Chapter 44
Sybil stepped from behind the folding screen at the far end of the room, fastening the ties at her wrist, and stopped short at the sight of Tristan holding up two shirts.
“They’re the same,” she said flatly.
Tristan did not so much as blink. “The collar on this one—” he turned it toward her with great seriousness, “—sits differently.”
“It does not.”
“It does, Syb. Look at the—”
“I am not looking at the collar again, Tristan.”
He drew himself up, scandalized in a way that was entirely too theatrical to be sincere. “Then you are forming opinions without evidence. Which, I might add, is deeply unlike you.”
Sybil stared at him, unimpressed. “I am forming opinions based on the evidence that you are holding two identical shirts and inventing distinctions between them to avoid getting dressed.”
“That,” Tristan said, lowering one shirt just enough to fix her with a wounded look, “is a remarkably uncharitable reading of my character.”
At the table, Ivan said nothing.
The room held the signs of recent occupation—boots discarded near the hearth, a half-burnt taper guttering in its dish, the lingering scent of wool, steel, and travel-dust worked into the grain of the wood.
Morning light slipped through the narrow window, catching on the rim of his cup.
He dragged a piece of bread through what remained on his plate and brought it to his mouth, though the taste of it barely registered.
The corners of his lips threatened upward.
He pressed them flat again before it could become anything worth remarking on.
Something in him had gone strange and dangerously soft. He set down his fork, reached for his cup, and discovered he was listening for the next line before either of them had spoken.
Behind him, Tristan said, “You truly see no distinction?”
Ivan glanced over his shoulder at last.
He let his gaze settle on the shirts—one draped over Tristan’s arm, the other pinched between two fingers like evidence in a trial. Clean, well-cut, and completely identical. “That one’s doing something unfortunate at the neck.”
Tristan spun toward Sybil, triumph flashing across his face. “Ha!”
It had been nearly a week since they had come to Eldham, and Ivan still found it strange to wake beneath a northern roof.
The rift had cast them out at the head of a valley, and when Ivan stepped through into the noise of it—the shouted orders, the stamp of horses, the smoke of fires rising blue into the mountain air—he had gone still.
He had expected a northern settlement. Something hard and serviceable, built for war and weather rather than beauty. Eldham was that. Heavy stone. Dark timber. Low roofs crouched beneath the wind.
But it was larger than he had imagined. Far larger.
It climbed the hills in block after block, its streets cut deep and narrow, its lintels and thresholds carved with Tírrísh.
The old script marked every surface: border stones, doorframes, wells, archways.
The very language Osin had spent ten years trying to burn out of the south lived here in mortar and wood and iron.
Not ornament.
Defiance.
Dominic’s return had been met first with celebration. Men had shouted his name from the lower square, women had come out from doorways with lanterns in hand, and children had run beside their company until their mothers caught them by the collars.
Then the crowd saw the Sídhe on the litter and the noise died as if a hand had closed around the throat of the street.
Gideon and Dario had carried him through the press of bodies, his face pale and emptied, too still beneath the blankets.
The people parted for him without being asked—recognizing something ancient being carried broken through their midst.
Dominic had spoken to a man at the edge of the crowd, and within minutes a healer appeared—old, broad-handed, steady-eyed. He took one look at the Sídhe and began giving orders. Bryn and Yoni followed without a word.
Hundreds of Dominic’s men had already reached Eldham, filling the lower squares and side streets in various states of rest, hunger, and repair. The advance force had come by another passage and arrived before them. Not all of them. But most.
Eldham, Ivan found out after the third day, was a small town an hour north of the border, distinguished primarily by its grain stores, its unremarkable taverns, and its complete absence of anyone likely to send word to the king.
His conclusion was thus: the crown prince of Vredia had stolen an army from his father and was currently hiding in a grain town, trusting that eventual victory would sort out the details.
Bold.
The room they were given sat on the eastern side of the village, the outer wall made of bare mountain rock, and the cold came through it in constant waves that no amount of fire eased.
Three narrow beds. A washbasin behind a screen.
A brazier they had to tend themselves to keep warm through the night.
The window looked down into the valley, where the road disappeared between black pines and the lamps of the lower town burned faintly through the dark.
Ivan had stood there a long while and watched the sun drop beyond the horizon. After the last of its light slipped away, he washed, dressed in the clothes left for him—northern cut, dark wool, plain enough to disappear—and sat at the small table, waiting.
Tristan, dressed finally in whichever shirt he had decided was superior, sprawled in the chair by the fire and stared at the ceiling in a way that would have looked idle to anyone who didn’t know him.
“Do you think they’ll hang us in the morning?” he asked. “Or do northerners have a more provincial method?”
“The method would be irrelevant,” Sybil said, stretched out on the bed. “Given that we would be dead.”
“I am asking philosophically.”
“We’re not going to be hanged,” Ivan said. “His Royal Highness needs something.” He reached for his cup. “He won’t kill anyone until he understands how Sybil broke his wards.”
Her gaze flickered to him.
Ivan drank, then set the cup down. “After that, it depends on what tonight’s conversation looks like.”
Tristan considered this. “That is somehow less comforting than the hanging.”
A knock came at the door, and all three of them went still.
Then a note slid beneath it.
Ivan rose and crossed the room. The paper was folded once, the seal already broken by its passage under the door. He read it, then handed it to Sybil.
Come now. Bring the others. —D.
Dario waited in the corridor, as Ivan had expected. He stood with his arms crossed, wearing the expression of a man who had drawn the short lot and intended everyone to know it.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Charming as ever,” Tristan replied.
Dario sighed deeply and led them through the city—down into the lower streets. They passed squares where fires burned low and men sat around them, speaking in the quiet tones of people slowly unwinding after a long time away from home.
Then across a narrow bridge over dark water.
Ivan slowed, and Dario nearly collided with his back.
“Must you?” Dario muttered.
“Reflex,” Ivan said.
They turned onto a lane Ivan would never have found without their guide.
A house of dark timber and old stone stood at the end of it, a single lamp glowing in the front window.
Dario knocked and stepped back. For a moment, he only stood there, eyes fixed on the door, something working behind his expression as though he were bracing himself for something.
“Hunter.”
Ivan’s brow arched.
“Fenreach.” Dario swallowed. “You—” He broke off, then began again. “I haven’t forgotten what you did.”
“Was that a thank-you?”
At his shoulder, Sybil made a brief sound through her nose and disguised it as a cough with only partial success. Tristan, meanwhile, looked between them with open delight.
The door unlatched, and Dario moved aside without glancing at any of them; whatever had nearly passed between them was left there on the threshold.
The front room was warm and crowded with work.
A long table stood near the center, buried beneath star charts layered one atop another in a sea of paper.
Brass instruments occupied every free inch of space—astrolabes, orreries of increasing complexity, a celestial globe large as a man’s head held in a cradle of copper rings, and another device Ivan could not name that seemed to be measuring the air itself.
Along the far side of the room, where another man might have placed a cushioned bench, stood a telescope of extraordinary length mounted on a pivoting mechanism of obvious and painstaking construction.
Its eyepiece angled toward a thick glass dome set into the ceiling above—not unlike the one in Ivan’s own library, only larger, and just now opened wide to the cold night.
Dominic stood near the hearth and turned when they came in.
Beside him, in a chair, sat an old man.
Ancient, Ivan revised, on second look. The elder’s face was so deeply lined it had become topographical, white hair shorn close, the whole of him slight and spare as if time had burned away everything nonessential and left only what mattered.
“Ivan,” Dominic said. “Sybil. Tristan.” A pause, brief and weighted. “This is Algernon.”
The old man smiled.
Dryly. Patiently.
“Sit,” Algernon said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”