He underestimated me. I put the page back into the case. I close the lid with my burned hand shaking against the clasp. Varek still has the rest.
He sees me glance. His fingers tighten around the second handful, and for one, vicious second I understand he may burn them anyway, not because it wins, but because men like him would rather leave ash than evidence.
Leoric moves then. Not far. He can't. But the blade reaches Varek's throat before Varek's hand reaches the brazier again.
"Enough," Leoric says.
Varek looks at him, and the smile he gives is almost pity. "You can barely stand."
"Then do not waste what little patience I have left."
Blood is running through Leoric's fingers at his hip. The blade doesn't shake. I reach for the second handful. Varek doesn't release it at once. His eyes stay on Leoric's, testing the distance between wound and will. Leoric presses the blade in just enough for Varek to feel the answer, and the papers come free.
I take the second handful, then the third. Page by page. Not cleanly. Not easily. The brazier eats nothing. The heat off it stays unfed.
"You think this is the ending," Varek says, quiet.
"No. This is the part of the ending where you stop writing it."
I turn before he can answer. The case is heavy, the page inside it, and the room is already shifting under us. Leoric keeps Varek at blade point while I cross to the south wall, past the fallen chair, past the brazier still breathing heat into the dark.
The relay is where I said it would be: south wall, low, bolted, dust-caked, the seal split with age. I press my palm to the housing. It coughs, then lights. Two paired administrative crystals, built into the old command chain. Garrisons. Border posts. Settlements that never tore the relays out because that was how they knew when soldiers were coming.
I lift my own crystal beside the housing. I pair them by touch. I have done this once before. I look at Varek. He isn't moving. The fight has gone out of him the way it goes out of men who counted on a single throw and made it badly.
"This is Corrine again." My voice goes into the housing. "I am broadcasting from beneath the Blackwater fortress. The man beside me is Senator Varek Noctryn. The case on this table contains the original execution orders for the prisoners murdered in the lower cells of this fortress in the months before the fire. It contains the perimeter directive that sealed the gates. It contains correspondence between Senator Noctryn and Gideon Valecrest of the Thornwall rebellion arranging the attack three months in advance."
I read the names. I read the dates. I read the lots—counted lots—and I keep my voice the way Leoric taught me to hold my hands at the picket line: steady, because steady is the only thing they can't argue with. I don't read it all. I read enough that no clerk in any garrison can pretend it wasn't said.
When I lower the crystal, the chamber is quieter than it should be. The brazier still burns. The relay still lights. I don't tell myself it's enough. It isn't. Tomorrow some captain will call it forgery. Some senator will call it a human plot. Some settlement won't have heard it at all because their relay died ages ago and no one came back to fix it. The work of this morning will go on for years, and some of it will fail, and some of the dead will stay slandered no matter what I say into a crystal beneath a fortress.
But it is out. The truth has left this room. It is in rooms I will never enter, in mouths I will never hear, and Varek does not get to take it back. I turn.
"You felt nothing," I say, low against his temple. "Before. You told me once."
"For seven years."
"And now?"
"Now too much. All at once. Since you." His head tips against mine. "I didn't know I was numb until you made it stop."
I close my eyes for one breath. Then I open them, because Varek is still in the room.
"The stairs," I say.
Leoric shifts the blade from Varek's throat to the space beneath his ribs and forces him toward the door.
"Slowly," he says. "You wanted witnesses. You can be one."
I take the case against my chest and follow them out, my burned hand locked around the handle. Not walking. Not running. Carrying the thing they burned a country to bury.
30
LEORIC
Varek goes up ahead of us because I give him no other direction. The blade stays close enough to make refusal expensive, not close enough to let him die before everyone has seen what he is. The stair has worsened in the time we were below. Heat has worked into its seams; every third tread gives. I keep my good shoulder to the wall and let the right side do what it has decided to do, which is empty itself slowly into my boot. Behind me Corrine carries the case close. I hear the small hitch of her breath each time the burned hand takes the rail. We come up into the lower hall and find the broadcast already working through the men.
I read it off them before anyone speaks. The relay runs through this room on its way to the garrison chain, and these men heard her read the lots aloud—the dates, the gates that would not open, a senator's name set beside both. They are looking at that senator now with the flat attention of soldiers redoing seven years of math in a single breath. Vesh is nearest. His sword is already loose in his hand. He doesn't glance at me for permission, and that absence is the first honest thing to happen all morning.
