Chapter 7
Bastian's compound is not what Emery expected, which is becoming a theme.
He had expected something utilitarian. Something carved from stone and lit with the bare minimum of lamplight, functional and cold and befitting a man who runs his empire from the deepest levels of the Underground.
A stronghold, maybe, or a bunker, something with the aesthetic sensibility you'd expect from dissolving people with your voice and not bothering to clean up the ash.
What he gets is dark wood and warm lamplight and the faint, pervasive scent of something that might be cedar, if cedar grew this far below the surface of the earth, which it doesn't, so whatever it is, someone has gone to the trouble of importing it.
The corridors are wide and well-lit and the stone walls are covered in panels of carved wood that soften the edges and absorb sound so that footsteps become quiet, muffled things rather than the sharp echoes of every other Underground space Emery has ever occupied.
There are rugs, actual rugs, woven in deep reds and golds, laid over the stone floors in a way that suggests someone made deliberate choices about where warmth should go.
There are sconces with glass shades that turn the lamplight from harsh to honeyed.
There are doors with real locks and hinges that don't squeal.
Emery has never seen the inside of anything close to this in his life.
He follows Hask through the corridors in his borrowed cloak and his bare feet, and the rugs are soft under his soles, which is a sensation so foreign after a night of running on cold stone that he almost stumbles.
Hask glances back at him without comment but slows his pace, which Emery pretends not to notice because noticing would mean acknowledging that he's struggling to keep up, and acknowledging that he's struggling to keep up would mean admitting that the night has taken more out of him than he wants to show.
The compound is larger than he would have guessed.
Corridors branch and reconnect. He passes a room with a heavy door that stands open, revealing a long table surrounded by chairs and the remains of a meal someone didn't finish.
He passes what looks to be a common room, dark at this hour but furnished with cushioned chairs and low tables and a fireplace that is banked but still glowing.
He passes a corridor lined with doors, evenly spaced, the kind of arrangement that suggests barracks or quarters or both.
Hask stops at one of these doors. He produces a key from somewhere on his person, which given the number of blades and belts he's wearing could have been anywhere, and unlocks it and pushes it open and steps aside.
"Yours," he says.
Emery looks at him. Hask's eyes above the mask give nothing away, which is apparently their permanent state.
He steps inside.
The room is, by any reasonable standard, nicer than any room Emery has ever slept in.
This is not a high bar, given that his recent accommodations have included a cot in a guild house with a cracked ceiling and a dancer's room at the Hollow that was warm but small enough to cross in three steps.
But this room clears that bar and keeps going.
It is spacious in a way that feels intentional rather than accidental, designed with the specific understanding that a person should be able to breathe inside the place where they sleep.
There is a bed, a real bed, with a wooden frame and a mattress that looks and feels as though it might actually have stuffing in it rather than whatever compressed misery passed for filling in his guild cot.
There are blankets, plural, in dark fabric that looks soft.
There is a wardrobe against one wall, closed, and a washbasin that doesn't have a chip in it.
There is a desk with a chair. There is a lamp already lit, the light warm and steady, prepared for his arrival by someone who knew he was coming.
And there, on the bedside table, carefully arranged with their spines aligned, are three books.
Emery stops.
He stops in the middle of the room and stares at the table and his chest does something that he has no language for and does not want language for.
His three books. The romance with the cracked spine and the cover so worn the title is barely legible.
The slim volume of Guille's poetry that smelled of smoke for months.
The knight's tale, stolen from a dead merchant, its pages soft at the edges from the pressure of his thumbs.
They are here. In this room. On this table.
Arranged the way he arranged them, with the romance on top and the poetry in the middle and the knight on the bottom, because that is the order he reads them in, because he always starts with the love story when he needs comfort and works his way down to the adventure when he needs escape, and someone knew that.
Someone looked at the stack and understood the order and replicated it.
Bastian went to his room at the guild. He went there and he found the token and he found the books and he brought them here.
Not just the token, which was evidence, which was leverage, which made strategic sense.
The books. Three battered, worthless, dog-eared books that no one in the world would consider valuable except the man who read them until the ink faded, and Bastian brought them here and put them on the table and arranged them in the right order.
Emery crosses the room and touches the spine of the romance with fingers that are not entirely steady.
The leather is warm, which is absurd, it's a book, it doesn't generate heat, but the room is warm and the air is warm and everything in this compound is warm in a way that feels deliberate, built by a man who decided that cold was something he would not permit within his walls.
He puts his hand flat on the stack and breathes and does not cry because he has not cried in years and he is not going to start now, in a room that belongs to the man he was sent to kill, over three books that the man he was sent to kill went out of his way to return to him.
Behind him, Hask clears his throat.
"There are clothes in the wardrobe," he says.
His voice is the same dry, measured thing it was in the alley, but there is something underneath it now, a thread of what might be consideration, or might just be the recognition that a person standing in a room touching book spines and visibly not breathing is a person who should probably be left alone soon.
"The kitchen is down the corridor to the left.
If you're hungry in the morning, it opens at dawn. "
Emery turns. "Thank you," he says, and means it, again, which is twice in one night and at this rate he'll have used up his annual allotment by morning.
Hask nods. He pauses in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and seems to consider saying something else. He doesn't. He pulls the door shut behind him, and Emery listens to his boots retreat down the corridor until the sound fades into the muffled quiet that seems native to the compound.
He is alone.
He sits on the edge of the bed. The mattress gives under his weight in a way that his guild cot never did, with an actual yield, an actual softness, and the sensation is so foreign that for a moment his body doesn't know what to do with it.
He has been sleeping on surfaces that were one engineering failure away from being a plank of wood for so long that comfort is disorienting, a language he used to speak and has forgotten the grammar of.
He should think. He should sort through the night, organize it into its component parts, determine what is useful and what is not and what the shape of his situation looks like now that Bastian Kane has rearranged it entirely without consulting him.
He should think about the token in his fist and what it means that Bastian gave it back instead of destroying it.
He should think about Sander and the stronghold and the men who grabbed him outside the Hollow.
He should think about his guild and what he's going to tell them and how much of the truth is safe to share.
He doesn't think about any of this. He opens his hand and puts the token on the bedside table, next to his books, and stares at it.
The metal glints in the lamplight. The guild cipher is small and precise on the back, stamped into the metal with the mechanical indifference of a system that does not care who lives or dies as long as the paperwork is filed.
He pulls the cloak off his shoulders and drapes it over the back of the chair.
He looks at the wardrobe and does not open it because opening it means accepting the clothes inside, and accepting the clothes means settling in, and settling in means he is staying, and staying means something he is not ready to define.
Instead he pulls back the blankets on the bed and climbs in still wearing his dancer's pants and still barefoot and still with rope marks on his wrists and someone else's blood on his skin.
The blankets are soft. Unreasonably, unjustly soft. He pulls them up to his chin and lies in the dark and stares at the ceiling, which is wood-paneled and smooth and does not have a crack in it, and thinks about rolling hills and a knight walking through a portal into a world that wanted him there.
He sleeps, eventually. He dreams about dark skin and white hair and a voice that could unmake him, and the voice says his name, his real name, the way it said it in the alley, and in the dream he doesn't flinch. In the dream he leans into it.
He wakes up irritated about this and lies in the unfamiliar warmth of the unfamiliar bed and listens to the unfamiliar quiet and decides that irritated is a much safer thing to feel than whatever the alternative is.