20. Brock
Brock
The crossing lets us out into spear points.
They’re held at rest, twenty of the Legion’s own arranged down both sides of the steps in parade order, every point angled at the sky, and every one of them was standing in place before we arrived, which means they knew we were coming.
The steps of the Vestry. Broad, black, worn smooth in the middle by every set of boots that was ever summoned down them.
I’ve stood on these steps before, always at Leif’s shoulder, and we have never once been met.
You come down alone and you stand at the doors until they decide you’ve stood long enough.
That’s how it has always worked, and I never had to be told why, because making a man wait tells him exactly what he’s worth.
Now there’s an honor guard, I would give a great deal to know what makes us worthy now.
“ásp Móra.” The officer at the top inclines his head the exact degree protocol requires and not a fraction more. “The Vestry is expecting you.”
Of course they are.
Leif’s eyes find mine. One look, nothing in his face, and I give him nothing back, and between the two nothings we agree on everything.
He drifts half a step left. I take the right.
Erik is already at her back and Rayner and Gunnar close the front without being told, and by the time we start down the steps Elara is walking inside a wall of us that assembled itself so smoothly she may not have noticed it happen.
She noticed. Her shoulder is almost touching mine. She hasn’t said a word since the switch crossing, and a quiet Elara worries me more than any spear on these steps.
The Legion men hold their lines and keep their eyes forward, because they’re good, because someone drilled them.
And every single one of them fails.
The man third from the bottom takes a breath deeper than a man at attention needs, and his eyes come off the middle distance, land on her for half a second, and get dragged back by force.
The one across from him does the same thing eight steps later, and then another, and then another, the same small failure repeating all the way down the staircase.
They don’t know what she is. I’d stake my life on that — there’s no recognition in it, no name behind their eyes.
But they know what she isn’t.
Every dragon on these steps just caught her scent, and not one of them understands what it means.
Vick walks ahead of us like a man on his own land.
Pressed, precise, hands loose at his sides, and I watch the guards make room for him without being ordered to.
Something about that sits wrong. There’s never been another to walk ahead of the ásp Móra.
Each time we’ve stood before the Vestry, we’ve walked alone.
I mark it and keep walking, because the doors are coming into view and there’s a limit to how many wrong things a man can hold at once.
The doors of the Embers stand open.
They were open last time too — the night they sent us — and I remember what it did to Leif, because he told me on the walk out that in every summons before that one, in all his centuries of standing on this ground, the doors had never once been open when he reached them.
You waited. They decided. Then one night they skipped the waiting, and everything that came after it led us to her.
That’s twice now. Whatever the old pattern meant, it’s finished, and nobody has told me what the new one costs.
The cost is going to be high, that I’m sure of.
But it won’t be hers to pay.
We walk in.
The circle is closed. Every seat filled, same as the last, which was unprecedented then and is apparently ordinary now. And at the center, in the seat I spent my childhood believing was a story — Ezra. Small and gray and still, her hair lifting on a wind that isn’t in the room.
I take the chamber in the way I take in every room, exits first, faces second.
The exits are guarded.
That’s not protocol.
The faces are all pointed at Elara, and they stay pointed, a dozen of the oldest powers in existence seated in a circle with every line of attention running through the woman standing in the middle of us. They let me see them do it. Beings that old don’t bother hiding.
All but one.
Ezra is looking at Vick, pleasantly, like she’s pleased with him.
Interesting.
Her eyes never move off of Vick and that’s how I know she wants to look more than all of them put together. I’ve played this game my whole life against the best there is. She’s better.
“Ah, Victor.” Her voice is unhurried. “You found them. Just as you said you would.”
Just as he said he would.
I don’t look at Vick. I look at Gunnar, but there’s nothing on his face. I’d never even know that he’d heard the words.
The why doesn’t change the impact.
Vick inclines his head to Ezra, precise, untroubled, a man who followed the correct procedure. He doesn’t look at any of us. I’d know what to do with shame. He isn’t wearing any.
“Commander.” Ezra’s attention moves to Leif, and the pleasantness comes with it, seamless. “ásp Móra has our gratitude. You were sent to find one of ours, and you have brought him home. The Vestry congratulates you on your success.”
Leif says something correct. I hear maybe half of it, because I’m counting the eyes in the circle again and getting the same number I got the first time — every gaze in this chamber on Elara while their eldest hands out compliments like this is a ceremony, like the woman in the middle of us is a detail.
My heart has picked up hard enough that every man in this wall can hear it.
Let them. It’s cheaper than letting it reach my face.
They knew she was there and couldn’t name what she was. I said that in the kitchen, on the record, and I have never wanted to be wrong about something so badly.
Except this is the wrong kind of wrong. The kind that I didn’t see coming and somehow that’s worse.
“Erik.” Ezra turns, and her voice does something I haven’t heard it do yet. It warms. “My dear boy. Three years.” She lets the number sit in the open. “Why did you not come back to us, all this time?”
“I couldn’t, Ezra.” Erik’s voice is even.
Flat, careful, a report. “I crossed on the task I was given. When I went back to the crossing, it was dead. The ground around it had died and the door wouldn’t open.
I walked out to it every night for three years.
” His jaw moves once. “It never opened for me.”
“Every night,” Ezra says softly. “Such devotion.”
She asks him the questions you’d expect — the disturbance, the ground, what he found, what he didn’t — and he answers them the way we agreed on nothing and all understood anyway, truth after truth after truth, each one trimmed at exactly the right place.
The word for what Elara is never touches his lips.
Erik hands her the full report and keeps the only thing that matters.
I stand here listening and I can’t shake the feeling that his words are falling on deaf ears.
Then Ezra’s eyes leave him.
They cross the chamber without hurrying, and they come to rest on Elara, and the room — the whole room, the circle, the guards at the exits, the wind that isn’t there — goes still around the attention.
Elara’s shoulder comes the last inch over and touches mine.
Ezra opens her mouth to speak and I listen for it, because she doesn’t choose words by accident.
“Oh, my dear,” Ezra says, and her voice is the kindest thing I have ever been afraid of.
“We have been waiting so very long for your return.”