Chapter 611: Still Late

Frost had come down on the outer ring overnight, and Nyx was using it against him.

She had been doing it for six minutes. Every time Vane planted his back foot, the Dreamscape laid a second floor over the real one, a thin false layer of stone a finger’s width higher or lower than the truth, so that his weight landed a hair early or a hair late and the strike he had built on top of it came out wrong. It was a small trick, and it had beaten him most mornings that spring.

He stopped trusting the floor.

The Usurper read the frost instead. Real stone held it in a grey crust that cracked under pressure; the Dreamscape’s copy only looked cold. Null Point found the seam between the two in less than a second, and Vane put his heel on the side that broke.

Nyx felt the change and smiled with half her mouth.

"There he is," she said.

She came in low. He let the wings open, no larger than he needed, and the space around his spear arm went taut, the way a sail goes taut when the wind finally decides on a direction. Her strike met it and slid; his counter met her Dreamscape and slid too. For three exchanges neither of them gained a step. Then Nyx sprang back across the ring and laughed out loud.

"Six months ago," she said, "I could put you on that stone before the sun cleared the wall."

"Six months ago I was a sub-band behind you."

"And now you’re not, and I’m meant to be gracious about it." She pushed loose hair off her face. Her breath smoked in the cold. "I’m deciding whether I want to be."

They were even, and both of them knew it. Vane had crossed into Peak Expert in late summer, on a breach night at the salt flats south of the city, with his spear buried in something that had crawled out of the water wearing a shell the size of a barn door. Afterward he had stood in the surf for a long time, not sure what to do with his hands. Since then, sparring with Nyx had stopped being a lesson and become an argument between two people who knew all of each other’s points.

"Again?" he asked.

"Obviously."

They had gone two more rounds when Ryuken spoke from the sanctum doorway.

"You are still late."

He had a cup of tea in one hand and the patience of a man who had watched a great many mornings like this one.

Vane lowered his spear. "On the turn?"

"Not on your feet. Your feet are correct." Ryuken drank. "You decide, and then you begin. There is a space between the two. It is narrower than it was. It is still there."

He went back inside without waiting to see whether that had been understood.

Nyx watched the door close. "He’s been saying that since the autumn."

"I know."

"Do you know what it means yet?"

"No," Vane said, which was not entirely true, and which Nyx, being Nyx, heard.

She let it go, tapped the flat of her blade against his shoulder and walked toward the kitchen. "You owe me breakfast for the floor trick."

"I saw through the floor trick."

"Eventually."

The guest-wing kitchen was warm, crowded and loud.

Ashe sat at the end of the long table with both hands around a bowl of rice porridge and her horns catching the lamplight. Isole was across from her, reading a letter with the expression she reserved for anything written by her mother’s lawyers. Valerica stood at the stove, where she had no business being, adjusting the heat under the kettle by a degree only she could detect.

She was wearing Vane’s coat.

He looked at it. She looked at him. Neither of them said anything until Ashe did.

"She took it at two in the morning," Ashe reported, not raising her eyes from the porridge. "I watched her."

"I requisitioned it," Valerica said. "The east corridor has a draught."

"The east corridor has a draught," Isole agreed, turning a page. "That’s why Nyx had it on Tuesday."

"I returned it on Tuesday."

"You returned it on Thursday."

"Tuesday," Nyx said, sliding into the seat beside Isole and stealing a piece of her bread, "was a statement of intent."

Vane took the only empty chair, directly across from his own coat, and decided silence was the most dignified position available. Ashe’s mouth twitched. She pushed the honey toward him without looking up.

Mara was at the corner of the table where she always sat, with the ledger open and a pen in her hand. She had grown a hand’s width in the past year and had not followed the conversation about the coat at all. She was frowning at a column of numbers.

"There are five coats," she said, "and six hooks. So one hook is always empty. I think that is why they move."

Nobody corrected her.

"What are you counting?" Vane asked.

Mara turned the ledger toward him. The page was ruled into months. Each month had a row of short black marks.

"Breach nights," she said. "Kaito sends the list. I write them down."

He counted with her. Two in the first month after they came back. Then one. Then three. Then a long run of single marks that thickened as the year went on, until the last two months were dense enough to look like a fence.

"Nineteen," Mara said. "Since last winter. On this coast." She put her finger on the first page of the year before, where there were only four. "That was the year before."

The table had gone quiet.

"Kaito says the north coast is worse," she added. "He did not say how much worse. I asked. He said a number and then he said not to write it down." She paused. "I did not write it down."

"What was the number?" Ashe asked.

Mara looked at the ledger, not at any of them. "Thirty-one."

Valerica turned the kettle off.

None of it was news. They had all stood on the coast on enough of those nights to feel the change in their own bodies. Ryuken had been gone three nights running last month, and Kaito had stopped sleeping at the compound at all. Kaito’s scouts still reported the same thing about the north every week: Varian at the fissure, facing the boundary, and nothing coming back down the road.

But it was different, seeing it ruled into columns by someone who did not know how to make numbers frightening and so simply wrote them down.

"The sea is getting worse," Isole said quietly.

"The sea is getting louder," Nyx said. "I don’t know yet if that’s the same thing."

Mara closed the ledger.

Down in the city, the harbor bell began to ring.

Three strokes. A pause. Three more.

Vane was on his feet before he had decided to stand. Ryuken would have had an opinion about that. He knew the pattern. Everyone in Korreth knew it. A breach rang long and without stopping. Three and three meant a ship in trouble, coming in off the open water.

The kitchen door banged open. Sen stood in it, out of breath from the steps, frost still in his hair.

"A boat," he said. "From the west. Its sail’s torn half off." He looked at Vane, and then, for some reason, at Mara. "There are children on it."