Chapter 140: — "The Square"

They had been in Vellmark six days before Seraphina touched anyone.

That was Mira’s decision and it was correct. A man nobody had ever seen being unpleasant once is a stranger having a bad day. A man everyone has watched for six days — being late, being loud, being served first because he expected it — is a known quantity, and by the time he does something in a square people have already decided what they think.

So for six days Seraphel of North Aldera did nothing except exist expensively.

He took the corner table at the inn on the second day and had taken it every day since, and on the fourth day a merchant had been sitting there and had moved without being asked, and Seraphina had thanked him with a warmth so total and so hollow that the man had gone red to the ears.

She had thought about that all night afterward.

She had been extremely good at it, was the trouble.

“They hate you,” said Mira, on the fifth evening.

“How much.”

“The innkeeper’s wife spat when you left the room.”

“Good.”

“She spat on the floor, Seraphina, indoors, in her own inn—”

“Good,” said Seraphina, and something in her voice was slightly wrong, and Mira wrote nothing down.

Halven came into the square at market bell on most days.

Not to buy. He walked through it. He’d done it for years — down the eastern side, past the grain stalls, a word here and there, out the north end toward the houses. Fourteen minutes, give or take, and the whole square arranged itself slightly around the fact of him.

Big man. Grey at the temples. Not remarkable.

He stopped at three stalls out of forty and it was the same three every day, and on the second day Mira had worked out why: they were the three run by widows.

“That’s the man,” she said that night, “and I’d like it on record that I don’t feel good about any of this.”

“Noted.”

“Formally noted.”

“He moves money for people who kill other people,” said Seraphina.

“I’m aware of what he does.”

“Then—”

“I’m aware of what he does,” said Mira, “and I’ve read the same file you have, and I still don’t feel good about it, and both of those are allowed to be true at once.”

The seventh morning was market bell and grey and cold.

Erenna came into the square from the south end with a basket, in a dress that a hundred people had worn before her, walking short from the knee.

Seraphina watched her come.

That was the last clean thought she had for a while — that she was watching Eren cross a market square and had not, for about four seconds, recognised him.

Not because he looked like a woman.

Because he looked poor, and tired, and like nothing in particular, and her eyes had gone straight past him twice before catching.

Four years, she thought, and you can still do that.

Then Mira, from the far side, touched the brim of her hat.

Halven had entered the square.

She let him get to the second stall.

Then walked out into the open with her hands behind her back and stopped directly in Erenna’s path.

The basket knocked her arm. Not hard. It was meant to.

“You’ve stepped in front of me,” said Seraphina.

Flat. Bored. Faintly amused.

Erenna went small.

“…Sorry, sir.”

“You’ve stepped in front of me and you’ve put your basket on my coat.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“That’s not what I said.”

Somebody at the nearest stall stopped talking.

That was the first one. She heard it happen. It went outward from there the way it does — one conversation stopping, then the two beside it, then a whole side of a square with its attention pointed in one direction and nobody quite admitting it yet.

“Do you know what this is.” Seraphina touched her own sleeve. “This coat.”

“No, sir.”

“No. You wouldn’t.”

She let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to.

Then, still perfectly pleasant:

“Pick it up.”

Erenna looked at the basket, which was on her arm.

“…It’s not—”

“Pick it up,” said Seraphina, “and do it properly, and then apologise, and then get out of my square.”

My square.

She heard herself say it and felt the whole eastern side of the market decide about her at once.

Erenna turned to go.

That was the plan. She turns, she gets four steps, and the hand comes.

She got three.

Seraphina took her wrist.

Not hard. She had four years of knowing exactly how hard, and she used none of it, and that was somehow worse — because she simply closed her hand and stopped, and Erenna pulled and nothing happened, and pulled again and nothing happened.

A woman at the grain stall said “hoi” in a low voice.

Erenna pulled a third time and made a small sound, and said:

“Please—”

And Seraphina did not let go.

Afterwards she could not remember how long it lasted.

Mira said four seconds. Mira had counted, because Mira counted everything.

It felt considerably longer from inside it. It felt long enough to notice that Eren’s wrist was thinner than she’d expected, and that he had not once looked at her, and that he was shaking — genuinely shaking, in a way she was fairly sure he could not have manufactured — and that some part of her had gone very cold and was watching the whole thing from about four feet up.

Then a hand closed over her forearm.

Large. Unhurried. Not squeezing.

“That’ll do,” said Halven.

She turned.

She had thirty seconds of Seraphel of North Aldera left in her and she spent all of it.

“Take your hand off me.”

“I will when you take yours off her.”

“Do you know who I am.”

“No,” said Halven.

That was all. Not a challenge. He simply answered the question and waited, and Seraphina understood in that moment exactly why four attempts had failed at the approach — because the man was not afraid of anything and had no interest in appearing not to be.

She let go of Erenna’s wrist.

Halven let go of her arm.

“There’ll be trouble about this,” she said.

“There might be.”

“I’ll have this square shut—”

“You won’t,” said Halven, quite kindly, “and you know you won’t, and everyone standing here has just watched you find that out.”

She left the square from the north end because that was the direction that made sense, and she did not look back, because Seraphel would not have looked back.

She got two streets.

Then went into a doorway and put her back against the wall and stood there with both hands flat on the stone behind her, breathing.

Please.

He’d said it exactly as agreed. Once. Not the name.

And she had known it was coming, and had written it herself, and had told him to say it — and it had gone through her like something with a point on it.

Mira found her eleven minutes later.

“Well?”

“He took her.”

“He took her?”

“Straight from the square. Coat round the shoulders, hand on the back, straight up the north end and into the house.” Mira leaned against the opposite wall. “Twenty minutes. No hesitation. He didn’t even ask her name until they were through the door.”

Seraphina nodded.

Then nodded again.

“Seraphina.”

“It worked.”

“It worked perfectly.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the whole plan. That’s the door. She’s inside—”

“I know, Mira.”

There was a pause.

“You’re still doing it with your hands,” said Mira.

Seraphina looked down.

Her right hand was open. She was holding it away from her body slightly, the way you hold something that isn’t yours.

She put it down.

“He was shaking,” she said.

“He was acting.”

“He was shaking, Mira—”

“He was acting,” said Mira, and then, after a moment, in a completely different voice: “Probably.”

There was nothing to do for two days, which was the part nobody had prepared for.

That was the design. Erenna was inside. Erenna would stay inside. She would be sad and grateful and slightly bad at hiding what she’d overheard, and in five or six days she would come out to a market with somebody’s cook and drop something at a particular stall, and Mira would pick it up.

Until then: nothing.

Seraphina had never been good at nothing.

She kept being Seraphel because she had to. Vellmark had watched a lord’s son be unpleasant in a square and had watched him lose, and a boy like that does not leave town the next morning — he stays, and he sulks, and he makes everyone slightly uncomfortable for a week.

So she took the corner table.

Nobody moved for her now.

That was the difference, and she noticed it within about four minutes on the first evening. The innkeeper served her last. The room’s attention arrived and left again quickly, the way it does with something unpleasant you’ve decided to stop looking at.

She had made herself hated on purpose, extremely efficiently, and she found she did not enjoy sitting inside it as much as she had expected to.

She sat there for three hours anyway, because Seraphel would.

“You’re not eating.”

“Seraphel doesn’t like the food.”

“Seraphina.”

“Seraphel doesn’t like the food, Mira, it’s a character decision—”

“You’ve had bread and water for two days,” said Mira, sitting down, “and if you’d like to keep telling me it’s a character decision I’ll keep writing it down, but I’d rather you ate something.”

Seraphina looked at the bread.

“He’s been in there forty hours,” she said.

“Yes.”

“We don’t know anything.”

“No.”

“He could have said something wrong in the first ten minutes and we wouldn’t—”

“He didn’t.”

“You don’t know—”

“I know Eren,” said Mira. “In forty hours in a strange house he has said approximately eleven words, nine of which were thank you, and every single person in that building is currently deciding they’d like to look after him. That is the one thing on this earth he is genuinely best at and he has never once had to try.”

Seraphina ate the bread.

On the third evening she went past the house.

Not close. Down the far side of the street, at the pace of a man going somewhere else.

Lamps on in the front rooms. Somebody moving behind the second window. A cart being unloaded round the side by two men who were laughing about something.

She got twenty feet past the gate before she understood what she was doing and stopped dead in the middle of a street in Vellmark.

You’re checking on him.

You’re checking on him and you’re in costume and if anybody in that house looks out of a window they will see the man from the square standing outside their gate.

She walked on.

She went four streets in the wrong direction before she trusted herself to turn round.

Mira was waiting when she got back.

She did not ask where she’d been. She had a chalk line on the floor and two chairs and the expression of a woman who had decided how the next hour was going to go.

“Sit.”

“Mira—”

“We’re going through the extraction.”

“We’ve been through the extraction—”

“We’re going through it again,” said Mira, “because you’re going to sit in this room for four more days doing nothing, and you are extremely bad at nothing, and I would rather you did something structured than whatever you were doing on Marl Street twenty minutes ago.”

Seraphina sat down.

“You saw me.”

“I’ve been behind you since the inn.”

“For twenty minutes—”

“For twenty-five,” said Mira. “You walked past the gate, you stopped, you had a small crisis, and then you went four streets north for no reason at all. I let you have it. Now sit down and tell me the extraction.”

They went through the extraction.

Then the fallback. Then the second fallback, which involved a cart and a great deal of optimism.

Then, at some point past midnight, with the lamp going low, Mira put the chalk down and said, in an entirely different voice:

“He’ll be all right.”

“I know.”

“He’s better at this than either of us.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you walking past the house.”

Seraphina looked at the floor for a while.

“Because I put him there,” she said.

“He volunteered.”

“He lost an argument, Mira, that’s not the same as volunteering—”

“He lost an argument he could have won in about nine seconds,” said Mira. “He had four objections. He picked facial hair. That’s a man throwing a fight and doing it badly on purpose so you’d think you’d talked him into it.”

The lamp guttered.

“He wanted to be the one inside,” said Mira. “He wanted it before you’d finished describing the plan. I watched him decide.”

On the fifth morning a woman from Halven’s kitchen came into the market with a girl in a grey shift walking two steps behind her.

Mira, at the far side, did not look up.

Seraphina, from a doorway sixty feet away, in costume, with her hands behind her back, watched Erenna cross a market square carrying somebody else’s basket.

He looked well.

That was the first thing. Fed, warm, in a better dress than the hundred-person one — somebody in that house had given her something of their own, which was exactly what the file had said Halven’s household did and which she had counted on and which she nonetheless found she had a reaction to.

He stopped at the grain stall. Said something to the woman. Laughed at whatever she said back.

Then, while the cook was arguing about a price, he put his hand flat on the top of a sack of barley for exactly two seconds.

That was the signal. That was the first signal. It meant nothing yet, still working, no trouble.

Then he took his hand away and turned round.

And, for approximately half a second, across sixty feet of market square, looked directly at the doorway she was standing in.

He should not have known she was there.

She had told him she would not be there.

He turned back to the cook.

They finished at the stall. They went up the north end. The gate closed.

Seraphina stood in the doorway for some time after that.

Then she went back to the inn, and took the corner table, and was served last, and sat there for three hours being extremely disliked by an entire room — and thinking, over and over, about a man with a hand flat on a sack of barley who had known exactly where she was standing.