Chapter 613: Greywater

Her father had covered the long table in the north gallery with the sea.

There were charts from every tide station on the western coast, held flat at the corners with whatever had been nearest to hand: a silver inkwell, a dagger, a pair of little jade weights. Over the charts lay sheets of soundings in the cramped hand of naval clerks, and over those, in his own hand, ran lines in red ink. They curved down from the north, bent around the shoulder of the continent, and stopped in a spray of small crosses somewhere off the southern shelf, where the water was deepest.

Anastasia stood where she had stood every morning for a year: at his left shoulder, a pace back, close enough to be seen as his daughter and far enough not to be mistaken for an advisor.

He had not punished her.

She still thought about that more than anything else. She had walked out of Korreth on foot and come home to the capital alone, by road and then by sea, braced for whatever the Emperor did to a daughter who had crossed a battlefield toward the weapon he had just lost. She had rehearsed answers. She had decided which of them she would refuse to give.

He had looked up from a report when she came in, looked at her for perhaps two seconds, and asked, "Was it worth the walk?"

She had said yes.

He had nodded and gone back to the report. In the twelve months since, he had never raised it again. She understood now what it had been: a judgment about scale. Her defiance was too small a thing to be worth his anger, and that was the cruelest response he could have chosen.

"Here," her father said, and tapped a cross off the southern shelf. "And here. Eleven days apart."

The naval officer across the table, a grey-bearded man with tide-salt still on his cuffs, leaned in. "Yes, Majesty. The Hesket station lost an anchor chain on the second sounding. The chain was rated for a warship. It was cut through clean."

"Cut," the Emperor repeated.

"Or bitten, Majesty. The divers couldn’t agree."

Her father smiled.

It was the smile she had seen at the winter gala, the night he fought Varian Dusk and enjoyed every second of it. It made him look younger than his fifty-seven years. The faint line on his left cheekbone lifted with it.

Anastasia kept her eyes on the charts.

She had known what that line was for a year now. She had known since a clearing two hours past the eastern boundary, when Lancelot told her in a flat, careful voice that it was the only mark anyone from his mother’s world had ever managed to leave on the Emperor. She had traced the air near that scar when she was seven years old, climbing onto the arm of his chair, and asked where it had come from. A training accident, she had been told.

She had not told him she knew. She had not decided yet what knowing was for.

The gallery doors opened.

Ormond came in the way he always did, as if he had built the room and was checking that it had been kept to specification. He was lean and exact. His hair was grey at the temples and cut close. He wore the dark coat of the Imperial Household with nothing on it at all: no medals, no rank, nothing a stranger could use to measure him. He carried a leather ledger under one arm.

He had been carrying something else, a year ago, when he had stood at the far end of this same table and delivered the message Lancelot gave him. Tell him what you saw. Ormond had told him. He had described the clearing, the binding, the moment it failed, the Master-rank crossing of a boy with no Authority whom Ormond himself had spent most of a childhood emptying out. He had spoken for a long time. Anastasia had watched his hands stay perfectly still while he did it.

When he finished, her father had said, "A loss," and asked for the next report.

That had been the whole of it.

Now Ormond stopped at the foot of the table and bowed precisely. "Majesty. The spring intake figures."

"Leave them," the Emperor said, without looking up.

Ormond did not leave them. He opened the ledger on the one corner of the table not covered by the sea and stood beside it.

"Two hundred and eleven secured under the statute since the thaw," he said. "Every one alive. All within the age range. The western provinces account for most of them. Holloway, Carrow, the Marrin valley." He turned a page. "Fourteen show grades of S or above. Two show a resonance pattern I have not seen since the boy."

The Emperor drew another red line, very slowly, around the curve of the southern shelf.

"I am asking for the Greywater site to be reopened," Ormond said. "And for authority to extend intake to the eastern ports. A network has been moving them across the water."

"The statute’s older than I am," her father said. "Use it."

"Majesty, if even one of them takes the installation—"

"Then you’ll have replaced what you lost." He set down the pen at last and looked up, and his eyes were mild and entirely without interest. "Good for you, Ormond. Spend it however you like. I only ask that you stop telling me about it."

For an instant Ormond’s face changed, in a way Anastasia could not have named. It was gone almost before it arrived, folded away behind the same exact stillness, and he bowed again.

"Majesty."

He closed the ledger. As he turned to go, his eyes passed over her, briefly, the way they passed over furniture.

Her father had already gone back to the sea. "The Hesket divers," he said to the naval officer. "I want them down again by the end of the week."

"Majesty, the depth—"

"I know the depth." The smile again, private and pleased. "Something down there is waking up. I would like to know what it ate."

Anastasia stood at his shoulder for another hour, while the tide officers came and went and the red lines multiplied across the charts. She said nothing. She was very good at saying nothing in this room. Inside the palace walls the Blessed by Mana hummed around her like a hearth, warm and steady, and she let it hold her up.

Two hundred and eleven.

She had seen what the installation made of one child. He had stood behind her for years, and she had never once understood what she was looking at.

When the audience ended she walked back to her rooms at the same unhurried pace as always, closed the door, and sat down at her writing desk. She took out a sheet of plain paper with no crest on it.

At the top she wrote one word, in a hand she had spent a year making less like her own.

Greywater.

Then she sat for a long time with the pen above the page, deciding who in the world she trusted enough to send it to.