I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 474: The Consultation

Vane heard about it secondhand, the way he heard about most things that happened in the Aurelia wing — from Isaac, who heard it from a kitchen steward, who’d heard it from someone in the courier service who thought the whole thing was a fascinating piece of gossip regardless of who it concerned.

"Archive’s pulling him," Isaac said, over lunch, in the same tone he’d have used to report the weather. "Same flag as you and Nyx, apparently. He’s on a transport within the hour."

Vane set his cup down. "Within the hour."

"That’s what I heard." Isaac shrugged, unbothered, already returning his attention to his own meal. "Archive faculty don’t usually leave room for negotiation once they’ve decided something’s worth a formal consultation. You’d know."

Vane did know. He thought about the sealed archive room, the fragment in its lacquered case, the scholar’s steady hand engraving a fourth line onto a brass plate that already carried three names struck through. He thought about six weeks and a countdown that had just, without warning, lost one more piece off the board before the real clock had even started running.

He didn’t say anything else about it. There wasn’t a version of worrying out loud that would have changed the transport’s departure time by a single minute.

The summons arrived at the Aurelia wing at the seventh hour, carried by a black-sealed courier crystal that Anastasia recognized before Lancelot had even finished reading it — Archive faculty script, the kind reserved for consultation requests that weren’t really requests at all.

"You’re being called," she said. Not a question. She’d seen enough Imperial correspondence in her life to know the shape of an order dressed as an invitation.

"Yes." Lancelot set the crystal down on the low table between them, precisely, the way he set down everything. "Pre-Consolidation faculty. Dark World frequency correspondence. Effective immediately."

"Immediately."

"The courier is already arranged. A transport leaves within the hour."

Anastasia stood from the window seat where she’d been reading — or pretending to, the same book open to the same page it had been open to for the better part of an afternoon — and crossed to the table, arms folded, her golden mana doing the thing it always did when she was working through something she didn’t want to say directly.

"How long."

"Unknown. The summons doesn’t specify a return date."

"That’s not an answer, Lancelot."

"It’s the only answer I have."

She looked at him for a long moment, and something in her face — carefully composed, the way it always was in front of anyone who might report on it — slipped just slightly, just for a second, before she caught it and put it back.

"Graduation is in six weeks," she said.

"I’m aware."

"You’re aware." She said it flatly, testing the shape of his indifference the way she often did, looking for the crack that would tell her it wasn’t indifference at all. "Six years, Lancelot. You’ve stood behind my shoulder at every state function, every gala, every diplomatic dinner I’ve been paraded through since I was ten years old. And the one ceremony that’s actually mine — not my father’s, not the Empire’s, mine — you’re going to be on a leviathan somewhere reading old parchment."

"The summons isn’t optional."

"I know it isn’t optional." Her voice sharpened, the way it did when she was more frustrated with the situation than with him and didn’t have anywhere else to put it. "I’m not asking you to refuse an Archive summons. I’m aware of what that would cost both of us. I’m simply pointing out that it’s inconvenient, and I am allowed to find things inconvenient in my own private quarters without it being reported to my father as insubordination."

"Understood."

"Stop saying understood." She turned away from him, toward the window, her reflection faint in the darkening glass. "You’ve said it four times since you walked in. It doesn’t mean anything when you say it like that. It just means you’ve stopped listening and started complying."

Lancelot was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, something in his flat, even voice had shifted by a degree so small most people would have missed it entirely.

"I don’t want to go," he said.

Anastasia turned back around.

It wasn’t much, as far as sentences went — five plain words, delivered with the same lack of inflection he delivered everything — but she had spent six years learning to read the specific absence of performance in him the way other people read faces, and she understood, standing there, that this was as close to an admission as he had ever handed her without being asked to.

"Then say that," she said, quieter now. "Not understood. That."

"I don’t want to go," he said again, and this time there was something almost deliberate in the repetition, like he was testing whether the sentence held up the second time he said it out loud.

"Why."

He didn’t answer immediately. His red eyes moved to the window, to the same view she’d been staring at, the Academic District’s lights just beginning to come on across the hill.

"I don’t know," he said finally. "I have a theory. I don’t trust it yet."

"What’s the theory."

"That I’d rather be here."

It was, Anastasia thought, the most human sentence she had ever heard him produce, and she didn’t know what to do with the specific, unfamiliar warmth it left sitting in her chest, so she did what she always did when she didn’t know what to do with something — she turned it into a command, because commands were the only language she’d ever been taught that let her care about someone without admitting to it out loud.

"Then come back quickly," she said. "That’s an order, if you need it framed that way."

"Understood," Lancelot said, and this time, for the first time since he’d walked into the room, something in the flat delivery had the smallest trace of something else underneath it — not quite warmth, but the shape warmth might eventually take, in a person still learning what the word was for.

The transport left within the hour, exactly as the summons had promised. Anastasia watched it go from the same window seat, the leviathan’s running lights shrinking into the eastern dark until they were indistinguishable from the stars, and stayed there a long while after they’d disappeared entirely, the book still open on her lap to the same page it had been open to all afternoon.

She did not go down to dinner that evening. She told her attendants she wasn’t hungry, which was true in the specific way lies were sometimes true, and sat in the dark of her own quarters turning over five plain words and one small, unfamiliar warmth, and did not let herself examine either one too closely, because examining them too closely felt like it would require admitting something she had spent six years being trained specifically not to admit.

Six weeks, she thought, echoing a number that wasn’t really hers to be counting either.

She wondered, distantly, whether he’d be back before the ceremony started, or whether she’d be standing in front of the entire graduating class with an empty space behind her shoulder where he’d always stood, and found she didn’t like either version of the answer very much at all.