Chapter 63: The Enemies' Pact, Part Six: A Sin Greater Than Death

There's a corner on the third floor of the Mayorka library, behind the heraldry treatises, where nobody has gone looking for anything in forty years. Two chairs and a table under a narrow window. You reach it by climbing a staircase that creaks on the sixth step.

Lianza found it during the first week. She dragged me there, sat me down, and told me that if I was going to be her bodyguard, I at least had to learn how to be quiet in someplace decent. We went almost every night after that. She read. I pretended to read. Sometimes she threw a walnut at my head to make sure I was still awake.

At that table I learned to recognize the sound she makes when she truly likes something: a little tap of the pencil, three times, on the margin. At that table she called me an idiot twice in a single night, and I went to bed absolutely delighted.

That night, Layda Alaranne sat in her chair.

I said nothing. I was the one who switched seats, took my usual one, and opened my notebook, and I spent the first quarter of an hour not understanding why it was so hard for me to read one full line.

"You're acting strange," said Layda.

"I'm fine."

The diary, open between us, gave off a lazy glow and went dark.

"I hate this thing," I said.

"I adore it."

"It's the chair," I said at last, because I couldn't come up with a better lie, and because it wouldn't have helped anyway.

Layda looked up. She looked at the chair. She looked at the table, the narrow window, the gap between the heraldry treatises.

And then she did something I didn't expect from her.

She stood, walked around the table, and sat down on the floor, her back against the bookshelf and the diary on her knees.

"There," she said. "Let's continue."

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽ ☆ ☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

We worked for three hours. She drew the entire ceremony from memory — the seven movements, the position of the officiant, where the seals are placed, how far away the Council sits — with a precision no student of this academy should have, and I'd stopped asking her where she got these things quite a while ago.

In the end, what was left was one page with three lines, two of them crossed out.

Proof: Valah. Sealed by the Council. Consent: Zaleador D'Tariel. Cannot sign without war. Invoker: Darlan Elcronne. Impossible.

"It's a beautiful plan," said Layda, resting her chin on her hand. "Its only flaw is being impossible three times over."

"It's a plan."

"Not yet, it isn't." She tapped the first line. "But this one can be stolen. And this one" — the second — "can be asked for. The third, we'll see."

"The third is the only thing that matters. Cordevan said so, and Vauxol said so on Monday, and both of them used the same phrase."

"The third is a people problem," said Layda. "And people problems are the only ones I'm good at." She bit her thumb. "You said one seal per house, and the head of the house carries it. Who told you that?"

"Nobody. It's what I know."

"It's what they've let you know, which isn't the same thing." She opened the diary to an old page and turned three leaves. "During the War of the Three Seals, there was a vassal house of Analazze with two bearers at once. Father and son. It lasted eleven months, and then they outlawed it — and when someone outlaws something, it's because it worked."

"And how did they do it?"

"It doesn't say." She closed the diary. "But it existed. Keep that to yourself, Elcronne, and don't show it to anyone yet."

I stared at the third line until the letters stopped meaning anything.

And since I'd spent the whole week avoiding it, I did what I'd spent the whole week avoiding doing.

"System."

Layda looked up. She can't hear it, of course. To her, I just go quiet with an idiot's face.

[Well, well. 🎭 You're the one calling me. This deserves a round of applause.]

"You can nullify Lianza's Empero in the middle of combat. I saw you do it. You snuffed out her ice right in front of me, the way you'd blow out a candle."

[And how lovely it turned out.]

"Then do it for the wedding."

There was a pause. The System pauses when it's about to enjoy something.

[No.]

"Can't you, or won't you?"

[Both, but the one that interests you is the first. Listen carefully, Romeo, because I won't say this twice: I operate on people. Your girl is a person. Her ice is hers, her body is hers, her ankles are deliciously breakable, and all of that falls within my catalog.]

[A Seal of Blood is not a person. It's a contract deposited with a god, and the gods of this world are another department, with another directive and appalling working hours. I don't touch that. It's not that they forbid me to: it's that I can't reach it.]

I stayed very still.

"That's the first thing you've ever told me you can't do."

[And it's cost me a great deal of distress. Write it down; it won't happen again.]

[Besides, think about it: if I canceled the wedding, where would the show be? Here, you have to earn everything. That's the only house rule.]

It left.

"Well?" said Layda.

"It can't touch the wedding."

"Good."

"Good?"

"Very good." She closed the diary. "It means there's something in this world bigger than that thing you carry around in your head. I'd been wanting to know that for a long time."

"Why does that make you so happy?"

"Because I've spent a long time losing against things that have no ceiling." She stood up from the floor and brushed off her skirt. "Anything that has a limit can be gone around. You've just found a limit for it. It's the best news of the week, and you haven't even noticed."

We went down the stairs. The sixth step creaked, as always, and I remembered that she avoids it by stepping on its edge, and that she never explained to me why it mattered to her.

And when we reached the bottom, in the second-floor corridor, someone was standing by the window.

A closed book in their hands. Glasses fogged from the cold they carried on them. Their eyes fixed on the staircase the two of us had just come down, at that hour, one behind the other.

They had been there long enough to have counted the steps.