Chapter 121: Progression

I do not remember walking back to my room.

I remember the stairs, because there were many of them, and I remember the way the torchlight kept sliding off the walls like water. I remember Captain Daniel’s hand falling on my shoulder somewhere around the third floor, and the sound of my own voice saying "yes, sir," and then nothing, until the door of my room closed behind me and the lock clicked. ⅇℯ𝚕.

I stood there for a long time, leaning against the wood.

The room was exactly as I had left it. The bed was neatly made. The mirror on the dressing table caught the lamplight. My pajamas were folded on the chair, soft and grey, and a half-finished cup of water sat beside them. None of it had changed. Somewhere below me, a man’s body was being scraped off a podium, and my room still smelled faintly of soap.

I peeled off the uniform, which was stiff with sweat and something else, and went into the bathroom. The shower coughed once and then poured hot water over my head. I stood under it with my forehead pressed against the tile and waited.

I was waiting to be sick.

It seemed the natural thing to do. A normal person watches a man’s face disappear and then kneels over a toilet and empties his stomach. I would have welcomed it. It would have meant I was still the person who had sat by the fire a week ago and told Sera that her plan was evil.

My stomach stayed quiet.

I stood there for five minutes. Then ten. The hot water ran down my back, and I realized that I was only tired. Tired and cold and strangely clear, as if someone had wiped a window inside my head.

’That is not a good sign,’ I told myself.

Then, because a man must think something, I thought: ’A bad man would not be asking.’

It was a comforting thought. I put it away carefully, like a coin in a pocket, and did not look at it too hard.

When the water went cold, I dried myself and sat on the edge of the bed in my pajamas. I counted.

It was something I had promised myself in the swamp, after the first masked ambush, when the hunters ran off and I had realized how easily a person could be made to disappear. Keep count, I had said. Every one. So you never get used to it.

It took no effort. The number was one.

One name. One face that was now half a face. I said it quietly into the dark, "Quinn," and it sounded very small. I promised myself that I would keep the tally, that I would never let the number become something I did not know. It was a good promise. I meant it.

I fell asleep with the lamp still burning, and I did not dream.

The mirror told me the truth the next morning.

I stood in front of it before the bell, dressed in the green uniform with its single star, and rehearsed. It was routine by then. Peter’s face had a shape: eyebrows slightly raised, lips slightly parted, eyes a little too wide, as if every shadow in the room might be hiding a knife. I tilted my head and let the fear settle in.

It looked perfect.

Then I let it go and put on my own face, the plain one, the one I had worn before the realm. I stared at it.

The two faces were almost the same.

There was a difference, if you knew where to look. Peter’s eyes were wet. Mine were dry. Peter’s mouth shook. Mine did not. But the gap between them was thinner than a few days ago, and I had a feeling it would keep thinning. One of them was a mask. I was no longer sure which.

I smiled at the mirror, and the smile that came out was not Peter’s.

I wiped it off before it could finish.

The reward arrived that evening.

We were at the black table, the five of us, with a platter of grilled meat steaming in the middle and ale in clay mugs. Nobody was eating. Jeffrey kept pushing a piece of bread around his plate. Jonas had not said a word since the bell. Martha chewed so slowly that I could have recited a prayer between bites, and Rico watched the empty seat at the end of the table as though it were an equation.

Captain Daniel had been summoned an hour earlier. When he came back, he came back alone and sat down without a sound.

"Sir?" Jeffrey asked carefully.

Daniel put a small leather pouch on the table. It chinked. "Fifty coins. For the faction." His voice was flat. "And the King’s gratitude, delivered by the chief councilor. He said that Captain Daniel of the Third Floor was a loyal and vigilant servant, and that his faction should drink tonight on the King’s account."

A servant brought in a fresh barrel of ale. Nobody reached for it.

"They are praising you," Martha said, slowly.

"They are," Daniel said. He stared at the pouch like it was a dead animal. "I told them I found him in the course of my rounds. I gave no names beyond my own." His eyes lifted, just barely, and met mine across the table. "Nobody needs to know who first came to me. I will not be the reason a child is dragged into this."

I swallowed. I had planned for suspicion, for questions, for a cold hand on the shoulder. I had not planned for kindness.

’He is protecting me,’ I thought. ’He is lying to the King to protect the boy who sent a man to be tortured.’

It should have been convenient. It was convenient. It meant I would stay at one star and keep my room and walk the corridors at night without anyone asking why. The decoy reason, the one I had been telling myself, was that I wanted to stay small and unnoticed, which was true. The second reason was that attention was a currency, and I did not want to spend it yet.

But the third reason, the one that sat in my stomach like a stone, was that I had just watched a good man take blood money, and thank me for letting him.

"Thank you, sir," I mumbled.

Daniel nodded once. Then he finally picked up his ale, drank half of it in a single breath, and set it down with a hand that was not quite steady. 𝖋𝘳ℯ

Rico was still watching me. I felt it like a draught from an open window. I lowered my eyes and bit into the meat, and tasted nothing.

"You did what?"

Sera’s voice cracked across the fire. I had barely stepped through the Moon’s Door, my knees buckling from the drain, and she was already on her feet.

"I handed in a corrupt soldier," I said. I sat on a log before my legs could make the decision for me. "Quinn. He was selling Gifts, extorting guests and breaking the King’s law. Daniel caught him. Culex tortured him for three days and then he confessed to being in the Order. They executed him last night."

Nobody spoke.

Arthur’s cheerful face had gone very still. Lee stopped chewing. Mary set down the skewer she had been holding and folded her hands on her knees, and Theodore, who sat at the edge of the firelight, simply tilted his head.

"He confessed," Mary said, at last. "To being in the Order."

"Yes."

"Which means Culex now believes the Order has a member inside his own army."

"Yes."

"And that it was trying to control the palace’s money."

"That part was Quinn’s own idea," I said. "He was desperate. He gave them whatever he thought they wanted."

"It is a very useful idea," Mary said quietly.

I did not answer. I did not have to. She had already seen the shape of it, the way the lie had been wrapped around the economic plan like a cloak, and the way my own coin movements would now be seen through the shadow of a dead man’s network. She only looked at me with her dark, calm eyes, and I felt the small, familiar chill of being understood.

"Was it bad?" Arthur asked.

"Quick," I said. "It was quick."

It was a lie. A small one. I watched it leave my mouth and settle in the air between us, and Arthur’s shoulders eased, and I felt the weight of it land on my own.

’The first lie to the people I’m doing this for,’ I thought. ’Remember that, too.’

Lee grunted. "Then the plan works. You have a name in Culex’s mind that is not yours, and a reason for him to be afraid. That is good. Do not make it a habit."

"I won’t."

"Mary," I said, "you told me to watch his face, not his words."

"Yes."

"I barely looked at him."

She waited. She was very good at waiting.

"But I remember one thing," I said slowly. "After he struck Quinn, he wiped his hand on a cloth. His eyes went over the crowd, slowly. They skipped the guests. They went across the soldiers and they stopped on the captains, and they stayed on one of them a little longer than the others."

"Which one?"

"Rashford. Quinn’s captain."

Mary closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, something quiet and satisfied had settled in her face. "Then he is suspicious of his own captain. That is useful too."

"Is it?"

"It means the lie is working," she said. "And that a king who doubts his captains is no longer certain of his army."

I let out a breath. It was almost a laugh. For a heartbeat, the fear in my chest loosened, and what grew in its place was something warm and hungry. I had made that. A dead man, a stolen thought and a priest’s good heart had added up to this. It felt like a chess move, and it felt good.

I tried not to notice how good.

It was Sera who broke the silence. She had not moved since I sat down. The firelight cut her face into angles, and she looked, just then, very much like me.

"You did not hesitate," she said.

"I did."

"I watched you walk in. You were calm."

"I hesitated," I said again. "I just didn’t stop."

For a moment she only stared. Then she let out a long, slow breath and sat down hard beside me, her shoulder against mine, and she said nothing at all. It was the strangest conversation we had ever had. Her plan had been the cold one, and I had called it evil. Now I had done something colder, with better manners, and she was the one who looked afraid.

"Be careful," she said finally.

"I always am."

"That is not what I meant."

I knew what she meant. I did not answer.

I returned to my room long after the bells. The Door had stripped my spiritual power down to the dregs again, and the fragment in my spirit temple was busy mending it, drop by drop. I sat on my bed in the dark.

Somewhere in the halls, someone was whispering a name. Quinn, Quinn, Quinn. It would be in every mouth by morning. The Twilight Order had a spy among the soldiers, a spy who had planned to take the palace’s money, and a King who had killed him with one hand. The lie was no longer a lie. It was history.

I took out the little tally in my head and looked at it again.

One.

It was still easy to remember. I told myself it always would be.