Chapter 176: The Price of a Signature

The second formal outfit had a collar. I hadn’t noticed this the night before, because the night before it had been hanging on a door and minding its own business. This morning it was around my neck, and it had opinions.

"Stop touching it," said Sorel.

"It’s touching me."

"It’s a collar."

"It’s a hostile collar."

She had come at dawn to check my chest and then my pulse, and then stayed to watch me dress, apparently on the assumption that I would otherwise attend a historic treaty signing in whatever I had slept in. The assumption was fair. That didn’t make it pleasant. When I was finished she looked me over from boots to hair and made a small, professional sound.

"You’ll do."

"That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me this week."

"It isn’t a compliment. It’s a medical opinion." She picked up her bag. "Two hours standing. If you feel faint, don’t lock your knees. That’s how people faint."

"I wasn’t planning to faint."

"Nobody plans to faint." She paused at the door. "If it happens, tell Daphne. She’ll be beside you, and she’ll catch you without making a speech about it."

That was unfair to James, and entirely accurate.

When she had gone I stood for a moment by the table where the book lay with Penelope’s letter folded inside it. I didn’t open it. I knew exactly where the blank line was, one space above my name, and I knew it would still be there tonight. After the signing, I thought, and then I made myself stop thinking it, because I had been saying that phrase to myself for a day now and it was starting to sound like a promise I hadn’t agreed to.

***

The others were already in the small room at the end of our corridor, where somebody had left bread and a pot of tea that was still hot, which I took as a sign that the day intended to be civilised for at least an hour.

Elizabeth wasn’t there. A Crown clerk had come for her before sunrise, and she had gone with him already dressed, which meant she either hadn’t slept or had slept in formal clothes. I didn’t know which was worse.

James was sitting with his back to the wall, glaring at a piece of bread as though it had challenged him. He was wearing dark blue with silver at the cuffs, and he looked like exactly what he was, a ducal heir who would rather have been anywhere else.

"They’re taking my knives," he said.

"Who is?"

"Nobody yet. At the door."

"We were told no weapons."

"I know."

I looked at his belt, where the hilt of one knife was perfectly visible, and then at his other side, where the hilt of another was slightly less visible. "Then why are you wearing them?"

"So they have to take them."

There was no answer to that, so I sat down and took some bread. Across the room, Sophie was at the window with her nose almost touching the glass. From there you could see down into the beastkin courtyard, where the delegation’s people were forming up under their three banners.

"The Rabbit representative has silver tips on her ears," she said, without turning round. "Did you know Rabbit families greet each other by touching foreheads? Only family, though. If you do it to someone who isn’t family, it means you’re proposing."

"How do you know that?"

"Tomas told me."

"Who is Tomas?"

"One of their guards. His sister’s getting married in spring. He’s worried it’ll rain." She turned round at last, looking pleased. "He said I could come to the wedding."

James stared at her. "You’ve been here two days."

"Three."

"That’s worse."

The door opened, and Daphne came in wearing grey with no ornament at all, which on anyone else would have looked plain and on her looked deliberate. She sat down opposite me, poured tea and looked at me over the cup.

"Two hours," she said.

"Don’t."

"One hour and fifty minutes, by the time we arrive."

I studied her face for any sign that this had been a joke. There was none, which meant it either wasn’t one or was the best she had ever made, and I would never know which. Sophie laughed anyway. Daphne drank her tea.

***

The council chamber was in the oldest part of the keep, down a corridor whose stones had been worn smooth in the middle by a few hundred years of soldiers. Renn was waiting at the far end beside a long table, with two of Colonel Dunmore’s men and a clerk holding a ledger.

James unbuckled the first knife and laid it down. Then the second. The soldier looked at him and waited. James looked back, and after a long moment bent down and took a third knife out of his boot.

"Thank you, my lord," said the soldier.

"I want them back."

"After the ceremony, my lord."

Sophie held up a long silver hairpin. "Is this a weapon?"

The soldier considered it with real seriousness. "No, my lady."

"It could be."

"Please keep it in your hair, my lady."

Daphne had brought nothing, because Daphne had listened to the briefing. I had brought Dream Haven, folded small inside my storage ring, and when the clerk looked at the ring I said, "Pillow," in the voice of someone who had said it at a great many doors. He wrote it down. Renn didn’t stop him.

Renn didn’t say anything to any of us, either, until we had all passed the table. Then he looked at me, only me, and said quietly, "Where you are put."

"I remember."

"Good," he said, and we went through the doors.

The wards met me on the threshold. I had expected to feel nothing, or a weight, or a cold, and it was none of those. My mana didn’t vanish. It simply stopped answering, the way a dog stops answering when it has decided you aren’t serious. Somewhere under my breastbone, the part of me that was always ready to raise Barrier reached for it out of habit and found nothing there to raise. I didn’t like that at all. Beside me, Daphne’s fingers twitched once at her side, and I knew she had reached for her Gravity and found the same nothing.

[The wards do not affect me.]

’Good. Stay quiet anyway.’

[I am always quiet.]

That was a lie, and we both knew it, but the System didn’t say anything else, so I let it have the point.

***

The chamber was long and high, with tall windows along one wall and old banners hanging between them. The Crown’s colours hung on the left. On the right hung three banners I had seen once before, a long time ago, in a cave: a cat’s head in black on grey, a deer’s antlers in brown on green, and a rabbit in white on blue. The floor between them was bare stone, and it seemed much wider than it actually was.

The Crown’s delegation sat along the left side of the room, the beastkin delegation along the right, and at the far end, under the windows, stood the signing table where both sides met. The treaty lay there already in three copies. Beside it was an inkstand, a single pen, and a small box of dark wood that I knew without being told held the royal seal.

Elizabeth was seated at that table beside the King’s envoy. The envoy was a silver-haired man with a voice built for large rooms, and Elizabeth sat beside him in white and dark gold with her hands folded on the lid of the seal box, perfectly still. She didn’t turn round when we came in. I hadn’t expected her to.

We took our places behind her: James, Sophie, Daphne and me, with me at the end nearest the beastkin side. When I got there I understood, for the first time, what the end of the row actually meant. The beastkin table began three paces to my right. I could have reached the nearest chair in two steps.

That chair belonged to the Deer representative. He was old, older than anyone else at either table, with grey in his hair and antlers that had been broken once and grown back crooked. His name had been read out at the door along with a title so long that I lost the beginning of it before the end arrived. What I kept was the last part: speaking for the Deer, under the authority of Elaris Grove. Elaris hadn’t come, and neither had Liora. The Deer and Rabbit factions had both sent people to sign in their names.

The Cat faction had sent its leader. Lyssairia sat in the middle of the beastkin table in dark formal clothes, with Mia on the bench directly behind her. Lyssairia’s eyes went to me once, then to my collar, and the corner of her mouth moved very slightly. Mia didn’t look at me at all, which was how I knew she had already seen everything about me she needed to.

Along the back wall there was a bench for the chroniclers. I didn’t look at it. It looked at me.

***

The ceremony began exactly when the briefing had said it would, which I respected.

The thin official from the Foreign Office stood and read the opening, and for once he spoke slowly, as though the words had been weighed and he was afraid of spilling them. Then the envoy rose and read the Crown’s statement. It was about the border and the dead on both sides of it, and the Crown’s desire that the next generation should inherit fewer of them. It was good. It had been agreed in advance, and it was still good, which I hadn’t known was possible.

Lyssairia read the Cat faction’s statement. It was the shortest of the morning. "The Cat faction comes to this table," she said, "because we have tried every other table, and this is the only one left." Then she sat down. I was fairly sure the official had argued with her for a week about that line and lost.

The Rabbit representative read hers quickly and clearly, with her silver-tipped ears very upright, and when she sat down Sophie let out a breath behind me as though she had been reading it too.

Then the Deer representative stood, and read his.

He read it word for word. I knew, because the Foreign Office official’s lips were moving with him. It spoke of Deer settlements emptied in the long years of the war, and of families who had gone to fetch water and not come back, and of the Deer faction’s willingness to set its name beside the Crown’s in the hope that those years were ending. His voice was quiet and very even, and he didn’t hurry any of it. He read the names of three settlements at the end, and the room was still for a moment after he finished.

By then we had been standing for fifty minutes, and my knees had begun to file formal complaints. I ignored them. Beside me, Daphne stood the way she always stood, as though the floor had been built underneath her.

The official rose again. "The order of signature," he said, "was drawn by lot in the second month of negotiation. The Deer faction signs first."

A clerk carried the first copy of the treaty across to the beastkin table and laid it in front of the Deer representative, with the pen beside it. The whole room leaned toward that pen without anyone moving.

The old man looked down at the treaty. He picked up the pen. He held it for a moment over the line where his name was meant to go, and then he looked up.

"Before I sign," he said, "I have a question that is not in my statement."