Chapter 360 - 360: Whoever You Left Alone

They did not run to the maps.

Rigel hated that the boy had said it.

Hating it did not make it unused.

"Cynthia. Stay on the boy. If the healer comes back, she stays in the hall. If Pell speaks without a question, you gag him. If the body changes, you cut the legs first."

Cynthia's mouth opened.

Closed.

"You want me on a child while the castle rings."

"I want you on the mouth that already knows my coat."

He was already moving.

"Mesterica. Archive door only. You look. You do not step in. If the dust is wrong, you wait."

"And you?" Mesterica asked.

"The one we left alone in this village."

The watchman at the miller's house.

The man who would not cross the threshold.

The man who had said the smell was flour in the rain, then stood in the yard with a ring of keys and a nail-hammered well cover.

They had walked away from him like he was furniture.

Riverbend's lane was shorter on the way back.

Or it felt shorter.

Doors stood open that had been shut.

A woman drawing water looked up, smiled with neighbor-bright teeth, and kept smiling after her eyes had already left them.

Mesterica saw it too.

"Returned."

"Don't engage," Rigel said.

"If they ask you a castle question, you didn't hear it."

The miller's yard was empty.

The well cover was still nailed.

The front door they had closed was open the width of a hand.

The watchman sat on the bench under the eaves.

His spear leaned beside him, unused.

On his knees was the wooden horse from under the table, the one with the chewed ear.

He was stroking the remaining ear with a thumb, over and over, the way a man calms a real animal.

"You came back," he said, not surprised.

"Good. I didn't know if I should follow the house or the well."

Rigel stopped at the edge of the chalk-pale prints that had crept, sometime in the last hour, from the inner floor onto the step.

"Where is the watch," he said.

"I'm the watch."

The man smiled.

It was the same tired village smile from before.

The eyes were not.

"You left the door knowing a thing. That's the same as leaving a person. It gets lonely."

Mesterica's sword cleared two fingers of steel.

"Name."

"Still Jorn," he said.

"This morning too. I remember my wife's soup. I remember the boy Pell asking for a ride in a cart last autumn. I don't remember putting this toy in my hands."

He held the horse out.

Rigel did not take it.

"Who told you to wait."

Jorn looked past them, toward the trees.

"She did. The miller's wife. The one we didn't find. She said the strong one would come back for the piece, and if I sat here I wouldn't have to go into the lights."

His thumb stopped on the chewed ear.

"I would like not to go into the lights."

The wrong bell sounded again, thinner at this distance, bent in the middle like a note that had been borrowed.

Mesterica's head turned despite herself.

"That's the north tower," she said.

"Not the archive wing."

Rigel filed that.

Pell had pointed them at maps.

The castle had rung from a different throat.

"Jorn. Did she give you a question to ask me."

The watchman nodded, grateful, as if Rigel had taken a tray from his hands.

"How many people in Gousel mansion still wear your new collar."

He said it carefully, like a message he was afraid to drop.

"And whether the little one still looks at a glass bird when she's scared."

Rigel's face did not change.

Inside, something small and sharp turned over.

Miena.

The bag at her chest.

A cheap blue thing on a far floor.

That was not a question a Riverbend watchman should be able to hold.

"You can tell her I don't answer mail from a ditch," Rigel said.

Jorn's smile shook.

"Please answer something. If I go back empty she said I have to walk. I don't want to walk. The last time I walked I came home and my spear was already sitting down."

Mesterica stepped in close enough that the man had to see the blade.

"If you stand, I will assume you are leaving this yard. If you leave this yard, I will assume you are not Jorn."

"I'm trying to be," he whispered.

"That's the worst part. I can feel where he ends and I start, and the seam is getting thinner."

Rigel crouched, same height he had used on Pell, different purpose.

He did not wrap kindness around it.

"Then hold the seam. You sit. You keep the toy. You do not go to the well. You do not go to the trees. If a woman calls from the fence, you do not answer with her name."

"What do I answer with."

"Nothing. Silence is the only door they haven't copied yet."

Jorn swallowed.

Nodded.

The wooden horse knocked his knee, once, polite.

Rigel stood and turned.

"Archive was bait. North tower is the hand. Cynthia is on the mouth. We're late for all three."

They were ten steps down the lane when Jorn spoke again, not loud.

"Lord Gousel."

Rigel looked back.

The watchman's face was his own for one clean instant, ugly with effort.

"If I stop being Jorn, don't let the boy near my keys. He already asked how the well cover comes off. I told him no. I don't know if I said it with my mouth or theirs."

Then the instant passed, and he went back to stroking the chewed ear, humming the third-bell change under his breath.

They took the horses hard toward the old capital.

Mesterica did not waste breath on I told you so.

She saved it for the gate.

The former royal castle had lights in windows that should have been dark.

Repair lanterns, at first glance.

Too many.

Too still.

Erna's crew should have been on the north corridor.

The carts were there.

The stone was there.

The people were standing in a line facing the inner wall, tools down, heads tilted the same degree, as if listening to a beam settle.

Erna was not in the line.

She was at the far end, one palm on the stone, talking into a crack the width of a finger.

Not loud.

The way she had talked to Rigel through a hole that morning, except now her mouth was shaping someone else's patience.

Mesterica hissed.

"That's your craftsman."

"I know."

Rigel walked the line without touching anyone.

A mason's eyes tracked him too smoothly.

A woman's hand flexed on a mallet she was not going to swing.

"Erna," he said.

She did not jump.

She finished a sentence into the crack first.

Then she looked over her shoulder, irritably, like a site chief interrupted on purpose.

"You're late. It asked for the man who writes collars. I said we don't do that kind of ironwork."

Her other hand was tight on her tool bag strap.

The same bag.

The clasp he had undone.

"I also said if it wanted a discount it could come out and negotiate."

A laugh came through the crack.

Not Erna's.

Not quite a woman's.

Not quite one voice.

"She didn't yield on the price," it said, fond.

"We like her. Send the maker in. The north tower is only a mouth. The throat is here."

Rigel looked at the crack.

It was new.

It had not been on Erna's damage list at noon.

The stone around it had the same pale film as the miller's floor.

Mesterica took the left.

Rigel took the right.

Neither of them put a hand on the opening.

"Where is Count Blade," Rigel asked.

Erna's jaw worked.

For a second the prickle was only hers.

"Conference room. He started a sixth bottle and then stopped talking in his own cadence. The civil official is still writing. I checked. The official is still the official. I think."

She jerked her chin at the lined-up crew.

"These ones started answering the wall an hour ago. I told them to take lunch. They didn't."

The wall breathed out a little cold.

"Lord Gousel," it said, using Pell's courtesy and Jorn's tiredness and something older under both.

"You left pieces of yourself in too many rooms. A sister. A slave. A hole in a corridor. A boy who knows your formula. We don't need the archive. You keep making maps of your own attachments."

Rigel smiled with his mouth.

"Then you should have picked a better craftsman. This one charges extra."

Erna shot him a look that was fury and plea nailed to the same board.

"Don't you dare make this about the estimate."

"It's always about the estimate," he said, and set the cloth packet on the floor a full stride from the crack, where the pale film had not yet reached.

The wrapped metal ticked once, like a beetle in a box.

The crack went hungry-quiet.

From the far end of the corridor, Cynthia's voice carried, running, wrong, because she was supposed to be in Riverbend.

"Rigel! The boy is gone. The cords are still knotted. The bed is still warm. And the healer—"

She came around the corner with her blade bare and a smear of porridge-white film on the hem of her cloak.

"—the healer asked me how many collars you keep at home."

Behind her, empty corridor.

No Pell.

Only the third-bell rhythm, tapped now by a mason's mallet against the floor, polite as a visitor knocking from the wrong side of the wall.