Chapter 19 Third Princess

Lysandra Halvere sat on the camp bed in her tent with her hands between her knees and waited for them to stop shaking.

They didn't. They'd been shaking since the Gap, on and off, ever since the ward broke. She had held that ward against a fire mage of the Gold rank for nearly two minutes. She had never held a ward against anything stronger than a tutor's practice bolt in her life, and she had held it, alone, with half a ton of terrified horse under her, and she had been proud of that for perhaps half a minute.

Then the dog had hit it once and broken it like a sugar shell.

She was Level 71. Her class was [Ward Mage]. She had spent eleven years in the palace library learning to put walls in the air, because nobody had ever thought a third princess needed anything else, and because walls were the thing she was best at. She had always thought, privately, that if it came to it, if anyone ever really tried, her walls would be enough.

They had been enough for two minutes. Then a farmhand had walked in front of her and made them unnecessary.

She put her hands flat on her knees and pressed down until they stopped. Then she got out her travelling desk and a clean sheet of paper and began to write things down. It was what she did when she was frightened. It was what she had done since she was twelve. You couldn't be frightened of a list. A list was only a list.

* * *

One. The palace stable yard. Twenty-six horses, all bred and trained for war, all used to blood and fire and noise. Every one of them panicked the moment he walked into the yard. Gareth's stallion had bolted at the sight of him three times in three days. Her own mare, who had stood quiet through a fireworks display for the old King's birthday, had locked her legs and shaken like a leaf.

He said it was the smell of butchering.

Two. He had walked fifty paces ahead of a mounted column for three days. Not kept up. Led. On the second afternoon the column had been trotting to stay behind him. He hadn't been out of breath once. She'd watched him at the night halts. He didn't even rub his feet.

Three. Rusk's account of the first volley. Twelve bolts from good military crossbows at forty paces, aimed by professionals at a man on an open road. Four in the case. One through the coat. One caught in his bare hand, out of the air, in front of his face. The rest missed.

Twelve professionals do not miss a man on an open road. Not that many times.

Four. The dash. She had seen it herself. She had seen it with her own eyes from inside her own ward. The dog had come over the tree ten strides ahead of him and fifty from her, and he had been in front of her before it got there. She didn't know how fast a man would have to run to do that. She was fairly sure there wasn't one.

Five. The dog.

Lys stopped writing and looked at that word for a while.

It had not been a dog. She knew what it had been. It was in the Royal Bestiary, plate forty-one, under Gold-rank threats. A Gravemaw. Two hundred and eighty, give or take, in the wild. And it had not been wild. It had worn a collar with a crystal set in the front of it, glowing, and she knew what that was too, because it was illegal in Aldmere and had been for two hundred years. A binding. Somebody had caught a Gravemaw and put a binding on it and brought it to the Hollin Gap on a chain. Somebody with a great deal of money and a frontier crystal powerful enough to hold it.

The collar had been cut through. So had the spine under it. With one blow, by a man who said, a minute afterwards, that he'd got lucky.

Six. Gareth.

She wrote his name down and underlined it, and then sat and looked at the underlining, because her hand had done that by itself.

* * *

She'd known for a while. That was the thing she had to be honest about, if she was going to be honest about anything tonight.

She had known since the spring, when her father had called her to his study and told her, kindly, that the Lord Chancellor had suggested a match, and it was a good match, and the Knight-Captain was a fine young man and a hero of the realm. She had smiled and curtsied and gone back to the library, and sat there until the candles went out, because there had been something in her father's face. Relief. Relief that the spare spare was being put somewhere, and that someone else had thought of where.

Mordaine Kell had thought of where.

And the Lord Chancellor had appointed Gareth to command her escort. And Gareth had drawn up the order of march, himself, in the palace on the night before they left, and shown it to nobody but her and Rusk. The red case fifty paces ahead. The real warrant in her coat.

And this morning there had been a spy tied to a tree with a drawing of that order of march in his wallet. Neat. Accurate. With the red case marked.

And tonight there was a dead man in the road with a purse of twenty new crowns round his neck. New from the Treasury mint. The same mint that had struck the thirty gold she'd paid Tobin Marsh out of her own household account, four days ago.

She took the two coins out of her coat and put them side by side on the desk. One from her own purse, one from the dead man's.

Same year. Same die. Same tiny flaw in the rim, by the King's ear, where the stamp had been chipped since spring.

"Shit," said the third princess of Aldmere, very quietly, to the coins.

This chapter came from the page the author uses for publication without approval; that page is where readers can support their work.

Somebody inside the palace had paid men to kill her decoy, and probably her. Somebody with a household account at the Treasury. And her betrothed had told them where to aim.

Her hands had started shaking again. She put them flat on the desk until they stopped.

Then she got up and went to find the auditor.

Her way led past Gareth's tent. The lamp was lit inside, and the flap was tied back, and he was sitting on his camp chair with a cup of wine, telling three of the younger guards about the beast. He'd got to the part where it reared. It hadn't reared. He was showing them with his hands how it had reared over him, and how he had stood firm.

Lys stopped in the dark outside, where he couldn't see her, and listened to the whole thing.

She could have walked in. She could have put the drawing and the coins down on his camp table in front of those three guards and watched his face. She thought about it with great care, the way you'd think about stepping onto ice.

Then she walked on. Let him tell his story. Let him think she was the spare spare, the one who read too much and noticed nothing, who'd been handed to him like a parcel. A man who thinks you're a fool tells you things. She had learned that at twelve.

* * *

Hesper Quill was sitting outside her tent on an upturned crate in the cold, with a bucket of water between her feet, scrubbing at her grey coat with a brush. She'd been scrubbing it for some time. The water in the bucket was pink.

"It won't come out," Lys said.

"I know," said Miss Quill, and kept scrubbing.

Lys sat on the other crate. They sat there a while in the dark, with the camp fires low round them and Brakka's warband singing something slow and sad up the road. Rusk had said it was for the dead. Not theirs. Anyone's.

"Miss Quill," Lys said. "What is he?"

The brush stopped.

"He's my audit subject," said Miss Quill. "His records are confidential under Guild regulations."

"Which section?"

"Four. I didn't write that one."

"Miss Quill."

The auditor put the brush down in the pink water. She looked across at Lys in the firelight, and Lys saw that she was very tired, and very frightened, and very, very angry, all at once, and hiding all three as well as anyone Lys had ever met. Which was well. Lys had met a great many people who hid things.

"Ask me something I can answer with a number," said Miss Quill. "I'll answer that."

Lys thought about it.

"What level is he?"

"One," said Miss Quill.

"And what," said Lys slowly, "does one mean?"

The auditor was quiet a long time. Then she reached into her satchel, which she had brought out of the tent with her, Lys noticed, and had kept beside her the whole time, and took out a thin grey book with a broken spine, and handed it over.

On the Three Runes. By Corvin Thale.

There was a slip of paper marking a page near the end. Lys read the page in the firelight. She read it twice. Then she shut the book and sat with it in her lap, and looked at the fire, and felt something in her chest go very cold and very still and very clear.

"Three runes," she said.

"Three runes."

"No fourth."

"No fourth."

"How far past?"

"I stopped counting," said Miss Quill, "when it needed a fifth."

* * *

They talked until the fires were embers.

Lys told the auditor about the drawing and the coins. Miss Quill took the coins and held them up to the lantern, one after the other, then put them down and said nothing for a while, and then went into her tent and came back with a bundle of papers tied with ribbon.

Copies. From the Land Office. In a clerk's tidy hand.

Dunmore and Vey, Factors. Fourteen frontier holdings in eight years, every one bought cheap just before a tax revision. Crown drafts on a great-household account. And the Thornfell file. Three holdings past a creek line, the tax raised from six gold to two hundred, by authority of the Lord Chancellor. Two bought by Dunmore and Vey six weeks before. And one that hadn't been sold, because a man still lived on it.

"His farm," Lys said.

"His farm."

"He doesn't know."

"No."

"Why haven't you told him?"

"Because he would walk to the palace," said Miss Quill, "politely, with that thing on his back, and ask to see the Lord Chancellor. And they would hang him for it. And he'd let them, because he wouldn't want to break anything." She took the papers back and retied the ribbon with quick sharp movements. "I need proof. Not a pattern. Proof. And I was hoping the Coldwater depot books might give me some."

"That's why you invented section fourteen."

"Sub-section six."

Lys looked down at her own commission, folded in her coat, and at the Land Office copies, and at the two coins.

Crystals bought before they got to the depot. A frontier being emptied one farm at a time. A Lord Chancellor with a household account and a binding collar. A betrothed who drew maps for assassins.

"They're the same thing," she said. "My commission and your audit. They're the same thing from two ends."

"Yes," said Miss Quill. "I think they are."

They looked at each other across the dying fire. Two women who counted. Lys had spent her whole life in rooms full of people who did not count, who looked at the spare spare and saw nothing worth adding up. She hadn't known how lonely that was until just now, sitting on a crate in the cold across from someone who had added her up in the first five minutes and come to the right answer.

"I hired him," she said, "because Ashby told me he was the most expendable man in the Guild. I wanted somebody nobody would miss." She heard her own voice crack and didn't stop it. "I looked at a Level one farmhand and saw what everyone else saw. I did exactly the thing they do to me. Every day. My whole life."

Miss Quill didn't say anything to that. She didn't say it wasn't true, which Lys was grateful for. She reached over, after a moment, and put her cold wet hand on top of Lys's, just for a moment, and then took it away and picked up the brush again.

"He'd say it was a fair mistake," said Miss Quill. "He'd say anyone would have made it."

"Would he?"

"He said the same thing about Gareth's ale." She scrubbed at the coat. "He's like that. It makes me want to scream. I have screamed. Into a ledger."

Lys laughed. She hadn't expected to. It came out of her, cracked and surprised and real, and Miss Quill looked up from the bucket and almost smiled.

* * *

His fire was at the far edge of the camp, away from the horse lines, the way it had been every night. It was the only one still properly burning. He was sitting beside it on a log, with Hal's oilskin coat across his knees, sewing up the hole the bolt had made in the shoulder. Neat small stitches, by firelight. The red warrant case lay beside him on the ground. He'd taken the bolts out of it and laid them in a row, all four, very tidily, like he might want them later.

The great cleaver leaned on the log by his right hand.

He looked up when she came into the light. He started to stand, and she shook her head, and he sat back down.

She stood there a moment. She'd meant to say something. She'd had it worked out, walking over. It had gone.

"Mister Marsh," she said instead. "What are you?"

He thought about it. He always thought about questions. She'd noticed that on the first day.

"A farmer, Your Highness."

"Lys."

"A farmer, Lys."

She sat down on the log beside him. Not fifty paces off. Right beside him, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through her riding coat, which was very warm, warmer than the fire. Her mare, tethered back in the horse lines, whinnied once, anxiously, and was quiet.

"All right," she said. "A farmer." She looked at the four bolts laid out in a row. "From tomorrow, Mister Marsh, you don't walk fifty paces in front."

"Where do I walk?"

"Beside me," said Lys. "Where I can see you."

He nodded, like that was a perfectly reasonable change of plan, and went back to his sewing.