerian. I wasn’t going to start with a man I had last seen on a stage at Zenith.

"Hm," said the Hermit, and turned to Daphne.