Page 20 of Zenith Court

I came inside her with her hands locked where the cuffs had been and her name in the wreck of my breathing.

Afterward, we lay on the narrow bed because the window seat had become impractical. The inn returned by degrees: wind working the shutter bars, the taproom quiet below, the stair silent under Delphine’s watch. Astra lay along me with one leg thrown over mine. I fetched the water and cloth, and she let me clean her without looking away from me. The washstand remained within reach afterward. She left the scent of marble and burnt sugar on her skin.

I watched her settle. Her hair, dry now, curled at the temple. The welt from the cushion seam faded from the back of her thigh. Her breathing lengthened toward sleep. The three lines at her wrist glowed low—green-gold, rain-dark, and the third one mine, its color hers to keep. Her palm found the rib a Tower baton had cracked last winter. She pressed carefully, checking for pain; when I did not flinch, her hand stayed. Nothing in the room required me to hold still, but I did, unwilling to disturb it.

“You’ll put him on again at daybreak,” she said, half asleep. “Chin, shoulders, that voice.”

“I will.”

“And when we’re alone?”

“You take him off.” I pressed the words into her hair. “Every night we’re in that building.” She nodded once against my chest.

Before sleep I rose once to turn down the lamp and close the box over the cuffs. In the mirror I saw the bed, Astra waiting in it, and my own bare wrists. My shoulders had dropped. My hands hung loose at my sides.

The costume would go on in four minutes tomorrow and pass any basin. It would fit. It would never again fit all the way down.

She found my wrist when I came back to the bed and kept it through the night, and everything under her fingers was mine.

11

Astra

The message reached us in the false spine of an old almanac, three days ahead of the convoy it described. Caspian burned the miller’s candle to its socket deciphering it.

A Court transfer, southbound on the lake road to the sister school at the coast. Cargo: one detainee—staff, nine years’ tenure. No name. Bound over for what the order called exemplary review. Caspian knew what that meant: a staged recantation, with schools from three valleys summoned to watch the woman who had put Untethered into the tribunal record apologize for it.

“They’re moving the administrator,” Delphine said. Her voice flattened whenever the Tower returned to her. “Under seal, by road. They want every school along the route to see what refusing costs.”

Caspian built the raid on the mill table that night with a candle stub for the ford and eleven dried beans for the escort, and it was a good plan, which I can say honestly because it was never the plan that failed.

Aldric sent two people to meet us. Tam was a broad, quiet carter whose hay had legitimate business on that road twice a month. The archer said perhaps ten words in two days, six of them about wind.

The lane south of the ford ran sunken between hedge banks the height of a mounted man’s knee, an old road worn down by four centuries of wheels, so that anything on it moved single file at a walking pace with the fields out of sight above. Whatever slowed in the ford slowed blind.

The plan, as the beans had it: the carter ahead of the convoy, dropping an axle pin in the ford’s far exit and cursing his own wheel with conviction; the archer up the west bank; Jonah at the water to meet the vanguard; Kieran on the rope of a thorn tree cut nearly through, closing the lane behind the rear riders; Caspian counting from the bank; Delphine and I on the barred wagon with a pry bar and the bolt cutters; then all of us up the thorn gap to the horses waiting at the charcoal burners’ clearing.

“Ninety seconds if it holds,” Caspian said, moving beans. “Three minutes if it doesn’t. Past three, we go up the gap with whatever we’re holding and not one thing more.”

“I love a plan with a clause for failing,” Kieran said.

“Every plan has one. I write mine down.”

We were in place before noon. The convoy came two hours later. I listened to water running over the ford’s gravel and kept my hands still inside my sleeves. The hedge smelled of wet blackthorn and old leaves. At my wrist, marble, apple, and leather lay warm but quiet.

Beside me, Delphine tested the pry bar against the ground, then shifted it to spare her ribs. The thorn gap was twenty yards behind us. We had walked that distance twice before taking our places. I counted it again without turning.

They came down the lane exactly as expected. Four riders ahead. The barred wagon, high-sided and sealed, with one driver on the box. A supply cart. Four riders behind, and an officer in Council gray with a clerk’s satchel on his hip. On the cart bench beside the driver sat a hooded figure in clerk’s gray, hands out of sight.

“Twelve,” Caspian breathed beside me. “As written.”

The first minute belonged to us. Tam dropped the axle pin at the ford’s far exit, and his wagon swung broadside. The officer sent the vanguard forward to move it; the lane bunched them at the water, stirrup to stirrup, nowhere to turn. Kieran hauled the rope, bringing the cut thorn tree down behind the rear pair in a crack of branches. The archer’s first arrow struck the lead rider through the shoulder.

Jonah waded into the ford. He dragged the second rider out of the saddle by the stirrup, drove the third belly-down across Tam’s wagon shaft, and turned toward the fourth. The man looked at the others already down and dropped his blade into the water.

Kieran met the rear pair where their horses could not turn. The officer dismounted at the fallen tree and lunged for him. Kieran drove the man’s saber wrist against the bank and knocked the blade into the mud.

Delphine and I hit the barred wagon. The hasp gave to the pry bar on her second heave, and the door swung open. Inside were two benches with chains bolted to them, a strongbox under Council seals, and one folded coat. No prisoner.