Chương 101: The Waiting

Th e W aiting Nobody told him how long deliberation would take, and Keth understood, by the second silent hour in his narrow chamber, that the not-knowing was probably its own deliberate design. He sat on the edge of the bed with his good hand wrapped around his knee, his altered arm resting pale and quiet across his lap, and tried, without much success, to make his mind land on anything that wasn't the sound of his own voice cracking in that chamber a few hours ago. I don't know what I am.

He'd meant it as honesty. Sitting alone with it now, it felt more like surrender. The high window let in a thin bar of afternoon light that crawled, slow and indifferent, across the stone floor. He watched it move because there was nothing else in the room that moved at all.

Voss came in the evening, and this time the guard let him linger past the usual allotted minutes without comment, as though even the Census's own procedures had quietly decided this particular rule wasn't worth enforcing tonight.

"You did well," Voss said, through the bars.

"Better than well. I've sat through a great many hard rooms in my life, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone say something truer in one."

"It didn't feel like it mattered."

"It mattered." Voss's hand found the bars, the same gesture Keth had watched him make a dozen times now, gripping them like something to keep himself upright rather than to test their strength.

"I watched Kael's face while you said it. I watched the broad one, the weathered Archon, go very still. Truth doesn't always change outcomes, Keth. But it's never once, in my experience, gone entirely unheard either." Keth said nothing for a while. The bar of light on the floor had gone from gold to gray.

"What happens if they decide against me," he asked finally. Voss's jaw worked once, hard, and for a long moment he didn't answer at all.

"Then we find out what kind of man I actually am," he said, "when someone tells me I can't follow you anymore." Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

Kael arrived not long after, still in his formal robes, looking considerably more exhausted than a man who'd only sat in a chair all day had any right to look.

"They're not deliberating quickly," he said, without preamble.

"That's either good or bad, and I genuinely can't tell you which. A fast decision usually means consensus. A slow one means at least one of the four is fighting for something. I don't know if that something is your favor or against it."

"Which way do you think it'll go?" Kael was quiet a moment, weighing the question with the same careful honesty he'd brought to every hard answer he'd ever given Keth.

"I don't know," he said finally.

"I'd like to tell you I do. I've learned, sitting in that seat today, that I understand this institution considerably less than I believed I did yesterday." His hand found the small gap in the door's iron grate.

"I'm sorry. For all of it. For not seeing the shape of this coming sooner, for not being able to promise you an outcome I don't actually control."

"You read me the charge straight," Keth said.

"You told me the truth when nobody else in this whole building seemed to think I deserved it plain. That's not nothing, Kael." Something in the Archon's tired face shifted, briefly, into something that wasn't quite a smile but stood close enough to one.

Prewitt did not visit that night. Keth understood, somehow, without being told, that this was itself a kind of information — that whatever she was doing instead, wherever her presence had gone, it likely had something to do with the deliberation continuing behind closed doors he'd never once been permitted near.

He lay awake a long time after the corridor's torches dimmed for the night, staring at a ceiling he couldn't properly see, his fingers finding, without deciding to, the small hard shape still tucked in his coat pocket where he'd stowed it since the church. He drew it out in the dark and turned it slowly between his fingers — small, cold, a seed unlike any he remembered from a market stall years ago, though he couldn't have said exactly what made it feel different.

He thought of Ashveil's voice, low and fierce in a church that felt now like it belonged to some other, gentler lifetime. Whatever happens, you are still exactly what I told you that you were the very first time I met you. He didn't know what that was supposed to mean yet. He held the seed anyway, its small weight steady in his palm, and found, somewhere in the holding of it, a fraction of the calm sleep would otherwise have refused him entirely.

He woke sometime past midnight to the sound of the corridor door opening, and for one disoriented, hopeful second thought the verdict had already come. It was only a soldier, making rounds, checking the small barred window with the same bored efficiency he'd shown every hour before. He moved on without a word. The corridor settled back into silence.

Keth lay still a long while after, the seed still curled in his closed fist, and thought about his brother — not the finger, not the pattern, not any of the folio numbers a prosecutor had spent a whole day reading aloud like a ledger of accumulated sin. Just Elian, quiet and calm, sliding half a loaf of bread across a refectory table on an ordinary morning that had, at the time, felt like it would simply go on being ordinary forever. You can't protect everyone if you're empty.

He didn't know, lying there, whether he still had it in him to be anything other than empty right now. He held the seed a little tighter regardless, and eventually, without quite noticing the moment it happened, sleep finally, mercifully, found him.

Morning came gray and unhurried, the thin window light climbing the same patient path across the stone floor it had crawled the evening before, and Keth was still sitting with his back against the wall, the seed returned to his coat pocket, when the soldier's boots finally stopped outside his door.

"The tribunal's ready," the soldier said. No further explanation offered, none needed. Keth stood. His legs, this time, held steady beneath him, though he couldn't have said whether that steadiness came from courage or simply from having run entirely out of any other feeling left to spend on fear. He walked toward the door before the soldier had to ask him twice. End Of Chapter One Hundred One