Chapter 95 The Road Beyond the Wall

The first crack reached Lexander's boot while he was singing.

He felt it through the sole before he saw it: a sudden movement beneath his weight, followed by a black line opening across the marble. Frost spread along its edges. He shifted back, pulling Io with him, and the note in his throat broke.

Around them, the song continued.

Thor's voice carried with more determination than melody. Near the entrance, Teren hummed through the damage that caught at his breath. Benjamin remained beside the throne, his thin hand resting on its cracked arm.

The cold rose hard enough to hurt.

Lexander turned his body toward Io without thinking. She caught his sleeve and looked past him at the spreading frost.

“Watch your feet,” she said.

Then she joined the next line.

He followed her voice back into the song.

Beneath them, footsteps moved through a place he could not see. The sensation made his mind reach for familiar explanations: a procession in a cellar, a crowded stair, people passing beneath a bridge. None would hold. The distance seemed to deepen whenever he tried to measure it.

Varrick ordered the dead to stop.

His voice no longer possessed the composure Lexander had come to hate. It scraped out of the floor and the widening cracks, insisting there was nowhere beyond the wall, no safety beyond his keeping.

The footsteps continued.

Then Varrick spoke of remembering them. Every name, every face. He offered remembrance as though it were a kindness nobody else could have managed, and Lexander felt anger catch behind his ribs.

He thought of names cut into stone. Of mothers who kept a small garment long after the child who had worn it was gone. Of soldiers speaking to an empty place beside a fire.

He did not have to answer.

The Keeper did.

Her voice came faintly through the floor, from somewhere beyond the darkness. She had remembered them. She had been waiting.

Io shut her eyes for a moment.

When she opened them, they were wet.

Thor heard the voices before she understood that the footsteps had changed.

People were speaking below them. Hesitant, bewildered voices, asking about the light. One remembered a song his father had sung. Another remembered the same thing.

She had heard men call to one another through smoke after a battle. Heard the relief when a familiar answer came back. This was quieter, but it made the same place in her chest tighten.

Brannoc moved.

Corra reached for his arm. He went forward with her beside him, down the hall toward the lamp. Thor took one step after them, then stopped when she saw his face.

He had recognized someone.

He knelt and set his bandaged hands against the marble.

“Faelan.”

The name passed through the hall.

Thor remembered the account of the bridge, the cell, the river taken from its god. She remembered Brannoc's certainty that fifty paces might as well have been the width of the world when he could not cross them in time.

An answer rose from beneath the stone.

Brannoc bent over his hands.

Thor had seen him endure pain without making a sound. She had never heard him speak like this.

Faelan told him he was walking. He spoke of what Varrick had taken, of being made part of the power that held the others.

Brannoc told him to continue.

Frost crawled toward his fingers.

Thor's hand closed around her hammer. Beside the lamp, Hollis remained still. Corra knelt close to Brannoc, watching the darkness reach for him.

Varrick claimed the river.

Brannoc answered with the same quiet certainty he had once brought to a broken gate.

Thor felt something pull.

It did not move through the air. It moved through the cold itself, a force drawing free of another force, and for a moment she thought of a winter river breaking its cover of ice.

Varrick screamed.

The sound struck the pillars and came back distorted. Frost climbed Brannoc's arms. Corra laid her hands on his shoulders, and autumn-colored light spread through the blackness until it fell away in fragments.

Thor kept her hammer ready.

There was nothing she could strike without risking the people already doing the work. The knowledge burned in her. She held her place anyway.

Faelan's voice came closer to the lamp.

He had reached the other side of the wall.

The river was his again.

Brannoc's shoulders shook once. He did not lift his hands.

Then something else loosened beneath them. Thor could not have named everything that departed, but she felt warmth where there had been only cold, the deep steadiness of stone, a shifting sense of roads dividing and meeting. Powers Varrick had swallowed were leaving him with the people who had carried them.

The shadow rose through the floor.

Thor lifted her hammer.

This time, she could see him.

Io felt Lethan's balance change before he asked for help.

He had pushed himself further than his body could comfortably manage. His shoulder touched the wall, and the contact became weight. Teren turned immediately, one hand closing around his arm.

Io crossed to them.

“Here,” she said, drawing a bench clear of the passage with a servant's help. “Sit for a moment.”

Lethan looked toward the dais.

The shadow there climbed almost to the ceiling, yet she could see the ruined throne through it. Its size frightened her less than the way it thinned when another surge of movement passed beneath the floor.

“Song,” Lethan said.

“You can hear it from here.”

He shook his head, angry with a body that kept imposing terms on him.

Teren helped him sit. Io knelt long enough to check his breathing, then looked at the people gathered near the doors. More had come since they entered. A corridor could become dangerous without anyone intending to crowd it.

She asked that a clear path be kept to the infirmary.

Lexander reached her as she stood.

“Go with them,” she told him, nodding toward Thor and the dais.

His eye moved over her face.

“I'm all right.”

“I didn't ask.”

“You were about to.”

From the far end of the hall came Varrick's voice, directed at Benjamin. It had become gentle again.

Io felt her stomach tighten.

She knew that gentleness now. It was the sound of someone finding a bruise and deciding where to press.

A healer appeared in the passage, summoned by the noise and the spreading alarm. Io spoke to her quickly. They would need space, warm water, and people ready to receive anyone who could no longer stand. Evelyn needed to know what was happening if she did not already.

Lexander listened, then touched Io's arm.

“I'll tell you.”

She knew what he meant. Whatever happened at the dais, he would bring the account himself.

“Then make sure you're still able to.”

He nodded.

Io went into the passage, taking the healer with her. Behind her, the song rose again, and she continued it under her breath while they made room for the living.

Lexander returned in time to hear Varrick ask Benjamin to stay.

The shadow curled around the old king's shoulders. Benjamin gripped the throne, his eyes closed, his body shaking with the effort of remaining upright.

Lexander knew how a command could hide inside concern.

They need you. Only you can do this. If you leave, someone will suffer.

He had spent too many lives inside that reasoning. Even after the machinery at the First Grave was broken, parts of him still mistook endless vigilance for devotion. He had caught himself counting breaths beside his children's beds. He had struggled to walk away from a window he had already checked.

Here was the lie laid bare, spoken aloud by the thing that profited from it.

Uriah started forward. Aurelia caught his arm.

Lexander stopped too.

Benjamin had to be allowed to answer.

The pause seemed long enough for the cold to settle into every crack in the room.

Then Benjamin opened his eyes.

He remembered being told the same thing before. Remembered the doors breaking, the family gone beyond his reach, the offered task that had become his prison. His voice cracked as he spoke, but it did not disappear.

He would not hold Varrick's door.

He took his hand from the throne.

Lexander watched him step down through the shadow. One step, then another, then the last. The darkness failed to make a wall of itself.

Benjamin reached the floor.

Adriana moved beside the lamp.

Silver light filled the space around her hands, bright enough to sharpen every broken edge in the room. Lexander raised a hand against it, then lowered it because he wanted to see.

Her refusal reached the stone.

He had expected violence. The force in the room seemed too great to end without something breaking. Instead, the strange gray surface began to lose its distinction from the marble around it.

The mark faded.

The stone became floor.

Lexander looked for an edge, a hinge, a trace of the claim that had made it a door. There was only cracked marble and an old woman's lamp.

Varrick shrank above them.

Adriana swayed. Lexander took a step, then saw help moving toward her and held back. Too many hands could become another kind of obstacle.

The shadow insisted it could not be refused.

Adriana answered that death would remain. People would still reach the end of their lives. What had ended was his keeping of them.

Lexander looked toward Benjamin.

The old king stood near the lamp, staring at the floor as if he had never seen stone before.

Then Varrick turned toward the broken windows.

He still had Ansel's doors, he said. The hall. The officers. The living.

Thor shifted forward.

The shadow thinned before she could close with it.

It left a final promise of patience and was gone.

Warmth entered the room.

For a moment, nobody seemed to trust it.

Then Castellan spoke.

He could see.

Lexander put one hand against the nearest pillar, feeling the old stone under his palm. He had not realized until that moment how hard he had been bracing himself against the cold.

Brannoc still held the floor.

Lexander watched Corra speak to him, watched her put her hands over his and lift them gently away from the marble. It was one of the most careful things he had ever seen.

He looked away when Brannoc bowed his head.

There were griefs that needed witnesses. There were also moments within them that deserved the shelter of people pretending to study something else.

Hollis remained beside her lamp, speaking of the people walking past. Too many to count. Callan made a small sound near the doors, and she looked at him with a kindness that seemed to release him from a duty he had assigned himself.

Then she saw Ansel.

Lexander went still.

He remembered what Ansel had done. The houses, the ledgers, the people reduced to means of making other people obey. He remembered the last report from the basin too, the opened doors and the choice to stay while others escaped.

Hollis spoke to someone Lexander could not see.

He could not judge the expression on Ansel's face. Could not know what he carried or understood. He could only hear the old woman speak of a lamp, a name recovered, a final act that had let others walk out.

There was a long silence.

Then Hollis smiled through her tears and told them he had knocked before continuing.

Lexander looked at the place where the door had been.

Allowing the dead to walk did not require them to pretend the living had never been harmed. The road was not a verdict delivered by the people in this room. It was a road that should never have been stolen from anyone.

He let that thought settle without trying to make it comfortable.

Evelyn stood beside Adriana now, supporting her. Lexander had not seen her arrive. Her eyes moved over the room, then found him near the pillar.

He nodded once.

She would understand enough of it: Io was outside, working. He was still on his feet. The danger had changed.

Benjamin climbed the dais again.

This time he called Uriah to him.

Lexander watched the old king place a hand on his grandson's shoulder and give him the room. He thought of the official in the courtyard asking about accounts and titles, and felt something in his chest ease.

No clerk would have understood this from a change in an address.

Hollis asked them to light the room.

They did.

Lamps gathered on the steps and beside the place where the door had stood. The stone lantern with its crooked hollow came forward. Vaust hung the bell from the throne. Thor set down a lamp, then stood aside while Loki placed his nearby.

Lexander had none to offer. He took a taper from someone who had finished with it and helped a waiting servant light one at the side of the hall.

There was no appointed place for it.

They chose a sound patch of stone near a pillar, clear of the rotten hanging, and left it there.

By dusk, the room was warm with small flames.

The Keeper's voice reached them once more. She was walking the dead home. It would take time.

Lexander bowed his head.

For the first time since they entered, he let himself think of going home too.

Io was washing her hands when he found her.

The water in the basin had gone cold. She had a damp sleeve and a smudge on one cheek where she had pushed loose hair away with the back of her wrist.

She turned before he spoke.

“Well?”

“The door is gone.”

Her hands became still above the water.

“Gone?”

“Floor. Adriana refused it. The dead are leaving.”

Io reached for the towel and missed it.

He put it into her hand.

She dried her fingers slowly, watching him as though each word needed to be checked against his face before she could believe it.

“Faelan?”

“Past the wall. His river went with him.”

“Brannoc?”

“Corra is with him.”

“Benjamin?”

“Exhausted. Still home.”

She laughed once, shakily.

“And Varrick?”

Lexander's answer changed the room between them.

“Gone north. Weaker. He still holds people in the hall.”

Io looked down at the towel.

He waited.

After a while, she said, “Tell me all of it.”

So he did.

They sat on a bench outside the infirmary, with people passing and someone occasionally needing Io's attention. He told the story in pieces, returning to it when she came back. Benjamin's refusal. Adriana's light. Castellan seeing the room again. Hollis recognizing Ansel. The lamps left burning.

Io asked questions where he expected them and remained silent where he did not.

When he finished, she rested her head against his shoulder.

“The children will want to know whether the dead are coming here.”

“Yes.”

“We should think about how to answer.”

“Yes.”

Neither moved for a while.

Then she took his hand and placed it briefly against her belly.

Thora was too small for him to feel movement. He knew that. He kept his hand there anyway, feeling only warmth and Io's breathing.

“Our daughter won't inherit it,” she said.

“No.”

“And now the people who died because of him can leave.”

He nodded.

Io closed her eyes.

“That's enough to be glad about tonight.”

He kissed her hair.

“It is.”

On the first morning afterward, Concordia still required grain.

A mill wheel had broken. Two carts had reached the wrong storehouse. Someone had approved an order for blankets without noticing that the number on the second page included the number on the first.

Lexander listened to the reports with an attention that surprised the council.

He had expected ordinary work to feel small after the throne room. Instead, the work seemed wonderfully available. A broken wheel could be repaired. A mistaken delivery could be redirected. The blankets existed; they merely needed counting properly.

Lysandra regarded him across the table.

“You're in a remarkably good temper.”

“Would you prefer that I become difficult?”

“I would prefer that you remain this way through the petition about drainage.”

He did his best.

The matters touching Greykeep were less simple. The allied gates would remain watched. Supplies would continue. Varrick had lost the dead, but no one had offered reason to believe his remaining officers would stop obeying him because their master had suffered a defeat.

Lexander asked that the roads remain supplied and the shelters supported. He refused a suggestion that the victory should be announced as the end of danger.

“What should the notice say?” the clerk asked.

“The truth.”

The man waited with his pen raised.

Lexander considered his words.

“The obstruction on the last road has been removed. The dead are passing freely. Greykeep and Concordia remain allied in protecting the living.”

Lysandra nodded.

“And the celebrations?”

“People may celebrate.”

“Officially?”

He thought of the courtyard lamps, lit without any decree.

“I doubt they need our permission to be relieved.”

When the meeting ended, he walked home through a city whose bells had not rung for battle.

He listened to them for a long time.

Seraphina wanted to know if the Keeper ever slept.

Io had prepared herself for questions about death, captivity, and why anyone would build such a wall. She had not prepared for this one.

“I don't know,” she admitted.

“If she has to walk with everyone, she must get tired.”

“Perhaps she rests with them.”

Ignatius considered that from his place on the rug.

“Does she have a horse?”

Lexander looked at Io.

Io refused to rescue him.

“I don't know that either,” he said.

Their son looked down at the wooden horse in his lap, visibly weighing the scale of the task against the size of his available contribution.

Seraphina leaned closer to Io.

“Will they be frightened?”

“Some may be.”

“Even with the lamp?”

“Being able to see where you're going doesn't always stop you being frightened.”

That answer seemed to matter to her. She sat back and turned it over without speaking.

Lexander watched the fire.

He had wanted, once, to give his children a world that could be explained entirely through safety. He was learning how much courage it took to offer them the truth in a form their hands could hold.

“The Keeper won't leave them alone on the road,” Io said.

Seraphina nodded.

Ignatius settled the horse on all four legs.

“Then she should have someone with her too.”

Io smiled, but her eyes shone.

“I think she has a great many people with her now.”

The first reports arrived quietly.

Figures on the roads after dark. A familiar face near a shelter. Someone passing a lamp without casting quite the shadow expected of a living person.

Lexander read them carefully and resisted the desire to turn every account into something certain.

Some were confused. Some contradicted themselves. Grief made people see what they hoped to see, and the world had also begun doing things that hope alone could not explain.

He asked for witnesses to be heard without mockery and without being told what their experience must mean.

The fourth night brought Hesketh's account. It reached Lexander later, through Greykeep, stripped of the spectacle other people might have made of it.

Hesketh had seen his grandmother.

Elsa. Her old shawl. Her familiar way of holding her head. She had paused near the trough and waved before walking on.

Lexander read the note twice.

He carried it to Io rather than sending for her.

She was sorting herbs at a table by the window. She took the page, read it, and sat down without appearing to notice that she had done so.

For a long time, she did not speak.

“Do you want me to stay?” he asked.

She nodded.

He drew up another chair.

Outside, the twins were being taught that watering a garden did not require flooding the path. Seraphina maintained that the water had escaped by itself. Ignatius offered the explanation that paths might be thirsty too.

Io listened until their voices moved farther away.

“My grandmother used to dry these above her hearth,” she said, touching a small bundle of herbs.

Lexander looked at her hand.

“She tied them badly. The knot would loosen, and leaves would fall into whatever was beneath them. She blamed the cat.”

“Was there a cat?”

“Oh, yes. It was innocent of very little. But not that.”

He smiled.

Io set the herbs down.

“I hadn't thought about it in years.”

He took her hand beneath the edge of the table, where she could hold it without having to stop looking at the page.

They remained there until one of the children came to ask whether mud could be brought inside if it was important mud.

Thor returned to Concordia on the sixth day with a tired face and news that Benjamin had been visiting people.

“Lethan wanted to hear him,” she said over a late meal. “The song.”

“Did he sing?” Io asked.

“I wasn't there. Liora said they spoke. Teren too.”

Lexander passed her the bread.

“Good.”

Thor broke off a piece.

“Mary and Melody met him properly today.”

“How did Melody behave?”

“Like Melody.”

“Then I assume he survived.”

“He laughed.”

The answer quieted the table more effectively than solemnity would have done.

Thor ate for a while before speaking again.

“Brannoc keeps going to the river.”

Io looked up.

“Alone?”

“Sometimes. Corra goes with him often.”

“Is he all right?”

Thor considered that with unusual care.

“He knows Faelan is free.”

It was not an answer that promised more than she knew.

Lexander nodded.

They spoke of Greykeep's wounded, of the repairs that could finally begin in the old throne room, of lamps that Castellan tended with a diligence nobody questioned. They did not speak as though a week had been enough to settle anything.

When the meal ended, Thor stood by the nursery door while the twins slept.

Lexander joined her.

Ignatius's repaired horse stood on a stool within reach of the bed. Seraphina had placed a folded scrap of cloth beside it, for reasons she had declined to explain.

Thor watched their sleeping faces.

“The ones in the hall,” she said quietly.

“I know.”

“He has fewer things to hurt now.”

Lexander looked at her.

“And more reason to hurt the ones he has.”

She nodded.

He did not tell her to rest and forget it. Neither of them would have believed the request possible.

Instead, he said, “When there is a plan, Concordia will be ready.”

Thor remained another moment, then stepped away from the nursery.

On the eighth day, Io went to Greykeep.

Her dress had begun to sit differently at the waist. The change was slight, but she noticed it each time she fastened the same clothes and found they were no longer quite the same clothes. Thora had become a small, persistent presence in the practical arrangements of her morning.

Evelyn was rolling a bandage when Io reached the infirmary.

She looked up and smiled, then set the cloth aside when she saw Io's face.

Io had been there for the song, the first voices, Faelan's answer. She had spent the days since hearing the rest of the throne room from Lexander and trying to fit its enormity around one small memory: a warm hearth in a southern village, herbs slipping from a badly tied knot.

Now the words came awkwardly.

“Lexander told me about the end. About all of them leaving.”

Evelyn nodded.

“And the roads. The people being seen.”

“Yes.”

Io sat on the edge of an empty bed.

“My grandmother died when I was small.”

Evelyn came to sit beside her.

Io looked at her own hands.

“She was from a village in the south. Before all this. Before I understood what I was.”

She had thought about death through so many terrible repetitions that she had almost forgotten the first absence that had taught her its meaning. A woman who had been there one day and not there afterward. A house altered forever by one missing voice.

“I used to wonder where she went,” Io said. “Whether she was somewhere. Whether anyone was with her.”

Evelyn took her hand.

Io had not realized how badly she needed the touch until it arrived.

“Since the throne room, I keep wondering whether she was there. Whether she's walking now.”

Evelyn answered gently. The Keeper was walking them. She knew their names. The road reached beyond the kingdoms they could name, beyond the people any one of them had met.

“Even villages in the south?” Io asked.

The question sounded very young when it left her mouth.

Evelyn did not smile at it.

“Every road.”

Io breathed in, then out. Her free hand settled over the small roundness beneath her dress.

For a moment, three generations seemed to occupy the quiet space between her hands: the woman she remembered, the woman she had become, the daughter who had not yet seen the world.

“Good,” she said.

Evelyn stayed with her until the word no longer trembled.

When Io came home, she brought news of Adriana's returning light.

A faint silver glow, seen again after days of exhaustion. No grand declaration accompanied it. The people closest to her were relieved and careful, letting strength return at its own pace.

Lexander listened while Io loosened her hair.

“And you?” he asked.

She looked at him through the mirror.

“I spoke to Evelyn.”

“About your grandmother?”

She nodded.

He came to stand behind her, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders.

“Did it help?”

“Yes.”

Neither asked the word to mean everything was settled.

Io leaned back against him.

“I want to tell the children about her.”

“The cat?”

“The cat. The herbs. How she burnt the first loaf every time she tried to teach someone else to bake because she talked too much.”

“That seems a valuable family history.”

“She would have liked you.”

“Even with my deficiencies?”

“She would have named them promptly. Then fed you.”

Lexander kissed the top of her head.

“I regret not meeting her.”

“So do I.”

They stood quietly for a while.

Then Io turned in his arms.

“Tell me about the council.”

He groaned.

“That badly?”

“There is a drainage petition.”

She laughed, and he began explaining it, grateful for the chance to make her laugh again.

The numbers arrived the following day.

Two hundred and four names in Cael's records. People sent to the hall and never recorded leaving. Some in cells, some in rooms called guest rooms by people who did not have to sleep behind their locked doors.

Probably more.

Lexander read the count before Thor returned from the meeting in Greykeep. He had already ordered the receiving spaces inspected when she reached him.

“Don't fill them with beds yet,” she said. “We don't know how we'll bring anyone out.”

“I haven't. We are finding out what can be made ready.”

She looked at the papers on his desk.

“Good.”

Ishkar had spoken to Uriah. Dun remembered people who had not escaped when Ansel opened the doors: too weak, too frightened, unable to believe the chance was real. The hall had closed around them again.

“The courtyard?” Lexander asked.

“No longer the shelter it was. The bakers are gone. The people who meant the welcome aren't there to keep it.”

Lexander sat back.

A route that had worked once could kill them if they treated it as though nothing had changed.

Thor told him what Benjamin had said at the meeting. That he knew what Varrick would be telling the people left inside. Stay. The closed door is safer. Someone you love will suffer if you leave.

Lexander looked toward the window.

“I want people ready to meet them who understand that being able to leave isn't the same as believing you can.”

Thor nodded slowly.

“Some of the ones already here.”

“If they wish. No one should be asked to go near that fear because we find their suffering useful.”

“No.”

“And healers,” he continued. “Not just carts and guards.”

Thor sat in the chair opposite him. For the first time since she arrived, she looked tired enough to admit it.

“We need a way in.”

Lexander put the papers aside.

“Then let's make certain there is a way home ready when you find it.”

Maren's name reached them after Uriah had told Teren.

Io heard it from Evelyn. Lexander heard it from Io when she returned to the room where the supply lists had begun spreading across every available surface.

“Teren's wife,” she said.

He put down his pen.

“Alive?”

“Yes. In the east wing.”

The words rearranged everything he knew about the number on the page.

Two hundred and four was still two hundred and four. Yet now one of those places held a woman whose daughters he had seen waiting beside their father, whose absence had shaped rooms without being named every time someone entered them.

“She was ill when the doors opened,” Io said. “She didn't hear them. When she woke, the officers had returned.”

Lexander shut his eye.

For a moment he could see only the nearness of it. Freedom passing down a corridor while someone slept through a fever. A door closing again before she knew it had ever been open.

“Does she know about the girls?”

Io's face gave him the answer before she spoke.

“Varrick tells her they're dead.”

Lexander stood.

He needed to move before anger made him promise something he could not yet deliver.

At the window, he rested both hands against the sill.

Behind him, Io said, “Teren lit another lamp.”

He looked back.

“A fourth. Beside the others.”

For a while, Lexander could not speak.

Then he returned to the desk and drew the nearest list toward him.

“Tell me what else they need.”

That evening, Concordia's castellan asked whether the receiving hall should remain lit through the night.

Lexander stood beneath the archway, looking over the benches that had been moved to leave a broad passage down the center. No one had begun bringing beds. They had set water nearby and checked the rooms beyond.

“Yes,” he said. “But give the attendants turns to sleep. We don't know when they will be needed.”

The lamps brightened a little.

He thought of Greykeep's old throne room, of another castellan finally able to see a place that had been taken from him. He put a hand against the arch.

“If there is ever somewhere you cannot reach,” he said, “tell us.”

A brief silence followed.

“Is there reason for concern, Your Majesty?”

“No new reason. I want you to know you may tell us before you understand why.”

“I understand.”

Lexander stayed beneath the arch another moment, then turned toward home.

Io was waiting near the nursery. She had already told the children the story of her grandmother's cat. Apparently Ignatius had decided the animal should have been allowed to defend itself against the accusation involving the herbs.

“That is fair,” Lexander said.

“It stole an entire fish the same afternoon.”

“Separate charges.”

She laughed and caught his hand.

They stood together in the doorway, looking at the twins.

There were two hundred and four people waiting for a door to open somewhere far away. There was a woman saying her daughters' names in a room where no one answered truthfully. There was still work they did not know how to do.

Lexander bent to kiss his children good night.

He let that work wait long enough to finish the kisses.

Thor's message came before they had gone to bed.

It was brief. She was returning to Greykeep's lower corridor. The Keeper had spoken again.

Lexander read it with Io beside him.

The count had changed.

Two hundred and five.

For a moment he assumed another prisoner had been found in the records. Then he reached the next line.

Someone had entered the hall willingly. A young man in a gray coat with silver at the throat. An officer once. A man who had sat down in a road when someone asked his name, who had since spent his days repairing a shelter's pipes.

Dellan.

Lexander lowered the message.

Io was staring at it.

“He went alone?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The room seemed to wait with her for an answer.

Lexander had none.

He thought of the trough, the lamps, the road north. Of a man walking past each place where he might have stopped, reaching the burned settlement, approaching the hall that everyone else was still trying to find a way into.

Then knocking.

Being admitted.

Beyond the nursery door, Ignatius murmured in his sleep and settled again.

Lexander folded Thor's message carefully.

“Have the gate watch ready to receive another message,” he told the castellan. “Wake me as soon as it comes.”

Then he went back to the desk with Io beside him and changed the number at the top of the page.