Chapter 202: The Question He Didn’t Ask

(Alash Vortex POV)

I should have slept.

The carriage was moving, my feet were up, Dream Haven was under my head, and nobody had asked me to be responsible for anything since the waystation. Every condition I have ever needed for sleep was in place. I lay there with my eyes shut and stayed awake anyway.

The Hermit had looked at the five of us as if we were a lock he had already started to pick.

He had known our answers had holes in them. He had said so, more or less, to Renn’s face. And then he had asked me about his seals.

I knew why the five of us were unusual, or the shape of it. I knew it the way you know where a bruise is: without looking, and without wanting to press it. I knew why the creature had looked at our chests, or I was as sure as I could be. I knew what the gold was made of, roughly, and what it had been connecting.

What I didn’t know was what the Hermit had felt inside his own illusion, or what Halden had to do with it. I didn’t know why a thing I carried should make a world he had built tremble. I didn’t know whether the gold on the ridge and the gold under his seals were the same thing, or two different things that only looked alike to me because I wanted them to.

I didn’t ask the System. I had asked it about the gold at the Citadel once already, and it had gone quiet on me. I didn’t think it had found anything to say since.

Across from me, Sophie wasn’t eating. That worried me more than anything the Hermit had said. She had the roll he had criticised in her lap, still wrapped, and she was turning it over in her hands without looking at it.

Daphne sat by the window with her wrists in her lap and watched the ditches go by. She hadn’t said a word since we left the waystation. With Daphne that can mean anything. Today I thought it meant she was thinking about the same thing I was, and liked it even less.

Outside, James rode beside Elizabeth with his left hand closed on the reins. He hadn’t touched his Space since the ridge, and he wasn’t going to. Elizabeth sat her led horse very straight and argued with nobody, which was its own kind of warning.

At the third stop of the afternoon, while Sorel had her fingers on Elizabeth’s wrist, Elizabeth said something to Renn that I couldn’t hear. Renn listened. He looked at the carriage, and at James, and nodded once.

When the carriage moved off again, Sophie stopped turning the roll over.

"She’s asked for a room," she said. "For us. Before he comes back."

I hadn’t heard it. Sophie had. She hears everything.

"Good," said Daphne, to the window.

***

The night’s stop was a walled Crown post where the road came down to a ford: a yard, a stable, a long low building with a kitchen at one end and four small rooms at the other.

Renn’s advance riders had walked every one of them before we arrived. I watched one of his men open a cupboard in the yard, look inside it, and close it again, and I didn’t think it was a joke.

Renn gave us the smallest of the four rooms, the one with a fire already lit and no second door.

"An hour," he said. "Healer Sorel examines Her Highness before supper, and I don’t move that. My men are outside. The healers are across the passage. If you need either, you call." He looked at each of us in turn. "Nobody uses anything in there. That isn’t my rule. It’s theirs, and it stands."

"We’re going to talk," said Elizabeth. "That’s all."

"I know." He paused at the door. "That’s why you’ve got the room."

He closed it behind him.

There were enough chairs, if James took the stool. Elizabeth had the one with arms, because Sorel had told us all that she would. Sophie folded herself into the corner of a settle with a blanket over her knees. Daphne didn’t sit. She leaned against the wall beside the door, where she could see all of us and the latch.

I took the end of the settle, put Dream Haven behind my back, and waited.

Nobody said anything.

It occurred to me, sitting there, that we had never done this. We had been questioned together. We had been put to bed together, examined together, and told off together.

On the ridge we had been inside each other’s heads together, which is more together than most people are ever obliged to be.

The evening after, in the little sitting room at Halden, we had worked out between us that the knowing-where only held while we were close. Sophie had said sorry to James, and he had let her. That was as near as we had come to talking about any of it. We had never once sat down to decide what any of it was worth to somebody else, or how much of it we were prepared to hand over.

It turned out none of us knew how to start.

***

Elizabeth did, in the end. I think she had decided to before she asked Renn for the room.

"He’s coming back tonight," she said. "And he isn’t going to stop asking because we don’t answer. You saw him. If we give him nothing, he’ll go on looking until he finds something, and he’ll find it without us, and he’ll find it wrong."

"He’d find it wrong anyway," said James.

"Probably. But he’d find it wrong with more confidence." She shifted her sling. "I don’t think we owe him anything. Curiosity isn’t a right. He doesn’t get what happened to us because he’s strong and he wants it. But I’d rather decide what he gets than have him decide it for us."

Nobody argued with that.

"So I’d like to separate two things," said Elizabeth. "What happened to us, and what we saw."

She held up one finger.

"What happened: our cores moved. All five, at once, while Alash was treating me. All of us felt it at the same moment, and it didn’t entirely stop afterwards. He knows most of that already. Sorel knows it. It’s in the Headmaster’s letters."

She held up a second.

"What we saw." Her voice didn’t change, but I saw her hand close a little in the sling. "Whose it was. What was in it. How much any of us saw of anyone else’s. That isn’t something that happened to us. That’s us."

"So we don’t tell him," said James.

"I’m not going to tell him. I’m asking whether anyone else wants to."

James looked at the fire.

"Not mine," he said. "And nobody else’s either. That one’s easy." He was quiet for a moment. "You don’t tell someone else’s. They didn’t choose to show it to you. They didn’t even know they were showing it. You can’t pass that on to somebody like a report."

He didn’t look at Sophie. In that sitting room at Halden she had told him she was sorry for being there when his father said better, and he had told her he’d been there for her mother’s hand, so they were even. I think he was remembering that.

Sophie hadn’t said anything. She was looking at her hands on the blanket.

"Sophie," said Elizabeth.

"I don’t want to tell it." It came out quickly. "I don’t want to tell it to him, and I don’t want to watch him listen to it." She swallowed. "Mine had my mum in it."

That was all she said about it. She didn’t need to say any more. I had stood in that small room with her, with the cracked plaster and the smell of bread and her mother’s hand gripping hers. All four of us had.

"Then you won’t," said James.

"I know. I just wanted to say it out loud, so that it was said."

Elizabeth nodded slowly.

Then everyone looked at Daphne, because she hadn’t moved, and with Daphne that’s when you look.

"Nobody asked me," said Daphne.

She didn’t raise her voice. She never does.

"Before it went into you. Any of you. Nobody asked me if I wanted a room full of people in that long room with me." She looked at the fire, and then at each of us, and then at me, and stayed on me. "I’m not having someone decide what happens to it now, either. Not him, and not anyone else."

She didn’t say my name. She didn’t have to.

I knew what she meant by someone. I had asked Elizabeth on the ridge. I had told her everything I knew the skill could do, and she had said yes. Then the gold had come up under all five of us, and nobody had asked Daphne anything.

Before that, in Merrow’s courtyard, something had formed between her and me that she hadn’t asked for either, and I still hadn’t told her what it was.

I had promised her, on the inner wall at Halden, that anything I saw in her body she would hear from me. I hadn’t promised her everything I knew. She had noticed the difference then. She was noticing it now.

There were things I could have said. I could have said I hadn’t known the gold would spread. That was true. I could have said I’d have asked if there had been time. That was also true, and it would have sounded like exactly what it was.

I didn’t say either.

"Nobody tells anybody’s but their own," I said. "I’ll keep to that. Whatever he asks."

Daphne looked at me for a long moment.

"That’s one thing," she said.

"I know."

"It isn’t the other things."

"I know that too."

She seemed to accept that, not as an answer, but as somewhere to stand for now.

***

"So we tell him what happened," said James, "and nothing about what we saw."

"There’s the light," said Sophie.

Everyone looked at her.

"The gold," she said. "We all saw that. It wasn’t anyone’s. It was just there, under us. One under each of us." She looked round at us, uncertain. "That isn’t a memory. Is it?"

I felt my whole body want to say yes.

The gold was mine, or as close to mine as anything on that platform. It had come up because of what I’d done. It had come up once before, under James, and once before that, under five Guardian Seals. If anything we had would lead the Hermit back to me, it was the gold.

But Sophie was right. It wasn’t a memory, and it wasn’t only mine. It had been under her feet as much as mine. It had been under Daphne’s, and nobody had asked her about that either.

I had spent most of my life deciding by myself what other people were allowed to know about things that had happened to them. I didn’t think I could do it in this room, tonight, with Daphne by the door.

"It was under my feet," said Daphne. "I’ll say that much."

"Then we say there was light," said Elizabeth. "Gold. Under each of us. We don’t say what it did."

She glanced at me. It was a short look, and it asked me a question. I didn’t answer it. She took that as an answer, which I suspect was fair.

"And this," said James. He tipped his head, not at any of us in particular. "The where-everyone-is thing."

"We tell him what it does," said Elizabeth. "Exactly. If we don’t, he’ll imagine it’s more than it is."

"It’s less than it sounds," said Sophie. "I can tell James is in the next room. I can’t tell he’s sulking."

"I don’t sulk."

"You were sulking at the second stop."

"I was thinking."

"You think very loudly," said Sophie, and James nearly smiled, and for a moment the room felt like a room again.

"And he doesn’t look at anything," said Daphne. "Not without Sorel and Master Alzette there, and not without asking whoever he’s looking at first. And nobody makes it happen again."

"Agreed," said Elizabeth.

"Agreed," said James.

Sophie nodded.

They looked at me.

"Agreed," I said.

That was all it was, in the end. We would tell him something had happened, and when, and that it had happened to all five of us. We would tell him there had been light, and that afterwards each of us knew roughly where the others were, and nothing more than that.

We would not tell him anything that any one of us had seen of another, and we would not let anyone try to make it happen again.

It wasn’t much. It was more than we had ever decided together about anything.

It also didn’t settle the rest, and I knew it. Agreeing that nobody would hand round anybody else’s memories didn’t give me the right to keep the rest of it forever. It didn’t tell me how long I could hold the thing that had brought the gold up in the first place, or what I owed the four people it had come up under.

I wasn’t ready to explain any of that. Sitting in a small room with my pillow behind my back, I wasn’t sure I ever would be. But I noticed, for the first time, that whether I was ready had stopped being the only question.