Chapter 373: Little Sands

"Arthur..."

The name comes out almost without voice.

I expect Rhayne to lower the letter, but she keeps reading. Her eyes go back to the top of the page and move through the same lines again, more slowly, as if the first reading wasn’t enough to accept what was written there.

I know the space Arthur occupies in her.

Rhayne talked about that man the way someone talks about a part of their own making, not just a teacher. He was the one who found her alone in Thirstfall, the one who taught her everything that turned a frightened girl into a spy capable of crossing a room without being noticed.

When she told me about him for the first time, she cried before she even knew whether he was dead.

So I expect tears now.

Strangely, they don’t come.

What happens instead is the color draining out of her face.

The paper starts moving between her fingers, a little at first, then enough to make a low sound with every tremor of her hands. Rhayne reaches the end, goes back a few lines, reads again, and stays locked on one specific part of the text.

"Rhayne?"

She doesn’t answer.

I take a step toward her.

"What does it say?"

When she finally lifts her eyes, her reaction worries me more than any amount of crying would have.

She’s white. Her mouth trembles slightly, and her expression doesn’t carry the weight of someone who just got confirmation of a death. It’s the expression of someone who found something impossible and is still deciding whether to trust her own eyes.

I hold out my hand.

"Can I see?"

Rhayne backs away immediately.

The back of her leg hits the nightstand, scraping the furniture against the wall. She catches her balance and pulls the letter against her chest, shielding the paper with both arms.

"No..."

The hand I held out stays where it is, halfway there.

Rhayne has trusted me with her life.

She’s linked herself to me knowing one mistake could destroy them both. She told me about Arthur, about the work as a spy, about the things she did to survive when nobody was around. She put Void Monarch in front of me when hiding it would have been far safer for her.

I’ve never had to ask her twice for anything because she was afraid of me. She has always trusted me.

Now she’s protecting a sheet of paper over that trust.

I lower my hand.

"All right. I won’t take it."

She keeps holding the letter against her body.

"But look at yourself."

Rhayne follows my eyes to her own hands. The tremor doesn’t ease when she notices it.

"I... can’t."

"You can’t show me?"

She shakes her head.

"Why?"

The question seems to make something worse.

Rhayne looks at the page and takes a while to answer.

"He asked me not to..."

The sentence dies before the end.

I pay closer attention.

"Arthur asked you not to do what?"

She closes her eyes.

For a few seconds all I hear is the faint movement of paper between her fingers and some distant noise from the street, muffled by the panels covering the window.

"Rhayne, I’m not trying to pull a secret out of you."

She opens her eyes again.

"I know."

"Then explain why you’re like this."

"I don’t know how."

"Try."

She takes a deep breath, but the air doesn’t seem to solve anything.

"Den... it was the last thing he asked me."

Now I understand at least part of the reaction.

I’m not asking Rhayne to choose between hiding a letter and trusting me. I’m asking her to disobey an order left by the man who raised her inside Thirstfall.

I keep my distance.

"Then don’t hand it over just because I asked."

She stares at me, not following.

"But if what’s in that letter put you in this state, I need to know whether there’s something in there that puts you in danger. If it doesn’t, you can keep it. I won’t touch it."

Rhayne looks at the paper again.

"It isn’t about me."

"Then who is it about?"

She presses her lips together.

The answer doesn’t come, but something in the way her eyes return to me makes the question unnecessary.

"Is it about me?"

Rhayne doesn’t move.

’Shit.’

I run a hand through my hair and try to hold down the urgency rising in me.

"Whatever Arthur wrote, you can trust me."

"I do trust you. It’s just—"

"Then why are you backing away from me?"

She closes her eyes again.

"Because he asked me to trust him too."

That shuts me up.

Rhayne opens the letter one more time. Her eyes run over the end, and I can see the fight happening without her having to explain it. Arthur gave her an order. I’m standing here, alive, asking her to break it.

I don’t move closer.

After a few seconds, she says:

"He never asked me for anything like this before."

"So it’s a secret?"

"Yes. From you."

The way she says it makes everything worse.

’This half-telling is driving me insane. Why won’t she just say it?’

"Did he mention my name?"

Rhayne’s eyes come up fast.

That’s answer enough.

"Rhayne."

"Den, I—"

"You don’t have to show me."

She’s surprised.

"What?"

"You heard me."

I point at the letter.

"It’s yours. Arthur wrote it to you. I’m not going to decide what you do with the last thing he left."

She looks at me for a few seconds, apparently waiting for the rest.

"But I’m going to worry," I continue. "Because you just found out he’s dead, and that wasn’t the part that scared you. So if you decide to keep it, at least tell me one thing. For the second time: are you in danger because of what’s written there?"

"I don’t know."

The answer comes honestly, and it’s worse than a yes.

Rhayne looks at the letter and runs her thumb along the edge of the paper. The tremor is still there, though smaller now.

"When he was training me..." she starts, slowly. "Arthur used to say a secret is only worth something while you understand why you’re protecting it. That obeying without understanding was a very poor kind of spycraft."

She lets out a short breath.

"I don’t think I ever understood why he gave me that order."

Rhayne comes closer.

This time I’m the one who doesn’t move.

She holds the page in front of herself for a moment and then holds it out to me.

Before letting go, she keeps her fingers on the paper.

"He asked me not to do this."

"That part seems obvious."

"And I’m doing it anyway."

"It’s all right."

Rhayne finally lets go, and I take the letter.

I look down at the text.

The handwriting is firm, small, and organized. It doesn’t look like it was written in a hurry. There are a few places where the ink lost strength, but the paper was folded carefully and stayed protected inside the envelope.

I start from the top.

Little Rhayne,

If you ever came to see this letter, then I am no longer among you.

I hope you’re well. I also hope you’ve learned to sleep without a knife under your pillow, though I don’t have much hope on that front. You were always a better student when I taught you to disappear than when I tried to teach you to rest.

There’s something I should have said while we still had time. I never thought of you as only a student. You became a pupil of enormous value to me, personally and emotionally. I wanted to turn you into the best spy your abilities would allow, but I also wanted the day to come when you wouldn’t need to be one anymore.

I didn’t have enough time for either. Forgive me.

If this letter reached your hands, it’s likely that some of my plans went wrong. Perhaps many of them. Don’t try to work them all out alone. You have that terrible habit of believing that asking for help lowers the value of what you can do. It never did.

I hope you’ve found Dryden Sands.

I stop reading.

For a few seconds I stare at my own name.

Arthur Lancaster.

A man I never met in this life.

A man who, according to Rhayne, disappeared from Thirstfall before I ever crossed paths with her.

He wrote my name in a letter hidden in a room on Earth.

I look up.

Rhayne is watching me.

"Was it here?"

I point at my name and she nods.

I go back to the letter.

If you haven’t found him yet, look for Alden Sands, his father and my great friend. You need to do this. Don’t put it off. Alden will know what to do better than I could explain in a letter.

If you did find Dryden, stay close to him for as long as that makes sense to you. Not because I’m ordering it, but because I believe the two of you will need each other before you understand why.

Take care of yourself, little Rhayne. You were one of the best things Thirstfall ever put in my path.

With affection,

Arthur Lancaster

My eyes stay locked on my father’s name.

Alden.

My great friend.

I read it again to be sure I didn’t misread.

There’s no room for interpretation.

Arthur Lancaster knew my father.

More than that. He called Alden a great friend.

I think about all the times I’ve tried to reconstruct my father’s life from what he left behind. My mother knew one part. Garen and Boris knew others. The Deepwarden knew a third, probably larger than all the rest combined. Every lead I find opens a door onto a version of Alden I never saw at home.

Now there’s Arthur Lancaster.

Another man important enough to call my father a great friend, and one Alden never mentioned to me. I knew about Boris. I didn’t know about Arthur.

"Did you know about this?" I ask.

Rhayne shakes her head.

"No."

"Arthur never talked about my father?"

"Never."

"Alden. Sands. Nothing?"

"Nothing."

I look at the letter again.

"He knew my last name."

"I didn’t know that either. If anything, you were the one who came to me. Twice."

I lift my face.

Rhayne comes a little closer.

"Arthur never said your name to me, Den. I swear."

It takes a second for the information to settle.

"What do you mean?"

"I already told you. He said I had to learn, get into the Academy within the window he gave me, and that there I’d find someone who would take care of me. That was all."

I remember that conversation.

I remember it very well.

It already struck me as strange at the time.

Arthur had appeared in Rhayne’s life in a timeline where he never existed for her before. He trained the girl for almost two years and disappeared after setting a ridiculously specific condition: get ready, reach the Academy, and wait.

Then I showed up.

Me.

Until today there were still ways to rationalize it. The Lancasters were a family of information brokers. Maybe Arthur had found some future opportunity at the Academy. Maybe he knew a group would form, that someone important would appear, that some event would push Rhayne in the right direction.

My name in the letter kills most of those excuses.

He knew who she would find.

And he decided to hide it from her.

"So he knew it was me," I say.

Rhayne nods slowly.

"And he never told me. I swear on my life."

I go back to reading.

There’s one last part below the signature that almost slips past, given how much is already wrong.

P.S.: Please don’t say anything about this letter to little Sands.

I let out a breath through my nose.

Now I understand completely why Rhayne backed away.

"Little Sands..."

Rhayne looks almost uncomfortable.

"That’s why."

"I figured."

"I wasn’t trying to hide something from you because I don’t trust you."

"I know."

"Arthur asked specifically."

"Rhayne, I know. It’s all right. I believe you."

She lowers her eyes.

I give my attention back to the page.

There’s a date below the postscript.

At first I only register the numbers.

Then my brain does the math.

I frown and check again.

Something tightens in my gut.

"No..."

Rhayne lifts her face.

"What?"

I don’t answer right away.

I take out my phone, check today’s date, and go back to the page. Out of pure stubbornness, because I didn’t need to. The math was already done, but I do it anyway because I want to find a simple error.

A month counted wrong.

A misread number.

Anything.

"Den?"

I look at her.

"This letter was left here two months and one day ago."

Rhayne looks confused.

"Yes."

"No. Think about it, Rhayne."

She still doesn’t follow.

I point at the date on the paper.

"When Arthur wrote this, I hadn’t made my first Dive yet. I wasn’t even infected with the Black Thirst."

Understanding arrives in stages.

Rhayne looks at the letter.

Then at me.

"But... how?"

"Exactly."

She takes the page by the edge, without pulling it out of my hand, and checks the date as if she expects to have misread it too.

We didn’t.

The kitchen calendar suggests the orphanage probably kept running for a while longer and was then abandoned. Someone came in here afterward, crossed this building, and put a message directly in her room, after the whole place was sealed off.

A message written by Arthur Lancaster.

A message about me.

When this page was left here, I hadn’t entered Thirstfall yet in this life. I hadn’t even gone back in time yet.

My existence was only that of a boy on Earth whom Arthur could, in theory, know because he was Alden’s son, and who, without my father, would never have gone to the Academy at all.

And simply knowing my name doesn’t explain this.

"Maybe your father told him about you," Rhayne says.

"Of course he did. If they were best friends, that would explain my name."

I point at one of the lines.

"It doesn’t explain this."

I hope you’ve found Dryden Sands.

I run my finger lower.

Stay close to him.

And I go back, in my head, to the words Arthur said to Rhayne before he disappeared.

Within two years.

Get into the Academy.

You’ll find someone.

He didn’t just know Alden had a son.

He expected that son to be in a specific place, inside a specific window, to find Rhayne, and to become important enough that she would need to stay at his side.

Rhayne seems to reach the same conclusion.

"Den..."

"I know. This is insane."

I keep looking at the paper.

In my first life, Arthur never existed in Rhayne’s story.

At least not in the story I knew.

She wasn’t a spy. She hadn’t had that training. She didn’t come into my life carrying two years of instructions left by a man who knew where I’d appear.

When I came back, I accepted that my actions would produce changes. That’s the obvious consequence of going back in time. I move a piece I didn’t move before, someone reacts differently, something else changes after that.

It’s a chain.

Cause and effect.

Arthur breaks that logic.

The change in Rhayne’s life started before I’d had any contact with her. Now I’m holding a physical letter showing that he knew my role before I took that role.

The possibility that bothered me during that conversation at the Academy comes back whole.

’Someone is moving pieces on a board I can’t see.’

Back then I managed to push the idea to the back of my head because there wasn’t enough proof.

Now I’m holding the proof.

Rhayne takes the letter back carefully. This time she doesn’t hide it from me. She only keeps the page open between her hands while she reads Arthur’s words again, and I notice the discovery changed something for her too.

Until a few minutes ago, Rhayne believed she knew her mentor’s last intentions.

She found out Arthur was hiding my name.

Hiding Alden. Hiding an entire friendship with my father, really.

And apparently knowing something about her own future that he never explained.

"Why didn’t he tell me?" she asks.

I don’t have an answer.

"Maybe he couldn’t."

"Why?"

"That’s one of the questions I’d like to ask him."

Rhayne looks at the signature.

"And he’s... dead."

"According to the letter, yes."

She lifts her eyes.

My choice of words bothers her.

But after everything we just found out, I have no intention of accepting anything written by Arthur Lancaster without verifying it.

Not even his own death.

I look over the room one more time, at the envelope left months after Rhayne was gone, at the dust that covered everything around it without erasing that message.

Halcyon.

Stardeep.

Arthur.

Alden.

Rhayne.

Me.

Pieces that until an hour ago belonged to different problems are starting to sit too close together.

I take the phone out of my pocket on reflex, almost expecting Shaw’s message to have arrived already, but there’s still nothing.

Rhayne folds the letter far more carefully than when she opened it and puts it back in the envelope.

I keep looking at her.

Thinking about the paper.

About the date.

About my father’s name.

And mostly about those two words Arthur chose to hide at the very end.

Little Sands.

He didn’t write it like someone who had heard about me.

He wrote it like someone who knew exactly who I was.

I run a hand over my face.

"What the hell is going on?"