Chapter 641: Terms

Valerica wrote the terms in a day and a half, and by the end of it Steward Cale had aged visibly.

She did it in the Hall of Wind, at the long pale table, with the three Stewards on one side and herself on the other and a stack of paper between them that grew taller by the hour. Vane sat in on the first morning. He lasted until noon. By then they had spent forty minutes on the definition of the word taught, and Valerica had produced from her pocket a list of every subject Aelstrom’s own children studied before the age of fifteen, copied out in her neat hand from a schoolroom wall she had apparently visited at dawn without telling anyone.

"All of these," she said. "For all of them."

"Navigation?" said Cale. "For a fisherman’s boy from the Marrin?"

"His father navigates a river every day of his life, Steward. I’m sure he’ll have opinions."

Steward Mor laughed out loud, and then looked as though he wished he hadn’t.

Vane left them to it. When he passed the hall again at dusk, the glass panes were turning overhead, the lamps had been lit, and Valerica was leaning across the table saying, very pleasantly, "Then we’ll go back to clause nine," and Steward Varo had her head in her hands.

"She’s enjoying herself," Isole observed, at his shoulder.

"She’s having the best day of her life."

"Don’t tell her you noticed," said Isole. "She’ll stop."

The terms were signed on the morning of the third day, by three Stewards and by Thessaly, whose mark was not a signature at all but a small, neat knot of moving air pressed into the bottom of the page, which went on very faintly turning long after the ink had dried.

A hundred and ninety-one children, guests of the Ninth Spire. Fed. Housed. Taught, every subject on Valerica’s list, for as long as they wished to stay, regardless of what any glass said at any gate. Free to leave at any time. Free to write home. Clause nine, which nobody but Valerica and Steward Varo fully understood, and which Valerica described only as "the part where they can’t change their minds."

Father Cray read it through twice in the small chapel the Palace had found for him on the second stack. Then he folded it and put it inside his coat, next to the brown cloth book.

"I’m staying," he said.

"I thought you might," said Vane.

"Someone has to read the names at the gate when the next lot come." The old priest looked out of the narrow window at the terraces, where a dozen children from Holloway were following a Palace clerk across a glass bridge in a long, delighted line. "And someone has to make sure that clause nine means what she says it means. I don’t understand a word of it. But I can read it out loud very slowly, in front of witnesses. I’ve found that does a great deal."

Mara said goodbye to Edda Marsh on the terrace by the Gate of Asking, in the wind, with great formality.

They shook hands. Then Edda, who had evidently not been told that this was supposed to be formal, threw her arms around Mara’s neck and held on, and Mara stood very still inside the hug with her arms at her sides and an expression of polite alarm, and then, slowly, put one hand on Edda’s back.

"You’ll write," Edda said.

"Yes."

"Every week."

"Every week," Mara agreed, and then, because she was Mara, "if there’s somewhere to post it."

Edda let go. She pressed something into Mara’s hand: a candle stub, the end of one from the dormitory at Greywater, burned down almost to nothing.

"So you can see," she said, "if it’s dark."

Mara looked at it for a long moment. Then she put it carefully in the inside pocket of her coat, next to Brynn’s knot, and buttoned the pocket shut.

They left that afternoon, not on the great ship that had brought them, but on a smaller one.

It was called the Lark. It was perhaps a tenth the size of the ship from Holloway, slim and pale as a fishbone, with three curved glass panes along each side and a cabin barely large enough for six people to sit in if two of them were friendly. It hung beside the terrace with the wind ringing gently in its panes.

Sarai Vell stood at its helm.

"Thessaly asked me to take you north," she said, before anyone could ask. "And then on to whichever Palace is next, for as long as you’re carrying her letter. A Palace envoy opens doors that a commoner, however famous, doesn’t." She looked them over with her usual polite curiosity. "And she says someone ought to make sure you don’t fall off anything."

"That’s very kind of her," said Valerica.

"It’s not kindness. It’s housekeeping." The envoy’s mouth moved slightly. "You’ve become a Palace investment. I’m here to protect it."

Ashe was standing at the edge of the terrace, looking at the Lark with an expression Vane had last seen on her face in front of a Dark World breach.

"It’s smaller," she said.

"Yes," said Sarai Vell.

"Smaller is worse."

"Smaller is faster," Sarai Vell said. "We’ll be at the Glacial Palace in four days instead of eight. You’ll only have to be uncomfortable half as long."

Ashe considered this. Then she walked up the narrow gangplank without looking down, sat in the dead center of the Lark’s tiny deck, folded her arms, and stared straight ahead at nothing.

"Four days," she said. "Go."

Nyx sat down beside her and leaned her head on Ashe’s shoulder, which Ashe permitted. Isole climbed aboard with her satchel. Valerica followed with a case of documents nearly as large as she was. Mara came last, with her ledger, and stopped at the rail to look back at the seven stacks and the white towers and the Gate of Asking, where a long row of small figures stood waving, and an old priest in a faded sash stood among them with one hand raised.

As the Lark slid away from the terrace, a single gust came down off the Ninth Spire and went through the little ship from bow to stern, ringing every pane at once. Isole, at the rail, went still. Vane saw her lips move.

"What did she say?" he asked quietly.

"Mind the ice." Isole kept looking up at the spire. "And something about eating properly. She sounded like a grandmother." A pause. "I’ve never had one who sounded like that."

Vane stood beside her until the Lark had swung clear of the stack and caught the wind, and Aelstrom had become a cluster of lights on the edge of the sea, and then nothing at all.

"Is it far?" Mara asked.

"Four days."

"No." She was still looking back. "To come back. When we’re done."

"I don’t know," he said honestly.

Mara nodded, as though that was the answer she had expected. Then she took out her ledger, opened it to a fresh page, and wrote at the top, in her careful hand: North.