Chapter 47: What the Moon Saw

Vivienne Ashgrave had not slept properly in six days.

She lay in the narrow bed at the top of the east tower with her eyes wide open and listened helplessly to her own body change. It made sounds now, small ones, at night when everything else was quiet: a faint creak in her skin, like leather drying in the sun. Rank D, Skin Tempering. The healers said it was perfectly normal. The healers said a great many things, and none of them helped her sleep.

At the foot of her bed, curled on the stone floor, lay a hound made of silver light.

It had come to her on the night of the Festival, while she was still lying in the white sand with her hands torn and her throat raw from screaming. She had not called it. It had simply been there when she opened her eyes, pressed against her side, soft and cold and glowing, looking at her with eyes like two small moons. Moonlit Familiar, her second skill, given by her class at the moment she broke through.

She had not named it, and she didn’t want to. Every time she looked at it she remembered the moment it came, and what she had been looking at when it did.

A black seam in the sand, closing.

She saw it every time she closed her eyes, which was exactly why she kept them open.

The Servant, running across the sliding sand faster than anything should run, throwing himself flat at the edge of the black, his hands around her wrist, bare skin on bare skin, and his face above hers, so close. She had looked up into it and known it. She had not known his name yet, but she had known him. The boy who carried her books. The boy who never looked at the floor when she walked past. The boy she had ruined in the Great Hall with a stolen relic and a borrowed witness on a cold grey morning a lifetime ago, because she had seen his face once before, in a vision, standing over her body under a black sky.

She had been so sure. For two years she had been absolutely sure.

And then he’d thrown her out of the dark, up and over his own head, with a strength no Servant with a combat aptitude of zero could possibly have, and he had stayed behind.

She had seen the rest too. She had been on her hands and knees in the sand, trying desperately to stand, and she had looked back. She had seen Aldous Penrose at the edge of the seam, and seen him look down, and seen his boot.

She had not told anyone.

Not her father, not the Headmaster, not the commander of the Royal Knights, who had asked her three times, very gently, what she remembered. She had said she remembered nothing after the edge, and she had said it in a calm, clear voice, and everyone had believed her, because she was Vivienne Ashgrave and Vivienne Ashgrave didn’t lie.

She had told herself she didn’t know why she had lied. That was a lie too.

The Penroses were vassals of House Ashgrave, and Aldous’s father held his lands at her father’s word. If she spoke, it would become a matter for the dukes. There would be a hearing, and lawyers, and a fine, and Aldous Penrose would be sent home to the country for a year, and that would be all.

She didn’t want that to be all.

She lay in the dark with the silver hound breathing at the foot of her bed and let herself think about what she did want, and it frightened her.

"Don’t look at me like that!" The hound went on looking at her exactly like that.

On the sixth night, she went down to the Great Hall.

It was completely empty. The banners were gone and the candles cleared away, and the Royal Knights had left with the Festival. Only the Measure remained, alone on its platform at the front of the hall, black and silent in its silver frame.

The gold marks at its base had been scraped off. She could see long pale scratches in the wood where the paint had been, dozens of them, made with knives. The Headmaster’s order, she supposed. On the morning after the Festival, the deacons of the cathedral had come to take the Measure back to the Headmaster’s tower, and the Headmaster had met them at the door of the hall with Professor Crane and six instructors and told them, very politely, that the Measure would be staying exactly where it was.

The deacons had gone away. Brother Ansel, the treasury clerk who always carried the silver box, hadn’t been with them. Nobody had seen Brother Ansel since the night of the Festival. The Archdeacon claimed he had gone on a pilgrimage, to pray for the dead.

Vivienne didn’t believe a word of it.

She walked up the steps of the platform and stood in front of the black glass. It didn’t reflect her. It never did.

She put her palm flat against it.

The last time, two weeks ago, she had seen the sky in it. Black, the same black sky from her vision, so clear that she had snatched her hand away as if the glass were burning.

Now she saw nothing. Just dark glass, cold under her hand.

She waited for it to show her something, a black sky or a face or a man standing over her body. Anything at all.

It showed her nothing.

She took her hand away. And for the first time in two years she let herself think the thought she had been running from since the night of the Festival.

’What if I was wrong?’

Voices came from behind the platform.

She froze instantly. The Great Hall was supposed to be empty. She stepped back into the shadow of the silver frame and held her breath, and the silver hound pressed itself silently against her leg.

There was a door behind the platform that she had never noticed before, set low and narrow into the stone of the back wall, the same color as the stone, with no handle. It stood open now. Lamplight came through it from a staircase going down.

Two people came up the stairs.

The first was the Headmaster, old Ysolde Marr, leaning on her black cane with her pale eyes tired. The second was Professor Crane, carrying the lamp, his thin face very serious.

"The seal held," the Headmaster was saying. "Barely. It cracked, Gideon. On the night of the Festival. Something pulled at it from above."

"The song."

"The song pulled. But it was pulling at a broken ring." The Headmaster stopped at the top of the stairs to catch her breath. "If the ring had been whole, the seal would have broken completely. Everything beneath this hill would have come up into the Great Hall in the middle of the Festival." She paused. "One of the nails failed. Someone made it fail."

"The same someone who left the vial. And the note about the Valdris gold."

"Yes."

"We still don’t know who."

The Headmaster looked at the Measure, and Vivienne pressed herself further into the shadow.

"I have a guess." The old woman sighed. "But the person I’m guessing about is dead."

Crane said nothing. He pulled the low stone door shut behind them, and it fit into the wall so perfectly that Vivienne couldn’t see where it had been. They walked down the aisle of the empty hall together with the lamp swinging, out through the great doors, and were gone.

Vivienne stayed in the dark beside the Measure.

The person I’m guessing about is dead.

She went down to the lower city the next morning, alone, without telling Corwin.

She had never been to the lower city in her life. It smelled of fish and smoke and the river. People stared as she walked through the narrow streets in her grey cloak with the hood up, and moved out of her way without knowing why. She found the healer house at the top of Salt Lane by asking a fishwife, who looked her up and down for a while before pointing.

The tired nurse knew who she was at once. She went white, curtsied badly, and led Vivienne up the stairs without a word.

The girl in the bed by the window was very small. Twelve, the nurse had said. She had short dark hair and a serious face that was mostly eyes, and she was reading a book with no cover. There was a bandage on her left arm.

She looked up when Vivienne came in and studied her carefully, the silver hair, the grey eyes, the fine cloak.

"You’re the lady. The one he carried books for."

Vivienne had stood in front of ten thousand people. She had faced Leon Harrow and the thing inside him. She had no idea what to say to a twelve-year-old girl in a bed.

"Yes."

Nell nodded slowly. "He talked about you."

"Did he." Vivienne’s voice came out strange. "What did he say?"

Nell thought about it with great seriousness.

"He said you were cruel. And he said you were the bravest person he’d ever seen." She looked down at her book. "I asked him how you could be both. He said most people are."

Vivienne stayed in the doorway. She found she couldn’t make her feet move.

"He’s coming back, you know." Nell didn’t even look up. "Everyone says he’s dead. Mira cried for two days." She turned a page. "But he owes me a story. He always pays what he owes."

Vivienne looked at the small girl in the bed, and the bandage on her arm, and the window that looked up the hill toward the white towers of the Academy. She thought about the low stone door behind the Measure, and the staircase going down.

"Yes," she heard herself say. "I think he will."