Page 8 of Zenith Court

“It’s true,” I said. “Once.”

Marta set down the bread. “What did it cost?”

“Her memory of everything they’d done to her in that place. We still don’t know whether it was payment or a mercy.” I nodded toward the trough. “This morning I called the current deliberately. It crossed the yard and started reading my friend. I can’t aim it. If I reach into your Mark and it goes wide, it could take him—the bright half, the eight years, whatever of him you keep in there.”

She looked at her arm for a long moment. “So it’s not never. It’s not yet.”

“Not today. I won’t gamble with you.”

She rolled the cuff down and buttoned it. “Then I’ll carry it dim a while longer.” She stood and shouldered her bundle. “Thank you for telling me. They took four minutes to dim me and never told me a thing. You’ve done better than they did.”

She was three steps gone when she turned back.

“When you learn to aim it,” she said, “the people who move me will know where they’ve put me. Marta. Gray to the elbow. I’m not hard to find.”

She went to wait beside the tinker’s cart, and I returned to the jugs and filled them.

The cart rolled north at dusk. By full dark, supper had been cleared and Cosima was reading the ledger’s evening entries aloud.

“The gray pair stopped at the crossroads today,” she said. “Forty-one minutes. They usually stay ten—water the horses, check the signpost, ride on. Today they dismounted and walked the verges.”

“And this came up from the mill with the flour,” Rev said from the stove. “A man wearing no colors asked the miller which farms on this side of the water take in travelers. Nobody answered him. He thanked them and rode on.” She shifted a pot on the stove. “He didn’t ask twice. That’s what bothers me. He didn’t need to.”

“Not answering told him enough,” Caspian said. “Now he knows there’s a farm worth protecting.”

No one answered, and Cosima closed the ledger.

That night I left my coat by the door with the wren pinned inside it and lay awake listening for horses on the mill road. None came. I listened anyway.

5

Caspian

My father walked the last half mile.

Hale spotted him from the orchard rise ten minutes out—one figure on the mill road, no horse under him, gray traveling wool carrying the dust of three counties. Before he reached the track, everyone was in position. Rev took the cellar. Delphine took the loft shadow. Kieran took the porch rail with an apple and a paring knife, neither in use. Aldric waited in the barn doorway with his arms folded.

I went to the head of the track and waited for the figure to become him.

Six weeks had passed since the tribunal came apart around us. My last sight of him had been through that chaos—a still man in a moving room, jaw set, watching stewards fail to contain what his own filing had helped set loose. We had not spoken then. There had been no chance.

I checked myself while he climbed: pulse quick, hands steady, breath even. I used to go numb whenever he entered a room. This time I felt everything.

He stopped two paces away—the regulation distance—then came one pace closer. Neither of us mentioned it.

“Caspian,” he said.

“Father.”

His gaze moved over the holding—the barn, the orchard, the chimney smoke, Aldric waiting in the barn doorway. “It holds,” he said.

“So far.”

We walked up. Aldric straightened from the barn door. He and my father studied each other for a moment.

“Ashford.”

“Aldric.”