Chapter 151: — "Where's the Crow"

She got halfway through the bread before she noticed.

“Daren.”

“Mm.”

“Where’s that bitch of a crow.”

Daren choked slightly.

“Where’s that— Aina—”

“Where is he.” She was looking at the tower, at the gate, at the four feet of air above Daren’s shoulder where a thing had sat for three years and was conspicuously not sitting now. “Six years. I’ve been home a week. That mangy, thieving, opinionated little bastard has not shown his face once, and I refuse to believe he doesn’t know I’m back, because there has never in the history of this world been a single thing that crow didn’t know.”

“He knows,” said Kael.

She turned round.

“So where is he.”

Kael did not answer immediately, which was the first wrong note of the morning.

“He’s around,” he said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“He’s around,” said Kael again.

She let it go.

She let it go because Daren changed the subject with the subtlety of a dropped cart, and because there was too much else in the day, and because six years had taught her that the fastest way to lose information is to grab at it.

But she filed it.

She filed it under a heading she had been keeping for four years, which was things Kael does not say, and which had exactly one other item in it, and that item was your hair, I’ll tell you later.

Eren was at the house when they got back.

Not inside. In the yard, sitting on the low wall with his coat off despite the temperature, doing something incomprehensible to a length of rope.

He looked up.

He looked at her, and then at Kael, and then at the twelve inches of road between them, and Seraphina watched him do the arithmetic in about a second and a half.

“You’ve been somewhere.”

“A bench.”

“The bench?”

“The bench.”

“Ah,” said Eren.

“Don’t—”

“I’m not doing anything,” said Eren, and went back to the rope, and it was somehow worse than if he had.

The tension started properly over the map.

Her father had a map of the northern territories in the study, out of date by about eleven years, and Seraphina had gone in after supper to look at it for no reason she could have defended — and had found the two of them already in there, on opposite sides of the table, not speaking.

“…What is this.”

“He was here first,” said Eren.

“I was here first,” Kael agreed.

“And then I came in,” said Eren, “and we’ve been looking at a map.”

“For how long.”

“Twenty minutes,” said Kael.

“Twenty-two,” said Eren.

Seraphina looked at the two of them.

“And you haven’t spoken.”

“We’ve spoken,” said Eren. “He said that’s Tallen and I said yes.”

“That’s the whole—”

“That’s the whole conversation,” said Kael.

She came round the table.

The map was open at the northern passes and somebody’s finger had been on the Vell shoulder recently enough that the dust was disturbed.

“Which one of you—”

“Me,” said Kael.

“Why.”

“Because I spent a year looking at that shoulder in my head,” said Kael, “and I wanted to see whether the real one matched, and it doesn’t, and I’d like to stop thinking about it.”

Silence.

Eren put his hand on the map. Not on the shoulder — four inches east, on a track that wasn’t marked.

“There’s a road there,” he said.

Kael looked at it.

“There’s no road there.”

“There’s no road on this map. There’s a road there.” Eren’s finger stayed where it was. “It’s eleven days and you need a guide and it’s shut from the first frost to the thaw, and it’s how the merchant trains got through in the autumn, and it’s why some people came south a month before the shoulder cleared.”

Kael did not move at all.

“You knew about that road.”

“I’ve walked it.”

“When.”

“Twice,” said Eren. “Once in year four. Once last spring.”

Seraphina felt the room change temperature.

“Kael—”

“Last spring,” said Kael.

“Yes.”

“You walked a road out of Varen last spring.”

“I did.”

“While the shoulder was down.”

“Yes.”

“So it was passable.”

“It was passable,” said Eren, “for a man on his own with a guide and eleven days and no cargo, and it was not passable for anybody else, and I want to be precise about that because I can see where this is going and I’d like to arrive there accurately.”

Kael put both hands flat on the table.

He did not raise his voice. He had not raised his voice in years and did not now, and Seraphina found that considerably more frightening than shouting.

“I stood at a gate for a year,” he said.

“I know.”

“I didn’t know if she was breathing.”

“I know.”

“And you were walking a road—”

“I was walking a road that would have taken you eleven days to reach the start of,” said Eren, “and forty days to get back from, in winter, without a guide, and you would have died on it, and I would like that in the room.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know that I nearly did,” said Eren, “and I’ve done thirty of those and you’ve done none.”

“Stop.”

Neither of them looked at her.

“I said stop.”

They stopped.

Seraphina stood at the end of her father’s table with her hands flat on a map of a country she’d left a month ago and looked at the pair of them.

“Kael. He didn’t come south to fetch me. He came south after me, eleven days behind, and he didn’t know where I was any more than you did, and if you’re about to say something you’ll be sorry for — think about it first, because you’re extremely good at that and you’re not doing it.”

Kael said nothing.

“And you,” she said, turning.

Eren raised an eyebrow.

“You’ve been in this house four days and you’ve mentioned that road twice.”

“Once.”

“Twice. You mentioned it to my father on Tuesday.” She didn’t blink. “Why.”

That landed.

She watched it land — the small third-of-a-second thing in his face that nobody else in the world would have caught, and that she had been reading across a fire for six years.

“Because it’s interesting,” said Eren.

“No.”

“Because—”

“No.” She was still looking at him. “You don’t say things twice. You’ve never said anything twice in four years except to annoy me. So you said it in front of my father, and you’ve said it again in front of him, and I’d like to know what you’re doing.”

The study was very quiet.

Eren looked at the map.

“I’m establishing,” he said, “that there’s a way out that isn’t the road everyone watches.”

“Why.”

“Because you got a letter six days ago,” said Eren, “and you’ve had your hand in your coat pocket about forty times since, and you haven’t told either of us what it says.”

Kael’s head came up.

Seraphina did not move at all.

“You’ve been counting,” she said.

“I count things.”

“You’ve been counting.”

“I’ve been counting since the yard,” said Eren, “and you’ve known that since the yard, and this is the first time it’s been inconvenient for you, so let’s not pretend it’s new.”

“That’s not—”

“Forty times, Seraphina. Left hand. Usually when you stand up from something.”

Nobody said anything.

Kael was looking at her.

Not at Eren. At her, with an expression she had not seen since the road, and which she had absolutely no defence against.

“What letter,” he said.

“It’s nothing.”

“Aina.”

“It’s nothing, it’s from the academy, it’s a — it’s an administrative—”

“What letter,” said Kael.

And Seraphina stood in her father’s study between the two of them, with six lines of paper folded four times too small in an inside pocket, and understood with total clarity that she had exactly one move available and that it was going to cost her something either way.

“Later,” she said.

“Aina—”

“Later,” she said. “Not never. Later.”

And she walked out, and neither of them followed her, and behind her in the study two men stood on opposite sides of a map and did not look at each other for a considerable time.

She got as far as the top of the stairs before she stopped.

Then stood there in the dark of the landing with her hand on the rail, listening to a house that had gone entirely quiet underneath her, and thought — with a clarity she resented:

They’re going to talk about me now.

Forty times.

Forty times and I didn’t notice once.

She had spent six years learning to notice everything. She could tell a man’s intention from the way he shifted his weight at forty feet. She had built an entire operation out of watching which stalls a woman walked past.

And she had put her hand in her pocket forty times in six days in front of somebody who counted, and had not caught herself doing it once.

That’s what home does.

That’s exactly what home does. You stop watching.

Downstairs, in the study, Eren rolled the map up.

Kael watched him do it.

“You’re not going to ask me what I think it says,” said Eren.

“No.”

“Good.”

“I already know what it says,” said Kael.

Eren stopped rolling.

“…Do you.”

“It’s from the people she worked for,” said Kael. “It’s not an order, because she’d have said. It’s not bad news, because she’d have said that too — she’s always been better with bad news than good.”

He straightened up from the table.

“It’s an offer,” he said, “or something shaped like one. And she hasn’t said no to it, and that’s why she hasn’t told us.”

The study was silent.

“That’s very good,” said Eren.

“I’ve had sixteen years.”

“Yes,” said Eren. “You keep mentioning that.”