Chapter 158: Four Questions

Carrying eleven salted apprentices up a spiral staircase is a lot like moving house, if the furniture was breathing and kept sagging in the middle.

"Mind his head," Lyra hissed.

"I’m minding it!"

"You’re *dragging* it."

"I’m minding it *while* dragging it!" Castor wheezed. He had one apprentice over each shoulder and a third balanced on his mattock like a stretcher. He looked like a bear who’d lost a bet.

I took the last one myself. She was small, light as a coat on a hook, and I’d carried her halfway up before I realized her eyelids were moving.

"Hey," I said quietly. "Hey. You with me?"

Where her face should have been, there was only smooth skin. But her mouth opened. A dry, cracked sound came out, and then, shaky and clear: "It... counts."

I stopped on the step.

"What counts?"

"Seats." Her hand found my sleeve and held on like a drowning thing. "Seven. By the festival. It needs seven. It said I was... the fourth."

"Marit?" Lyra had come down two steps. "Marit, it’s me. It’s Lyra."

The girl’s mouth worked. Then her fingers went slack, and she was out cold again, breathing slow and even.

Lyra looked at me. I looked at Lyra.

"Fourth," Lyra whispered.

"Don’t tell Gareth that yet," I said.

"*Valen—*"

"I mean it. Not in front of everyone. Let me think about who we tell first."

*Fourth,* Aurelix said in my head. *Six at the table, and the seventh was meant for you. So who are the other five?*

I really hated how good a question that was.

"Valen?" Castor called down from above, panting. "You coming? This one’s getting heavy!"

"She’s not heavy," I called back. "You’re just out of shape!"

"I’m carrying *three!*"

"Then you’re doing great!"

He swore at me all the way up. It helped, a little.

---

Gareth was waiting at the top of the stairs with half the Sector B guard behind him, torches up, swords out. He took one look at the line of faceless, salt-crusted apprentices stumbling out of the dark and the color drained out of his face.

"Stand down," he told the guards. His voice came out strangled. "Stand *down.* Get healers. Get blankets. Move!"

The next hour was chaos. Healers poured in. Somebody threw a blanket over my shoulders and I let them. Casper got carried off to the infirmary with Pollux glued to his side. Castor sat on a barrel with his head in his hands.

Solene gave the report. She did it well. She said *a cult storehouse beneath the ruins, salt-preserved victims, a ritual altar, a hostile entity.* She didn’t say *Giver of Bread.* She didn’t say anything about my scythe.

I noticed that.

Mirain stood off to one side, silent, with her coat buttoned to the throat and one hand flat against her ribs. Nobody asked her why. Nobody asked her anything. She looked, to everyone else, like a Representative who’d had a very bad day.

I was the only person who watched her touch the loaf through the cloth and flinch.

"Sector B is closed," Gareth said, when the report was done. He sounded ten years older. "Every trial, every patrol. Nobody goes in or out without my signature. The Tribunal will be told by morning." He looked at us, all seven. "You did well. You did *very* well. Go rest."

Nobody argued.

It wasn’t until the others had drifted off toward their dorms that I felt a hand on my elbow.

"Walk with me," Solene said.

---

We went to the old well behind the east gatehouse. It’s a dead end, nobody’s business but the pigeons’. She sat on the rim. I sat on a stack of firewood, and for a long minute neither of us said anything.

"You didn’t mention it in the report," I said.

"No."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted to ask you first." She had her rapier across her knees, and she was running her thumb along the guard. "Four questions. I’ve been counting. You can answer them, or you can lie, and I’ll know either way."

"That’s a lot of confidence."

"I’m a Representative. It’s most of the job." She almost smiled. "Question one. Are you Valerian Sanguis?"

I thought about lying. I thought about it for exactly as long as it takes to remember she’d seen the scythe.

"Yeah."

"Question two. Why are you *here?* The Governor of Bergis doesn’t need to shelve books."

"Because the Governor of Bergis gets a seat at the head table and a bowing line," I said. "Valen gets to sit in the back and watch who’s rotten."

She blinked. "That’s a very Sanguis answer."

"It’s a very *spare* answer. Seventh child, remember?" I shrugged. "Big families have big problems. I wanted to see the Academy before anyone had time to put on a show."

"Question three." She wasn’t smiling now. "The fire. That wasn’t mana. That wasn’t alchemy, and it wasn’t a Blood Art. What was it?"

*Careful, darling,* Aurelix murmured.

"It’s something I’m not going to explain tonight," I said. "Not because I’m hiding it from *you.* Because if I tell you, you become a person who knows, and some people don’t survive knowing. Ask me again in a month, and I’ll think about it."

Solene was quiet a long moment.

"That’s the most honest non-answer I’ve ever heard."

"I get that a lot."

"Last one." She finally met my eyes. "Today. In the hall. When you grabbed Mirain’s wrist. I was ten feet away, and I saw your face." Her voice dropped. "That wasn’t a clerk’s face. That wasn’t even a governor’s. That was somebody who’d already lost people he couldn’t save. Who *are* you, Valen?"

It hit harder than the god had.

I’d gotten used to people looking at the mask. Nobody had looked past it in a very long time.

"I’m a guy who’s trying not to do it again," I said finally. "That’s the whole answer."

She nodded slowly.

"Okay," she said. "Four. That’s four." She stood, sheathed the rapier, and dusted off her skirt. "I’m not telling anyone. Not Gareth, not the Tribunal. Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Because you carried eleven strangers up that staircase with a cracked rib," she said. "And I think the person who does that should get to choose when to be found out."

I stared at her.

"You noticed the rib."

"I notice everything." She turned to go, then stopped. "For the record, I still think you’re an idiot. But you’re a *useful* idiot, and I’ve got a long list of those I’m willing to be loyal to. It’s a short list."

"Am I on it?"

"Provisionally." She walked away. "Don’t make me regret it."

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

*I like her,* Aurelix said.

"You like everyone who’s rude to me."

*Only the ones who’re right.*

---

I should’ve gone to bed. I went to the library instead.

It was past midnight, the lamps dark, the long reading hall empty. I slipped between the shelves to the back wall, where the Reference section runs out of daylight, and found the treatise that had gotten me caught. *Transitional Forms of the Shapeshifting Staff, by V. Sanguis.* I’d written it at eleven, between running a province and being too short to see over the council table. Nobody had warned me it would end up on the Academy’s reference shelf, where a girl with a rapier and a Thursday memory could find it.

I put it back with a sigh. "You could’ve been less interesting."

"It’s a good book."

I didn’t jump. I’d have been proud of that if my heart hadn’t tried to climb out of my throat.

Seraphina stood at the end of the aisle in a plain grey robe, her hair down, a single candle in her hand. Her eyes were blue, and her face was white as paper.

"Seraphina. It’s the middle of the night—"

"Elizabeth woke me." She came closer. The candle shook. "She won’t say much. She won’t say *anything,* really. But she says something is awake that shouldn’t be, and she says..." She swallowed. "She says it wasn’t a mistake."

My blood slowed.

"What wasn’t?"

"Whoever woke it. They did it on purpose." Seraphina’s mouth shook. "Elizabeth knew the voice. She knew the *name.* She says she’s heard it before, a long time ago, before she was sealed. She says it’s one of the Lords."

"Which one?" It came out quieter than I meant.

The candle flame bent sideways, as if a draft had gone through the library. Seraphina’s eyes went violet, just for a second, and a voice that wasn’t hers spoke from her mouth, very flat and very tired.

"The Ninth. Xul’Gorgoth. He told me he’d let it sleep." A pause. "He *promised.*"

Then the violet went out, and Seraphina swayed on her feet, and I caught her before she hit the floor.

"Valen," she whispered, clinging to my arm. "What does it mean?"

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

I was thinking of a table with seven chairs, a god who fed people, a loaf of bread buttoned inside a girl’s coat, and a Demon Lord who’d made a promise to a woman locked inside another woman’s head.

Whatever Xul’Gorgoth was building, he wasn’t building it alone.

And somewhere in the back of the dark, something that had once been a god was patiently counting the days until the festival.