Chapter 614: Plain Paper

Valerica did not argue against going. She argued against going stupidly, which was the more useful argument, and she had it spread across the table within an hour of Brynn being carried up the mountain.

"Our faces are known," she said. "Not wanted, exactly. There’s no warrant. But every Household agent on the western coast has seen a sketch of the five of us who were standing in the Grand Hall when the Emperor walked in. Ashe has horns. Nyx has eyes nobody forgets. I have a family name that opens doors I can’t afford to have opened." She tapped the map Brynn had drawn for them in charcoal, a crude curve of coastline with three villages marked along it. "Carrow is a fishing town of six hundred people. We will be the most interesting thing that has happened there in a decade."

"So we don’t go in as ourselves," Ashe said.

"So we go in as something nobody looks at twice. Which none of us has ever successfully been."

Vane said, "I have."

Valerica looked at him, then wrote something in the margin and moved on, which was as close as she ever came to conceding a point in public.

Isole had been quiet, her tea untouched. Down the corridor, Brynn slept under a fever draught. The four children slept in the next room, all in one bed because they had refused to be separated, and the youngest had held Isole’s sleeve until his breathing evened out.

"Someone has to stay with them," Isole said.

"Kaito’s people—" Ashe began.

"Kaito’s people will feed them and guard them and be kind to them, and I’m grateful." Isole turned the cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. "But one of them has an Authority that keeps flaring when he dreams. I felt it twice last night. If nobody who understands that is near him the next time it happens, he’ll hurt himself, or someone else, and then he’ll learn that he’s exactly what the men with the tags told him he was."

The table went still.

"You want to stay," Vane said.

"No," Isole said. "I want to go. I’m saying it so that we decide it properly, instead of me deciding it alone in a corridor at two in the morning."

They decided it properly. It took most of an hour, and in the end it was Ryuken who settled it, by way of a note sent down from the sanctum. His compound, he wrote, had kept dangerous children alive for three hundred years and saw no reason to stop now. One of the older healers in the eastern wing had trained under a Sylvaris defector forty years ago; she would be moved into the room across the hall by evening. Isole read the note twice and then said, to the empty doorway, "Thank you," in the voice she used for things she meant all the way down.

That left Nyx.

She had spent the meeting at the window with her arms folded, looking at the sea.

"I’ll get us across," she said, when they all turned to her. "That isn’t the problem."

"Then what is?" Ashe asked.

"The water’s loud." Nyx did not turn around. "I’ve been listening to it for a year. I know its moods better than I know the island’s. And it’s louder now than it has ever been, in a way I can’t read." She was quiet for a moment. "Whatever touched Brynn’s boat, I want to know where it is before we’re sitting on top of it in something made of planks."

"Can you find out?"

"I can try. Give me two nights on the cliff."

Mara had not said anything. She sat at the end of the table with her ledger closed in front of her and both hands flat on top of it, which was what she did when she wanted to say something and was not yet sure she was allowed to.

Vane saw it. He had been waiting for it, if he was honest, and dreading it a little.

"Mara," he said.

"I’m coming," she said.

"Mara—"

"I know what the tags are." She said it to the ledger, not to him. Her fingers had found the strap that held it closed and were working it back and forth. "You don’t. Nobody here does. They count you so they can move you. If you’re a number, it doesn’t matter where you go. You’re still the same number." She stopped. Her throat moved. "In the Council they gave me one before they gave me a name."

Nobody spoke.

"I can find them," Mara said. "The seven. If someone writes them down, I can find where they went. That’s what counting is for." She finally looked up. "That’s what I’m for."

The words landed under his ribs, where his own unfinished sentence had been sitting for a year. He thought about the eleven-year-old the Council had tested and the twelve-year-old two captains had come to kill, and about what leaving her here, safe, would teach her.

"You stay with me," he said. "Every hour. Not with Ashe, not with Nyx. With me."

"Yes."

"If I tell you to run, you run, and you don’t count anything on the way."

Mara considered this seriously.

"I’ll count afterward," she said.

Ashe laughed, short and surprised, and the tension at the table broke a little.

The letter came the next evening.

It came up from the port in a courier’s satchel with the coastal reports, folded small and sealed with plain wax. The outside said only Razar compound, Korreth. The courier said it had crossed on a grain freighter from the west, passed hand to hand by people paid not to ask who it was from.

Ryuken opened it at the table, read it once, and handed it to Vane without a word.

It was a single sheet of plain paper. The hand was neat and careful and somehow anonymous, the writing of someone who had worked hard to sound like no one in particular.

Greywater, in the Marrin valley. It has been closed for years. It is being reopened. Wagons from the western provinces are routed through Holloway and leave for it on the first day of each month.

Two hundred and eleven since the thaw. Fourteen graded S or above.

He does not care. I want that understood. He has been told and he does not care. The man who cares is the one who made the first one.

There was no signature. There didn’t need to be.

Vane read it twice and passed it to Ashe. Ashe passed it to Nyx, who went very still.

"The first of the month," Valerica said. She was already counting. "That’s nineteen days."

"Then we leave in two," Vane said.

Nobody argued.

Later, when the others had gone to bed, he sat alone in the kitchen with the letter on the table in front of him. He thought about a girl in a buttoned coat walking down a mountain road toward the capital, shaking each of their hands at the gate and saying nothing. He thought about what it had cost her to write he does not care about her own father, even in a hand that wasn’t hers.

He folded the letter and put it inside his coat, over his heart, beside a map his father had given him on another morning in this compound, for a road he never ended up taking.

Then he went to find Nyx on the cliff.