Chapter 30: Candles

Aren didn’t look away, because looking away is what guilty people do.

So he held the grey-eyed clerk’s gaze down the whole length of the nave for one long second, wearing the polite, empty face of a lower-city boy caught staring at something shiny, and then he turned slowly and walked over to the candle rack by the wall.

It was a long iron frame full of small white candles, most of them burning, with a wooden box beside it: a copper for a candle, a silver for a prayer. A boy from the lower city didn’t walk into the High Cathedral for no reason, and he needed one, and he had one. He dropped a copper in the box, lit a candle from one of the flames, set it in the rack, and looked at it while he thought about an old man in grey bandages lying in the paupers’ field.

"A candle for someone you lost?"

The voice was soft and pleasant and very close behind him. Aren didn’t jump. He simply turned his head.

The grey-eyed clerk was standing beside the rack with the silver alms box held against his chest, and up close he was even more ordinary than he had looked from the door. Plain face, smooth-shaven, brown hair cut neatly short. There was nothing about him you’d remember except the eyes, which were the color of rain on a window and were studying Aren with gentle interest.

"Yes."

"Family?"

"No. A man from the east bank, a scavenger. His name was Hob." He looked back at the candle. "They found him in the river last week."

"Ah. I heard about that. A terrible thing." The clerk paused. "The city guard says it was robbers. Did you know him well?"

"Everyone on the river knew him." That was true. Aren had grown up watching Hob pick through burned houses with his wrapped grey face, and he had never once spoken to him. "He used to give the children copper wire for nothing."

"Then the Light will remember him." The clerk smiled, a warm, tired smile, the smile of a young priest who had comforted a great many people. "I’m Brother Ansel, of the cathedral treasury. And you are?"

"Aren, Brother."

"Aren." The grey eyes moved over him slowly and unhurriedly, the shabby coat, the ink on his fingers. "You’re not dressed like a dockworker. A student?"

"A servant, Brother. At the Academy."

"At the Academy." The smile didn’t change at all. "How wonderful. Then you’ll see the Festival this year, the three hundredth. It’s going to be very beautiful." He shifted the silver box in his arms. "We’ve been working very hard to make sure of it."

"I saw the scaffolding outside. The north wall. You’ve rebuilt it so quickly."

"The Light provides."

They stood together by the candles without speaking, and Aren could feel the weight of the clerk’s attention the whole time, light and patient, like a hand resting on his shoulder without quite touching it.

"Well. I’m sure we’ll see each other again, Aren." Ansel inclined his head. "Light keep you."

He walked off toward the altar with his white robes whispering softly over the stone, and he didn’t look back.

’Oh, that’s not good. That’s not good at all!’

Aren stayed by the candles until his heart slowed down. Then he left by the main doors and walked calmly down into the lower city at a perfectly ordinary pace, without running and without looking behind him once. He didn’t need to. Street Fighter’s Instinct told him exactly where the man was: forty paces back, a thin man in a brown coat who had been sitting on the cathedral steps when he came out, and who followed him down Gilded Row and across the market square all the way to the bottom of the Academy hill.

Aren walked in through the Academy gates like a servant coming home from an errand. He didn’t try to lose the man, because a servant had no reason to lose anyone. The thin man stopped at the gate, watched him go in, and then turned and walked away.

He went to see Rook that night.

Rook wasn’t in his tall chair for once. He was propped on cushions on a narrow bed in a back room of the warehouse, his chest wrapped tight in linen and his book open on his knee. Doran had said a month without fighting, and Rook looked like a man counting every one of those days. But he was breathing deeply, long slow breaths on both sides, and Aren could hear it from the doorway.

"Stone-seller." Rook didn’t look up. "You look like a man who wants to talk."

So Aren told him everything: the scaffolding, the stone ordered two months early, Elric, the clerk with grey eyes and the alms box, and the man in the brown coat who had followed him to the gates. Rook listened without interrupting and closed his book slowly when it was over.

"So the Church lit a fire beside its own house. I did say."

"You did."

"And now they’ve seen your face." Rook’s dark eyes settled on him. "They don’t know what you are, or you’d already be in the river next to Hob. But they’ve noticed an Academy servant who asks questions about money and stares at their treasurers, and that isn’t a good thing to be noticed for."

"I know."

"So what will you do?"

"I can’t fight the Church." He had been thinking about it all the way down the hill. "Nobody in this city can. But someone has to know what’s coming at the Festival, and it has to be someone who can actually stop it." He took a breath. "The Headmaster."

Rook watched him like a hawk watching a field mouse. "And how exactly will you tell the Headmaster of Highcrest that the High Cathedral is planning to murder the heir of House Ashgrave in front of the whole city, without telling her how you know?"

"The same way I told her about the poisoned tonic."

For the first time since Aren had known him, Rook looked genuinely, openly surprised. Then he laughed, slowly, pressing one hand to his wrapped ribs because it hurt, and laughing anyway.

"That was you. The vial, the note. Everyone on the river heard about it." He shook his head. "Of course it was you."

[Rook. Hostility: 87% → 85%.]

"I’ll lend you a man." Rook had finally recovered. "Someone to sit on the cathedral steps and watch who comes and goes. Brother Ansel, and your thin friend in the brown coat." He opened his book again. "Consider it an investment."

Aren wrote the note at midnight in large plain capitals, nothing like his own hand.

THE MAN WHO PAID IN VALDRIS GOLD WORKS IN THE CATHEDRAL TREASURY. HIS NAME IS BROTHER ANSEL. THE CHURCH ORDERED STONE TO REPAIR THE NORTH WALL TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE NIGHT OF BELLS. ASK THE STONECUTTERS’ GUILD. SOMEONE HAS BET FIVE HUNDRED CROWNS THAT LADY ASHGRAVE WILL NOT FINISH THE FESTIVAL. THE ARCHDEACON WILL STAND BESIDE THE MEASURE.

He checked every word carefully, then climbed the service stairs of the Headmaster’s tower, slipped through the little door beside the fireplace, and laid it on her desk in the dark on top of everything else. He didn’t wait around to see if anything moved.

Mira found him on the dormitory steps the next morning, trying very hard to look calm.

"They posted the pairings! I’m fighting a girl from Class C, lightning class, Rank E, Level 4." She pulled her knees up to her chest. "Everyone says she’s going to destroy me."

Aren knew that girl, because he had watched her train. Her footwork was good, and her left guard was always late.

"She keeps her left hand low after every strike." "Watch for it. When she lifts her right arm to throw lightning, her whole left side is open for a heartbeat. You’re a Hearthwarden, you don’t need to dodge. Just walk into it and push."

Mira stared at him. "How do you know that?"

"I carry their practice swords. I watched."

She gave him the look she had been giving him a lot lately. Then she bumped his shoulder with hers.

"You’ll come? To watch me fight? It’s on the second day, in the morning."

"I’ll come."

"Promise."

"I promise." And he truly meant it. He didn’t know yet that he wouldn’t be able to keep it.

The Church delegation came up the hill that afternoon to prepare the Great Hall for the Measure: twelve of them in white and gold, with two wagons of crates and candles and banners. Students lined the courtyard walls to watch them pass curiously. In the middle of the group, leaning on a deacon’s arm, walked an old man with a kind, tired face, Archdeacon Morvane, and behind him came his clerks carrying ledgers and incense and a heavy silver box.

Aren was crossing the courtyard with a crate of laundry, and he stepped aside with his head down to let them by, as servants do.

A pair of white robes stopped right beside him.

"Hello again, Aren." Brother Ansel’s voice was soft. "Light keep you."

Then he walked on toward the Great Hall, where the Measure was waiting.