4. Astra
Astra
Delphine trained with her back to the barn wall. She had chosen the spot the first morning we trained. She tested the boards with her shoulders, set her boots, and folded her arms. The Hall and the Tower had taught her the cost of open ground, so nobody remarked on the wall at her back.
“Left wrist,” she said. “It’s coming up.”
On my end, there was nothing. Five weeks of nothing. I stood at the trough and found the same blankness as every morning since the decree.
“It rises partway, then drops when you reach for it,” she said.
“I’ve tried every morning.”
“I know.”
She didn’t speculate about how she could hear it, and neither did we.
Since her review, she had sensed my current, changes in the weather, and once a rider on the valley road a full minute before Jonah lifted his head.
She had called it a seam exactly once. What the Tower had done to her was hers to discuss or leave alone, and mostly she left it alone.
“Stop asking nicely,” she said. She hadn’t moved from the wall. “It comes for fear. Give it some.”
The water lay flat in the trough. I put my hands back on the rim and pictured gray coats turning up our track, the lamp seen from the road, our table emptied chair by chair while Linden read the order aloud.
It answered.
Metal flooded under my tongue, and all three lines brightened, hot through my damp sleeve.
The water in Jonah’s channel jumped uphill and slapped the grass above the trough.
Then the current ran beyond the place I had aimed it.
It crossed ten feet of yard along a thread I hadn’t known was there, found Delphine’s Mark, and began to read her.
She went white against the barn boards.
“Stop,” she said.
My hands were already off the rim, but that made no difference. I let go of the gray coats and the empty chairs. The current lost its path and drained from my lines. In the channel, the water ran downhill again.
Delphine’s color came back in patches, throat first.
“It started to read me,” she said. “It didn’t get past the edge.” She nodded at my wrist. “You called it and it came. Write that down before you decide the morning was a failure.”
“It came and went straight for the nearest Mark it knew.”
“Tomorrow I’ll stand at the fence line. We’ll test the distance.” She pushed away from the wall and rolled her shoulders. “And Astra—I’ve been read by something that never asked. This wasn’t that. Yours stopped when I said no.”
I held on to that, but it didn’t help much. I hadn’t sent the current toward Delphine. Its first act had been to search for a Mark, and it had chosen a friend who had already paid dearly for this power. I needed to control where it went, and I couldn’t.
* * *
I was still thinking about aim that afternoon when one of Aldric’s carts came up the track.
He had arranged the network months before any of us knew we would need it, moving people through our valley in ones and twos—a spare horse, a night in the loft, gone by the next dusk.
This cart carried a tinker who wasn’t a tinker, and a woman named Marta.
A dispatch had come north in a courier’s satchel, and Cosima had copied it by lamplight in our barn. She and Aldric read it line by line at the porch table. It gave the hunt a name: Walkin.
I had stood before Walkin once, at the Tower tribunal. What stayed with me was his voice, completely untouched by anything he read aloud.
“Most enforcers want something they can put in a report,” Aldric said. “Walkin stays until he finds what he came for.”
“Marrow’s been moved twice under Council seal, south both times,” Cosima said, pencil moving.
“And the administrator is held at the Court’s pleasure.
No charge filed.” She dated the entry and underlined nothing, which from Cosima counted as emphasis.
“No charge means they haven’t decided how best to use her. ”
For nine years the administrator had held her post so she could blunt the Tower’s reviews from within. She had risked all of it to get us out the door. I carried the thought with me as I crossed the yard with the water jugs.
Kieran was at the woodpile, stacking stove-lengths with more rhythm than the job required. As I passed, he caught my wrist and pressed his mouth to the inside of it. “Still keeping time,” he said, and went back to the wood. I walked on with my pulse jumping.
Marta washed the road dust from her face at the trough while the tinker saw to his cart. She was near fifty, with a drover’s squint and work-roughened hands. I brought her bread and the good end of the cheese. She thanked me and ate slowly.
“You’re her,” she said after the yard had emptied. “The Verita girl.”
“Depends who’s asking.”
She nodded as if that settled it, which I suppose it did. She set down the bread and rolled back her left cuff. The bond-line beneath was gray as cold ash.
“I dimmed the spring I turned nineteen,” she said. “Public reading. The west door afterward. You know the room.”
“I know it.”
“The man on the other end of this line died eight years back. Carried his half bright to the last. Hid half his life to keep it from ever being read.” She looked down at her arm. “Word on the road says you opened a Mark the Council closed. Is it true?”
The current rose in me while she spoke. It had refused me at the trough that morning. Now, with Marta asking, it came at once. I counted the five gray lines beneath her cuff because my hands wanted work and there was none to give them.
“It’s true,” I said. “Once.”
Marta set down the bread. “What did it cost?”
“Her memory of everything they’d done to her in that place.
We still don’t know whether it was payment or a mercy.
” I nodded toward the trough. “This morning I called the current deliberately. It crossed the yard and started reading my friend. I can’t aim it.
If I reach into your Mark and it goes wide, it could take him—the bright half, the eight years, whatever of him you keep in there. ”
She looked at her arm for a long moment. “So it’s not never. It’s not yet.”
“Not today. I won’t gamble with you.”
She rolled the cuff down and buttoned it. “Then I’ll carry it dim a while longer.” She stood and shouldered her bundle. “Thank you for telling me. They took four minutes to dim me and never told me a thing. You’ve done better than they did.”
She was three steps gone when she turned back.
“When you learn to aim it,” she said, “the people who move me will know where they’ve put me. Marta. Gray to the elbow. I’m not hard to find.”
She went to wait beside the tinker’s cart, and I returned to the jugs and filled them.
The cart rolled north at dusk. By full dark, supper had been cleared and Cosima was reading the ledger’s evening entries aloud.
“The gray pair stopped at the crossroads today,” she said. “Forty-one minutes. They usually stay ten—water the horses, check the signpost, ride on. Today they dismounted and walked the verges.”
“And this came up from the mill with the flour,” Rev said from the stove.
“A man wearing no colors asked the miller which farms on this side of the water take in travelers. Nobody answered him. He thanked them and rode on.” She shifted a pot on the stove.
“He didn’t ask twice. That’s what bothers me. He didn’t need to.”
“Not answering told him enough,” Caspian said. “Now he knows there’s a farm worth protecting.”
No one answered, and Cosima closed the ledger.
That night I left my coat by the door with the wren pinned inside it and lay awake listening for horses on the mill road. None came. I listened anyway.