Chapter 90: Eight Paces

For a heartbeat, nobody moved at all.

Abruptly every head in the hall turned at once toward the corner by the kitchen door where the players were waiting, toward the white mask and the checkered cap with its floppy point and its little bell.

Aren stood up, slowly.

He walked out into the middle of the black floor in the silence, stopped in front of the examiners’ platform, and bowed, a deep, careful, perfectly ridiculous bow with one arm swept out and the bell on his cap tinkling.

The hall exploded.

It was louder than laughter: the sound of three hundred nobles who had been bored all evening finally being given something worth the wine. People stood on their benches, a woman at the Merrow table was crying with laughter into her napkin, and at the gold-trimmed table Cassian Haskel rose and raised his glass.

"House Varken," he called over the noise, "I’m honored! I didn’t know you were fans of my work!"

The roar doubled.

’Laugh, Haskel, laugh while you still can!’

Sigrid Varken had gone completely white.

She stood beside her steward in the middle of the laughter, with every eye in the Empire on her house and on the painted fool bowing in front of it, and Aren watched her slowly, painfully understand. Her family had brought her here, alive, on the night that should have been hers, and put a clown beside her.

She turned to Halvard Rusk. She didn’t raise her voice, and Aren couldn’t hear her words, but he watched the steward’s face, which didn’t change, and his mouth, which said four words.

The house has reasons.

Then Halvard Rusk looked across the hall at the fool, at the white mask and the crooked painted mouth, and Aren saw him remember a hooded figure in his tower room picking up a bag of gold. He’ll be the one you’re embarrassed to be seen with.

The steward’s face stayed perfectly still, but he inclined his head very slightly toward the fool: one bow, from one Rank B to one nobody.

Nobody in the hall saw it except Aren, and Sigrid Varken, who apparently saw everything. She looked from her steward to the fool and back again, and her eyes narrowed.

[Sigrid Varken. Hostility: 41%.]

’Forty-one percent just for bowing? That’s a new personal record!’

Mother Grell caught him by the collar the moment he came through the kitchen door.

She dragged him behind a stack of costume trunks, out of sight of the hall, and planted herself in front of him with her fists on her hips and her small black eyes burning.

"And you were going to tell me when, exactly?"

"Now, I suppose," he offered meekly.

"Now," she repeated, as if it were a curse. "House Varken, a Rank B house, sponsoring my fool in the Iron Trial!" She reached out without asking and squeezed the hem of his checkered trousers between her fingers, and the coins in the lining shifted. Her mouth went very thin. "So that’s what you were sewing in there."

He said nothing.

She studied him closely, the mask and whatever she could see of the boy behind it, which was never very much.

"Last year Haskel’s stable boy died on the second day," she told him quietly. "They brought him back on a cart. He was sixteen."

"I know."

"Then why on earth would you do it?"

He briefly considered telling her a lie, and couldn’t think of a good one.

"Because there’s something in that lake I need. And because I’m not a stable boy."

Mother Grell stared at him, and then she let go of his collar and patted it flat, roughly, like a mother straightening a child’s coat before church.

"Don’t die. Fools are very hard to find."

The troupe played one more set at the end of the night, when the nobles were drunk and loud and the candidates had gone back to their tables to be stared at.

The fool did his best tumbling run of the evening down the long strip of carpet in the middle of the hall. He had taken the twins’ walkover and Moonlit Step and put them together, and it was the first time he had ever done it in public: three back handsprings and a somersault, and then a landing on one foot on the very edge of a wine glass that a servant was holding out on a tray, so lightly that the glass didn’t even tip.

Even the gold-trimmed table clapped grudgingly for that.

He was standing there, balanced on one foot on the rim of a glass with his arms out like a bird, when the herald at the great doors struck his staff three times, harder than he had all night, and the whole hall turned.

"His Highness Aurelian Voss-Kharos, Crown Prince of the Iron Throne, returned from the southern front for the council of war!"

Every person in the hall stood, and then every person in the hall went hastily down on one knee.

Aren stepped carefully off the glass and knelt with them in the middle of the carpet, the bell on his cap tinkling faintly in the silence.

The Crown Prince walked in, tall and straight in black and gold, with the dust of the road still on his boots. He looked exactly as he had on the platform at Kharn, only older, more tired, and colder.

"And Captain Kaela Voss of Kharn," the herald added.

’No, no, no, not her, not here!’

She came in a step behind her brother, silently.

She was in her armor, black iron scratched and dented from the front, with her dark hair pulled back tight, the pale scar through her eyebrow and the slightly crooked nose. On its chain outside her breastplate, where everyone could see it, hung a dead iron heart split down the middle.

She ignored the nobles and she ignored the examiners. She walked down the length of the black floor behind her brother with her eyes straight ahead, exactly as she had walked through her own soldiers in the yard at Kharn, and the kneeling nobles on both sides might as well have been furniture.

Her path ran straight down the middle of the hall, straight down the strip of carpet, and straight past the fool.

Aren knelt with his head down and his hands flat on his knees, the white mask turned toward the floor, and listened to her footsteps come closer: iron boots on black stone, ten paces, then five.

They stopped, and he kept his head down. He could see her boots now at the edge of his vision, scratched and dented, a pace in front of him, and the end of her shadow across the carpet.

She was looking at something, and he could feel it. It wasn’t his hands or his breathing, because he had been very careful with those for twenty days.

She was looking at his feet.

The great doors had stood open behind the herald for the whole of his last run, and he hadn’t looked at them once, because he had been far too busy landing on a wine glass. Three handsprings, a somersault, and at the end, without thinking, because the carpet was long and the crowd was clapping, eight paces covered in the space of two.

She had seen that once before, in a dark chamber full of steam, when a masked man slid sideways away from her lance faster than any man should move.

’Twenty days of perfect lying, and I ruined it with a wine glass.’

[Anchor back within range: Kaela Voss.][Hostility: 100%.]

The silence lasted three heartbeats.

Then her brother’s voice came from further up the hall, quiet and distinctly impatient.

"Kaela."

After another heartbeat, the boots moved on.

He kept his head down until the Crown Prince had reached the platform and the herald had told the hall it could rise. Then he stood up with everyone else, dusted off his checkered knees, and glanced down the length of the hall.

She was standing beside her brother’s chair on the platform with her hands behind her back, and she was looking straight at the fool.