Chapter 633: Interesting

Anastasia reached the capital on the ninth evening after Holloway, and went straight to the north gallery without changing her clothes, because she had learned long ago that the only way to tell her father anything was to stand in front of him before he had decided to be elsewhere.

He was at the long table, as she had known he would be. The sea had spread since she left. The charts now ran off both ends of the table and onto a second table that someone had dragged in beside it, and the red lines had multiplied until the western coast looked as if it had been clawed. The great dark scale from the Hesket shelf stood propped against the wall at the far end of the gallery like a shield left by a giant.

"You’re back," her father said, without looking up. "Was it interesting?"

"Yes."

That made him look up. It was a small thing, the lift of his chin, but she had grown up watching for it the way sailors watch for weather.

"Tell me," he said.

She told him. She had rehearsed it on the road until she could say it in the time it took him to lose interest, which she estimated at about two minutes. Greywater, and the floor, and the High Saintess walking out of her own blessing. The convoy on the river road. The ledger burned in the street. A Peak Master on his back on wet stone, and a commoner standing over him, telling a whole valley his name.

"Vane, of Oakhaven," she said. "He asked that it be written down that way."

Her father considered this.

"The boy from the graduation," he said. "With the wings."

"Yes."

"He’s a Master now?"

"Since the first."

"Hm." He went back to the chart in front of him, and for a moment she thought that was the end of it. Then he said, still looking at the soundings, "That’s twice now that Ormond’s been put on the ground by a child from that year. I’d begin to wonder about the year, if I were the kind of man who wondered about years." He made a small mark in red. "Where is Ormond?"

"I don’t know. He rode west."

"Then he’s sulking." He did not sound displeased. He did not sound anything. "He’ll come back when he’s thought of a way to make it sound like a plan." He made another mark. "And the Saintess?"

"She went home."

"She’ll write to me about it. At length." He seemed to find this mildly funny. "Her daughter unmade a Church blessing in front of my seal, and she’ll want me to be outraged on her behalf. Three pages, at least. Possibly four."

"Will you read it?"

"Certainly not," said the Emperor.

She laid the order on the table beside his hand. She had written it herself on the road, in the plainest language she knew: the Greywater site closed, the Household’s western intake suspended, the program ended. It needed only his seal.

He pressed his ring into the wax without reading a word of it.

"There," he said. "Is that what you wanted?"

"Part of it."

"And the rest?"

She thought about the statute. Three hundred years old, written in fear after the Unbound, and still sitting in every regional bureau in the Empire with its two choices for any low-born child who woke up strong. Secure or liquidate. She thought about two hundred and four children in a valley town, and a table that would come back.

She thought about how long it would take to explain, and how long he would listen.

"Another time," she said.

"Good." He smiled at her briefly, warmly, the way he smiled at a clever move in a game he was not playing. "Now. Look at this."

He slid a letter across the table toward her. It was a single sheet of heavy Academy paper, folded once, sealed in pale grey wax she recognized at once. Evangeline’s.

"I asked her for the records," he said. "Very politely. You’d have been proud."

Anastasia unfolded it.

There was almost nothing on the page. Five lines in a narrow, slanting hand.

Majesty. The Academy’s records belong to the Academy, and will stay there. But since you ask so nicely, I will tell you one thing for nothing. The last scale of that size was brought up from the deep three hundred and twelve years ago. We built Zenith the following spring. The water came ashore ten years after that. I suggest you take the hint. E.

Anastasia read it twice. She felt the gallery go very quiet around her, although nothing in it had changed.

"Ten years," she said.

"Eleven, from the scale to the shore." Her father took the letter back and looked at it with deep affection, as though it were a gift. "Three hundred years ago they found a scale, and they were so frightened that they built a school on a rock in the sky and put every prodigy in the world inside it and waited for the sea to come to them. And it did." He set the letter down. "I have no intention of waiting for it to come to me."

"You’re going to the coast."

"I’m going to the coast." He stood, and the Domain moved in the room the way it always did when he stood, very slightly, like the air before a storm. "Hesket first. Then further out. I want to see what’s growing down there before it decides to grow any closer."

At the end of the table, the salt-stained naval officer from the Hesket station cleared his throat. Anastasia had not noticed him there. He had the look of a man who had been waiting for two days for permission to speak.

"Majesty. One more thing from the station."

"Yes?"

"Your Master-at-Arms passed through Hesket six days ago. He had a boy with him. Ten years old, perhaps. He took one of the station’s boats and went out past the shelf." The officer hesitated. "He didn’t say where. The harbormaster thought you’d want to know."

Anastasia went cold all the way through.

Her father, gathering his charts, did not even pause.

"Did he," he said. "Well. If he finds anything, he can tell me about it when I get there."

He went out. The doors closed behind him. The secretaries began to roll the charts up, and the officer stood at the end of the table with his salt-stained hat in his hands, looking at the scale against the wall as if he were afraid it might move.

Anastasia stood by the long table with Evangeline’s five lines still in front of her eyes, and a single line in a printed-looking hand behind them.

Corin. Transferred. By my hand. O.

She went back to her rooms, sat down at her desk, and took out a sheet of plain paper.

This time she wrote more than one word.