Chapter 149: — "The House"

She walked the last stretch with a cuckoo in a cage and worked out, somewhere around the turning, that she had no idea how to do this.

Six years.

There had been a version of this in her head for the whole of the first year and then she had stopped building it, because building it had started to hurt more than it helped. And now the gate was forty feet away and she had a bird and a hole in her left glove and absolutely no plan.

They don’t know I’m back.

They don’t know I’m back today. They don’t know I’m back at all. The last word they had was a letter from the academy fourteen months ago saying proceeding as expected, which was written by an administrator who had never met me.

She stopped at the gate.

Then, because she could not think of anything better and because six years of doing dangerous things had produced a woman with no talent whatsoever for arriving:

She knocked.

On her own front door.

The maid who opened it did not recognise her.

That was the first thing. Fourteen seconds of a young woman in the doorway saying can I help you to a person she had dressed for eleven years, and Seraphina stood there holding a cage and understood exactly how she looked.

Short hair. A coat two years past its best. A mark on her cheekbone. Hands like a bricklayer’s.

“It’s me,” she said, uselessly.

The maid looked at her.

Then made a sound that brought the entire household.

Her mother came down the stairs too fast and had to catch the rail.

Her father came out of the study and stopped dead in the middle of the hall and did not move at all, and Seraphina found — with something like relief — that she recognised that exact stillness, because she had watched it in the road that morning on somebody else’s face.

Nobody said anything for a second and a half.

Then everybody said everything at once.

It went on for a long time.

She would not be able to reconstruct it afterward. There was crying, most of it not hers. There was a moment where her mother held her face in both hands and said your hair in a voice that had genuinely nothing in it but grief, and Seraphina said “I cut it in a common room with a boot knife” and her mother made a sound like she’d been struck.

There was her father, who did not touch her for nine full minutes and then put one hand flat on the top of her head, briefly, the way he had when she was small — and had to leave the room straight afterward.

There was somebody asking about the bird.

Nobody got an adequate answer about the bird.

Later — much later, when the house had stopped being a noise — her mother sat across from her and looked at her hands.

Not at her face. Her hands.

“May I.”

“They’re fine—”

“May I,” said her mother.

Seraphina put them on the table.

Her mother turned them over, one and then the other, and looked at the palms and the knuckles and the two fingers on the right that had been broken and had knitted slightly wrong, and did not say anything at all for a long time.

Then she said: “Was it worth it.”

“…What?”

“Was it worth it.” Her mother’s voice was completely level. “Six years. You wished for it in front of two hundred people. You made a public thing of it and you went. I’d like to know from you, once, and then I’ll never ask again — was it worth it.”

Seraphina looked at her own hands lying on the table between them.

“Yes,” she said.

Her mother nodded.

“Good,” she said, and let go, and never asked again.

Kael came at seventh bell.

He did not come in. He came to the gate, which she found out about because a maid told her, and she went down and he was standing in the road with his hands at his sides.

“You can come in.”

“I know.”

“Then—”

“Not today,” said Kael. “It’s your first day. They’ve had six years of not having you and they’re not sharing you with anybody, and I’d like to be the only person in the county who understands that.”

Seraphina stood in her own gateway.

“…That’s very annoying,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That’s extremely annoying, Kael, you can’t just—”

“I brought this,” he said, and handed her something wrapped in cloth.

Then he left, before she’d unwrapped it, which she would think about for some time.

It was the note.

Come back.

Two words, in clean minimal handwriting, on a piece of paper that had spent six years somewhere dry and had gone soft at the folds from being handled.

She stood in a gateway holding it.

He took it off the post.

After I left, he went back and took it off the post, and he’s had it for six years.

And he gave it back.

She went inside and did not show it to anybody and did not put it in the trunk.

Eren appeared on the third day, having established himself at the coaching inn under circumstances she declined to investigate, and was invited to dinner by her mother inside four minutes of meeting him.

“How.”

“I’m charming.”

“You’re not charming, you’re—”

“I complimented the house.”

“Everyone compliments the—”

“I complimented the specific house,” said Eren. “I said the east windows were badly placed and that whoever put them in had clearly overruled somebody who was right. Your father hasn’t stopped talking about it.”

Seraphina stared at him.

“That’s — he had a fight about those windows. years ago. With an architect.”

“Yes.”

“How could you possibly—”

“They’re badly placed,” said Eren. “Anyone can see it. Nobody’s ever said so out loud in this house because they’re your father’s windows.”

Kael came to dinner on the fourth day.

Which meant that on the fourth day, at a table in her own house, Seraphina sat between the two of them while her mother conducted what could only be described as an assessment, and did it so smoothly that neither man appeared to notice it happening.

“And you finished at the academy in Varen.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“With Seraphina.”

“Same year. Same unit.”

“Unit,” said her mother.

“Cohort,” said Eren, without a flicker.

Seraphina put her fork down.

“And you,” said her mother to Kael. “You’ve been here.”

“Yes.”

“The whole time.”

“Yes.”

“Doing what.”

There was a pause of about a second.

“Waiting,” said Kael.

Her mother’s expression did not change in any way that could be described.

“Mm,” she said, and passed the bread.

Afterward, in the hall, her father took Kael aside for four minutes.

Seraphina did not hear any of it. She asked twice and got nothing from either of them, and Kael’s ears were doing something for the rest of the evening.

But at the door, going out, Eren said quietly:

“Your father shook his hand.”

“He shakes everyone’s—”

“He shook it for eleven seconds,” said Eren, “and he didn’t shake mine, and I want you to know that I’ve noticed and that I’m not going to make it a thing.”

“Eren—”

“I’m not going to make it a thing,” said Eren. “I’m noting it. There’s a difference. Mira taught me the difference and it’s the single most useful thing I learned in four years.”

On the sixth day, a letter came.

Not by device. By hand, brought up from the crossing by a boy, addressed in a hand she didn’t recognise, sealed with something she did.

Kestral’s seal.

She opened it in the hall with her coat still on.

Six lines.

She read it twice.

Then said, to nobody in particular, in a completely flat voice: “That was quick.”

She read it a third time.

Seraphina Valois.

Congratulations on the completion of your sixth year. Records confirm sixty-seven assignments.

You are advised that the Border Service maintains a standing interest in graduates of your track. No response is required. No response is expected within twelve months.

Renna

That was all of it. No offer. No terms. Nothing she could refuse, because nothing had been asked.

She stood in the hall with her coat on.

Twelve months.

They’ve given me twelve months.

Not to decide. To notice that I’ve been given twelve months.

Somewhere upstairs her mother was talking to a maid about linen.

Seraphina looked at the six lines and understood exactly what the letter was — because it was the same construction Renna had used the morning she read four names in a yard.

Not an offer. Scheduling.

She folded it.

Then folded it again, smaller than it needed to be, and put it in the inside pocket of the coat — the same pocket that had held a letter for two years — and went in to breakfast, and did not mention it to anybody.