Chapter 634: The Envoy

The ship did not land. Palace ships never did, Valerica said afterward. It hung above the rooftops of Holloway with its bright wind held in its glass panes, and a platform came down from its belly on four silver lines, slowly, the way a spider lets itself down a thread, until it touched the cobbles of the market square without a sound.

There was one woman on it.

She was tall and narrow and very upright, with silver-grey hair cut close to her skull and a long coat the color of a clear sky at noon. She carried nothing in her hands. Around her throat, on a fine chain, hung a disc of clear glass the size of a coin. She stepped off the platform onto the cobbles and looked around the square, at the children, at the townspeople pressed into doorways, at the chapel steps, with the polite curiosity of someone visiting a very old museum.

Vane read her before she had finished looking.

High Master. A grade-S Authority so bound up with the air around her that he could not tell where one ended and the other began. She was holding none of it at the surface. She did not need to.

"Good evening," she said. Her voice carried without being raised. "My name is Sarai Vell. I speak for the Aelstrom Palace, in the west. I’m looking for the young man who stood on a road yesterday and told a valley his name."

"That’s me," said Vane.

She looked at him. It took about two seconds, and he felt every one of them.

"So it is," she said. "The Usurper. We meant to speak to you at the Gala in your first year. We never had the chance."

"Why not?"

"A Transcendent walked into the ballroom and looked at you," said Sarai Vell. "After that, everyone found they had somewhere else to be." Then, without asking anyone’s leave, she turned away from him and began to walk along the row of children sitting on the chapel wall.

She did it the way the clerk had done it, and at the same time nothing like the way the clerk had done it.

She stopped in front of each child and lifted the glass disc from her throat and held it up between them, not touching, so that she was looking at the child through it. Most of the time the glass stayed clear. Sometimes it clouded, faintly, the way breath clouds a window, and she nodded to herself and moved on. Three times it went the color of honey, and once, in front of Edda Marsh, it filled with light from edge to edge, and Sarai Vell lowered it and looked at Edda for a long moment with an expression that was not unkind.

"What’s your name?" she asked.

"Edda," said Edda.

"Thank you, Edda."

Then she moved on.

Vane watched her go down the wall. Behind him, he felt the others gathering: Ashe at his left shoulder, Valerica at his right, Isole a step behind, and Nyx, who had drifted up to sit on the fountain’s edge with her chin in her hand and her eyes half closed, reading the envoy the way she read everything, from the inside.

"She’s not lying," Nyx murmured. "About anything. Not once."

"Is that good?" Ashe asked.

"It’s worse," said Nyx.

Sarai Vell reached the end of the wall, let the glass fall back against her throat, and came back to them.

"Nineteen," she said. "Out of two hundred and four. That’s a remarkable harvest for one valley. Ormond had a good eye." She said the name without any particular feeling. "The Aelstrom Palace will take those nineteen tonight. They’ll be fed and taught and kept safe, and in ten years they’ll be among the finest practitioners in the west. I can promise you that. I don’t make promises I can’t keep."

"And the other hundred and eighty-five?" said Valerica.

Sarai Vell looked at her with mild interest.

"Sol," she said. "The Imperial line. You’ve come a long way from your family’s table, haven’t you?" She did not wait for an answer. "The others aren’t my concern. The Palace doesn’t take children because they need saving. Everyone needs saving. We take what we can teach, and what will be worth having." She spread her hands slightly. "I’m sorry. That’s the honest answer, and you’d have found it out later anyway."

"Then no," Vane said.

She turned back to him.

"No?"

"You don’t get nineteen. You don’t get to walk along that wall and pick." He kept his voice level. "Either you take all of them, or you go back up that rope and take none."

The square was very quiet. Up above, the ship’s panes rang faintly in the evening wind, like a glass when someone runs a wet finger round its rim.

Sarai Vell studied him for a long time.

"I can’t promise you all of them," she said at last. "It isn’t mine to promise. The Palace decides who stays, not me." She tilted her head. "But I can carry them. The ship can lift three hundred. I can take every child in this square to the Aelstrom Palace, and set them down at its gate, and they can stand in front of the people who decide. And so can you."

"Me."

"You." For the first time, something that was almost a smile touched her mouth. "You didn’t think I came all this way for nineteen children, did you? The Palace has wanted to meet you since your first year. If you want to argue for the other hundred and eighty-five, you’ll have to come and argue in person."

Valerica’s hand closed lightly on his sleeve, very briefly, and let go. He understood. That’s the price. That’s always been the price.

"We’ll talk about it," he said.

"Of course." Sarai Vell inclined her head. "The ship will stay until the morning after next. Then it leaves, with whoever is on it."

She turned to go back to the platform, and stopped.

Mara was standing in her way.

Vane had not seen her come. She had her ledger under one arm and Isole’s satchel still slung across her body, and she was looking up at the envoy with the steady, measuring look she gave to columns of figures.

"You didn’t do me," Mara said.

Sarai Vell looked down at her. Then, slowly, she lifted the glass disc from her throat and held it up between them.

Vane was already moving. He was beside his sister before the glass had stopped swinging, his hand on her shoulder, but there was nothing to stop. The glass did not cloud. It did not turn gold. It did not do anything at all. It simply hung there between them, perfectly clear, and through it Mara’s face looked just as it did without it.

Sarai Vell lowered the disc. She looked at Mara for a long moment, and then at Vane, and her eyes were very bright.

"How unusual," she said softly.

Then she stepped onto the platform, and it rose into the dark.