Chapter 146: Counting in the Dark
The slow channel ran through a fruit-seller two streets from the Sealed Step, and the fruit-seller did not know he was the channel.
He sold Tobian Marrow the same three figs every fourth day. Every fourth day, one of the figs was sometimes not a fig.
"Three again, scholar?" the seller asked, already reaching for the cloth.
"Three again," Alistair replied. "My landlady insists they help her joints."
"Figs don’t do anything for joints."
"I know that, and you know that. However, she takes a little off my rent whenever I bring them, so the figs help my joints."
The seller laughed and pressed the wrapped cloth into his hand. "Then may her joints never improve."
At that moment, two Justicars passed the stall in their grey coats, unhurried, their eyes moving over the stalls one by one.
Seeing this, the seller lowered his voice without seeming to notice it. "Fourth patrol since sunrise. Somebody important must be losing sleep."
"Somebody important is always losing sleep," said Alistair.
Alistair walked back to his room without hurrying, since a man who hurries through a market is worth following.
***
The letter came folded into a square no bigger than a coin, wrapped in waxed cloth, and the cloth tasted faintly of fig when he worked it open. Everything through that seller tasted of fig, and he had stopped minding it.
Her hand was small and even. Elara wrote the way she spoke, wasting nothing and apologising for nothing.
Three houses met at one table tonight, she wrote. Velden, Marish, and Veir. It is the first time in two generations that any of the three have sat in one room without a blade between them. They will tell you to your face it cannot be done, and then they sit down and do it anyway. What kept them apart was pride, and pride turns out to be very cheap once a man is made to say its price out loud.
Alistair raised his brows slightly. Two generations of feuding, undone in a single evening.
I spoke for less than an hour of the four we sat.
The rest I listened, because Caelmari pride is fed by being heard and starved by being argued with.
Their custom forbids signing, so nothing is signed. By their custom, an understanding witnessed in the body is stronger than ink. I do not fully trust the custom, but I trust what I watched move across their faces.
’Nothing signed,’ Alistair thought. ’Nothing signed means nothing seized if it goes wrong. She built it that way on purpose.’
Velden says eleven houses will move when we ask. I halved that number in my head before writing it, because Velden is the kind of man who counts his cousins twice. Five houses is still five houses, and five houses is more than we had this morning.
Alistair was reluctantly impressed. Most people inflate their victories in letters, but Elara cut hers in half before it left her hand.
The one I watched hardest was Veir. He said almost nothing the entire evening, which made him the only one worth watching. Velden talks to fill rooms and Marish talks to win them. However, Veir sat with his hands flat on the table and let the other two spend themselves, and only at the very end did he speak, and his one sentence moved both of them more than the four hours before it.
He said his grandfather was hanged by the old order, under a banner that no longer flies. He said he had waited his whole life to stand under any banner pointed the other way, and that ours would do.
I believe Veir more than the other two combined, because Veir wants nothing I can give him. He wants a thing that is already gone, and he has decided we are the nearest road back toward it.
Alistair read the letter once for the facts, and once for her. The second reading was the one that mattered, since Elara never put her own state into a letter directly, and he had learned to find it between her lines.
She had pressed hardest on Velden’s number, halving it, defending the smaller figure before anyone could attack the larger one.
That was a woman who walked out of a four-hour victory and spent the night counting all the ways it could still come apart.
The last lines were the ones he sat with.
Marish said a thing as we parted that I am sending word for word, because you will want it. He said: Do not thank us. We are not doing you a kindness. We are using you. The fact that you know we are using you is the only reason we are willing to do it.
I told him I knew. Hearing this, he relaxed, as if he had just learned he would not have to keep a lie going through an entire dinner.
I find lately that I prefer working with people who admit what they are. It is restful. I expect there is none of it where you are.
Be careful, she wrote at the bottom, in the same even hand, no warmer than the rest, which was how he knew she meant it. The careful ones live. You taught me that. I am holding you to your own lesson.
"Holding me to my own lesson," Alistair muttered, and his lips twitched.
He did not burn the letter at once, a small breach of his own rule, and he allowed himself the breach for the length of one more reading.
Following that, the counting started, because with him it always starts.
’Eleven houses. Five, if Velden is a liar. Either number reaches Aldous within the month through the Wreath’s people, and a faction making friends in the south is a faction worth auditing harder in the east. Her victory tightens my noose.’
He clicked his tongue.
’She would know that. She sent it anyway, because she does not have the luxury of moves that cost nothing either.’
The thought he did not want to finish was the one about Elara sitting alone across tables from men who told her plainly they were using her, with no one on her side close enough to reach her if it went wrong.
He finished the thought anyway, since not finishing it felt like a kind of lie. Alistair was honestly worried, and there was nothing useful he could do with the worry.
Then he let himself, for once, simply miss her, like an ordinary man missing an ordinary person. Tobian Marrow was not permitted such a thing, and Alistair Thorne rarely allowed himself it either.
Eventually, he burned the letter over the basin, and the room smelled of fig and ash past midnight.
Somewhere far to the south, a woman who had renounced her own name was building him five houses, or eleven, and counting in the dark all the ways it could fail.
However, the counting in Alistair’s head refused to stop there.
The Wreath’s audit runs on information, and information of this size does not walk, it runs. If word of the southern houses reached Verissan before the preliminary review of his death warrant closed, the review would stop being preliminary very quickly.
His jaw tightened.
’A month, maybe less. The noose and the review are going to arrive at the same time, and one of them has my real name on it.’
