Chapter Five
Trial of Silence
The first trial was announced for dawn, five days after the opening ceremony, and Calla spent the intervening nights sleeping badly on the narrow pallet in her aunt's hollow, where Maren had insisted she stay for the duration of the Tally rather than make the long climb between the Under-City and High Reach each morning.
"You will need every scrap of strength these trials leave you," Maren had said, without particular room for argument, "and I am not sending you into that arena exhausted from a climb you could have avoided simply by accepting a bed I am perfectly willing to offer."
Calla had not argued, though some quiet part of her missed the sound of her father's breathing on the other side of the room, missed Bryn's small restless movements through the night, missed, most of all, the ability to check, first thing each morning, whether the grey along her brother's hand had spread any further while she slept.
She had begun sending word down each evening instead, a runner boy Maren trusted paid a small coin to carry news back and forth, and the news, so far, had held steady.
Not better. Not worse. A fragile stalemate that Calla had learned, in the space of a handful of days, not to examine too closely for fear of jinxing it.
The trial chamber, when she and the other contestants were led into it on the appointed morning, occupied a vast circular hall beneath the main council building, carved deep enough into the cliff that no natural light reached it at all, lit instead by a ring of pale lanterns whose flames burned with a steadiness that suggested they were fed by something other than ordinary oil.
High Warden Cassian Thorne stood at the chamber's center, beside a raised dais where a series of narrow silver rings had been set into the floor in a wide circle, and as the contestants filed in and arranged themselves along the chamber's outer wall, Calla felt Oda fall into step beside her with the easy familiarity of someone who had decided, days ago, that this particular alliance was worth maintaining.
"Trial of Silence," Oda murmured, low enough not to carry.
"The first trial's always this one. Tests whether a contestant can hold a vow of restraint under pressure, because half the office of Voice is knowing when not to speak, and the crown likes to find that out before it invests too much ceremony in anyone unsuited to it. "
"You've researched this."
"I've survived one Tally already, as an observer, watching my mother compete and lose everything she staked on it," Oda said, and something flickered behind her flat, practical tone, gone before Calla could properly examine it.
"You learn to research quickly when you've watched what happens to the ones who didn't."
Before Calla could ask what that meant, Cassian Thorne raised one hand, and the murmur of the assembled contestants fell away into a silence that felt, in this deep stone chamber, considerably heavier than ordinary quiet.
"The Trial of Silence tests a single vow," the Warden said, his voice carrying without apparent effort to every corner of the hall.
"Each contestant will be paired, and each pair will stand within a binding circle, sworn to silence for the full duration of the trial.
You may not speak. You may not gesture in any manner intended to convey meaning to your partner or to any observer.
You may endure whatever provocation the trial presents, or you may break your vow of silence, in which case the trial ends for you, and you are marked accordingly. "
A murmur moved through the gathered contestants, quickly stilled, and Calla felt her own pulse quicken as the Warden began reading pairings from a scroll held at arm's length, names called in a flat, unhurried rhythm that gave nothing away about how the pairs had been decided.
"Sera Blackreef and Thane Stormwake."
A tall, sharp featured woman near the front of the assembled contestants stepped forward without visible reaction, her dark hair bound close to her skull in a manner that left nothing to catch or obscure her expression, and Calla understood, watching her, that this was precisely the point, a woman who had trained herself to give away nothing at all.
Beside her, the contestant called forward as her partner was built along entirely different lines, broad and heavy through the shoulders in a way that suggested strength rather than speed, his expression carrying none of Sera's careful blankness, something closer to open, restless aggression barely held in check.
"Odalys Windmere and Ferrin Coldwater."
Oda squeezed Calla's arm briefly before stepping forward to join a lean, nervous looking young man Calla did not recognize, and Calla watched her go with a small, unexpected pang of worry, aware, suddenly, of exactly how alone she was about to be standing in that circle, whoever her own pairing turned out to be.
"Calla Duskane," the Warden read, and something in his tone, subtle but unmistakable to anyone listening closely, shifted very slightly on the name, "and Ademar Ashvane."
The murmur that moved through the chamber this time was considerably less quickly stilled, and Calla felt every eye in the room find her at once as she stepped forward from the wall, her face carefully arranged into the same flat neutrality Sera Blackreef had demonstrated moments before, though her heart had begun hammering hard enough that she suspected the effort was largely wasted.
Ademar crossed to meet her at the edge of the nearest silver ring, and up close, she saw that whatever composure he had managed to project during the opening ceremony had frayed considerably.
His jaw was tight, his eyes carrying a wariness that Calla could not immediately parse as directed at her, at the trial itself, or at something else entirely that she had no way yet to guess.
"This wasn't arranged," he said, low enough that only she could hear, before the Warden's next instruction cut off any chance of further speech. "I want you to know that, whatever you think of my family right now. I had no part in choosing these pairs."
Calla said nothing, because there was nothing safe to say, and a moment later it did not matter regardless, because Cassian Thorne's voice rose again to address the full chamber, and the time for speaking of any kind, safe or otherwise, had ended.
"Step into the circle," the Warden instructed, "and speak the vow of silence as it is given to you."
Calla stepped onto the silver ring set into the stone floor, felt a faint warmth pass up through the soles of her feet as the metal recognized her presence, and Ademar stepped into the circle's opposite curve a moment later, close enough now that she could see the pulse working visibly at his throat, close enough to notice, with an unwelcome clarity, the particular way his eyes held hers even as neither of them spoke.
The Warden's voice moved through the chamber, and the words of the vow settled over Calla the way she imagined a physical weight might settle, not painful, but undeniable, a pressure at the base of her throat that told her, more clearly than any warning could have, exactly what would happen if she tried to force words past it before the trial released her.
"You will each hold this silence," Thorne said, once every pair stood bound within their circles, "for the length of one full turning of the chamber's lanterns, which the Concord itself will measure.
You will not know the provocations you are about to face until they arrive, because foreknowledge would defeat the trial's purpose.
Endure, or break, and let the Concord judge which of you understands the true weight of a vow properly kept. "
The lanterns dimmed, very slightly, and the chamber seemed to hold its breath along with every contestant standing within it, and then the first provocation began.
It did not come as violence, though Calla had braced herself for something closer to that, some physical trial of endurance that would at least have given her a familiar shape of pain to withstand.
Instead, faint at first and then swelling in volume, she heard a sound she recognized with a jolt that nearly broke her composure before the trial had properly begun, the particular uneven rhythm of a child's labored breathing, amplified and echoing through the chamber as though the sound itself had been drawn directly from her own memory and given voice.
Bryn's breathing. Or something built to sound precisely like it, the catch and stutter she had learned to listen for every morning since his hand had first turned grey, filling the vast stone chamber until it seemed to come from every direction at once, and Calla felt her jaw clench hard enough to ache, felt the desperate, instinctive urge to speak, to ask what this was, to demand it stop, rise up through her chest and meet the pressure of the vow already pressing down against her throat.
She did not speak. She held Ademar's gaze instead, because it was the only fixed point available to her in a chamber suddenly filled with the sound of her brother's suffering, and something in his expression shifted, some flicker of understanding or sympathy she had not expected and did not entirely trust, and she made herself breathe through her nose, slow and controlled, the way she had taught herself to breathe through fear since childhood.
The sound faded, eventually, replaced by something else entirely, a murmur of voices this time, indistinct at first and then resolving, gradually, into words Calla recognized with a different, colder kind of dread.
Her grandmother's voice, or something built to approximate it from whatever record the Concord's magic could draw upon, speaking words Calla had never actually heard but somehow recognized as true the moment they reached her, an account of the vow that had broken House Duskane, delivered in tones of quiet, devastating disappointment.