Chapter 412: The Roads That Remained

Vaust's first request concerned the door to his room.

“It catches,” he said.

Liora looked at the door, which she had just opened without difficulty.

“Where?”

“Lower corner. When the air is damp.”

“It isn't damp now.”

“It will be.”

I arrived in time to hear her sigh.

“You are allowed to recover before inspecting the building.”

Vaust looked toward me from his pillows.

“Is she always this unreasonable?”

“Usually more.”

Liora pointed at the chair beside his bed.

“Sit down before you encourage him.”

I sat.

Vaust watched her leave, then lowered his voice.

“The hinge is sound. It's the frame.”

I promised to tell Perrin.

That appeared to satisfy him more than the previous ten minutes of reassurance about food, blankets, and the healers' plans.

For someone who had been made to hold a road between worlds, an ordinary troublesome door seemed almost restful.

He could sit upright for a little longer that morning.

Evelyn had examined the burns beneath his cuffs and found that the deepest damage came from the repeated strain of opening the same forced connection.

His strength was returning.

His wrists had not received the news.

He winced when he reached for his cup, then accepted my help without pretending it had not hurt.

“Fenrir tells me you ask questions,” he said.

“Several people complain about it.”

“Good. Ask one.”

I looked at the bandages.

“Do you want visitors this morning?”

He studied me.

Then laughed softly.

“Yes. That was one.”

I gave him time to drink before asking the question I had brought with me.

“Does the Hall of Accord exist somewhere we can reach without a gate?”

Vaust set down the cup.

The humor left his face, but he did not look away.

“Yes.”

Caldris and Thesra joined us after Evelyn agreed that Vaust could manage a short conversation.

We brought no great map to spread across his bed. Mary sent a small sketching board and a clerk who could write quietly without requiring every sentence to be repeated.

“The hall was built in a basin beneath the northern heights,” Vaust told us. “Stone foundations. Wells. Storehouses. A road that once climbed the western slope.”

“Once?” Thor asked from the doorway.

“I haven't walked it in years.”

She came in and took the remaining chair.

“And the sky we saw?”

“The courtyard's boundary changes what is admitted. Light. Air. Weather. It can make noon linger where the outer hills are already dark.”

I remembered the pale paving beneath the wrong sky.

“But the building hasn't moved.”

“No. Its doors have.”

Caldris leaned forward.

That distinction interested him immediately.

Vaust noticed and lifted one bandaged hand.

“It will interest you less when you see how many doors he has made answer to the same corridor.”

There were ordinary roads to the outer settlement.

Food arrived by wagon. Firewood came from managed woodland beyond the basin. Servants and laborers lived in buildings that had no divine thresholds at all.

The inner court was another matter.

“You can stand beside the wall and still be farther from the prisoners than someone walking through a gate fifty miles away,” Vaust said.

Thesra nodded slowly.

“The passage determines the distance.”

“And whose permission determines the passage,” Caldris added.

I looked at the unfinished sketch.

“Can we reach the servants?”

“Perhaps.”

“Without entering the courtyard?”

“Yes, if the western road remains open.”

Thor glanced toward me.

We had both heard what mattered.

There were people outside the impossible doors. People who might know which windows were lit, which carts entered, which names the guards used when they thought no one important was listening.

The next step did not require Vaust to open anything.

It required us to find a road.

Evelyn ended the visit when his answers began to slow.

He objected with far less energy than he intended.

“I've barely told them anything.”

“You've given them enough work for today.”

She moved the sketching board out of his reach.

“Sleep.”

After we left, Mary compared his landmarks with the oldest maps the archivists had found.

They disagreed about names.

They agreed about a ridge shaped like a broken hook, a spring beneath the western climb, and a road passing an abandoned quarry before entering the basin.

Eliza selected a small group to examine the approach from outside the settled ground.

No uniforms from Greykeep. No stolen seals. No pretending to be an expected prisoner escort.

They would look, speak with travelers where it could be done without drawing attention, and return.

Thor watched the last of the instructions being copied.

“We have been following his cages,” she said.

I looked at the ordinary road on the map.

“Now we follow his supper.”

Mary underlined the spring.

“And the people who carry it.”

The western reports arrived while the scouts prepared to leave.

Surtr's troops were repairing a crossing north of Rillcross. Our watchers had counted additional timber wagons and another band of giants along the river.

The town's surviving families were well beyond the immediate danger now.

That did not make the loss of their homes smaller.

The next threatened settlements had begun moving their children and grain stores before the enemy reached them. Lexander was coordinating the road patrols with the local commanders rather than trying to defend every mile with the same exhausted soldiers.

The dragons had identified a route by which fresh supplies could reach those defenders.

One of the phoenixes had carried a message through smoke thick enough that the watchtower never saw him arrive.

He spent most of the report complaining about the smell.

Thor smiled at that line.

Then she turned the page and resumed placing units on the map.

For three days, we would remain in Havenreach unless the situation changed.

I did not argue.

That surprised her more than I thought it should.

Avarn used the first of those mornings mercilessly.

He placed a shield against the practice-yard wall and told me to defend it.

“From you?”

“From me.”

Thor stood on the opposite side with a practice hammer resting against her shoulder.

“And me.”

Elyan watched from beside the gate. Vaerun leaned against the wall, looking far too entertained.

The exercise lasted less than a minute.

I moved to answer Thor, let Avarn's first cut pass through my storm form, and discovered that he had never intended to strike me.

His wooden blade touched the shield.

“Again,” he said.

On the second attempt, I stayed closer and took Thor's hammer against my guard hard enough to numb both hands.

On the third, I remembered that the empty ground beside the shield was somewhere I could arrive, not merely somewhere I could retreat through.

Lightning snapped across the yard.

My sword met Avarn's before it reached the target.

Thor came in immediately.

I did not attempt to stop her hammer with the sword.

I turned to wind, let the head pass through my shoulder, and struck her wrist with my own practice hammer as I moved around the blow.

She changed her grip before I could disarm her.

Avarn's next cut came low.

I caught it, stepped in, and turned the edge just as he had made me practice until my forearms ached.

The flat of my blade touched his coat above the hip.

For one extraordinary heartbeat, he was the one looking down at the place I had reached.

Then Thor tapped the shield.

I stared at her.

She smiled.

“You became pleased.”

Avarn lowered his sword.

“He had reason.”

I looked back at him.

The god of swordsmanship inclined his head once.

Then he pointed toward the shield.

“Now do it while remembering why you're here.”

I had never been happier to hear someone tell me to start again.

When I returned to our rooms, Adriana was standing beside the window with a measuring ribbon in one hand and an expression of personal grievance.

“The dress has changed,” she announced.

Evelyn looked up from the couch.

“Has it?”

“Considerably.”

I stopped in the doorway.

“Would agreeing be dangerous?”

“Very,” Evelyn said.

Adriana gave us both a look before allowing herself to laugh.

The baby moved while I was helping untie the ribbon. She caught my wrist and placed my hand against the curve beneath her ribs.

A firm little push answered.

I stood still.

Practice, maps, the northern road—all of it receded for a moment.

“Someone has opinions,” I said.

“Mostly about where my ribs should be.”

Evelyn came to stand beside us, her hand settling over mine.

The movement came again.

Adriana watched our faces with a tenderness that made me forget whatever clever thing I had intended to say.

Liora found me later with a request from Lethan.

He wanted to hear someone reading something that was not a report about his treatment.

“I offered a history,” she said.

“Did he accept?”

“He asked whether everyone in it died.”

“A reasonable question.”

“I decided to find another book.”

We went to the library, where Julian and Elowen were sorting the next stack for the lodging halls.

Lysandra had brought several books from Concordia, and Cassia was trying to determine whether one adventure story was missing a chapter or merely very badly written.

When we explained what Lethan wanted, Julian immediately reached for a small volume.

“This one.”

“Do people die?” I asked.

He thought carefully.

“The uncle is believed dead, but he isn't. He owns an inn.”

Elowen nodded.

“Everyone is more annoyed than relieved when they find him.”

I accepted the book.

That sounded promising.

Lethan listened while I read the first chapter.

The story concerned a young courier, a missing inheritance, and a mule with a stronger understanding of roads than any of the human characters.

I reached the part where the courier attempted to impress a village magistrate and was promptly mistaken for the man sent to repair the privy.

Lethan's bell rang.

I stopped at once.

Liora looked up from her notes.

Words formed slowly beside his hand.

Read that again.

I did.

This time, his mouth moved before I finished.

The sound was brief and rough, more breath than laughter.

It was laughter anyway.

Liora lowered her eyes to the page in her lap and waited until she could look up without making too much of it.

When I reached the chapter's end, Lethan rested for several minutes.

Then he wrote two words.

Bring it.

“Tomorrow?”

One blink.

Yes.

I left the bookmark where he could see it.

In the corridor, Perrin sat on the floor beside Pellen's chair, adjusting a new brace. Aldren held the discarded one across his knees.

“Who fitted this?” Aldren asked.

“A guard,” Pellen said. “He said wood was wood.”

Perrin paused with his fingers on the buckle.

“An opinion he should keep well away from stairs.”

Bera snorted from the neighboring chair.

The boy looked down as Perrin loosened the strap another notch.

“Will I be able to carry things?”

“Eventually, perhaps,” Liora said. “Today, I want you to tell us where it hurts.”

He glanced toward Bera before pointing beneath his knee.

Perrin removed the brace immediately and marked the offending edge with chalk.

No one told Pellen to endure it. No one mentioned what another delay might cost.

As we left them, I heard him ask whether the padding could be blue.

“It can,” Perrin said, as solemnly as if they were designing a royal carriage.

Merek's treatment continued in the adjoining infirmary wing.

The remaining binding no longer answered commands from outside, but Caldris found fragments that tightened whenever Merek began to change form.

They worked slowly.

His shoulder was healing. His sleep was less reliable.

Melody visited with a map and listened while he named streams, hunting paths, and the settlements whose smoke could once be seen from the northern ridges.

When he grew tired, she folded the map rather than asking him to finish the last valley.

“There are more,” he told her.

“Then we'll come back to them.”

He watched her put away the pencil.

“You believe some might still be there?”

“We have people who can look.”

She gave him that answer and no larger promise.

Outside his room, she showed me the places he had marked.

Several lay beyond routes already used by our allied scouts.

We could add questions to journeys people were making anyway.

Merek's map would leave Greykeep before he could.

Corvin joined Mary and Melody for supper the following evening.

I knew because the three of them occupied the small table near the garden doors, where Mary normally worked when she wanted to pretend she was enjoying the weather.

There were no ledgers.

There was, however, a folded paper beside Corvin's plate.

Mary noticed me looking as I passed.

“A list of books,” she said.

“I hadn't asked.”

“You were preparing to.”

Melody smiled into her cup.

Corvin appeared to be enjoying himself despite the risk of being mistaken for a clerk.

Later, when I returned through the garden, they had moved to the bench beneath the wall. Melody sat with her legs tucked sideways, her hand resting comfortably in Mary's.

Corvin was telling them about an aunt who had once dismissed three dancing instructors in a single month.

“Why?” Melody asked.

“They kept disagreeing with her about the music.”

“Was she wrong?”

“Frequently. She considered that irrelevant.”

Mary laughed before she could disguise it as a cough.

She found me the next morning while I was signing the requests Eleanor had left.

“Corvin has asked whether he may court me,” she said.

I set down the pen.

“Again?”

“With a clearer understanding of my answer.”

“Which is?”

She looked toward the open window.

“That Melody is part of my life. That my work will remain demanding. That affection is not an appointment he can secure by waiting outside my door.”

“He knows all that?”

“He said he had begun to notice.”

I smiled.

Mary's ears moved in warning, but she did not stop speaking.

“Melody and I have talked. At length. I told him we may continue, slowly.”

“I'm glad you told me.”

“I am telling you because palace households invent things when left without facts.”

“Of course.”

She picked up one of the signed papers, examined it, and put it back.

Then, more quietly, she added, “I am also glad.”

I left that answer alone.

The northern scouts returned on the third evening.

They had found the abandoned quarry.

Beyond it, the western road climbed through a narrow cut and opened toward the basin Vaust had described. They had not approached the inner walls, but from the outer slope they saw storehouses, workers' cottages, two wells, and a long building used for receiving wagons.

The Hall of Accord rose above them.

Part of it, at least.

The scouts disagreed about how many towers they had seen.

One counted three.

Another counted four, though she had watched from the same ridge only minutes later.

Caldris made a note without looking surprised.

“The inner boundaries are still active.”

Eliza set the sketches side by side.

The outer settlement matched in both.

That gave us ground we could begin to trust.

“People?” Thor asked.

“Plenty,” the scout replied. “And some of them are trying to leave.”

They had met a carter at a roadside shelter below the climb.

He was bringing down empty barrels and a broken handcart whose wheel had been tied in place with rope.

He complained about the road first.

Then the payment.

Only after our scout offered to help lash the wheel more securely did he mention that the receiving officers had begun keeping workers inside after their deliveries.

“For questioning,” he had said. “Until the stolen property is recovered.”

The property was Vaust.

The man did not know that name.

He knew two kitchen girls who had failed to return to their families. He knew a mason whose tools had been sent home without him. He knew the outer gate now closed before sunset instead of afterward.

He also knew when the next food convoy would climb the road.

“He didn't ask who we served,” the scout told us.

“Did he suspect?” Eliza asked.

“He told us the same time twice before he left.”

Thor studied the sketches until everyone else had finished speaking.

“We do not put soldiers in food sacks and hope the court forgets how to count.”

No one had proposed it yet.

Several expressions suggested she had saved time by saying it first.

“We meet the carters below the climb,” she continued. “Find out who is being held. Learn whether there is a way to get those people out without entering the inner hall.”

“And the convoy?” I asked.

“We keep it out of the fighting if there is fighting.”

Vaust listened from the chair Evelyn had allowed him for the meeting. His hands rested on cushions in his lap.

“There is a small counting room beside the receiving shed,” he said. “No altered thresholds. Othellos's officers use it when they don't want ordinary clerks hearing what happens farther in.”

He looked at Adeline.

“That may be where they are keeping your people.”

She leaned toward the drawing.

For the first time that evening, she asked for the pencil.

We finished late.

Outside, the garden lamps had been lowered, and the windows near the infirmary shone softly above the paths. Somewhere inside, Vaust was being persuaded back to bed by a healer who had heard enough explanations of why he was not tired.

I walked past Fenrir's pavilion on my way upstairs.

He lifted his head.

“A road?”

“A road.”

“Not another door?”

“Not yet.”

He considered that, then settled again.

“Good. He has spent too long deciding how everyone comes to him.”

I stood beside the garden wall for a moment.

Beyond the city, people were preparing wagons of flour, onions, lamp oil, and firewood for a court that had grown powerful enough to steal gods.

It still needed someone to bring its bread.

And those people had begun telling strangers when the road would be busy.

I went upstairs with the first useful thing I had learned about Othellos that did not concern how much stronger he had become.

The people around him were still people.

Some of them wanted a way out.