Chapter 323

Zaeryn woke a little after two in the morning and reached for his slate. The only message waiting was from Ysmeine.

I’m glad the hearing is over and you’re safe, darling. When you come home, we’ll have tea and you can tell me about it properly, including whatever you’ve decided I don’t need to hear.

He smiled as he wrote back. There’s quite a bit to tell you. Can I call you later today?

He had half expected to hear from Athea as well, although she’d never said she would contact him that evening. He set the slate aside and tried to get comfortable again. After nearly ten hours of sleep, he was wide awake, and there were still several hours to go before he could reasonably call anyone.

Zaeryn gave up on sleep and took his slate into the sitting room. The sofa where Sage had spent the afternoon was empty, and he wondered what time she’d gone back to work. There was a good chance she was still awake.

Are you still up? he wrote. I slept through the whole evening, and I could use some company if you’re free.

He settled on the sofa and opened a game on his slate. By the time he finished the first round, she still hadn’t replied. She was probably busy. Sage had taken a few hours away from the Aegis Division yesterday to be with him, and he could easily imagine her still at work catching up on what she’d missed.

Halfway through the second round, Zaeryn got bored and closed the game.

For a while he sat with the dark slate resting on his knee and listened to the faint hum of the suite, trying to decide whether what he felt was boredom or something that had been waiting for a quiet moment to catch up with him. The past two days had been divided into the hearing, the waiting before the hearing, and the waiting after it, and now that nobody was asking him for anything, the stillness had become harder to sit in than the questions had been. He had spent so long preparing for the Council that he had never planned what he would do once there was nothing left to prepare for.

He thought about the walk Valerie had taken him on, and about what she had told him at the stone railing, that next time he only needed to ask the warladies outside his room and they would accompany him. At the time it had sounded like a courtesy he would never use. He had spent most of his life being careful about asking people for things, and asking two women who were working through the night to follow him up and down a hallway because he could not sleep was exactly the kind of request he would normally talk himself out of. Then he remembered that Viora had only said leaving the residence required permission, and he had no intention of leaving it. He only wanted to move, and a hallway on the same level would do.

He stood up, set the slate on the sofa cushion with the screen facing up in case Sage answered while he was gone, pulled on his shoes, and took his dark coat from the back of the chair, because the corridors of the palace had been cooler than the suite every time he had passed through them.

Both Royal Warladies at the night post straightened when the door opened. One was tall, with a long braid over her shoulder, and the other was shorter, with dark hair cropped close to her head, and they had clearly been standing there long enough that the stillness had become part of them.

"Is something wrong?" the taller one asked.

"No, I just can’t sleep." He stayed in the doorway, feeling more awkward than he had expected to. "Princess Valerie told me I could ask you to come with me if I wanted to walk somewhere. Would one of you mind? I only want to walk along this floor for a while. I’ve been in bed since yesterday afternoon."

The taller Warlady considered the request for a moment and then nodded. "This floor is fine. Tell us if you want to turn back."

The shorter one stepped aside to let him pass and then fell in a few paces behind him with her partner, close enough to reach him quickly and far enough away that he could almost forget they were there.

They followed the short entry corridor to a wide archway that opened onto the main hallway of the upper level. He had only crossed it once before, on his way in with the escort, and he had been too tired and too anxious then to notice anything about it. At night the palace had lowered its lights to a warm amber that left the far end of the hallway in shadow, and the long windows along one wall showed the Capital far below, its towers rising in tiers of small lit windows with transit lines crossing between them in thin, slowly moving threads. The floor was polished stone that returned a faint reflection of the ceiling lights. His shoes made a sound on it with every step, while the guards behind him made almost none, and it took him a while to understand that this was their training and not an accident of the floor.

He walked slowly with his hands in his coat pockets and let himself look at things he had not had the time to look at before: a row of low alcoves, each holding a single pale plant under its own small light, and a long woven hanging whose silver threads looked different in the amber light than they probably did by day. For the first several minutes it worked. The restlessness that had kept him on the sofa thinned out with each length of hallway, and he found himself thinking about what he would tell Ysmeine over tea, and about which parts of the hearing he had already decided she did not need to hear, and about how long it had been since he had walked anywhere without a reason.

He was about halfway down the hallway when he felt a dull ache behind his right eye. It was faint enough at first that he put it down to having slept for so long, which had left him with a heavy, overfilled feeling, and he rubbed his brow with two fingers and kept walking.

A dozen steps later he noticed the sound. It was a thin, high tone at the very edge of hearing, so faint that he took it for a light fixture, since the palace lamps hummed whenever the rest of the building was quiet enough for them to be heard. He tilted his head toward the ceiling, thinking he must be passing under a faulty one, and then glanced back at the guards. Neither of them had looked up. They were walking at the same even pace as before, with the same attentive expressions, and nothing about them suggested that they heard anything unusual. That told him more than the ceiling had, because it meant the sound was not in the hallway.

He turned forward again and kept walking, because there was nothing else to do with a sound like that except wait for it to stop. It did not stop. It began to rise instead, in slow swells that peaked and drew back and came again a little higher each time, and the ache behind his eye rose and fell with them until the two were hard to tell apart. His steps shortened without his deciding that they should. Behind him the guards’ footsteps changed too, so quietly that he only noticed because they were no longer a few paces away but closer.

The next swell brought pain with it. It arrived with his next footstep as a deep throb through the side of his head, and by the following step it had spread behind both eyes and across his skull as though something were pressing outward from the inside, and the amber lights that had looked soft a minute earlier turned sharp enough to make him squint. He stopped walking and put one hand flat against the wall for balance. The stone was cool under his palm, and he held on to that coolness because it was the only part of the hallway that still felt like it was where it belonged.

Behind him the footsteps stopped. When he turned his head he saw the two Warladies looking at each other in a silent exchange, one of them asking a question with her eyebrows and the other answering it with a small shake of her head that told her to wait. Then the taller one crossed the distance between them in two strides and stopped at his shoulder, close enough to catch him if he fell and far enough that she did not crowd him, while the shorter one stayed where she was with her weight settled evenly on both feet and her eyes fixed on his face.

"Are you all right?" the taller one asked.

He opened his mouth to answer, and the pain spread across his forehead before he could. He bent over and stayed that way for a few seconds, hoping it would ease enough for him to straighten up, but the tone swelled again, so loud now that it seemed to come from the center of his head, and his knee gave out and lowered him to the floor. The taller Warlady’s hand settled on his shoulder, and he could tell from the small movements of her fingers that she was speaking to him, but the ringing had grown so loud that he missed nearly all of it.

"Give me a second," he managed. Even his own voice sounded distant.

Text appeared at the edge of his vision, pale against the glare.

? [Warning: Abnormal neural activity detected.]