Chapter 201: What We Didn’t Tell Him

(Alash Vortex POV)

"Before you went in," he said. "What could you feel?"

"Blood."

"Whose?"

"Hers. I didn’t know that then."

"How did it feel?"

Daphne thought about it. She always does. She would rather be slow than wrong.

"Wrong," she said. "Like through water. I knew it was there, and fresh. I didn’t know how much, or where."

"And once you were inside?"

"It was blood."

"Nothing between?"

"No."

The Hermit was quiet for a moment.

"The soldier’s hand stopped on the wall," he said. "Yours didn’t."

"No."

"Why?"

"I don’t know."

"Have you thought about it?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"I still don’t know."

It was the same answer I had given Renn across the foot of my bed, and Renn had believed it. The Hermit looked at Daphne for a long moment and seemed to believe it too.

"Your Gravity," he said. "Did you hold it?"

"No. I hit it and let go."

"Why not hold?"

"Holding costs me," said Daphne. "Hitting costs it."

The corner of the Hermit’s mouth moved, very slightly.

"And there’s nothing else you noticed?" he said. "After."

I didn’t look at her. I didn’t have to. I could feel her at the end of the table, exactly where she had been all along, and I knew what after could mean for her, and so did she.

"Nothing I’m going to tell you about," said Daphne.

"That isn’t the same as nothing."

"No," said Daphne. "It isn’t."

She said it in exactly the tone she had used on me on the inner wall at Halden, and I felt it land in my own chest like a stone in a well. The Hermit didn’t press her. I suspect he had already worked out that he wouldn’t get anywhere if he did.

***

He turned to James.

"Your Light," he said. "I’ve seen it on a sword. Was it the sword?"

James’s eyes flicked to Elizabeth, and back. "A knife."

"Why a knife?"

"A sword gives Light room to spread. I didn’t want it to spread." He shifted. His left hand was still flat on the table. "I put it all into a few inches of steel until there was nowhere for it to go but forward. It came out past the point in a line."

"And then?"

"I put the line into its shoulder." James looked at the table. "It didn’t cut across the hide. It went in. It burned the dark underneath. The pale lines lit up all through it, white, branching, like the whole thing had been lit from inside. The Light went in among them and didn’t cut any of them."

"You’re certain."

"Yes."

"How?"

"I felt it go past them." James frowned. "I can’t tell you how I know that. I just know what the knife was touching."

The Hermit was quiet.

"Her fire," he said, and glanced at Elizabeth. "You burned it?"

"Yes. In a joint."

"How long did the burn last?"

"Not long. By the time it came at me again, it had almost closed."

He looked back at James. "And yours?"

"Slowly," said James. "Much more slowly. I watched it."

"Hm."

That was all. He didn’t say light and dark in the same breath, or say what kind of thing heals fire in minutes and Light in hours. He only looked at James a moment longer, and then at James’s left hand, closed on the table, and then away. James saw him look. He didn’t open his hand.

Somewhere in the back of my head, the System had said a word about that creature when James’s knife went in. It hadn’t said it to anyone else. I didn’t say it either.

***

"Ice," said the Hermit, turning to Sophie.

Sophie, to her credit, didn’t say what about it.

"What did you hold first?" he said.

"Its feet." Sophie swallowed. "Then it got out, so I took everything."

She had stopped looking at her cup, and she was talking with her hands now, small careful movements that didn’t make anything.

"I froze the whole of it. Shell, right over the top. It folded. All its joints went the wrong way at once and it got narrower and came out the front, like a hand out of a glove. So I stopped freezing it."

"And did what?"

"Froze the parts it bent with. Every joint. Thin rings, really cold, with another one underneath each, so if it broke one the next was already there." She hesitated. "And I could hear it. Not the creature. The air round the joint, just before it bent. So I only had to lock the next one."

"When did you stop locking all of them?"

Sophie blinked. "At about forty. I was counting seconds. I could feel how long I had left."

"Late," said the Hermit. "But correct."

Sophie opened her mouth, and closed it, and opened it again.

"Thank you?"

"It wasn’t praise."

"It sounded a bit like praise."

"It wasn’t," said the Hermit, and Sophie looked at me, and I very carefully didn’t laugh, because laughing would have cost me a rib’s worth of chest, and because I had once said exactly that to the System, and it hadn’t listened either.

***

Then he looked at me.

"You," he said.

I had known it was coming. That didn’t make it pleasanter.

"Unfortunately," I said. It was what I had told him the last time he said it, in front of the whole year, and it was still true.

"Tell me what you did on that platform."

"I healed her." I kept my voice level. "Shoulder, ribs, the cut at her hairline. I stopped the bleeding. I couldn’t put back what she’d already lost. Healing doesn’t."

"And her channels?"

"Overdrawn, palm to shoulder. Nothing I have heals channels."

"So you did something else."

I looked at Elizabeth.

It was her body, and it had been her choice. At Halden I had promised her that anything I found in it, she would hear first. It seemed to me that what a stranger heard about it was hers to decide, too.

She held my eyes for a moment and nodded.

"Tell him," she said. "It’s mine as much as yours."

"I used a skill on her," I said. "The Headmaster had forbidden it. Personally, by name, not for any reason, not on anyone. I knew that when I did it, and she knew it when she said yes."

"What does it do?"

"For an hour, the body recovers at its own rate, only faster. Then the hour ends."

"That’s all?"

"That’s what it did for her channels."

"That’s an answer to a different question."

I didn’t say anything. He waited long enough for the silence to become an answer of its own, and then he let it go. I didn’t think he had dropped it. I thought he had put it down somewhere he could find it again.

The Hermit looked at me. It was the look he had given me on the stage at Zenith after the Crucible, when he told a hall full of first-years that I collected responsibility while complaining about it. It saw a great deal and said almost none of it.

"And your cores," he said. "All five of you. Two stages, at once."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I don’t know."

"You don’t know, or you can’t say?"

"I can’t explain it," I said, and that was the truest sentence I had said since I sat down. "Healer Sorel can’t. Master Alzette can’t. Whatever it was, it didn’t heal anything. It put more weight on what was already hurt."

"It did," said Valerian, from behind my chair. "I’d thank you not to make them carry any more of it today."

The Hermit didn’t look at him. He was still looking at me.

I had told him the truth. I had told him the hour, and the order I broke, and that I couldn’t explain the cores. All of that was true, as far as it went.

It didn’t go very far.

I had left out the part of the skill that didn’t end with the hour. I had left out the gold, and what came with the gold, and the word the System had used when James’s knife went in. I had told myself, as I spoke, that most of that wasn’t only mine to tell.

It occurred to me, a moment later, that I hadn’t asked the other four whether it was only mine to keep, either.

I didn’t like that thought. I put it somewhere I could find it later, which with me usually means three in the morning.

***

The Hermit sat back in the good chair. For a little while he didn’t ask anybody anything.

When he spoke again, his voice had changed. It wasn’t softer. It was narrower, as though he had stopped looking at the whole room and started looking at one corner of it.

"Your cores went up together," he said. "At the same moment?"

"Yes," said Sophie.

"All five?"

"All five," said Elizabeth.

"Did anything else happen at that moment? To all of you. At once."

Nobody answered.

I felt the silence go round the table. Sophie looked at her hands. James looked at Elizabeth. Elizabeth looked at nobody. Daphne, at the end of the table, didn’t move at all.

All five of us had been on that platform when the gold came up. All five of us had been inside each other’s worst memories on that platform, whether we wanted to be or not. None of us had said much about it to anyone outside the five, and we had barely managed to say it to each other.

"Yes," said Elizabeth at last. "To all of us, at the same moment. I won’t pretend otherwise."

"What?"

"That," said Daphne, "is ours."

The Hermit’s eyebrows rose. He looked at Elizabeth for confirmation.

"If we tell you more than that," said Elizabeth, "it’ll be because the five of us have decided to. We haven’t. We haven’t even talked about whether to." She held his eyes. "You’ll forgive us. We’ve been busy bleeding."

"Hm," said the Hermit.

He didn’t press. I had expected him to. I had expected him to keep asking, more sharply each time, until one of us gave him something to stop the asking. That was what Renn had done, in his way, and Theoran would have.

He did something worse. He turned his head and looked at me.

"Vortex."

"Yes."

"You remember my seals."

I did. Five Guardian Seals, gold, floating above the gate of a Citadel that didn’t exist, one above each of the places where the five class leaders stood. The whole first year had seen them light. The whole first year had poured its mana through them.

He had made them. He had made them five because there were five classes, and gold because he had decided they should be gold. Nothing about their number or their colour meant anything by itself. I knew that.

I also knew what I had seen under them, before the mana went in. Gold lines, where there shouldn’t have been any. Five points. And for a single instant, the whole of his illusion had trembled around me, and something far beneath it had seemed to shift.

I hadn’t told anyone that, either, except Elizabeth, and only part of it, and only three days ago.

"I remember them," I said.

"When the five of you reached them," said the Hermit, "you all put your hands on them. Lady Spinster had to shout at you before you fed yours."

I said nothing.

"Why?"

He wasn’t looking at the others. He didn’t need to. Across the table, I saw Elizabeth’s attention land on me, sharp and still.

I could have said I was tired. It would have been true. I was always tired. He would have known exactly what it was worth.

"It felt strange," I said. "Just for a moment. I don’t know what it was."

"Strange how?"

"I don’t know how to describe it."

It was true, as far as it went. It didn’t go very far either. I could have described what I had seen. I couldn’t have explained it. The only words I had for it were the System’s, from just before it went silent, and they had explained nothing to me either. Describing any of it would only have led to the questions I wasn’t ready to answer.

The Hermit didn’t ask a third time.

He went quiet instead. Not the quiet of a man waiting for an answer, or deciding whether he had been lied to. It was a different kind, and it went on for long enough that Renn shifted his weight by the door, and Sorel looked at Valerian, and Sophie finally, carefully, picked her roll back up off the table and held it in both hands.

For the first time since Renn walked in, the Hermit didn’t look annoyed with any of us.

He looked interested.

I liked that much less.

***

Renn was the one who broke it. I don’t think anyone else would have dared.

"These questions," he said. "They aren’t about Halden any more."

The Hermit looked up. I think he had forgotten Renn was there. "Aren’t they?"

"You came here about something that attacked the First Princess on a Crown ridge. Have you learned anything about it?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"That your report is incomplete."

Renn’s face went very still.

"Not wrong," said the Hermit. "I haven’t read it, and I expect it’s accurate. Incomplete. Whatever happened on that ridge, the account you’ll have given the Crown is missing something." He tilted his head. "I don’t know what. I don’t know what attacked them, or where it went, or who sent it. I won’t pretend to, from four people’s testimony and a fifth who doesn’t know how to describe things."

"That’s not much use to me."

"No. It isn’t much use to me, either."

"Then we’re done," said Valerian.

He came round from behind my chair and stood where the Hermit could see him without turning his head.

"That was a quarter of an hour some time ago," he said. "This stop was for their bodies, not your questions. Her Highness has been sitting up for longer than she should. Lord Vortex has a chest he still pretends about, and the other three have channels I won’t have strained for anybody’s curiosity. You’ve had your conversation."

"I haven’t finished it."

"You’ve finished it for today."

The Hermit looked at him. I had seen people take that look and decide, all at once, that they had somewhere else to be. Valerian didn’t. He had stood in tents full of dying soldiers with officers looking at him like that, and he hadn’t moved for them either.

"Two more questions," said the Hermit.

"Later," said Sorel, from the doorway.

"Then one more conversation," said the Hermit, "before I go."

He said it to Elizabeth. I don’t think that was an accident. He had watched her measure him, and he had decided she was the one who would answer.

Elizabeth took her time.

"If there’s another conversation," she said, "it’ll be after the five of us have talked. Among ourselves, first. About what we’re willing to tell you, and what we aren’t." She glanced along the table, at James, and Sophie, and me. Last of all at Daphne. "Some of it isn’t mine to give. Some of it isn’t any one person’s."

"And whatever you want to look at," said Daphne, "you ask first. Me. Not them."

"I wasn’t going to look at anything."

"You were going to," said Daphne.

The Hermit regarded her. For a moment I thought he might actually smile.

"Yes," he said.

"Tonight," said Elizabeth. "After we stop. If we’re ready by then. If we aren’t, you’ll wait."

"I’m very bad at waiting."

"So am I," said Elizabeth. "I’ve been practising all week."

Renn let out a breath through his nose. "You’ll come to the gate," he said. "Like anyone else. You’ll give your name to the man there, and he’ll write it down."

"If you like."

"I would."

"Then I will," said the Hermit. "He’ll have a terrible time spelling it."

***

I should have been relieved. I was, a little.

I had spent the whole of the conversation braced for him to ask me something I couldn’t answer: how I had known it was Elizabeth before anyone told me, why my hand had gone through that wall first, why the creature had looked at the centre of five people’s chests. I had my refusals ready. I had been ready since the ridge.

He hadn’t asked any of it. He hadn’t needed to.

He had found a question I didn’t know the answer to myself. Since the ridge, I had been telling myself that what happened there and what happened under his seals were two different strange things, which had happened to happen to the same five people. I had believed it, mostly, because it was easier.

The Hermit didn’t believe it. I could see that in the way he sat.

He was looking at us now, at all five of us, one after another and back again: Elizabeth very straight in her chair with her sling, and James with his hand closed, and Sophie holding her roll, and Daphne against the wall, and me with my feet up and my pillow behind my head and my face, I hoped, doing nothing interesting.

I had seen that look on him once before.

It was after the Crucible, on the stage at Zenith, when he stood under his own screens and told a hall full of first-years that his test had never had one right answer. He had been studying his illusion then, and what we had done inside it.

He wasn’t studying an illusion now.

He was looking at us.