Chương 23

John smoothed the sheet across his knee, though it had no writing to crease. The paper had acquired a damp curl from the night air. Beneath the residence terraces, a paved courtyard lay between low walls and bare trees, its worn stones dark with rain. A single lamp burned at the far end, doing little for it. The resignation form remained folded in his coat pocket. Dorr had marked the places that required a name, a witness and the date upon which his service would end. Simple work.

John could have completed it in less than a minute, which was presumably why he had left it untouched. The other sheet was meant to be a letter. He had walked only as far as the lower court before sitting. The residence remained visible through the trees, warm light showing around the shutters. Going farther would have required choosing a direction, but John wasn't really in the mood to be making choices. He set the point of his borrowed pencil against the paper.

Lady Elara, The name sat alone at the top of the page, with too much white beneath it. He erased it. Elara, Worse. He lifted the pencil. The stationery had been lent to him by Dorr and was basically a stub with rough wood where someone had whittled it sharp with a dull knife. An eraser was glued to the end. The plan had been simple. Sign the form, sell what Voss and Harl had left him, buy two fast horses, ride for Corvane and the sea.

And leave this behind for her to find once he was a day south and past retrieving. The letter would have told her that he knew. About her Shadow Affinity. That it had not disgusted him then and did not now, and that the knowing, once he was across the ocean, goes with him. That part might even comfort her, once she recovered from the reasonable desire to have him murdered for knowing it. John lowered the pencil again, but the point left only a dark speck. Lucan Ilyra would be harder.

If he left the letter after he was already a day south, pursuit would be inconvenient and questions useless. Elara could read his warnings, decide he was mad, and burn the paper. He would be well on his way to Corvane with no obligation to defend any of it. There was danger in the Undercroft, he planned to write. Lucan Ilyra had used the buried chambers for fleshcrafting, and the things he had grown there would eventually get loose. John could warn her to prepare for this. He could inform her to watch Aren Mills.

He could explain why the commoner from Bletchmoor mattered so greatly, and how it all tied to Maar and the Hollow King. He could hedge the rest. He had planned to. I cannot prove this. Treat it as a gambler's hunch from a man who owes you. Then: he would mention the Gate tremors; the war that was coming north of anything her father's muster imagined; that a sickness called the Ashen Pox would follow it. He was still unsure how he would write the rest. He turned the pencil between his fingers. Names would help.

Names could be checked. Ghen the Stitcher was somewhere on the March fringe. A Fourth-Circle Wood mage, an outlaw and flesh-shaper, he had entered the serial as the sort of man soldiers called a monster before riding out to kill him. When the Ashen Pox came, the celebrated physicians failed. Ghen found the cure. Find him before anyone else does. Do not send hunters; go as someone desperate, with a patient he cannot refuse, because that is the only door he still opens. Ask him about grey ash.

Ask him about void-salt, and about water touched by Shadow. Then there was Bors Kilhane. The armsmaster could protect Elara far better than John, and his loyalty had a price she might actually be able to pay: help for his dying brother. Ghen possessed the skill for that too, if Elara could somehow persuade either man to trust the other. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Maghren the Unlit presented a worse problem.

Elara needed the imprisoned woman's teaching. Greyspire held Maghren in its deep cells, and official Church channels would draw attention to the very secret Elara had spent years hiding. Writing the name might save her. It might also put her on a road leading straight to Greyspire. Last, he had meant to send her home.

There was the book at Veymoor — Veyra's own grimoire, the Sable Psalter, the one text her family's scrubbing had missed — and he had sat with the pencil hovering and discovered he couldn't finish the sentence. The chapel crypt, yes. Which wall of it, behind what stone, under what wards, he could not recall. John stared down at the sheet. One black dot occupied the empty page. Quite a farewell for one black dot. A shoe scraped softly on the path behind him. John folded the paper before he looked around.

Nessa stood beneath one of the bare trees, her arms tucked close against the cold. She had come without a cloak. She looked at him, looked at the empty length of the bench, and sat down at the far end of it with the whole middle left between them. Minutes passed. She said nothing. That alone was strange enough to keep him quiet. He had shared a residence with Nessa long enough to know that silence bothered her.

Yet she sat with her knuckles reddening and her jaw set and watched the lamp at the bottom of the court, and the minutes run by. Somewhere beyond the terraces, a door shut. Water dripped steadily from a gutter into a cistern. John slipped the folded sheet into his coat, beside the resignation form.

"Are you ok?"

"Yes." She rubbed her palms along her sleeves. Another silence, shorter. Then: "My lady should not have said it the way she said it. At dinner. She was unkind, and you hadn't earned that much of it." A breath.

"I won't tell you she had no right to be angry. Because I think she did. But the way it came out in — that wasn't fair, and someone on her side ought to say so. So. I'm saying so." John watched the lamp too. It was easier than watching her deliver the apology like a splinter she was working out of her own hand.

"She wasn't always like this," Nessa continued.

"You'd not believe it, but she was almost warm, once. When I first entered service she'd play cards with the younger children in the back parlour — she cheated, and she was terrible at it; everyone could see her doing it, and she'd laugh." John frowned.

"That doesn't sound like her."

"She had just turned twelve," Nessa replied. Her shoulders came up.

"Then, suddenly, her lessons were moved into private rooms. People stopped inviting her to things. If a brother or sister went looking for her, there was suddenly somewhere else they needed to be. Music practice. Riding. Lessons with the chaplain. The whole household got very busy whenever she was in a room, and nobody ever told me why. I asked. I got told to mind my work." Twelve. John kept his eyes on the lamp and his face still. He could guess the reason for the change but didn't speak up.

It wasn't his place to do so, nor was it wise.

"After a while she stopped giving anyone the chance," Nessa went on.

"That's the thing I want you to understand, because you weren't there for the learning of it. If she wanted something, someone decided it was unsuitable. If she leaned on someone, they got sent away, or told to keep their distance. Every time. So she taught herself to want nothing and lean on no one, and she got so good at it that people call it pride." Her voice thinned.

"Lady Mirelle stayed. I stayed. The rest of the household treated her as though she might cause trouble simply by being in the room. I am sure you can imagine what that does to a girl." John looked towards the residence. The lit edges of the shutters had narrowed as lamps were put out within. Nessa turned her head and looked at him properly for the first time.

"Then she chose you." John arched a brow.

"I don't know why. Maybe she felt responsible for your wound. Maybe she liked that nobody picked you for her — that you were the one thing in her household her family hadn't approved, arranged, or vetted. I can't say for certain. I'm not in her head." She looked away again.

"But it was hers. The choosing. I can count on one hand the things she's had that were." The wind moved through the bare trees below and settled.

"I want to be clear," Nessa said, "that I would be delighted to see the back of you. You're rude, you track mud, you keep enough steel in that room for a small uprising, and my lady listens to you over sensible people. Personally, I'd wave from the gate." Her hands tightened on her own arms.

"But I can't bear it. Watching her lose one more thing because a man decided that losing it was good for her. I can't. So I'm asking you to reconsider." John looked down at his hands. He had an answer. He'd had it in Dorr's office and at dinner, and it had been sound both times: the blacklist, the surety she couldn't spare, the review he might fail, the people from the tollhouse still loose with his name on their ledger. Sound.

He held it in his mouth and did not let it out, and the silence went on long enough that it became the answer's replacement. Nessa waited through all of it. Then she stood, smoothed her skirt with stiff red fingers, and said, "I might have given the impression I'd fetch you back."

"Really?"

"Yes." She went up the stairs without looking behind her. When the sound of her had gone, John took the letter out again and opened it across his knee. The lamp at the far end of the court gave just enough light to read by, which was a joke at his expense, because there was nothing on the page to read. One dot, in the corner, where he'd set the pencil down and stopped. He sat with it open a long time.