Chapter 155: — "Four Days"

Day one.

Rowan organised it, because Rowan organised everything, and because within about eleven minutes of arriving he had established that nobody else in the room could think in straight lines.

“Three questions,” he said. “Where did she go. Why did she go. Who knew she was going.”

“The letter—”

“The letter is a guess,” said Rowan. “Nobody’s read it. We know she got paper from Kestral and folded it small. That’s all we know and I’d like everybody to stop building on it.”

“Then what do we do.”

“We do the boring thing,” said Rowan. “We ask people.”

The boring thing took two days and produced four facts.

One. She had taken the eastbound coach at fourth bell. The driver remembered her — short hair, good coat gone bad, paid the full fare to the end of the line without asking what the end of the line was.

Two. The end of the line was Marrow Cross.

Three. Nobody at Marrow Cross remembered her getting off.

Four. Everybody at Marrow Cross remembered the coach.

“That’s not possible,” said Daren.

“It’s entirely possible,” said Rowan. “It means she got off before the end.”

“Then where—”

“There are nine stops,” said Rowan, “and she paid to the end so that nobody would remember which one she wanted, and I want to say that I find that extremely impressive and that I’d have done the same thing.”

Day two.

Kael did not sleep.

He did the stops. All nine of them, north to south and back again, on a horse he pushed harder than he should have, asking the same four questions in the same order at every inn and posting house and stable on the road — and got nine variations of no and one maybe that fell apart under a fifth question.

He got back at some point past midnight and stood in the yard of his own house not going in.

Daren found him there.

“Kael.”

“She got off at one of them.”

“Yes.”

“She got off at one of nine stops on a road I’ve now ridden twice, and there’s no way to know which, and every hour I spend finding out is an hour she gets further from wherever she got off.” He was looking at the wall. “So the road’s finished. The road’s got nothing left in it.”

“Then—”

“Then it’s the letter,” said Kael, “and nobody’s read the letter.”

Day three.

He read the letter.

Not that one — there was no getting that one. He read the other thing, which was the fact that Kestral existed, and had records, and was four hundred miles away and could not be reached in under a month.

And then Rowan, who had been quiet for most of a morning, said:

“Fell.”

“What?”

“Fell’s still writing to me. Monthly. He’s been writing to me for six years.” Rowan was already pulling paper toward him. “He’s at the lower market in Varen and he has one useful quality, which is that he notices what students do. If anything’s moved at Kestral — if anyone’s been sent for, if a name’s gone on a list — Fell will have heard it within a week.”

“That’s a month each way—”

“It’s three days each way,” said Rowan, “because I’m going to pay the top rate, which I have never once done in twenty years of trade, and which I want somebody in this room to appreciate.”

The reply came in three days and said nothing.

Rowan.

No movement here. No names called. The academy’s quiet and has been since the sixth-years went.

I’d know. I’ve asked three people who would also know.

Whatever’s happened, it hasn’t happened from this end.

— Fell

Kael read it twice and put it down.

“So she wasn’t sent for.”

“No.”

“So the letter wasn’t an order.”

“No.”

“So she went because she chose to,” said Kael, “and told nobody, and paid to the end of a line she didn’t ride.”

Rowan folded the page.

“Yes,” he said.

Day four.

They found the first real thing at the crossing inn, and it had been sitting there for four days, and nobody had asked the right person.

The boy who brought up the post.

“You said she got a letter.”

“Yes, sir. days back.”

“Was there anything else that week.”

The boy thought about it.

“There was one for the inn,” he said. “Not for the house. For a guest.”

Daren went very still.

“Which guest.”

“The gentleman on the second floor at the back,” said the boy. “With the bird.”

It had come the same day.

Same runner. Same route up from the coast road. Delivered within about an hour of hers.

“Where was it from?”

“Couldn’t say, sir.”

“Was there a seal—”

“There was,” said the boy, “but I didn’t know it. It wasn’t the academy one. It wasn’t any I’ve seen and I’ve been on the post four years.”

Kael and Daren looked at each other.

“What did he do with it?” said Kael.

“He read it in the yard, sir.”

“And?”

“And nothing,” said the boy. “He read it and he put it in his coat and he asked me if I’d had breakfast, and I said no, and he gave me a coin and told me to go and have some.”

That was, everyone agreed afterward, the moment it stopped being about a coach.

“He got a letter.”

“The same day.”

“Both of them. Same day. Same runner.” Daren was walking in circles. “And she went east and he went north, and he took the bird—”

“Daren.”

“He took the bird, Kael, why would a man take a—”

“Daren.”

He stopped.

“We don’t know anything,” said Kael. “We know two people got letters. That’s it. That’s the whole of it. Everything past that is a thing we’ve built.”

But he did not believe it, and Daren could tell, and neither of them said so.

Tax came back that evening.

Four days, north, and he came in over the wall low and fast and landed on the rail and did not say hello.

“Where have you been.”

“Around.”

“Tax—”

“North,” said the crow. “Eleven miles a day, four days out, and I found nothing, and I’ve come back to say so before anybody wastes a week doing it themselves.”

“Nothing?”

“No man. No bird. No cage.” He resettled his feet. “He didn’t go north.”

“The innkeeper said—”

“The innkeeper saw him leave the yard heading north,” said Tax, “which is a different statement, and which I’d like everybody in this house to hold onto.”

Later — much later, when the house had gone quiet and Daren had gone home and Rowan was asleep in a chair with his coat still on — Kael went back to the room at the coaching inn.

The innkeeper let him. It hadn’t been let again. Nobody had wanted it.

He stood in the middle of the floor and turned round once, slowly, the way he had in her room, and read it.

Bed made. Washstand clear. Ring in the dust on the sill where a cage had stood for eleven days.

And on the floor by the leg of the bed, where it had gone in under the frame and stayed, one small thing.

He picked it up.

A feather.

Grey-brown, barred, about two inches — the sort of small body feather a caged bird sheds constantly and which had presumably been coming off that cuckoo across the whole county for a fortnight.

He turned it over.

Then put it in his pocket, for no reason he could have given, and went home.

It would be eleven days before it occurred to him — at three in the morning, in the way things did — that the cage had gone from the sill at third bell on the first night.

And that the room had been swept on the second day.

He did not sleep that night either.

He lay on his back with the ceiling four feet away and did the thing he had done every night for a year, which was to take the day apart and lay it out in pieces and look at each one.

Nine stops.

Two letters.

A coach paid to the end of a line she didn’t ride.

A man who left north and didn’t go north.

He turned it over and over and it did not resolve, and at some point past three he understood why — because he was doing it wrong. He was assembling it the way you assemble an accident.

This isn’t an accident.

Somebody planned this. Somebody planned it carefully enough that four days of asking has produced two facts and one of them is a coach fare.

And then, arriving in the dark with no warning at all:

She planned it.

She’s been doing exactly this for six years. That’s her job. That’s what sixty-seven assignments makes. She is, right now, somewhere in this country, being deliberately extremely hard to find — and she is better at it than every person currently looking.

He lay in the dark.

I’m not going to find her.

She’ll come back when she’s done, or she won’t.

He put his hand over his eyes.