Chapter 41: The Empty Box

They buried an empty box on the second day.

Mira stood silently at the edge of the grave in the paupers’ field outside the north wall and watched four men from the city lower it on ropes. It went down far too easily, because it was too light, and everyone could see it, and the men on the ropes kept glancing awkwardly at each other.

There was nothing in it. The Rift had closed over him and taken everything, his body and his clothes and the stupid dented knife he always carried. The Royal Knights had dug frantically in the arena sand for a whole night with shovels and their bare hands. They had found the sword case he dropped, and nothing else.

So they buried a box with nothing in it, because you had to bury something.

The grave was in the second row of the field. Two places down there was a small fresh mound with a wooden marker, and Mira had read the name on it while they waited for the priest. Hob. She didn’t know who Hob was. She wondered if Aren had known him. She wondered if there was anything about Aren she had actually known at all.

More people had come than she had expected.

Most of Class D was there, standing in a ragged line behind her in their grey uniforms, not talking. Fenwick, the boy with the squeaky voice who had called Aren Zero every morning for two months, had red eyes and kept wiping his nose on his sleeve.

"I didn’t mean it." He whispered it to her before the priest started. "The name. I didn’t mean anything by it."

"I know." She didn’t, really, but it was a funeral.

A few people from the lower city had come too: the tired nurse from the healer house, and Elric the stone cutter, holding his cap awkwardly in his huge hands. A tiny ancient woman with one eye and an unlit pipe, standing perfectly still at the back.

And a man in a long black coat that Mira didn’t know.

He stood under the bare tree at the edge of the field, slightly apart from everyone. He was tall and thin, with grey at his temples and a pointed beard, and he held himself carefully, like someone healing from a wound. A small grey man stood beside him cracking nuts. The man in the black coat never once looked at the grave. He looked at the sky and the hill and the white towers of the Academy far above, as if he were reading something written there.

Mira had the strangest feeling that Aren would have known exactly who he was.

The priest of the Light was young and nervous and had never met Aren. He read the short prayer for the dead nervously, in a thin voice, the same one they used for everyone in the paupers’ field. The Light receives all who walk in shadow. He stumbled badly over the name.

"Aren," he read, and paused, looking down the page for a family name that wasn’t there.

’He didn’t have one,’ Mira thought. ’He used to say it saved ink.’

She looked at the stone at the head of the grave. That was the strangest part. Paupers didn’t get stones. They got wooden markers like Hob’s that rotted in a few winters. But at the head of Aren’s grave there was real stone, pale grey, carved that morning, the letters cut deep and clean.

AREN. HE GAVE HIS LIFE FOR ANOTHER.

There was nothing else. No family name and no class.

The Ashgraves had paid for it. Mira knew because the old steward, Corwin, had come down to the lower city the day before with the stonecutter and the order, a purse of gold for the funeral and another for the boy’s sister. He had stood in the doorway of the healer house with his hat in his hands and said, very formally, that Lady Ashgrave wished it.

Mira had wanted to throw the purse at him. She had taken it anyway, for Nell.

Nell had not cried.

That was the thing Mira couldn’t stop thinking about. She had climbed the stairs of the healer house the morning after the Festival with her heart in her throat, sat on the edge of Nell’s bed by the window, and told her. She had done it badly, starting three times and stopping three times, and in the end she had just said it. He fell into the Rift, Nell. He saved Lady Ashgrave, and then he fell, and it closed.

Nell had listened to all of it with her serious face and her small hands folded on the farmer’s book. When Mira finished, Nell had looked steadily at her without blinking.

"No."

"Nell..."

"He promised he wouldn’t do anything stupid." Nell’s voice was perfectly calm. "He always says I promise, and then he does the stupid thing anyway. But then he comes back. He always comes back." She looked out of the window at the hill and the Academy. "He’ll come back."

Mira had not known what to say to that, and she still didn’t.

Nell wasn’t at the funeral. The nurse had said the cold and the walk would be too much for her lungs, and Mira was glad. She couldn’t have stood at this grave with Nell holding her hand, still waiting.

When the priest finished, the students of Class D came forward one at a time and dropped handfuls of earth onto the box. It made a hollow sound. Mira went last.

She stood over the hole with the cold dirt in her fist and thought about the last real thing she had said to him. You’re always sorry, Aren. She had said it on the low wall of the training yard, with a bruise on her face from the best fight of her life, because he had promised to watch and hadn’t come, and she had been so angry. She had turned her back on him in the dining hall that night, and she had not spoken to him once on the last day.

And then he had run onto the sand.

Everyone had seen it. Ten thousand people had watched the Servant with a combat aptitude of zero drop a sword case and run across a floor that was sliding into the Abyss, faster than anyone should be able to run, throw himself flat at the edge of the black and catch the heir of House Ashgrave by the wrist. And then throw her, up and out over his own head, like she weighed nothing.

Nobody could explain how he had done it. Mira had heard a dozen students arguing about it. Luck, adrenaline, the Rift letting go for a second. She didn’t care how. She had known him since they were eight, and she had never once seen him move like that.

’Maybe I never saw him at all.’

She opened her hand, and the earth fell onto the empty box.

"You idiot. You stupid, stupid idiot!"

Aldous Penrose was telling the story again when she walked back through the crowd.

He stood with a group of Class B students near the gate of the field, in a black coat much too good for a pauper’s funeral. He had told it a dozen times since the Festival, in the dining hall and the courtyard and to anyone who’d listen. How he’d climbed over the rail when he saw the Servant go onto the sand. How he’d tried to reach him. How the Servant had been hanging from the edge, and Aldous had reached down and almost had him, almost, and then the edge had crumbled.

"I couldn’t hold him." Aldous’s voice shook a little, in a way that sounded suspiciously practiced. "I tried. I tried so hard."

The Class B students nodded. One of the girls touched his arm.

Mira walked straight past them without stopping. If she stopped, she was going to hit him, and she was fairly sure she wouldn’t stop at once.

The man in the black coat was waiting for her by the gate.

Up close he was older than she had thought, and paler, and his dark eyes were very calm. The small grey man beside him had stopped cracking nuts.

"Miss Hale." His voice was quiet and educated, the voice of someone who had grown up in a house with a library. "You were his friend."

"Who are you?"

"Someone he did business with." He reached into his coat and took out a small leather bag that clinked. "His share, from our last arrangement. Fifteen percent. It belongs to his sister now." He held it out. "There will be more each month, for as long as there’s a book to keep."

Mira didn’t take it. She just stared at him.

"What kind of business," she said slowly, "does a Servant from Class D do with someone like you?"

The man in the black coat considered her. For a second he looked tired, and older still, and then that was gone.

"The kind he was very good at."

He put the bag into her hand, closed her fingers around it, and walked away down the road toward the city. The small grey man followed him. Neither of them looked back.

She was nearly at the top of the hill road, walking back toward the Academy, when she saw the carriage.

It was parked under the trees at the edge of the road, where you could see down over the whole paupers’ field. It was black with silver trim, drawn by four grey horses that stood perfectly quiet, and the curtains were closed.

On the door, painted neatly in silver, was a crescent moon.

Mira stopped in the road and looked at the closed curtains. Nothing moved behind them, and nobody got out.

Then, without any signal she could see, the driver lifted his reins, and the carriage turned and rolled slowly away up the hill toward the white towers. The curtains never opened at all.