Chapter 154: — "Gone"

The first thing was the boots.

Her mother noticed it at fifth bell and did not think anything of it, because a pair of boots not being inside the door is not information — and then thought about it again at sixth, over tea, in the way a person returns to a thing without knowing why.

By seventh she had been up to the room.

By half past she was in the hall saying “she’s not here” to a maid, in a voice that was still entirely calm, and would not be calm again for some time.

Kael arrived at the gate at eighth and knew before anyone said anything.

The house was making the wrong sound.

He had spent a year listening to a road and had got extremely good at hearing shapes at distance, and a household that has lost somebody sounds different from one that hasn’t, and he was through the door before the maid had finished opening it.

“Where.”

“Master Arden—”

“Where.”

Her father was in the study with the map open, which told Kael two things immediately and neither of them helped.

“Her coat’s gone,” he said. “Boots. One bag — the small one. Not the trunk.”

“Money?”

“I don’t know what she had.”

“Horse?”

“All four in the stable.”

Kael stood very still.

She walked.

She walked out of a house at night, in a coat, with a bag, and she didn’t take a horse, because a horse is noise and a horse is traceable and a horse has to be fed by somebody who remembers you.

That’s not a person leaving in a hurry.

That’s a person leaving properly.

Daren arrived at ninth and made it worse for eleven minutes and then, abruptly, stopped making it worse.

That was the thing about Daren that nobody outside the room ever saw. He shouted for eleven minutes — she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t*, she’s been back nine days, she hasn’t even* — and then something went across behind his eyes and he sat down at the table and said, in a completely different voice:

“Right. What do we actually know.”

“Coat, boots, small bag. No horse.”

“When.”

“Between midnight and fourth bell.”

“How d’you know midnight?”

“Because her mother went up at midnight,” said Kael, “and she was in the room.”

They went up to it together.

Kael had not been in that room in six years. It had been a girl’s room when he’d last stood in it and it had gone on being a girl’s room in his head the whole time she was away, and it was not one now — it was a room with a bag emptied out on the bed and a lamp still full of oil and a chair placed, very deliberately, where a person sitting in it could see the door.

Daren went to the window.

Kael did not.

He stood in the middle of the floor and turned round once, slowly, and read it the way he had been taught to read a road.

Bed’s been sat on. Not slept in.

Lamp’s full. She didn’t burn it long.

Chair’s wrong. Chair’s been moved from the corner to face the door and it’s not been moved back.

She sat in that chair for a while.

And then he saw the trunk.

It was at the foot of the bed where it had been since the first day, and it had not been opened, and its lid did not sit flat.

He looked at it for four seconds.

It would occur to him afterward — much later, at three in the morning, in the way things did — that he had known in those four seconds exactly what it was. Not the contents. The shape of it. A thing that had come four hundred miles with a lid that wouldn’t close and had been put at the foot of a bed in a house and not opened once in nine days.

He did not touch it.

“Anything?” said Daren, from the window.

“No,” said Kael.

They had a theory by tenth bell and it was a bad one and everybody adopted it because a bad theory is easier to carry than nothing.

“There was a letter,” said her father.

Kael’s head came up.

“She had a letter six days ago. Came up from the crossing, brought by hand. She read it in the hall in her coat and she folded it four times and she never mentioned it to anybody.”

“You saw her fold it.”

“I was on the stairs,” said Lord Valois. “She didn’t see me. She folded that paper smaller than it needed to be, and she put it in her coat, and she came in to breakfast and asked her mother about the linen.”

Silence.

“That’s Kestral,” said Kael.

“That’s Kestral.”

“She’s gone back.”

“She’s gone somewhere,” said her father, “and I’d rather it was Kestral than the alternative, and I’d like somebody in this room to tell me what the alternative is.”

Nobody did.

Rowan came at noon, from the crossing, having heard it from the inn.

He listened to all of it standing up, with his coat still on, and asked four questions, all of them about times.

Then he said: “The southbound left at fourth.”

“…What?”

“There’s a coach out of the crossing at fourth bell, three days a week, and today’s one of them,” said Rowan. “It goes east and connects at Marrow. If a person wanted to be forty miles away by breakfast without a horse, that’s the only way to do it, and it’s the way I would do it.”

“Then she’s on it—”

“Then she’s forty miles away,” said Rowan, “and the coach doesn’t stop, and there’s no getting word to it, and I want everybody to understand that before anybody says anything hopeful.”

It was Daren who noticed the second thing, at some point past one, because Daren was the only person in the county who thought about Eren at all when Eren was not in the room.

“He’ll know.”

“Who.”

“Eren. He’s been with her six years, he’ll — he’ll know something, he notices everything, he counts how many times she puts her hand in her pocket—”

He was already going.

Kael went with him.

The room at the coaching inn was on the second floor at the back and the door was not locked, which Kael disliked before he had opened it.

It was empty.

Not empty of a man who had gone out. Empty of a man who had left — no bag, no coat, nothing on the washstand, bed made in a way that suggested it had been made by somebody who had not slept in it either.

And on the sill, where the cage had been, a ring in the dust.

Daren stood in the doorway.

“…No.”

“Daren—”

“No, that’s — that’s not—” He was looking at the ring in the dust. “He took the bird, Kael. He took the cuckoo. You don’t take a bird if you’re—”

“If you’re what.”

Daren didn’t finish it.

The innkeeper had seen him go.

Third bell. Bag over the shoulder, cage in the left hand, settled up the night before in full and in coin.

“Did he say anything?”

“He said thank you,” said the innkeeper, “and he said the east window on the landing was in the wrong place, and he said it in a way that made me feel he’d been waiting eleven days to mention it.”

“Which way did he go.”

The innkeeper thought about it.

“North,” he said.

Kael stood in the yard of the coaching inn with his hands at his sides.

North.

She goes east on a coach at fourth. He goes north on foot at third.

Both of them, the same night, out of the same town, in opposite directions, without telling anybody.

That’s not two people leaving together.

That’s worse.

Tax was on the gatepost when they got back.

He had not been there when they left. Nobody had sent for him and nobody had told him and there was no possible way he could have known, and he was sitting on the post facing north with his feathers flat to his body.

“Tax—”

“Which way did he go.”

Daren stopped.

“…What?”

“Which way did he go,” said Tax.

“North. The innkeeper said north—”

“How long.”

“Third bell, so — ten hours?”

Tax said nothing at all for about four seconds.

Then he said, “Ten hours,” in a voice that Kael had heard from him precisely twice in years, and both of those times somebody had died within the week.

“Tax,” said Kael. “What is it.”

“Nothing.”

“That’s not—”

“It’s nothing,” said Tax, “and I want you to leave it, and I want you to leave it now, because I’m working.”

“Working on what—”

But he had already gone off the post.

Not the ordinary way — not the lift and the flap and the settling. He went off it hard and low and fast, out over the wall, north, without a word to anybody, and neither Kael nor Daren nor anyone else in that yard saw him again for four days.

Guys, I’m really, really sorry. I’m actually so dumb sometimes, my memory is seriously terrible.

Like, I had already thought about some scenes that I really wanted to add here almost a month ago, and I was so sure I’d remember them. But then I started writing and somehow just… forgot about them completely. So while writing, I ended up skipping those scenes without even realizing it.

But don’t worry, I’ll put them in the auxiliary chapter instead. I’m pretty sure that’ll be free to read, and I can add all those extra little scenes and details there that I forgot to include here.

So if I remember everything, I’ll definitely give those scenes to you guys. And if I don’t remember them… please be my reminder and remind me, hehe. Seriously, my brain clearly cannot be trusted.

Anywayyy, that’s it from me. Byyyyyyeee byeeeeee. Have a great day or night, whatever it is where you are right now muwaaahhh