Chapter 132 — "The Old Lady"

Then stood there, on a stair, in the last of the light, entirely aware that she had just moved backwards away from a person she had spent two years walking toward.

Eren watched her do it.

Something closed in his face. Not dramatically. Like a hand unclenching, going back to rest.

"There it is," he said, and turned back to the window.

"That’s not—"

"It’s fine."

"Don’t say it’s fine, that’s my word—"

"It’s a very good word. That’s why I took it." He was watching the yard again. Ordinary voice. Ordinary everything. "You’ve had six days of the worst and one hour of an interrogation. You’re allowed to step backwards on a stair."

"I didn’t step backwards because of you."

"Mm."

"I stepped backwards because—"

She stopped.

Because she didn’t have the end of that sentence.

Because the true end of it was because for four seconds on a rise you knew something before an officer with twenty years did, and I have been carrying it around ever since, and I hate it, and I want it to not be a thing.

"Because I’m tired," she said.

"Sure," said Eren.

And that was worse than if he’d argued.

She let it sit for two days.

Two days of being perfectly normal at each other, which was the most abnormal thing that had happened all week.

Then, on the third evening, she went and found him.

Not the stair. The wall at the eastern edge — the one that had become theirs at some point without anyone deciding.

He was already there.

Of course he was.

She sat down. Didn’t say anything for a while.

"You’re breathing loudly," he said.

"I’m deciding."

"I know. It’s my favourite thing about you. Please don’t fix it."

She looked out at the flat grey country.

"Where are you from."

He didn’t move.

"That’s the shape of a question."

"That’s a whole question. It’s got a question mark. It’s got everything."

"You’ve never asked before."

"I’m asking now."

A pause.

"North," he said.

"North of what—"

"I know what the man on the road asked."

"Then answer it better."

And he sighed. A real one. From the chest. She’d known him two years and had never heard it.

"Fine," he said. "But you’re not going to enjoy this."

"I’ll decide that."

"You won’t. You’ll enjoy it enormously, and I will never recover, and this friendship will be permanently altered."

"There’s a family," he said. "North. It isn’t interesting. It has land, it has money, and it has a long-standing problem with the fact that I exist."

"Why."

"Fourth son."

"So?"

"So nothing." He turned the cup in his hands. "That’s what happens to fourth sons. Nothing. It’s the defining feature of the role."

She waited.

"There’s an arrangement," said Eren. "There’s a woman. There is a considerable amount of land attached to the woman. And there is — I want to be clear about this — a substantial age difference."

Seraphina put her cup down.

"How substantial."

"I don’t want to discuss the number."

"How substantial, Eren—"

"She was at my grandfather’s wedding."

She made a sound.

"As a guest," he added, wounded. "As an adult guest. With opinions about the catering."

"Eren—"

"She has opinions about catering that predate my father."

"EREN—"

"So that," he said, over the noise she was making, "is why I’m at Kestral. There’s a clause. There’s an actual written clause, in an actual document, which I have read, and which states that if I complete a border-track qualification with distinction, the arrangement is void and I’m free to be useless anywhere I like."

She was holding her ribs.

"That’s why you applied."

"That’s why I applied."

"For the rotation—"

"Applications had closed and I wrote four pages," said Eren, "because the alternative is a woman who once described my mother as the new one, and I would genuinely rather freeze to death on a border."

"THE NEW ONE—"

"THE NEW ONE."

Mira arrived in the middle of it, holding three cups, and stood assessing the scene for approximately four seconds.

"She’s crying," said Mira.

"She’s laughing."

"She’s doing both. What did you do."

"I explained my domestic situation."

Mira handed the cups round and sat.

"The old woman," she said.

Seraphina stopped mid-breath.

"You knew?"

"He mentioned it in the first year."

"He mentioned it in the—"

"Once. In passing. It came up because of a form." Mira drank. "I didn’t think it was a secret."

"IT WASN’T," said Eren, with feeling. "It has never been a secret. It’s humiliating, which is different."

And Seraphina laughed until her eyes ran, and then wiped them with the back of her wrist, and felt — for the first time in two days — the specific relief of a thing coming loose in her chest that she hadn’t fully admitted was stuck.

He’s here for the same reason everyone’s here. To pass. To get out from under something.

He’s Eren.

He’s just Eren.

And she was so relieved that she didn’t notice Mira watching her be relieved, and writing nothing down at all.

The talking started after that.

It always did, once she got going — Mira had a name for it and refused to say what it was.

She talked about the assessment postponement and the eleven theories. She talked about Torin, at length, and about how Torin’s entire personality was a man who watched a gate. She talked about a design problem she’d had for three weeks involving a sleeve that wouldn’t sit right, and then about why the sleeve mattered, and then about the fashion district in a city very far from here where a woman named Marianne Voss had once told her to think bigger and she still didn’t know if she’d done it.

She talked about the porridge. At length. She had strong views on the porridge.

She talked about the fourth day on rotation, and how nothing happening had been worse than something happening, and how that felt like it should mean something and she didn’t know what.

She talked for nearly an hour.

Somewhere in the middle Mira left, quietly, with the unhurried competence of a woman who had decided where to be.

Seraphina didn’t notice.

Eren didn’t say anything the entire time.

He sat with his back to the stone and his cup going cold in his hands and he watched her talk, and every time she paused to check whether she’d gone on too long, he said "keep going" — not as a joke, not as a bit, just the two words, until eventually she stopped checking.

When she finally ran out, the light was gone.

"Sorry," she said. "That was a lot."

"It was fifty-one minutes."

"You timed it—"

"I noted it," said Eren. "There’s a difference. Timing implies I wanted it to end."

She looked at him.

He was smiling.

Not the deadpan one. Not the one he used when he’d landed a joke and was waiting for her to catch up.

Something quieter, and completely unhidden, and directed entirely at her.

"What," she said.

"Nothing."

"You’re doing a face."

"I’m allowed a face."

"You never do a face."

"I do this one," said Eren. "You’ve just never been looking."

She thought about that for most of the walk back and all of the following morning, which was inconvenient, because the following morning had other plans.

The notice came down at breakfast.

Not a new one. The old one — the postponement — taken off the board by an instructor nobody recognised, folded twice, and carried away.

Nothing replaced it.

The mess hall watched this happen in near silence and then detonated the moment the door shut.

"That’s worse," said Torin, appearing at her elbow with the instant unerring accuracy of a man who could smell an event. "That’s so much worse. A postponement is information. No postponement is—"

"Also information."

"It’s bad information."

"It’s the same information, Torin."

"It’s the same information wearing a different coat," said Torin, "and I don’t trust the coat."

Halvard, across the table, eating with total focus: "Assessments are back on."

"You don’t know that."

"I do."

"How."

"Renna’s at drill this morning." Halvard didn’t look up. "She wasn’t for nine days. She is now."

The table went quiet.

"That’s it?" said Ost. "That’s the whole read?"

"You asked how I know."

"I asked how you—" Ost stopped. Rubbed his face with both hands. "I hate that that’s how it works. I hate that a man can just watch a yard and be right."

"He watched a gate," said Torin, wounded.

"You watch the gate. He watches everything."

"That’s not a distinction—"

"It’s the entire distinction," said Halvard, and went back to his food, and that was the end of the conversation.

Renna was, in fact, at drill.

She said nothing about nine days. She said nothing about Kell. She ran the session exactly as she had run every session since month one, corrected two people, and at the end of it said, "Assessments in four days. Same criteria. Nothing has changed," in the voice of someone stating a fact that was true in every respect except one.

Seraphina caught her at the yard’s edge.

"Sir."

"No."

"I haven’t—"

"You’re going to ask about Kell." Renna kept walking. "The answer is that he’s an officer, he was reassigned, that happens, and if you make it a bigger sentence than that you’ll be constructing something out of nothing."

"Is he all right."

Renna stopped.

It was a very short stop. Half a second, maybe less.

"He’s an officer," she said again, "and he was reassigned."

And she went inside.

Seraphina stood in the yard for a while with that.

He’s alive, she decided. She’d have said it differently.

Then, because she was learning things she didn’t want to learn: or she’d have said it exactly like that, on purpose, because I’m a student and she’s not going to hand me anything.

She hated the second thought.

She kept it anyway.

Assessments swallowed the next four days whole.

She did well. She knew she’d done well before anyone told her, which was a new sensation and one she wasn’t sure she liked — the certainty made the waiting worse, not better.

Eren did adequately.

He did adequately in every single component, at almost exactly the median of the year, the way he had done adequately at every assessment since the first week of the first year, and Seraphina — standing in the yard reading the posted results with her breath going in front of her — looked at the flat, unremarkable, perfectly average line of his numbers and thought, with genuine warmth:

Of course. He doesn’t need distinction. He needs border-track distinction. That’s the clause.

He’s not even trying at the rest of it.

He’s been not trying for two years.

And she laughed out loud, alone, in a cold yard, at a results board — because it was so obvious, and because she’d spent two days being weird about a man whose entire life problem was an elderly landowner with opinions about catering.

Torin, three feet away: "What’s funny."

"Nothing."

"What’s funny—"

"Fourth sons," said Seraphina, and left him there.

She wrote that night.

Not the trunk letter. That came later, the way it always did.

This one first.

Daren.

I went to a border for six days and came back and everything at this academy is exactly where I left it, which I am taking personally.

Things I have learned:

One. Cold is not a temperature, it is an ongoing legal dispute.

Two. There is a man here called Ost who has been improving one anecdote for two years and finally told the true version on a road, and the true version was terrible, and I’ve never respected him more.

Three. There is a man called Halvard who says under twelve words a day and every single one of them is load-bearing. You’d like him. He’d say four words to you and you’d talk for an hour and both of you would consider it a success.

Four. Eren’s family is trying to marry him to a woman who attended his grandfather’s wedding as an adult with opinions about the catering. He is at Kestral to void the contract. I have never in my life been so entertained by a legal document.

Tell me about the bench. Rowan says you’ll explain it at length and I want the length. I want all of it. I want the specific reasons it’s that bench and not the one four feet along.

— S

She read it back.

Added one more line at the bottom.

Is he well.

Looked at it.

Did not specify who.

Sent it anyway — by the fast courier, the way she sent everything, the way she had sent everything for two years, because Daren answered in three days and three days was survivable.

Then she opened the trunk, and took out paper, and started the other one.

Kael.

There is a woman up north who once described someone’s mother as the new one and I have thought about it for four days and I still cannot—

She stopped.

Looked at the sentence.

You’d have found this funny.

You’d have found this funny in the way you find things funny, which is that you don’t move at all and then say one word four seconds later and ruin me.

She finished the letter.

Put it on the stack.

Closed the lid, which didn’t close.