Chapter 638: Letters

The Palace had given them six rooms on the Lower Terraces, one each, with white walls and narrow windows full of sea, and by midnight on the second night five of them had ended up in Valerica’s. The sixth, Mara, had taken the room beside Edda Marsh’s on the floor below, and shut the door, and could be heard through it reading the Palace’s guest rules aloud to herself.

Nobody had planned it. Isole had come in to check Vane’s shoulder. Nyx had come in because Isole had. Ashe had come in to complain about the bridge, and then sat down on the end of the bed, and then lain down across the foot of it, and then fallen asleep. Valerica had looked around at them all occupying her room and said, "I have four empty rooms on this corridor," in a tone of great patience, and then had moved her papers to the windowsill so that nobody would lie on them.

In the morning, a steward’s boy came to the door with breakfast for one and found it full. He stood in the doorway with his tray for a long moment, counting.

"I’ll bring more," he said finally, and fled.

"They’ll think we’re strange," said Isole.

"They’ll think we’re cold," said Nyx. "It’s a city made of wind. I’m making a political statement about the heating."

Mara spent the morning with Edda Marsh and a dozen other children, exploring the terraces under the eye of a patient Palace clerk who had clearly been assigned to stop them falling off anything. Vane found them at noon on the third stack, lying flat on their stomachs at the edge of a glass bridge, looking straight down through it at the sea.

"There’s a fish down there," Edda reported, "as big as a cart."

"It’s a seal," said Mara.

"It’s as big as a cart."

"Seals can be big," Mara said. "That’s still what it is."

Edda considered this, and then looked up at Vane with the frank, solemn interest of an eleven-year-old who has recently decided that someone is safe.

"Are you going to see the wind?" she asked.

"The what?"

"The wind. The one that talked. Everybody’s saying." She lowered her voice. "The clerk said it hasn’t talked to anyone from outside in forty years. She said it’s a lady and she lives at the top and she’s older than the Palace."

"Older than the Palace is impossible," said Mara.

"The clerk said."

"Then the clerk is wrong," Mara said, and went back to watching the seal.

The letter came in the afternoon.

It came out of the north, very fast and very high, a small bright shape against the grey sky that the Palace’s own lookouts must have seen long before anyone on the terraces did. It came down over the Lower Terraces in a long spiral, and Vane saw that it was a bird, or the shape of one, a falcon made of something clear and pale and faceted, so cold that frost formed on the stone where it landed. It walked across the terrace to Valerica’s open window, hopped up onto the sill, and held out one leg.

There was a small silver tube tied to it.

Valerica untied it very carefully. The falcon waited until she was done, then turned its faceted head to look at each of them in turn, and lifted off into the wind, and was gone.

"Isadora’s," said Isole quietly. "Nobody else in the world makes those."

Valerica unrolled the paper.

It was three sheets, written very small in a precise, slightly cramped hand that Vane had not seen in a year and recognized immediately anyway, because it looked like its owner: tidy, careful, and trying very hard not to show how much it cared.

Valerica began to read it aloud.

Vane, Valerica, Ashe, Isole, Nyx. (And Mara, if she is with you, which I assume she is.)

I said I would write. I have written eleven times. I am fairly sure none of them arrived, because I am fairly sure my mother has been reading the post, and I am quite sure she has been burning it. I have had to bribe a falcon. You have no idea how difficult it is to bribe a falcon that your mother made.

Ashe had sat up on the bed. Nyx had stopped pretending to be asleep.

The Palaces talk to each other. Not often, and never politely, but they talk. Two days ago a ship from Aelstrom told a ship from us that a commoner had beaten the Emperor’s Master-at-Arms on a public road in the western provinces and then told the whole valley his name. I knew it was you before they said the name. Nobody else I know would be that stupid. I have been smiling about it for two days. My mother says it is unbecoming.

Isole laughed, a soft, startled sound, and put her hand over her mouth.

The second page was different. Valerica’s voice changed as she read it.

I need to tell you something, and I don’t know who else to tell. The ice is breaking. Not the edges, the way it does every spring. The middle. The sea-ice north of the Palace has stood for longer than anyone has records, and this autumn it cracked from underneath, in a line forty miles long, in a single night. Mother went down to look. She came back and did not speak for a day. She has not let me go down since.

Something is under it. I don’t know what. I don’t think she does either. But she has started reading very old books, and she will not tell me which ones.

Valerica lowered the page for a moment. Nobody said anything. Vane thought of a dark scale propped against a gallery wall, and a band of cold light under the sea, and Nyx at the rail saying it’s bigger.

The third page was short.

I’d like you to come north. I know it is a long way, and I know you have a hundred reasons not to. I’m asking anyway. I would like to see you. That is the whole reason. I am not good at saying that, so I have written it down, and now it is too late to cross it out.

Isaac.

Below that, in a different hand, sharp and slanting and unmistakably written in a hurry, was a single line.

Do not come. I.

And below that, very small, in Isaac’s hand again:

She doesn’t mean it. She’s been setting a place at the table.

Sarai Vell came for Vane at dusk.

She stood in the doorway of Valerica’s room, which now had five people in it and six breakfast trays stacked in the corner, and looked at all of them with polite, unhurried interest.

"At dawn," she said. "The Ninth Spire. Just you."

"Who is she?" Vane asked.

The envoy hesitated. It was the first time he had seen her do it.

"She’s the reason there is a Aelstrom," Sarai Vell said at last. "She built the first tower on the first stack. She hasn’t come down from the top of it in forty years. The Stewards call her the Lady of the Ninth Spire." A pause. "Her name is Thessaly."

Behind him, Vane heard Isole put down the satchel she was holding.

He turned. She was standing by the window, very straight, and her face had gone the careful, colorless blank it used to go at Zenith whenever someone mentioned her mother.

"Isole?"

"It’s nothing," Isole said. "It’s a name I’ve read before. That’s all." She folded her hands, left over right, and this time she did not separate them. "In my family’s book. Written in the margin, beside a page somebody cut out."