Page 45
He sat across the small table from me, and it was nothing like the dark.
In the shrine, there had been nothing to manage. We had been two shapes in the night with no names, and the not-speaking had been easy, the speaking easier. Here there was a teapot between us, a woman pouring, and a lady and a Veilborn who were meeting, as far as anyone watching knew, for the first time over a returned shawl. All the ease we had built in the dark had nowhere to stand in Selene’s bright front room. He held himself very straight. I wrapped both hands around my cup to have somewhere to put them. When Selene set the tea in front of him, he thanked her a beat too carefully. I looked at the table, and the silence that should have been nothing sat between us with weight in it.
“You found the house easily enough,” Selene said, settling in, light as anything. “Most people get turned around in these streets. They all bend the same way.”
“I asked at the corner.” He turned the cup a quarter-turn on the table and did not drink. “Someone knew the name.”
“Mm. Everyone knows everyone, down at this end.” She poured for herself, without hurry, in no apparent pursuit of anything at all. “You’d be amazed what the woman who sells me my candles can tell me about people I’ve never met.”
I lifted my eyes from the table, and Auden was already looking at me.
It was not the glance you give across a room. He had been looking before I looked up, and he did not stop when I caught him at it. For the length of a breath, neither of us did the easy thing and slid away. I saw the gold at his jaw, unshaven a day, the line of his throat where the plain veil-pendant sat, and how the lamplight found the fairness of him. I understood he was seeing me the same way, taking the whole of me in, my own true face and my own true hands for once, the woman the brew had given back. He could not stop seeing it any more than I could stop letting him. Then Selene laughed at something she had said herself, and we both looked away at once, too fast, and I drank tea I did not want.
“Of course the real trouble,” Selene was saying, and I made myself catch the thread of it, because under the chatter she had begun, gently, to fish, “is that this city hoards its cleverest people behind the highest walls. Liora’s not been well, you know, here and there, nothing the air doesn’t mend, but I do wish I knew someone with the old learning to set my mind at rest. The proper old learning. Not these court men who’ll sell you a love-charm and call it physick.” She said it idly to her cup, a woman complaining of nothing in particular. “You’d know the difference, I expect. You’d know who in this place actually knows a thing.”
Auden took the bait so lightly I do not think he felt it as a hook, because there was no hook in how she set it, only a friendly grievance laid out for a man to agree with. “I’d know who doesn’t,” he said. “The court keeps sorcerers as it keeps everything else. For show. They charm the weather for a garden party. They’d not know an old sickness from an old story.”
“There. That’s exactly what I feared.” Selene shook her head, all sympathy, and let a silence open. Into the silence, because she had built it for exactly this, Auden went on by himself.
“There’s one I’ve heard of.” He frowned at the middle distance, thinking aloud now, given the room to. “Older than the rest of them. Serves the emperor directly, and has done a long while, keeping to the parts of the palace no one’s asked into. Even we aren’t asked into them.” His eyes came back to me as he said it, as though the answer were a thing he was offering me and not Selene. “I’ve never met them. But if anyone here held the kind of knowing your lady needs, I’d look there first.”
I held his gaze and did not let my face do anything at all, because I was the only one in that room who could put a name to what he was describing. I could say nothing, and Auden was looking at me as though he had done me a kindness, which he had meant to, and which would get me killed if I let it run.
“You’re a help,” Selene said warmly. “Truly. I’ll not press you on it. Drink your tea.” She turned the talk to something else, easy and bright, having gotten exactly what she came for and letting him believe the visit was about a shawl.
Under the table, I pressed my nails into my own palm and felt skin, not claws, and was glad of the brew for that one mercy at least, that I could sit there whole in front of him and let him look his fill, even while everything else in the room went wrong around the looking.
He would not stay long past that, and I was glad of it, because I did not think I could hold myself together much longer.
Selene saw him to the door as warmly as she had pulled him through it, her catch made, and Rainthorn gave him the nod she did not waste. Then it was me at the threshold seeing him out into the early dark, the two of us alone in the doorway for the length of a breath.
“I’m glad you’re well,” he said, low, only for me. “You stopped coming. I had no way to know if something was wrong.” It was not a reproach, only the plain truth of why a shawl had needed returning in person. Then, being who he was, he did not let it sit heavy. “There’s to be a rite at the shrine in a few days. We’re opening the place to a few more of the old gods, the ones with no house left of their own, making room for whoever has nowhere else to be prayed to. It wants more than one pair of hands, and more than one voice that knows the forms.” The corner of his mouth moved. “I happen to know a voice that knows the forms. If you wanted to come.”
The choice was left with me, as it always was with him. I told him I would think on it, which was true, and he bowed and went down the steps and away up the darkening street. I watched him go longer than I should have, my friend’s triumph, the old practitioner, and the whole borrowed fullness in my own skin draining out of me. Then I went in and shut the door, carrying the one thing I could not set down, the look he had given me asking to be let go, and the chair I had left him in anyway.
* * *
Across the street, in the blue shadow of a doorway where she had stood unmoving since before the women came up the road, the old practitioner who served the emperor watched the door close on the Veilborn.
Morrigwen had followed him down from the palace. It had been a simple thing, once she knew which of the scattered pieces was drifting, to set herself on his track and let him lead her. He had led her here, to a respectable door in a middling street. She had watched him wait, watched the two women come up the road with their basket and go in at the door together with him, the noblewoman talking, and she had settled in the cold to wait out whatever it was. It was a long while before the door opened again, and one of them came out with him to see him off, alone, the pale one. She stood close in the doorway in the last of the light, and at that distance, with no working between them to muddy it, Morrigwen saw her face plain.
She did not know it. That was the thing that itched at her, standing in the cold. She did not know the face, and she knew every face that mattered in this city, having known their grandmothers’ faces. This one she had never seen. Still, it pulled at something under her, a pale, fine, well-made face that the part of her older than memory recoiled from before her mind could give a reason, a half-recognition with no name on the end of it.
On her shoulder, the crow shifted its weight, three-legged, black as a hole cut in the night, and turned its head to her.
“Up to the palace,” she told it, low. “Find me where the emperor is. Not the audience he shows them. Where he is in truth, tonight and tomorrow. I have let too much drift while I was patient. I need a word with him, and soon.”
The crow opened its wings and was gone over the rooftops without a sound. Morrigwen stood a moment longer, looking at the shut door and the dark window above it, troubled by a face she could not place and a stillness she could place all too well. Then she drew her hood up and went back the way she had come, faster than she had left it, three centuries of certainty cracked for the first time straight down the middle.
Chapter 21
The envoy from the north had been speaking for the better part of an hour, and Drystan had heard perhaps a third of it.
This was a failing in him, and an old one. His father had governed by listening, by letting men empty themselves of words until they had told him more than they meant to, and he had tried to teach his son the trick of it, the stillness that draws confession. Drystan had the stillness. What he had lost, somewhere in the last season, was the appetite, the part of him that cared enough about the manoeuvring of empires to attend to every word of it. He sat the throne and held his face in the arrangement the throne required, letting Vasstent of Iskanrin lay her empress before him like a merchant unrolling silk.
“Her Radiance the Empress Caelia,” she was saying, and at her signal two of her people brought the thing forward, draped, and uncovered it, “wished you to have the most recent likeness. Painted this spring. The court at Iskanrin holds it a poor shadow of her, but it is the best our hands could manage.”
It was a magnificent painting. He would grant them that. Empress Caelia of Iskanrin looked out of it as a fortress looks out over a plain, handsome and cold and entirely certain of her own ground, jewelled to the throat, crowned, a woman built by a thousand years of northern blood to rule beside a man and outlast him. Everything about the portrait was correct. The bearing was correct, the magnificence was correct, and the alliance the marriage would forge was correct, two empires bound, the long peace secured, the bloodline carried forward into another age. His father had wanted this match before he died. His council wanted it. The realm, insofar as a realm wants anything, wanted it. There was not one argument against it that a sane man who loved his people could make.
