Chapter 58: Unseen

"Shop’s closing." Old Mag didn’t even look up from her pipe.

Aren stood in the doorway behind the fish stall with the grey scarf wrapped tight around his face and the hood pulled low, and for a second he couldn’t make himself step inside.

It was all exactly the same: the fish crates, the three oil lamps, the shelves of things nobody else would sell, the glass case of cores glowing like sleepy jewels. Mag sat behind her counter on her tall stool, a tiny dried apple of a woman with one leather patch and one bright black eye, and that eye moved over him exactly as it moved over every stranger, a tall shape in a grey hood, a face she wouldn’t remember.

[False Face: Concealment active.]

’Hello, Mag. It’s me. You gave me bandages once and called it an investment.’

He couldn’t say any of it. He had thought about this all day, lying on the sacking in the loft. He had twenty lilies and almost no money. He needed boots, cloaks, food and rope, and he needed to be gone in two days. There was only one person in the lower city who would buy what he had to sell without asking where it came from.

"I want to sell something." His voice came out low and flat through the scarf. "And buy some things."

"Sell first. Then we’ll see if you can afford to buy."

He put the wrapped bundle on the counter and carefully folded back the dried eel skin, just enough. A single black flower lay inside, its thin petals moving very slightly in the still air of the shop.

Mag’s hands stopped dead on her pipe.

She stared at the lily without touching it. In the lamplight Aren watched her face change slowly from surprise into something he had never seen on it before, and it wasn’t greed. It was fear.

"Do you know what that is?" she whispered.

"Yes."

"Do you know what happens to people who carry those around this city?" Her eye came up to his hood. "There are men who would cut your throat for one without blinking!"

"That’s why I’m selling it to you. And not to them."

Mag looked at him, and then she quickly flicked the eel skin closed over the flower with two quick fingers, as if she couldn’t stand to look at it.

"There’s a house in Calvessa. Free Cities. Alchemists. They don’t ask questions. It’ll take me a month to get it there and another for the gold to come back." She tapped the bundle once. "I can give you sixty crowns now, from my own box. The rest when it’s sold. If you’re still alive to collect it."

"I’ll be back in two months."

"People always say they’re coming back." She slid off her stool and opened an iron box under the counter. "Most of them aren’t."

She counted sixty gold crowns into a leather bag, and he told her what else he needed. Fur-lined boots, two pairs. Gloves. Two heavy cloaks, the kind that shed snow. Rope, a small iron pot, flint and oil. Dried meat and hard bread for three weeks. Salve for frostbite. She found most of it without looking and piled it on the counter.

"Two of everything. Going north?"

"Yes."

"Hm." She named a price, and it was outrageously high. Once he would have argued, and she would have laughed, and they would have met somewhere in the middle.

He paid it silently.

"You don’t haggle," Mag observed.

"No."

"Shame." She looked down sadly at her pipe. "Used to be a boy came in here who haggled like a moneylender. Made me laugh." She was quiet for a moment, filling the bowl with tobacco she didn’t light. "Fell in that Rift at the Festival. I went to the burying. Empty box. Never seen anything so stupid in my life."

Aren’s hands stopped on the coins, and then he made them go on counting.

"I heard."

"Hm." Mag said nothing else.

He picked up the bundle and went out into the night, and he didn’t let himself look back at the door behind the fish stall. He knew that if he did, he would go back in and pull the scarf off his face, and two months of hiding would be over in one minute.

’Two months, Mag. Keep your box locked. I’m coming back to haggle.’

Crane was in his rooms on the ground floor of the old building, with a lamp lit and a cup of tea going cold beside him. He opened the door before Aren had finished knocking.

"Servant." He glanced at the bundle of furs and boots on Aren’s back. "You’re going somewhere."

"Tomorrow night," Aren said.

"And you’ve come to ask me something."

Aren nodded slowly. "My sister. Nell. While I’m gone, I need her somewhere safe. Somewhere nobody can walk in and ask questions about the mark on her arm."

Crane considered that for a long, careful moment.

"The Headmaster has been interested in that mark since the day she saw it. She’d like the healers to study it properly, every day rather than once." He picked up his tea and frowned at it thoughtfully. "A girl with a rare illness, moved to the Academy infirmary for observation by order of the Headmaster. Nobody would think twice about it. And nobody would get past the door without the Headmaster’s seal."

"She’d be safe there," Aren said.

"Safer than anywhere in this city." Crane looked up. "I’ll speak to the Headmaster tonight. Your sister will be moved within the week."

Aren’s shoulders finally came down for the first time in two days.

"Thank you."

"Don’t thank me." Crane set down his tea. "Come back. That will be thanks enough." He paused. "And, Servant. Wherever you’re going, remember that you’re dead. The dead don’t get second chances to be careless."

Roderick was awake when he got back to the rope shed, sitting by the little round window with his cloak around his shoulders.

Aren dropped the bundle on the floor between them and opened it. Roderick looked at the boots, the cloaks, the rope and the iron pot. He picked up one of the fur-lined gloves and turned it over slowly, like something from a life he had forgotten he used to have.

"I haven’t worn gloves in two years."

"You’ll need them. I’ve never been north either."

Roderick pulled the glove on, though it was too big, and flexed his fingers, the three that were left on his left hand, and looked at them. "How far?"

"I don’t know. The iron mountains. Then wherever he went after that." Aren sat down on the sacking. "We travel at night. Your cloak keeps the light off, but I don’t want to test it in full sun for a whole day."

"Neither do I." Roderick pulled the glove off and set it carefully on the pile. "What do we do when we find him? The grey-eyed one."

Aren had thought about that too, and he had no answer yet. He had a direction, a name and a face. He didn’t know what Ansel had gone north to do, or who he was meeting, or why three men in grey had gone with him carrying heavy packs.

"We watch. We find out what he’s doing. Then we decide."

Roderick looked at him.

"That’s a nice plan, ghost."

"No," Aren agreed ruefully. "It’s the start of one."

He wrote the letter that night by the light of a candle stub, after Roderick had gone back to sleep under his cloak in the corner.

It took him four hours, and he wrote it seven times. Every time he read it back, it sounded like a contract, or a confession, or a lie, and he tore it up and started again. He had written hundreds of letters in his old life, to clients and banks and lawyers, and he’d never once found one this hard.

In the end, it was very short.

Mira.

I’m sorry. I know. You told me I’m always sorry, and you were right.

I’m alive. I was alive the whole time you were angry with me, and the whole time you stood at that grave. I couldn’t tell you. I still can’t. If you’re reading this, it means I couldn’t come back and tell you myself, which means I broke another promise. I’m good at that.

Look after Nell. Look after yourself.

Aren.

He folded it twice and sealed it with a drop of candle wax. On the outside he wrote: For Mira. If I’m not back by the first snow.

He would leave it with Nell. She would keep it. She was better at keeping things than anyone he knew.

Then he sat by the little round window holding it quietly until the candle went out.

’First snow. That gives me until winter. Plenty of time!’

Outside, very high up and very far away, the first cold wind of the year came down from the north and rattled the shutters of the lower city, and he stubbornly pretended not to hear it.