Chapter Four #2
She paused, and her gaze moved slowly across the assembled contestants, and Calla had the uncomfortable sensation, when that gaze briefly found her own, that the Empress had already known exactly who stood in this courtyard before the ceremony began, that nothing about House Duskane's presence here was, in fact, a surprise to her at all.
"The Tally will test each of you in the manner the Concord itself requires," Isadora continued.
"Trials of silence, of sacrifice, of truth, of binding, each designed not merely to display your skill, but to reveal your relationship to the vow itself, because the office you compete for does not merely administer the Concord's law.
It embodies Concord's trust, and trust, as every one of you should already understand, is not a thing that can be performed convincingly for twelve years running if it was never genuinely present to begin with. "
Beside Calla, Oda had gone very still, her earlier flippancy entirely absent now, and Calla understood, watching her, that whatever careless confidence Oda projected in ordinary conversation, she was taking this moment with the same gravity everyone else in the courtyard seemed to hold.
"The winner of this Tally," the Empress went on, "will be granted the office of Voice for the coming twelve years, and with it, the right to cancel one blood debt of their choosing, whatever its size, whatever its age, so long as the debt in question remains properly recorded and unresolved.
This is not a small mercy. Some of you stand here today because your houses carry debts your families have waited generations to see cleared.
I would advise you all to remember, across the trials ahead, precisely what winning would actually mean to you, because the Tally has a long history of punishing those who forget their own reasons partway through. "
Her gaze moved once more across the courtyard, and this time, unmistakably, it settled on Calla and held there for a beat longer than courtesy required, long enough that Calla felt the weight of it settle into her spine like a hand pressed flat against her back.
"House Duskane has not competed in this Tally in living memory," Isadora said, and something in her tone had shifted very slightly, not quite warmth, not quite hostility, something Calla could not properly name but felt, instinctively, that she should be wary of.
"I understand there are those among the Under-City who will find that particularly significant.
I would remind everyone present that the Tally does not concern itself with the political weight of any name.
It concerns itself only with the truth of a vow properly kept or properly broken, and that truth, whatever else may be said about this Empire's history, has never once, in four hundred years, been successfully argued with. "
Calla held very still under the weight of that gaze, aware of the eyes turning toward her from every corner of the courtyard, and made herself meet the Empress's stare without flinching, though her heart hammered hard enough that she was certain, absurdly, that the sound of it must be audible to everyone standing near her.
The moment passed. Isadora's attention moved on, and the ceremony continued through its remaining formalities, the presentation of the trial schedule, the introduction of High Warden Thorne's authority over the certification of each contest, a series of details Calla absorbed only in fragments because some part of her attention remained fixed, despite every effort otherwise, on the memory of the Empress's gaze and the peculiar, deliberate way she had chosen to speak the Duskane name aloud in front of the full assembly, as though testing, publicly, whether the name still had the power to unsettle a room the way it once had.
It was only as the ceremony drew toward its close, the contestants beginning to disperse into the loose clusters that would, Calla understood, become the shifting alliances and rivalries that would carry them through the trials ahead, that she found herself, for one brief and unguarded moment, close enough to Ademar to speak, the two of them momentarily separated from the wider crowd by a gap in the dispersing bodies that neither of them, she suspected, had entirely intended to create.
He looked at her properly then, for the first time since she had glimpsed him across the registration hall days before, and up close, the tension she had noted in his posture on the dais resolved into something more specific, something that looked, uncomfortably, like guilt.
"Calla," he said, and the sound of her name in his voice, familiar in a way that surprised her despite the years and the distance the fall had put between them, landed somewhere in her chest she had not braced properly for. "I didn't know you'd registered until the herald's lists were posted."
"Would it have mattered if you had?"
The question came out sharper than she intended, and she watched it land, watched something flinch behind his eyes before he could smooth the reaction away.
"I don't know," he said, with an honesty that seemed to cost him something to admit aloud. "I've thought about your family more than you probably believe, over the years. I've never quite known what to do with this thinking."
"You could have started with the truth," Calla said, and did not soften it, because Maren's warning still sat fresh in her mind, and some careful part of her refused to let the familiar ache of his presence make her forget exactly what his family's silence had cost hers.
"Whatever version of it you actually know. "
Something crossed his face then, quick and complicated, gone before she could properly read it, and for a moment she thought he might actually answer her, might say something that mattered, and instead the moment was interrupted by the arrival of a guard in Ashvane colors at his elbow, murmuring something about the Empress requiring his presence, and whatever he had been about to say dissolved back into the careful, practiced neutrality she suspected he had spent years learning to wear.
"We'll speak again," he said, which was not an answer, and turned to follow the guard back toward the dais, leaving Calla standing alone at the courtyard's edge with the wide blue sky pressing down overhead and the distant, patient sound of the water far below, and the uncomfortable, unwelcome certainty settling into her chest that whatever this Tally was about to demand of her, the boy she remembered from a childhood already sixteen years gone had grown into a man carrying secrets of his own, and that untangling those secrets from her own family's fate was not going to be nearly as simple as she had allowed herself, in her better moments, to hope.