The Åsten Chronicles: Asterys — the Knowing (Book 2)

 

CHAPTER 1

 

 

It snowed in Caerwyn perhaps once in a generation.

Aster knew this because his Mother had told him, the first time he'd seen it — he'd been very small, and the snow had been very brief, and he remembered almost nothing of it except the quality of the light and the way Marina had looked standing in it, her face turned up, her eyes closed. He had filed it away the way he filed most things: carefully, in a place he could find again.

He had not expected to see it twice.

But there it was. Outside the window, in the grey early Morning, the Garden was white. The harbor beyond it was dark and restless, the way it always was in Winter, but the ground was white and the branches were white and the World had gone very quiet in the particular way Åsten went, only when snow had fallen overnight and was still deciding whether to continue.

He heard Fintan before he saw him.

The sound came from outside — not distress, nothing like distress, something closer to the noise a Person makes when they have encountered something so far beyond their expectations that language has temporarily failed them. Aster pulled on his coat and went out.

Fintan was standing in the middle of the Garden in his boots and his nightshirt, which meant he had gone out the moment he woke up without stopping for anything as impractical as trousers. He was three years old and he was standing very still, which was unusual enough on its own, and he was looking at the snow with an expression of complete and total seriousness.

Then he crouched down.

Aster leaned against the doorframe and watched.

Fintan pressed one small hand into the snow and looked at the print it left. Then he pressed the other hand beside it. Then he sat back on his heels and considered what he'd made. Then, with the focused deliberateness of Someone who had Decided something, he raised one finger and began to draw.

The Fire came the way it Always did with Fintan — easily, without effort, the way Breathing came, the way it had come since before he had words for it. It burned bright as Light, brighter than it had any right to be from something so small, and where it touched the snow it left clean dark lines, precise and certain.

He was drawing a boat.

Aster could tell because Fintan told him so, at length, without looking up, explaining each line as he made it — this is the front, this is the back, this is where Grandpa stands, this is the flag — and the boat looked nothing like a boat and exactly like what a three year old who had grown up watching the Moonlight Wake would draw if you gave him Fire and snow and a quiet Winter morning and no one telling him to stop.

Aster did not tell him to stop.

He stood in the doorway of his Family's House in the Country of Caerwyn while the snow held, and his youngest Brother drew a boat in the Garden with Light, and he Felt something Settle in his chest.

'This,' he thought. 'This is what I came Home to.'

Ada had brought her own books.

This was, Aster reflected, either very Kind or a quiet indictment of his ability to focus, and he suspected it was both. She had arranged herself in the chair by the window with her feet tucked under her and a cup of tea going cold on the table beside her, and she was reading something that was clearly more interesting than what he was supposed to be reading, and she had not looked up in twenty minutes.

He had looked up considerably more often than that.

The textbook was open in front of him. He had read the same paragraph four times. He knew this because he had made a small mark each time, thinking it would help, and it had not helped, because the problem was not that he couldn't find his place. The problem was Ada, in the chair by the window, with the Winter light coming in pale and low behind her and her hair falling forward when she turned a page and the particular expression she wore when something she was reading surprised her — not a large expression, just a slight shift, a fraction of attention redirected — and he had been cataloguing these expressions for the better part of an hour instead of reading about whatever it was he was supposed to be reading about, which concerned the History of something he would not be able to name if asked.

She turned a page.

He looked at his textbook.

"You haven't turned a page in twenty minutes," Ada said, without looking up.

"I'm a slow reader."

"You're not, though."

He considered this. "No," he agreed. "I'm not."

She looked up then, and the expression she gave him was fond and unhurried and entirely aware of exactly what he'd been doing, and he felt the back of his neck go warm in a way that had nothing to do with the fire.

"Aster."

"I'm studying."

"You're studying something," she said, and went back to her book.

He lasted four minutes before he was looking at her again.

The Moonlight Wake was in the Harbor, which was where she usually was in Winter, and she looked — as she Always looked — like something that had Decided to exist and was entirely Confident in that Decision. The Enchantment that kept her whole meant she needed nothing from Fin, and Fin came anyway.

Aster found him on the Dock, not doing anything in particular. Just standing. His hands in his pockets, his eyes on the Ship, the cold coming off the Water and not appearing to bother him.

Finian 'Silver Tide' Bollard at fifty-seven looked like a Man who had been somewhere and come back and made his Peace with both. The brown of his hair had given way mostly to silver now, a bit further along than the last time Aster had looked closely enough to notice. But the brown eyes hadn't changed. He stood the way he Always stood — Easy, Unhurried, like someone who had Learned a long time ago that most things could wait.

He didn't look up when Aster came to stand beside him.

They stood Together for a while. The water moved. The Moonlight Wake sat in it, Patient and Certain, the way she Always was.

"She doesn't need anything," Aster said eventually.

"No," Fin agreed.

"But you come anyway."

Fin was quiet for a moment. "Some habits," he said, "you keep because they're useful. Some you keep because they're Yours." He glanced sideways at Aster. "You'll understand that better when you're older."

Aster thought he might already understand it. He didn't say so.

They stood there a while longer, the two of them, while the Winter Harbor moved around them and the Moonlight Wake asked for nothing, and received their company anyway.

The firewood needed splitting, which was the kind of task that existed in every Season but felt most Honest in Winter, when the reason for it was immediate and the cold made the work satisfying in a way it wasn't in Summer.

Aster worked beside his Father, who split wood the way he did most physical things — efficiently, without waste, with the particular competence of someone who had been doing it long enough that it required no thought. Aidan Bollard had given up his Immortality for a Life in Caerwyn with Marina and their Children, and there were Moments — splitting firewood in the cold, his breath visible in the air, his hands certain on the axe — when Aster thought he understood why.

His Mother came out at some point with two cups of something hot and stood watching them with her coat pulled around her and her expression doing the thing it did sometimes, the thing that was too large and too quiet to name, the thing that meant she was looking at something she Loved.

She handed Aster his cup. Her hand was warm.

"Good day?" she asked.

He thought about Fintan in the snow, drawing a boat with Light. Ada in the chair by the window, not looking up. Fin on the Dock, keeping a habit that was His.

"Yes," he said. "Good day."

Marina looked at him for a moment in the way she sometimes did — like she was reading something he hadn't said aloud — and then she nodded, once, and went back inside.

Aster picked up the axe.

The snow was still holding. In the Garden, Fintan's boat was still there, dark lines in white, patient and certain, waiting for the thaw.

 

CHAPTER 2

 

 

Gale had Decided, sometime in the first week of Winter, that the indoors was an invention of considerable genius and he intended to make full use of it.

He had claimed the hearthrug in the Main Room with the quiet authority of Someone who had assessed all available options and made a considered Decision, and he spent the better part of each Day there, stretched to his full length, generating heat in the manner of something that had always been warm and saw no reason to change. Occasionally he opened one eye when someone walked past. Occasionally he didn't bother.

Aster had stopped trying to move him. There was no point. Gale went where Gale went, and in Winter, Gale went to the hearthrug, and that was simply the shape of things now.

He was there when Aster came downstairs on the Evening of the fourteenth day — the House quiet, his Parents already retired, Fintan long since asleep in the particular collapsed way of very small Children who have spent the day being exhaustively themselves. The fire had burned down to coals. The room was warm and dim and still.

Aster sat in the chair nearest the hearth.

Gale opened one eye, assessed him, and closed it again.

The Book was on the table beside the chair. It had been on the table beside the chair for fourteen days, which was how long Aster had been Home, which meant he had been putting it there every evening and not opening it, which was a thing he had not examined too closely because examining it too closely would require admitting he was doing it.

He looked at it for a while.

Then he picked it up.

It was the same weight it had always been — heavier than it looked, lighter than it should have been, the particular weight of something that had decided what it was a long time ago. The cover was worn smooth in the places his hands went naturally, which meant it had been Waiting for him specifically, which was a thought he set aside because it was too large for a quiet evening by a dying fire.

He opened it.

The pages were blank, the way they always were. He turned through them slowly — one, two, ten, twenty — all blank, all the particular white of something that had not yet been written.

And then, on a page near the middle, it wasn't blank anymore.

The Writing was small and precise and had not been there a moment ago. He Knew this because he had looked at this page specifically, had run his thumb across it, had felt nothing. And now there were words on it, dark and certain, as though they had always been there and he had simply failed to see them until now.

He Read them once. Then again. Then a Third time, slowly, the way he read things that Mattered.

'In a place where ancient things lay, The Dawn will find a price to pay. Surrounded by others will find the Dawn alone, In a narrow pass of stone. The Darkness comes, the Shadows converge, Enemies in dark cloaks emerge. Light will fail, the Dark prevail, The Dawn taken, to Darkness hail.'

He sat with it for a long time.

The fire shifted. A coal dropped. Gale made a small sound of mild objection and resettled himself without opening his eyes.

Aster read the riddle again.

A place where ancient things lay. He thought of Aethon Academy — the age of it, the weight of its History. He thought of StarTide, which was old in its own way. He thought of a dozen places he had never been and could not name.

Surrounded by others, find the Dawn alone. That one sat uneasily. He turned it over, looking for the angle of it, the way you turned a stone to find what lived underneath. Alone in a crowd. Alone despite company. He didn't know what to do with it.

Light will fail. He looked at his hand, at the place where the Dawn lived in him, quiet and present the way it always was. The idea of it failing was not something he had considered before. He considered it now, briefly, and then set it aside because there was nothing useful to do with it yet.

The Dawn taken, to Darkness hail.

That one he couldn't set aside.

He closed the Book.

Gale opened one eye, looked at him with the particular attention of something that Understood more than it let on. The look that Meant he already Knew. The look that meant Aster did too, if he was being Honest with himself.

Something was already in motion. He hadn't Chosen anything Tonight — had only sat down by a dying fire and picked up a book he'd been avoiding for a fortnight. And the page had written itself anyway. Which meant the Choice hadn't been his. Someone, somewhere, had already Decided something about him. And the Book had simply been the first to say so.

"The Dawn taken," Aster said quietly, to no one in particular. To Gale. To the room. He wasn't sure it mattered who he said it to. Saying it aloud didn't make it smaller the way he'd hoped it might.

"The Book shows what may be," Gale said. "Not what will be. It sees the shape of things given the choices already made. It does not see the choices that haven't been made yet."

He paused.

"Those are still yours."

Aster nodded.

Gale closed his eyes again.

Asterys sat there a while longer, the Book in his lap, the fire going to ash, the House quiet around him. Somewhere upstairs Fintan was asleep, Dreaming whatever three year olds Dreamed. Beyond the Harbor the Sea was doing what the Sea did in Winter — restless, Patient, indifferent to the concerns of People sitting by dying fires with Books that Wrote themselves.

He didn't know what the riddle meant.

He Knew it meant something.

He put the Book back on the table, went upstairs, and did not sleep particularly well.

 

 

CHAPTER 3

 

 

He waited two days.

He told himself this was because he was still thinking about it, still turning the riddle over, still looking for the angle that would make it legible. This was partially true. The other part — the part he didn't examine — was that showing Ada meant watching her face when she read it, and he wasn't sure he was ready for that yet.

On the second Evening he showed her anyway.

She was in the chair by the window again, the one she had claimed without discussion sometime in the first week and which was Hers now in all the ways that Mattered. He sat on the arm of it, which was not what the chair was designed for, and he held the Book out without saying anything.

She looked at him. Then she took it.

He watched her read.

She was very still when she read — stiller than usual, which was already still. Her eyes moved across the lines once, then went back to the beginning. He saw the moment the last line landed. Something in her face that she didn't quite manage to keep from him, there and then gone, replaced by the Steadiness that was so particularly Ada that he sometimes forgot it was something she Chose rather than something she simply was.

She closed the Book.

For a moment neither of them said anything.

"It hasn't happened," she said finally. Not a question. A thing she was Deciding to hold onto.

"No."

"And it may not." She handed the Book back to him. Her hand was very steady. "The Book shows what could happen. Not what will."

"Yes."

She nodded, once, the way she nodded when she had taken something in and filed it somewhere she could find it again. Then she looked at him directly, the way she did when she wanted to make sure he was actually listening and not just appearing to.

"Aster."

"Yes?"

"I won't let anyone take you," she said. "Not if I can help it."

It was quiet and absolute and she said it the way she said things she Meant Completely — without decoration, without drama, just the fact of it, placed between them where they could both see it.

He didn't say anything for a moment.

"I Know," he said.

She held his gaze for another moment, then looked back at the window. Outside the Town was dark, and the last of the snow had gone to grey slush at the edges of the Garden. Ordinary. Everything Ordinary.

"Now," she said, "are you going to Study Tonight or are you going to look at me again for two hours and retain nothing?"

"Those aren't mutually exclusive," Aster said.

Ada said nothing, but the corner of her mouth moved.

The rhythm of Home reasserted itself the way it Always did — not all at once, but in increments. A Morning that felt normal. An Afternoon that felt normal. A meal where no one said anything of consequence and it was exactly Enough.

Fintan Helped.

Fintan helped primarily by being three years old and therefore a continuous source of events that required immediate attention, and left very little room for brooding. The incident with the Kitchen, for instance — which had begun with Fintan Deciding, entirely Independently, that he would like to make something, and had ended with a quantity of flour that defied reasonable explanation distributed across three rooms, Gale, and the better part of Aidan Bollard's left side. Fintan had surveyed the damage with the expression of someone who had achieved something and was not yet sure what. Gale had left the room with immense Dignity and not returned for several hours. Aidan had stood very still for a moment and then started Laughing, which meant Marina started Laughing, which meant Aster started Laughing, which meant Fintan — sensing the room had shifted in his favour — started Laughing too, loudly and without entirely knowing why.

Aster had written it down almost immediately, because Cal would want to know.

He wrote the letter on a Thursday Evening, at the desk in his room, with the lamp going and the wind off the Harbor making itself known against the window.

'Cal,

I hope this finds you well and that wherever you are is warmer than Caerwyn, which has been doing its best impression of the end of the World for the better part of a month. We had snow — actual snow, which apparently happens here once in a generation and which Fintan treated as a personal gift from the universe. He spent the morning in the garden in his nightshirt drawing a boat with Fire in the snow. It looked nothing like a boat. He explained it to me in considerable detail anyway.

I should tell you about the flour incident. I'm not entirely sure how it started — I don't think Fintan is entirely sure either, though he has a version of events that presents him in a very favourable light. What I can tell you is that by the end of it my father was covered in flour from the shoulder down, Gale had removed himself from the situation with more dignity than any of us managed, and Fintan was laughing so hard he had to sit down. My mother cried laughing. I haven't seen her cry laughing in a long time. It was a good thing to see.

It's good to be Home, Cal. I didn't know how much I needed it until I was back in it. The kind of good that's hard to explain — just ordinary things, ordinary days, the people I love being exactly themselves. I've been trying to hold onto that.

I hope you're well. I hope wherever you are has good food and at least one person worth talking to. Write back when you can — I'd like to know how you are.

Aster'

He read it back once, folded it, and sealed it.

Then he sat for a moment with it in his hands — this small ordinary thing, this letter to his Friend about flour and snow and a three year old's boat — and felt, quietly and without drama, that this was exactly the right thing to do.

He sent it in the Morning.

 

 

CHAPTER 4

 

 

The post arrived early at the Bartum Estate.

It always did — efficiently, without fuss, the way everything at the Estate arrived, because Lord and Lady Bartum ran a household that did not tolerate inefficiency and the post had apparently received the message. Cal could have left it to Henderson, who handled such things as a matter of course and would have had it sorted and on the breakfast table before anyone sat down. He usually did leave it to Henderson.

This Morning he went himself, for no reason he could have named. Just a Feeling. The kind that didn't announce itself.

The bundle was the usual sort — correspondence for his Father, something official-looking with a seal he didn't recognize, a catalogue his Mother had been expecting. And at the bottom, addressed in handwriting he knew immediately:

'Calix Bartum'

Just that. No Estate name, no County, no careful directions. Just his Name, in Asterys Bollard's handwriting, as though the letter had known exactly where to go and hadn't needed any further instruction. The Postal Delivery always knew where to find a letter's recipient, even without an address. As long as there was a Name, the letter or package would arrive where it was meant to.

Cal stood on the front steps of the Bartum Estate in the cold morning air and Smiled before he'd even opened it.

He read it twice in the Entrance Hall, standing up, still in his coat.

The snow. Fintan in the Garden in his nightshirt, drawing a boat with Fire. The flour incident — Cal had to stop at the flour incident and read it again, more slowly, because the image of Aidan Bollard covered in flour from the shoulder down while a three year old surveyed the damage with satisfaction was one he wanted to have properly. He Laughed, alone in the Entrance Hall, the sound of it bouncing off the high ceiling in the particular way sounds did in large Houses.

Gale removing himself with Dignity. Marina crying Laughing. Fintan sitting down because he'd Laughed too hard.

'It's good to be home, Cal. I didn't know how much I needed it until I was back in it.'

Cal folded the letter carefully and put it in his coat pocket, where it would stay for the rest of the day because that was simply what you did with letters like that.

Then he went to find his Parents.

They were in the Morning Room — his Mother at the writing desk, his Father standing by the window with his coffee, both of them doing the particular Comfortable nothing of two People who had shared mornings for a very long time. Cal knocked on the open door out of habit, the way he Always had, and they both looked up.

"I had a letter," Cal said. "From Asterys Bollard."

He held it out. His Mother took it first, and read it with the attentive expression she gave to things that Mattered to Cal, which was one of the things about her he had Always appreciated without ever quite putting into words.

"That's Wonderful, Dear," she said, when she had finished. Her voice was Warm and Genuine. She handed it across to his Father.

Lord Nigel Bartum read efficiently, the way he did most things. He nodded once when he reached the flour incident — not a laugh, but the acknowledgment of one — and handed the letter back to Cal.

"Good that he's Settled," his Father said. Practical. Approving. "Write back."

"I will." Cal tucked the letter back into his pocket. "I thought I might go into the Village this Afternoon, if there's nothing needed."

"Nothing that can't wait." His mother had already turned back to her correspondence. "We have a Meeting this Morning before we depart — you'll have the Afternoon to yourself."

"Of course." Cal said it the way he always said it, which was without thinking, because meetings at the Bartum Estate were simply part of the shape of things. There had Always been Meetings. Important People came and went and Cal had never once caught the moment of their arrival, had never heard a carriage or a knock, had simply found the Meeting Room occupied when it hadn't been a moment before. Business. His Parents knew a great many People and a great many people Knew them and that was what it Meant to be a Bartum.

He said goodbye, took his letter, and went.

The Morning Room was quiet after he left.

Lady Marian Bartum set down her pen. Lord Nigel Bartum finished his coffee. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

Then Cal's Father moved toward the door.

"The Others will be Arriving," he said.

"Yes," said his Mother.

She picked up her pen again.

Outside, somewhere in the House, a door opened and closed, the way doors did when people who knew how to move quietly had arrived without being seen. Cal was already halfway down the drive, his Friend's letter in his pocket, the Morning ahead of him.

Then, without discussion, they moved toward the East Wing — the part of the House that Cal had never had reason to visit, where the Meeting Room sat behind a door that was always closed when it mattered.

The Others were already there.

They arrived the way they Always arrived, without sound, without announcement, Present in the room before anyone had seen them enter. Nigel Knew how they'd gotten there. It was simply what they were. People who moved through the World without leaving marks where they didn't want to. Nigel had used similar means of travel himself.

There were four of them, seated at the long table. And at the head of it, as he always was now, Orthos Malus.

He was not a large man. This was the thing people noticed first, and then immediately forgot, because largeness had nothing to do with what Orthos was. He had been free for only a matter of months, released from the Void by a door that should never have opened, and already he sat at the head of this table as though he had never been anywhere else. The room arranged itself around him the way rooms did around things that could not be argued with. His eyes were dark and patient and they moved to Nigel the moment he entered, the way eyes moved to things they had already assessed and filed and were simply confirming.

"Lord Bartum," he said. "Lady Bartum."

They took their seats.

"We have news," Nigel said. He kept his voice even. He had Learned, over the years, that evenness was the only register that served him in this room. "Our Son received a letter this morning. From Asterys Bollard."

A small silence.

"He wrote to your Son," Orthos said. Not a question. A thing being considered.

"They were at Aethon together. Cal considers him a Friend." Marian's voice was composed. She had Always been better at this than Nigel, which was one of the reasons they were both still here. "The letter was ordinary. News from Home. Nothing of consequence."

"The letter itself is of no consequence," Orthos agreed. "The Friendship is."

He let that sit for a moment, the way he let things sit, not for effect, but because he was genuinely thinking, and he saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

"Asterys Bollard carries the Dawn," he said. "Lumen's Blood. You understand what that means."

The room Understood. Nigel understood. He had understood since the first time Orthos had explained it to him, and Understanding had not made it easier to sit with.

Lumen was Light given Human Form, and he had carried Light, Light that did not merely Illuminate but unmade Darkness, that had closed the very door to the Void itself. Centuries ago, Lumen had refused, absolutely, without negotiation, to use that Power in service of anything but his own conscience. The Artifacts and Relics of the World responded to his Blood, to the particular quality of what he carried. Without it, the Council could not touch them.

Lumen had refused.

He had Chosen a Name for himself and refused, and that had been the end of it.

Orthos did not say the Name he had Chosen. He never did.

Lumen had been Chosen to be called, Errant, and Orthos refused to acknowledge the Choice, even now. Centuries had passed, Errant's Life had run its course. He was gone, and still Orthos would not give him the satisfaction.

"There are others of his Line," the Unnamed Woman said, the one whose Name Nigel had never been given and had Learned not to ask for. "Why this one?"

"Because this one is closest to what Lumen was." Orthos said it without hesitation. "Lumen's Gift was the same — it was not something he carried. It was something he was. Asterys Bollard is the same shape. The Mother wields Lumen's Primal light, but it is not what she is. Twilight is not the Dawn. White Fire is not the Dawn. The Dawn casts away darkness. It opens doors that should not be opened." A pause, brief and precise. "I am proof of that."

No one spoke.

"Asterys opened the Void," Orthos continued. "He did not intend to. He did not understand what he was doing. But the door opened because of what he is, and I walked through it." He looked around the table. "Lumen's Blood released me. It will serve me. That is not a coincidence. That is the shape of things."

"He is settled in StarTide," the Unnamed Woman said. "For now."

"For now. We are not rushing." He looked at Nigel with the particular attention that meant he was being addressed specifically. "Your Son's Friendship is useful. We will not waste it. Continue as you are. Report what comes to you. Do nothing that draws attention."

Nigel nodded.

"The Boy will move eventually," Orthos continued. "They always do. When he does, we will be ready." He paused. "There is also the matter of Tarsus."

The room shifted slightly, not visibly, just a change in the quality of the attention.

"Ravenwood's information was thorough," the Unnamed Woman said.

"It was. Half Dragon, half God. Son of Lyra." Orthos said it the way he said most things, quietly, without emphasis, which somehow made it worse. "The Order of the Old Gods would find that information very interesting. At the right moment." He looked around the table. "We will know when that moment is. It is not yet."

He rose.

The Meeting, apparently, was over.

"Lord Bartum," he said, at the door. "Lady Bartum. As always."

And then he was gone, the way they were all gone, between one moment and the next, the room empty before Nigel had quite registered the leaving.

He sat for a moment in the silence.

Marian placed her hand briefly over his on the table. Then she withdrew it, stood, and went back to the Morning Room.

Nigel followed.

Somewhere in the Village by now, their Son was walking with a letter in his pocket from his Friend, thinking about flour and snow and a Three-year-old's boat, thinking about nothing that could hurt him.

Nigel said nothing about that either.

 

CHAPTER 5

 

 

Cal's letter arrived on a Tuesday.

Aster Knew it was Cal's before he opened it, the same way Cal had Known his — the handwriting was immediately Recognisable, large and unhurried, the kind of handwriting that Belonged to Someone who had never been told to slow down because they were already moving at exactly the pace they wanted. The letter was addressed to 'Asterys Bollard, StarTide, Caerwyn', which was more address than Aster had given him and suggested Cal had either asked someone or simply Known, the way People who moved easily through the World tended to Know things without having to work for them.

He opened it at the Kitchen table, Gale installed on the chair beside him with the air of Someone who had claimed it some time ago and was simply continuing to occupy it.

 

'Aster,

The flour incident. I had to read it twice. I have questions, primarily about the structural integrity of your Kitchen and whether Fintan has been allowed back in unsupervised. I hope the answer is no. I suspect the answer is yes.

It sounds like Home. The good kind. I'm glad you have it.

We're preparing to leave for the Winter — Inriva Almare, which my Parents visit most years. I've never been. I'm told it announces itself before you can see it, smell first, then sound, then light off the water. I'll write when we arrive and tell you if that's true.

Write back when you can. It's good to hear from you.

Cal'

 

Aster read it twice, the way Cal had read his. Then he set it down on the table and looked at it for a moment.

"Inriva Almare," Gale said, from the chair beside him.

"He mentioned it."

"I heard." Gale's tail moved once, slowly, the way it did when he was thinking rather than reacting. "It's a Good City. Old. The Eastern part of it is older than most people Remember."

Aster looked at him. "Have you been?"

"Several times." Gale said it the way he said most things about his own History, which was without elaboration, as though the centuries were simply a matter of record and didn't require comment. "There is an Archive there. Eastern side, nearest the Water. Significant collection."

"Significant how?"

Gale closed his eyes. "Ask me again when the question is more urgent."

Aster looked at him for another moment, then looked back at Cal's letter. Inriva Almare. He turned the Name over without knowing why, the way you turned over something that had caught the light without being able to say what it was made of.

He wrote back that afternoon.

 

The Pull began Three days later.

It was not like the first time, which had arrived with the force of something that had been waiting a long time and was no longer willing to wait. This was quieter. A direction, more than a compulsion. The faint persistent sense that something was Calling from somewhere specific, the way you sometimes woke in the Night Certain you had heard your Name without being able to say who had said it.

He noticed it first on a walk along the nearby cove, Gale in his coat pocket in the particular way that meant Gale had Decided the weather was not worth engaging with but was not willing to be left behind. The Pull was there when he turned South, and not there when he turned North, and he stood for a moment on the path above the Water testing it the way you tested a loose tooth, carefully, not wanting to make it worse.

"You Feel it," Gale said, from his pocket.

"Yes."

"Good." A pause. "Don't ignore it."

"I wasn't planning to."

"You were considering it," Gale said. "I could tell."

Aster put his hands in his pockets, which disturbed Gale slightly, and looked out at the cove. The water was grey and very still. South. Whatever it was, it was South.

He didn't say anything else about it. Neither did Gale. They walked back to the House in the particular Companionable silence of two People who had agreed, without discussing it, to let a thing sit until it was Ready to be looked at directly.

 

The rumors arrived on a Friday, which felt appropriate somehow, the way bad news often Chose the end of the Week.

They came through the Harbor first, the way most things came through StarTide — carried in by Someone off a Ship who had heard it from Someone in another Port who had heard it from Someone who claimed to Know Someone who had been near the Aethon Ruins when it happened. By the time it reached the Bollard House it had passed through enough hands that it had shed most of its original shape and picked up several new ones.

Aster heard the first version from Emrys, who had heard it from Someone at the Harbor, who had heard it from a Crew off a Merchant Vessel out of the South.

"Apparently," Emrys said, leaning in the doorway of Aster's room with the expression of someone delivering news they found more entertaining than alarming, "something came through a Portal at the Aethon ruins. Something from the Void."

Aster went still for a moment.

"A Nightmare Creature, this version says. The kind that reaches into your Dreams. Doesn't sound too far off really." 

"Nothing came through that I'd describe as a Nightmare Creature," Aster said, and held his Brother's gaze. Emrys looked at him for a moment with the particular expression that meant he had heard what Aster hadn't said and was Choosing, for now, to let it go.

"There's another version," Emrys said, already moving down the hall. "Apparently someone's Mother-in-Law stepped through. He said she looked well. That was the frightening part."

Aster waited until he was gone, then looked at Gale, who was sitting on the windowsill with his eyes closed.

"A Nightmare Creature," Aster said.

"Mm," said Gale.

"That's one way to describe it."

Gale said nothing, which was its own kind of Answer.

 

By the following Tuesday there were four versions in active circulation through StarTide. The Nightmare Creature. The Mother-in-Law. A Goose, mean-tempered and of unusual size, which had apparently been the detail that caught on fastest because geese required no explanation — everyone had encountered a Goose and understood instinctively that one emerging from the Void was not an improvement on the standard variety. And a fourth version, quieter and more specific, that said simply: something came through that should not have, and the Boy who Opened the Door is Fin Bollard's Grandson.

That version didn't have a creature. It didn't need one.

Marina heard all four versions at some point during the week. Aster watched her receive them with the particular expression she wore when she had already filed something and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up. When the Goose reached her — delivered by a Neighbor with great enthusiasm and considerable detail about the temperament of Geese as a species — she said 'a Goose, Honestly,' and went back to what she was doing.

Aster watched her go and felt, quietly, Relieved.

He did not notice that she hadn't asked him whether any of it was True.

Gale, from his pocket, said nothing at all.

 

 

CHAPTER 6

 

 

The Pull was stronger in the Mornings.

Aster had noticed this the way you noticed things you weren't quite ready to act on — peripherally, carefully, without looking directly at it. He would wake before the House did, in the grey hour before the light came properly off the Harbor, and it would be there. South. Specific and Patient and entirely Unbothered by the fact that he hadn't Decided anything yet.

Gale, who slept at the foot of his bed in the particular boneless way of Cats who had made their Peace with the Universe, would open one eye when Aster sat up.

"Still there," Aster said one morning. Not a question.

"Yes," said Gale.

"You could tell me more about the Archive."

"I could," Gale agreed, and closed his eye again.

Aster looked at him for a moment. Then he lay back down and looked at the ceiling and listened to the House breathe around him and tried to think about something else, which did not work, and eventually got up.

 

It Happened on a Thursday, at the Docks.

He had gone down to the Docks in the late Morning, no particular reason, the way you went to the Docks in StarTide when the House felt too small and the Hills were too familiar and you needed the particular noise and salt of a working Port to remind you that the World was large and mostly indifferent. Gale was in his pocket. The Pull was South, as it had always been recently, and he was doing his best to ignore it.

He didn't notice the group until he was already among them.

There were four of them, about his age, the kind of young men who moved through the World in groups because the group was where the confidence lived. They had the look of people who had heard something and had decided, without much deliberation, that they were entitled to an opinion about it.

"That's him," one of them said. Not quietly.

Aster kept walking.

"Oi." A hand on his shoulder, turning him. "You're the one from Aethon. The one who Opened the Void."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Aster said, which was the wrong thing to say because it was obviously untrue and they could all hear it.

"Let something out, didn't you." The one who had grabbed him was taller, pleased with himself in the way people were pleased with themselves when they had an audience. "Something that shouldn't be out. And now it's just wandering around? And you're here having a nice time at the Docks?"

"I think you should let go of my shoulder," Aster said.

He didn't.

What followed was brief and unpleasant and ended with Aster against a stack of crates with his jaw set and his hands at his sides and the particular cold clarity of someone Deciding very carefully not to do something they would regret, because the Dawn was there if he Reached for it and he was not going to Reach for it, not here, not over this, not to prove something to four young men at the StarTide Docks who didn't know what they were asking him to prove.

The shove came from the tall one. Then another, harder. A Third that sent him back against the crates with enough force that Gale made a small undignified sound from his pocket and then went very still in the way that meant he was offended.

"That's enough."

The voice was not loud. It didn't need to be.

Fin Bollard was not a tall man, which the group had clearly noted and clearly miscalculated, because they turned with the expressions of people who intended to dismiss him and found instead something that made the dismissal die before it arrived. He was older. His hair was silver and his face had the particular weathered quality of someone who had spent a great deal of his Life at Sea. He was also standing in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with Someone who had been doing this since before any of them were Born.

"Walk away," Fin said pleasantly.

"And who are you, Old Man?" the tall one said, which was the last confident thing he said for some time.

"Fin Bollard," said Fin. "Silver Tide, if you prefer. I don't mind either way."

A silence.

"I don't believe you," the tall one said, but the confidence had gone out of it.

 Fin looked at him for a moment with the expression of Someone who found this mildly Interesting. Then he said, "Draw your sword."

The tall one drew it, because he was committed now and the group was watching and there was no graceful way out. He was not unskilled. That much was clear in the first second, in the way he held it, in the way he moved his weight.

It didn't matter.

Fin moved the way water moved, without apparent effort, without anything that looked like urgency, and the tall one's sword was on the ground in the time it took to register that something had happened. His wrist was fine. His grip simply wasn't there anymore. Fin had removed it so cleanly and so completely that the young man stood for a moment looking at his empty hand as though trying to understand how it had gotten that way.

The group looked at Fin.

Fin looked back at them pleasantly.

They left.

Fin watched them go, then rolled his shoulder once, carefully, with the expression of someone hoping no one had noticed.

"Grandpa," Aster said.

"I'm fine," Fin said.

"Your back."

"My back is perfectly—" Fin stopped. Rolled the shoulder again. Made a face that he immediately attempted to make into a different face. "I'm not as young as I used to be," he said, with great Dignity. "That's simply a fact about Time. It happens to everyone."

Aster looked at him.

"Don't," Fin said.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were thinking it very loudly." Fin straightened, which took a moment longer than it once would have, and looked at his Grandson with the particular expression he wore when he was about to say something that Mattered and had Decided to say it simply. "You didn't Reach for it."

"No."

"Good." He put a hand briefly on Aster's shoulder, the one that had been grabbed, and then removed it. "Come on. Your Grandmother will Know something happened and I'd rather tell her before she finds out from someone at the Harbor."

They walked back up from the Docks Together, Fin moving with only the slightest evidence of a back that was making its opinions known, and neither of them said anything else about it.

Gale, from Aster's pocket, said nothing. But he was awake.

 

Ada found out within the hour.

Aster hadn't told her. He hadn't told anyone. But Ada had a particular way of Knowing things that had nothing to do with her ability to teleport and everything to do with the fact that she paid attention, and by the time he got back to the House she was already in the Kitchen with the expression that meant she had heard, and was Deciding how to respond to it.

"I'm fine," Aster said, before she could speak.

"I Know you're fine," Ada said. "Fin was there."

"It wasn't—"

"Aster." She said it the way she said things she Meant Completely. "You were shoved around at the Docks because of something you can't explain or correct, and you stood there and took it because you didn't want to make it worse. I Know. I'm not angry at you." A pause. "I'm angry at them."

"It doesn't matter."

"It Matters," she said. "You Matter. Those are the same thing."

He didn't say anything for a moment.

Kasahn appeared in the doorway behind Ada with the expression of Someone who had also heard and had opinions. Collette was beside him. Tarsus, who had to duck slightly for the doorframe, filled the rest of the space.

"Right," Tarsus said, looking at Aster with the particular directness that meant he had already Thought this through and was going to say it. "I think we should go somewhere."

 

They sat around the Kitchen table, the five of them, and Tarsus laid it out the way he laid most things out — practically, without drama, as though the conclusion were obvious and the only question was whether everyone else had caught up yet.

"The rumors aren't going away," he said. "They're getting worse. And staying here isn't helping." He looked at Aster. "You've been restless. I've seen it. I think we should Travel for a while, through the Veil. Go South. Come back when things have settled."

"South," Aster said.

"South," Tarsus confirmed. "I Know the routes. We go where we need to go and we come back when you're Ready."

A silence around the table. Then Ada said, "I'm coming."

"Obviously," said Kasahn.

"Obviously," Collette agreed.

Aster looked at them. Then at the doorway, where Emrys was leaning with the expression of Someone who had been there for a portion of this conversation and had already made up his Mind.

"The Fishing is slow," Emrys said. "The House Building can wait." He came in and sat down. "I'm coming. That's not a discussion."

"You don't have to—"

"Aster," Emrys said, with the particular Patience of an Older Brother who had been watching his Younger Brother try to carry things alone for long enough. "I'm coming."

Aster looked around the table. At Ada, Steady and Decided. At Kasahn and Collette, who had the expressions of people who had also already made up their Minds. At Tarsus, patient and practical. At Emrys, who had simply shown up in the doorway and announced himself the way he Always had, since before Aster could Remember a time without him.

"We should tell Mum and Dad," he said.

"Yes," said Tarsus. "I'll handle it."

 

He found Marina and Aidan in the sitting room, the particular Comfortable arrangement of two People who had shared enough years that proximity had become its own language. Marina looked up when Tarsus came in, and something in her expression shifted very slightly, the way things shifted when you had been waiting for something, and it had finally arrived.

Tarsus sat down. He explained it practically, without drama. The rumors were getting worse. Aster needed to be somewhere else for a while. They would travel South through the Veil, see something of the World, come back when things had quieted down.

"I'll look after him," Tarsus said. "I'll bring him Home."

Marina looked at her middle Son for a long moment. Then she looked at Tarsus.

"I Know you will," she said.

Aidan said nothing for a moment. He had the expression of someone running through a calculation they had already run several times and arriving at the same Answer. Then he looked at Aster directly.

"You'll use the Light Fountain," he said.

"Yes."

"Regularly."

"Yes."

Aidan nodded once, the way he nodded when something was settled. "Then go," he said. "And come back."

Marina stood and put her arms around Aster, briefly and Completely, the way she had when he was small and the World had been too large and she had been the thing that made it manageable. Then she let go.

"South," she said, almost to herself.

"South," Aster said.

She nodded. And did not say what she Knew, and did not say what she feared, and went to Help them pack.

 

 

CHAPTER 7

 

 

The Veil opened the way it always did for Tarsus — without ceremony, without resistance, as though it had been expecting him and had simply been Waiting for him to Arrive. One moment there was the edge of StarTide behind them, the cold salt air and the distant sound of the Harbor, and then there was something else entirely.

Aster stepped through and stopped.

It was not dark. It was not light. It was not any color he had a name for, which was the first thing, and the second thing was that the ground — if it was ground — felt entirely certain beneath his feet while looking like nothing he could have stood on. The air, if it was air, had a quality he couldn't locate. Not warm, not cold. Present, in the way that things with awareness were Present.

"Don't look for edges," Tarsus said, from somewhere beside him. His voice sounded the same and also slightly different, the way voices sounded in large stone rooms. "There aren't any. Or there are, but they move."

"That's not reassuring," Kasahn said.

"It wasn't meant to be reassuring. It was meant to be accurate." Tarsus was already moving, with the unhurried Confidence of someone walking a Path they Knew, through something that had no paths. "Stay close. Not because you'll get lost exactly, but because the Veil has a way of expressing interest in new people and it's easier if you're Together when it does."

"Expressing interest," Collette said. "What does that mean?"

"You'll Know it if it happens," Tarsus said. "It's not dangerous. Just — don't engage with anything that seems to want your attention unless I tell you it's fine."

A silence.

"Wonderful," Emrys said, with the tone of someone filing this information away for later.

Gale, from Aster's pocket, had gone very still. Not the stillness of Sleep or indifference. The stillness of something old Recognizing something older.

"Gale," Aster said quietly.

"I'm Here," Gale said. Just that.

They walked — or moved, because walking implied a relationship with ground and distance that the Veil didn't entirely honor. The space around them shifted without shifting, the way the quality of light changed in a room when clouds moved outside a window, except there were no clouds and no window and no outside. Colors that had no names came and went at the periphery. Aster kept his eyes on Tarsus's back and tried not to think too hard about what he was seeing, because thinking too hard about it seemed to make it more complicated rather than less.

The Pull was still there.

That was the thing he noticed, underneath everything else. South, in the World outside, had been a direction. In here it was something different — not a direction exactly, more a quality, a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature, a Certainty that sat in his chest and pointed. He hadn't expected it to follow him in. He hadn't expected it to be clearer.

"Tarsus," he said.

"I Feel it," Tarsus said, without turning. "I've been Feeling it since we entered. Something Knows we're coming." A pause. "That's not necessarily a problem."

"Necessarily," Ada said.

"Necessarily," Tarsus confirmed, pleasantly.

The Veil shifted around them — not dramatically, not with any sense of threat, but with the quality of something turning its attention. Aster had the distinct impression, impossible to locate and impossible to dismiss, that they were being observed by something that was not hostile and was not friendly and was simply very, very old and curious about what they were doing in its space.

Tarsus said something under his breath that wasn't quite words, or was words in something that predated the Languages Aster knew. The attention shifted. Not away entirely. Just — sideways. Satisfied, perhaps, or simply finished with its assessment.

"What did you say to it?" Emrys asked.

"I introduced you," Tarsus said. "It likes to know who's passing through."

"You introduced us to the Veil."

"I've been mapping it for twenty years. The least I can do is be polite." He glanced back, briefly, with the expression of someone who found this entirely reasonable. "It won't bother you again. Probably."

"Probably," Kasahn said.

"It's a Living Thing," Tarsus said, with the Patience of Someone who had explained this before to People who found it difficult. "Living Things are not entirely predictable. That's what makes them Interesting."

They moved on. The Veil moved with them, or around them, or possibly instead of them — the geometry of it resisted examination. At some point the colors at the periphery settled into something that was almost familiar, almost the quality of late afternoon light through old stone, and Aster felt the Pull sharpen from a warmth into something more specific.

A City. He didn't know how he knew. He just Knew.

"Tarsus," he said.

"Yes," Tarsus said.

"Inriva Almare."

A pause. Tarsus turned and looked at him properly for the first time since they'd entered the Veil, with the expression of someone whose suspicion had just been confirmed.

"Yes," he said again. "I Thought so." He turned back. "I Know the route. We'll be there by Morning."

Gale, from Aster's pocket, opened his eyes.

"Good," he said, to no one in particular. "The Archives will be open."

 

 

CHAPTER 8

 

 

Inriva Almare announced itself before it was visible.

The smell came first — warm stone and salt water and something cooking somewhere that involved garlic and something sweet, the particular combination of a City that had been feeding People for centuries and had gotten very good at it. Then the sound, rising as the Veil thinned around them and the World reasserted its Familiar rules — voices in a Language Aster half recognized, the knock of boats against old wood, water moving under stone. Then the light.

He Understood immediately why Cal had written about it. The light came off the canals and hit the buildings and bounced, gold and shifting, so that the whole City seemed to be in gentle motion even where it was perfectly still. The stone was old and pale and warm and the water was everywhere, threading between buildings that had no business being as close Together as they were, connected by bridges that arched over the canals with the casual confidence of things that had been standing long enough to stop worrying about it.

"Oh," Ada said, quietly, beside him.

"Yes," Tarsus said. He was looking at the city with the expression of someone returning to something they had missed without quite admitting it. "It does that."

They had come out of the Veil in a narrow street in the older part of the City, the half-submerged section nearest the water where the buildings rose straight from the canals and the stone at the waterline was dark with centuries of Tide. The Street was already busy despite the early hour, People moving with the particular Purposeful ease of a City that had been awake since before dawn and saw no reason to slow down.

Gale had emerged from Aster's pocket and was sitting on his shoulder, which he did occasionally when he wanted a better view and had Decided that Dignity was less Important than Perspective. He was looking at the City with his eyes very open and something in his expression that was not quite nostalgia but was adjacent to it.

"You've been here before," Aster said.

"Several times," Gale said. "It was different then. The older parts were newer." He paused. "The Archive is still standing. That's what Matters."

They moved further into the City, following Tarsus, who Navigated the bridges and the narrow streets with the Ease of Someone who had a Map in his head and Trusted it. The Pull had changed since they'd arrived — not stronger exactly, but more specific, the way a sound became more locatable the closer you got to its Source. It was pointing somewhere in the Eastern part of the City, toward the water, toward the older stones.

Toward the Archive, Aster suspected, though he didn't say it yet.

They crossed a bridge — one of the wider ones, arching over a canal where two boats were passing each other with inches to spare and neither operator seemed concerned — and Aster stopped in the middle of it because the view was worth stopping for, the city spreading out on both sides with the light doing its particular gold trick off the water, and he stood there for a moment just looking.

"Aster."

The voice came from the other side of the bridge. Carrying, unhurried, with the particular quality of Someone who was Confident it would reach.

He turned.

Cal was leaning against the railing on the far side of the canal, exactly as Aster Remembered him — dark hair slightly disordered in the way it Always was, the Easy posture of Someone who had Decided some time ago that the World could come to him and had been proven Right often enough to keep Believing it. He had clearly been watching the City the way Aster had just been watching it, and had looked up at exactly the Right Moment.

He pushed off the railing and came across the bridge toward them, and his face did what it Always did — Open and Warm and Genuinely Glad, the Smile of Someone who Meant it without thinking about it.

"You didn't mention you were coming," Cal said.

"I didn't know," Aster said, which was entirely True.

Cal looked at him for a moment, then looked past him at the group with the particular pleasure of Someone encountering Familiar faces somewhere they hadn't expected them. Tarsus, who received the look with his usual Equanimity. Kasahn and Collette, who had been at the Academy long enough that Cal Knew exactly Who They Were. Ada, who Cal had met enough times to Know well.

"All of you didn't know," Cal said.

"It was a recent Decision," Tarsus said pleasantly.

Cal looked at Tarsus, not bothering to hide the amusement on his face. 

And then Emrys, who he hadn't met, but who he looked at for precisely one second before something in his expression settled into Recognition.

"You're Emrys," Cal said.

"And you're Cal," Emrys said. "My Brother mentioned you once or twice."

"Same," Cal said pleasantly.

Cal looked at Gale, who was on Aster's shoulder with the air of Someone conducting a survey of the City from an elevated position. Gale looked back at Cal with the particular expression he reserved for people he had already assessed and filed.

"Gale," Cal said, with the easy acknowledgment of someone greeting an acquaintance.

"Cal," said Gale, which was more than he gave most people.

"How long are you here for?" Cal asked Aster.

"We don't know yet," Aster said.

"Where are you staying?"

A pause. Aster opened his mouth.

"We haven't arranged anything," Ada said, before he could answer, with the tone of someone who had seen where this was going and had Decided to let it arrive.

Cal nodded, as though this confirmed something he had already suspected. "We have a Villa," he said. "My Family uses it when we're in the City. There's room." He said it the way he said everything — simply, without making a production of the Generosity, as though it were the obvious Solution to an obvious problem and there was no particular reason to discuss it further.

Aster looked at him.

"Cal—"

"It has a Garden," Cal said. "And the cook makes something with fish and lemon that I have been thinking about since we left Home." He looked at Gale, who was still on Aster's shoulder, with the expression of Someone encountering a Cat on a Person's shoulder in a foreign City and finding this entirely reasonable. "Your Cat is Welcome."

Aster looked at his Cousins, his Brother, and then at Ada. She had the expression of Someone trying not to Smile. Emrys had already made up his Mind. Tarsus's eyes had turned gold, which, Aster had Learned, was a Good sign.

"Thank you," Aster said. "That's — yes. Thank you."

Cal Smiled, the Easy Unhurried Smile of Someone who had never needed to work very hard at being Liked and had somehow avoided being ruined by it. "Good," he said. "Come on. I'll show you the City on the way."

They fell into step together, Cal and Aster at the front, the others behind, crossing back over the bridge into the warm gold morning of Inriva Almare.

Aster did not think about the villa, or who else might be staying in it, or what it meant to sleep under the same roof as Someone who had just arrived in the City for reasons of their own.

The Pull pointed East. The Archive was waiting. And the City was Beautiful, and Cal was Here, and for the length of a bridge on a gold Morning it was Enough to simply be Glad about both.

 

 

CHAPTER 9

 

 

The Villa was older than it looked from the outside, which was saying something because from the outside it looked very old indeed — pale stone and climbing things, set back from a narrow canal on the quieter Western side of the City where the streets were wider and the light came differently, filtered through trees that had been growing in the Garden long enough to have opinions about it.

Cal led them through a Gate in the Garden wall and Aster understood immediately why he had mentioned the Garden first. It was the kind of Garden that had stopped trying to be formal some decades ago and had arrived at something Better — overgrown in the specific way of things that had been Tended long enough to Know what they were doing, stone paths between plants that spilled over their borders with Complete Confidence, a fountain in the center that was older than the Villa and probably older than the Street.

"It's Beautiful," Ada said.

"My Mother's doing," Cal said, with the easy Pride of Someone who had Grown Up around beautiful things and Knew who to credit for them. "She spends more Time in the Garden than in the House when we're here."

As though on cue, the door at the far end of the Garden opened.

The woman who came through it was perhaps fifty, with the kind of face that had been striking when she was young and had become something more Interesting with Time. Dark hair threaded with silver, worn simply. She moved through the Garden the way Cal moved through the World — Unhurried, at Ease, as though the space had arranged itself for her Convenience and she saw no reason to rush. She was carrying Gardening gloves and had the expression of Someone who had been interrupted at something they were Enjoying and had Decided to be Gracious about it.

"Cal," she said Warmly. Then she saw the Group behind him and her expression opened further, Genuine and Unguarded. "Oh — you've brought Friends."

"They arrived this Morning," Cal said. "Aster and his Family. You Remember me mentioning Aster."

"Of course." Marian Bartum looked at Asterys with the particular Warmth of Someone who had heard enough about a Person to have formed an affection for them before the meeting. "It's Wonderful to finally meet you properly. Cal speaks of you often." She said it simply, without flattery, the way People said things they Meant.

"Thank you for having us," Aster said. "We don't want to impose—"

"You're not imposing," she said, with the Certainty of Someone who had never found Guests an imposition in her Life. "The Villa has more rooms than we use. Stay as long as you need." She looked at the Group with the easy assessment of Someone who was good at People — at Tarsus, who she looked at for a moment longer than the others, not with suspicion but with the particular attention of Someone filing something carefully — and then at Gale, who was still on Aster's shoulder.

"What a remarkable Cat," she said.

"He has his moments," Aster said.

Gale said nothing, which was unusual. He was very still on Aster's shoulder, in the way he was still when he was paying close attention to something he hadn't decided about yet.

"Nigel is inside," Marian said, already turning back toward the door. "Come in, come in. You must be hungry after traveling."

 

Nigel Bartum was the kind of Man who filled a room without appearing to try. Not tall, not loud — just Present, in the specific way of Someone who had spent a long time being the most Important Person in various rooms and had Learned to wear it lightly enough that you didn't notice until you were already paying attention to him. He had Cal's dark hair, greyer now, and Cal's Ease, and something underneath the ease that was not quite the same thing as Cal's ease, but looked enough like it, that you would have to know both of them well to see the difference.

He stood when they came in and shook hands with the Unhurried Warmth of Someone who was Genuinely Pleased to meet People, and had also never met anyone he couldn't charm if he Chose to.

"Aster," he said, when Cal introduced them, as though the Name were Familiar and Welcome. "Cal's told us a great deal about you. All of it Good." He Smiled, and the Smile reached his eyes, and it was entirely Real. "You're Fin Bollard's Grandson."

"Yes," Aster said.

"Remarkable Man," Nigel said, with what sounded like Genuine Admiration. "I've never had the pleasure of meeting him, but his reputation speaks for itself." He looked at Aster with the warm Interest of someone who found him genuinely Worth looking at. "You have something of him, I think. Around the eyes."

Aster didn't know what to say to that, so he said 'thank you', and Nigel moved on to Greet the others with the same easy Warmth, and by the time they were seated in the large cool room off the Garden, with something cold to drink in front of them, Aster had the distinct and Comfortable feeling of being in a House that Knew how to Welcome People.

Gale had relocated from his shoulder to the windowsill, where he sat with his back to the room, looking out at the Garden.

Aster looked at him once.

Gale did not look back.

 

The fish and lemon was everything Cal had Promised.

They ate in the Garden as the Afternoon light shifted, the long unhurried meal of People who had nowhere to be immediately and were Glad of it. Cal was at ease in the way he was Always at Ease, drawing People out, moving the conversation with the light touch of Someone who had Grown Up at tables like this and Knew how they worked. Lady Marian asked questions that were Genuinely curious rather than politely probing. Nigel listened more than he spoke, which Aster noticed without knowing why he Noticed it.

Emrys, who was good at People in a different way than Cal was — quieter, more watchful — said the Right things at the Right Moments and gave nothing away. Tarsus's eyes were silver through most of the meal, which Aster also Noticed.

Ada's hand found his under the table at some point and stayed there.

It was a Good Afternoon. That was the True and Simple fact of it. The City was gold outside the Garden walls, the food was Extraordinary, Cal was Laughing at something Kasahn had said, and Marian Bartum was refilling glasses with the ease of Someone who Genuinely wanted everyone to have enough.

Aster let himself be Glad about it.

He did not know, sitting there in the Garden with Ada's hand in his, and the Pull pointing quietly East, that the two people at the ends of the table had attended meetings with the Council of Darkness. He did not know that his Name had come up. He did not know that Nigel had listened then the way he listened now — carefully, without appearing to, filing things away behind Warm eyes.

He just knew that the fish was Good and the Garden was Beautiful, and that Cal was his Friend.

That was Enough, for one Afternoon.

Gale watched from the windowsill and said nothing at all.

 

 

CHAPTER 10

 

 

Aster woke to light off water.

It came through the window at an angle he wasn't used to, gold and moving, the particular quality of Inriva Almare's Mornings that he was already beginning to Understand was simply how the City started its Days — with light that had bounced off the canals and arrived at everything slightly warmer than it had any right to be.

Gale was sitting on the windowsill, facing out, exactly as he had been at Dinner. Or possibly he had moved in the Night and returned. With Gale it was sometimes difficult to tell.

"You were quiet last night," Aster said.

"I'm often quiet."

"You were specifically quiet."

Gale was still for a moment. Then he turned from the window and looked at Aster with the expression he wore when he had Decided something was Ready to be said.

"The woman," he said. "Marian."

Aster waited.

"I don't know her," Gale said. "She's not in anything I carry. Neither is the man. But there is something about the way they hold themselves in a room." He paused, Choosing the Words with the Care of something very old that had Learned not to say more than it Knew. "I have seen that particular stillness before. In people who are accustomed to Knowing things other people don't."

"Cal's Parents," Aster said.

"Cal's Parents," Gale agreed. "I'm not saying what it means. I'm saying I noticed it." He turned back to the window. "The Archive is East. We should go Today."

Aster lay there for a moment looking at the ceiling, at the light moving across it, at the particular gold quality of a Morning in a City that was Beautiful and Old and had no idea what they were here for.

"Yes," he said. "We should."

They found Cal in the Garden with coffee and the expression of Someone who had been awake for some time and was entirely Content about it. The Morning was cool and the fountain was doing something Pleasant with the light and he looked up when they came out with the easy pleasure of Someone whose Day had just Improved.

"I thought I'd show you the City Today," he said. "If you want. There's a Market on the Western side that's Worth seeing, and the Old Quarter near the water has—"

"East," Aster said. "We were thinking East. The older part, nearest the water."

Cal looked at him for a moment with the mild curiosity of Someone who had noticed a specific direction being named but wasn't going to make a thing of it. "The Archive is that way," he said. "Among other things."

"I Know," Aster said.

A pause. Cal looked at him, then at Tarsus, who was standing slightly behind Aster with his eyes silver and his expression neutral, and then back at Aster.

"Right," Cal said, setting down his coffee with the easy movement of Someone who had Decided to be Interested rather than cautious. "East then."

Marian was in the Garden when they left, doing something Considered with a climbing plant near the wall. She looked up when they came through and Smiled with the Warmth that Aster was already beginning to Understand was simply how She Was — Genuine, Unhurried, the Smile of Someone who was Glad to see People and didn't need a reason.

"Exploring?" she asked.

"The Eastern Quarter," Cal said. "The Archive, I think."

Something moved across Marian's expression, very briefly, the way a cloud moved across water — there and gone before you could name it. Then the Warmth was back, Easy and Complete.

"It's a remarkable collection," she said. "Tarsus — you've been before, I Imagine?"

Tarsus looked at her. "Once or twice," he said pleasantly.

"Wonderful." She turned back to her climbing plant. "Enjoy the City. We'll have dinner when you're back."

They went through the Gate and into the Street and Aster did not look back. Gale, in his pocket, was very still.

 

Cal was a good Guide in the way that People were good Guides when they had spent enough Time somewhere to have stopped being Tourists and started simply Living in it. He Knew which bridges were Worth crossing for the View and which were purely Functional. He Knew where the Street widened unexpectedly into a small Square with a well and three Cats, and a very Old Man who sold something from a cart that Cal described as the Best thing he had eaten in the City so far. He moved through it all with the Ease of Someone who had made the City His within days of arriving, the way he made everything His, without effort and without thinking about it.

Aster walked beside him and let the City happen around him, and felt the Pull sharpening with every block they moved East.

"You Feel it," Emrys said quietly, falling into step beside him.

"Yes."

"Getting stronger?"

"Yes."

Emrys nodded once, the way he nodded when he was filing something. He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.

Cal, slightly ahead, was pointing out something about the architecture of a building that had been partially submerged for so long that the waterline had become decorative, the stone below it dark and smooth and beautiful in its own way. Kasahn was asking him something. Collette was looking up at the bridges.

Ada fell back to walk beside Aster and took his hand without comment, the way she did things she Meant Completely.

The Pull was East. They were going East. The City was gold around them and the water was everywhere and somewhere ahead of them the Archive was waiting with whatever it had been Waiting with since Gale had last been here, however many centuries ago that was.

The Archive announced itself the way Old things announced themselves — not with drama but with weight. It was a Building that had been standing long enough to have stopped caring whether you were impressed by it, set into the older part of the Eastern Quarter where the stones were darker, and the canal beside it was narrow and very still. The door was wood and iron and older than anything Aster had touched before.

Cal pulled it open and they went in.

 

Inside, the Archive was larger than the outside had suggested, which Aster was beginning to understand was simply a quality of very old Buildings in very old Cities — they held more than they appeared to. The ceiling was high and vaulted and the light came from somewhere that wasn't immediately obvious, warm and diffuse, the kind of light that was kind to old things. The shelves went further back than he could see clearly, and the smell was the particular smell of documents that had been kept carefully for a very long time — not dust exactly, something drier and more specific than dust.

There was no one else inside.

Gale climbed out of Aster's pocket and onto his shoulder and looked around the Archive with the expression of Someone returning to a Place they had Known well and Finding it Changed in ways that were both expected and not.

"There," he said.

Aster followed his gaze. Further back, past the first rows of shelves, past a reading table that had been used by enough People over enough centuries that the wood had taken on a particular quality of accumulated attention — further back, where the light was slightly different, slightly warmer.

The Pull was there. Specific now. Certain.

"What is it?" Ada said, beside him.

"I don't know yet," Aster said.

He went to find out.

 

CHAPTER 11

 

 

The Archive was the kind of place that asked you to be Quiet without saying so. Not silent — there was the sound of the canal outside, muffled through old stone, and the particular settling sounds of a Building that had been breathing for centuries — but quiet in the way that Places with long Memories were quiet. Like the air had absorbed enough Words over enough years that it had Learned to hold them carefully.

They moved through it in the particular way of People who were looking for something without being able to say exactly what. Tarsus went directly to the older section at the back, where the texts were kept in cases and the shelves were lower and the light was different, with the Purposeful ease of Someone who Knew what he was looking for and where it was likely to be. Kasahn and Collette went with him. Emrys moved slowly along the nearest shelves with the expression of Someone who found old things Interesting on their own terms and needed no other reason.

Cal drifted, the way he drifted through everything — Unhurried, Curious, picking things up and setting them down with easy Confidence. He'd been here enough times for it to feel Comfortable, and it showed. He didn't ask what they were looking for. Aster noticed this and filed it away — Cal was good at not asking questions until the Moment was Right, which was either a Social Grace or something more Considered, and he hadn't Decided which yet.

Ada stayed close to Aster.

The Pull had narrowed to something almost precise now, a direction within a direction, pointing further back and slightly left, toward a section of shelves that held smaller volumes, older ones, the kind that had been rebound enough times that the covers no longer matched what was inside.

Aster walked toward it.

He heard it before he saw it. Not sound exactly — more the particular quality of attention that Artifacts had, the sense of something that was more than it appeared being aware of being approached. He had Felt it with Gale, at Starfall Sanctuary, and had Followed it to Aethon Academy. He Felt it now, quieter, more Patient, like something that had been Waiting long enough that it had stopped being urgent about it.

It was on the Third shelf from the bottom, between two larger volumes that had nothing to do with it. Small, bound in something that had once been dark and had faded to the particular color of old things that had been handled carefully for a very long time. It looked like nothing. It Felt like Everything.

He reached for it.

The moment his hand closed around it he Felt two things simultaneously. The first was the particular quality of an Artifact — Old and Significant and Aware in the way that the Best ones were aware, the same quality he had Felt with Gale, the same quality he Felt every day from the Book in his pocket. The second was stranger and more specific: the Sense of Recognition, not in himself but between the two things. The Book in his hand and the Book in his pocket Knew each other. He could Feel it the way you Felt a conversation happening in the next room — not the words, just the fact of it. Two things that had been separated for a very long time, suddenly Aware that the distance had closed.

'Siblings,' he thought, without knowing why. 'Living in separate Homes.'

He looked at Ada.

She was watching him with the expression she wore when she was paying close attention and not showing it.

The Sister Book (because that was the impression it gave) was already looking past him. Not rejection — nothing so definite as that. More the way Someone looks over your shoulder for the Person they actually came to see. Politely, but clearly.

He held it out. "Can you put this in your bag?"

Ada looked at it. Then at him. "Why?"

"My pockets are full," he said, which was True — Gale was in the left one and the Book was in the right, with various other things that had accumulated over the course of the Morning. "Just for now."

Ada took it and put it in her bag without further comment. The bag closed over it.

Aster turned back to the shelves.

Cal, three rows over, was looking at him with the mild expression of Someone who had seen something happen and was Deciding whether it was Worth asking about. Then he looked back at the shelf in front of him and picked up something else entirely, and the moment passed.

 

Tarsus found what he was looking for twenty minutes later — a text in the older section, handwritten, the kind of document that had been copied from something older still and had lost some of itself in the copying, but had retained enough. He read it standing up, quickly, with the Focused attention of Someone extracting what they Needed and leaving the rest.

"The Lance of Latimus," he said quietly, to Aster, when he came to stand beside him. He closed the text carefully and returned it to its place. "It's in the City. The older section, nearest the water. The submerged part." He paused, Choosing what to say next with the Care he gave to things that Mattered. "It's called the Spear of Chaos. It Changes things — not Fate, not People, but Circumstances. Outcomes. The shape of what's Possible. The problem is it can't be directed. You can't Choose what it changes or how. It simply does what it does and you Live with the result."

"Then why find it?" Aster said.

"Because if we don't, someone else will," Tarsus said, with the simple practicality of Someone who had Thought this through already. "And someone else might use it." He looked at Aster steadily. "We find it. We secure it. We don't use it. That's the only responsible thing to do with something like this."

Aster looked at him. "You've Known about it for a while."

"I've suspected," Tarsus said. "The Archive confirmed it." His eyes were silver and very Focused. "I have a rough Idea of where. Not Today — I need to Think about it some more. But soon."

Aster nodded. He looked around the Archive — at Emrys, still moving slowly along the shelves with his hands behind his back, at Kasahn and Collette near the window, at Cal replacing something carefully on a high shelf with the Ease of Someone who Respected Old Things.

"Cal," he said.

Cal looked over.

"We're done, I think."

"Right," Cal said, and came away from the shelves without hesitation, the easy compliance of Someone who had no agenda of his own and was simply Glad to be Included in whatever this was.

They went back out into the City, into the golden Afternoon, and the Archive door closed behind them with the quiet solidity of something that had been doing this for a very long time and would go on doing it long after they were gone.

Ada's bag was over her shoulder. Inside it, the Sister Book waited with the Patience of something that had already Waited centuries and could manage a few more hours.

 

That evening, after Dinner, after the Villa had settled into the particular quiet of a House where everyone had gone to their own rooms, and the canal outside was still, and the City had dimmed to something softer —

Ada sat on the edge of the bed and opened her bag for no particular reason, the way you opened things when your hands had somewhere to be, and your Mind hadn't caught up yet.

She took out the Sister Book.

She looked at it for a moment. Small, old, the cover worn to something between brown and grey. Nothing about it that should have made her open it.

She opened it.

The pages were not blank. They were not filled with text either, not exactly — what was there moved at the edge of legibility, the way things moved in the moment before you understood them, and then it steadied, and she could Read it, and what it showed her was something that had already happened.

Not a Memory. Not a Record. A Moment, rendered in something that was not quite words and not quite image, with the particular quality of something that was offering rather than telling. This Happened, it said, in whatever language it spoke in. And here is what it Means. And here is what might still be Possible.

Ada sat with it for a long time.

When Aster came to find her, later, she was still sitting in the same place, the Book open in her hands, her expression the particular one she wore when she had Understood something Significant and was Deciding how to carry it.

She looked up at him.

"It's Mine," she said. Simply, without drama, the way she said things she was Certain of.

"I Know," Aster said. He sat beside her. "Figured as much. What does it show you?"

Ada looked back down at the pages. "The Past," she said. "What happened. What was missed." A pause. "What might still be Changed."

Aster looked at the Book in her hands — the Companion to His Own, the other half of a Conversation that had apparently been Waiting for both of them to Arrive. Past and Future. One facing back, one facing forward.

"What's it like?" he asked. "Reading it."

Ada considered this seriously, the way she considered everything seriously. "It's like... being shown something you already Knew but hadn't found the words for yet."

Gale, from the windowsill, opened both eyes and looked at the Book in Ada's hands for a long moment.

Then he closed them again.

Neither of them said anything else. The City was quiet outside and the canal was still, and the two Books were in the same room for the first time in longer than either of them could calculate. It Felt, oddly, Right — like it had Always been Meant to Be.

 

 

CHAPTER 12

 

 

The Villa was quiet by the time Marian set down her book.

Nigel was at the window, which was where he went when he was thinking — not pacing, just standing, looking at the City the way he looked at most things, with the Patient attention of Someone who had Learned that things Revealed themselves if you Waited long enough. The canal below was still and dark and the lights of the City reflected in it, broken into pieces by the water.

"I like the Boy," Marian said.

Nigel didn't turn from the window. "I Know."

"I can see why Cal is so fond of him." She smoothed the cover of her book without looking at it. "He's — there's something very Genuine about him. You don't see that often. Not in People who come from what he comes from."

"No," Nigel said. "You don't."

A silence. The canal moved slightly outside, some current from further in the City, and the reflections shifted.

"We both know what needs to be done," Nigel said. Not a question.

Marian was quiet for a moment. "Cal will be crushed," she said.

Nigel looked out at the City for a long time. The lights on the water. The old stones. The bridges connecting things that had no business being as close together as they were.

"Yes," he said.

"He doesn't have many Friends. Not like this. Not—" She stopped. Started again. "Cal is sociable. He'll find another Friend in Time."

Nigel turned from the window then and looked at his Wife, at the way she was looking at the bedspread without seeing it, and his expression was the expression of Someone who had made a Decision and was carrying the weight of it with the particular Steadiness of someone who had carried difficult things before.

"We have no Choice," he said. "Not if we want to Survive. Not if we want to remain in good standing with the other Families." He paused. "You Know what happens to People who Know what we Know and do nothing with it."

"I Know," she said.

"The Council doesn't ask twice."

"I Know, Nigel."

He crossed the room and sat beside her, and for a Moment they were simply two People sitting Together in a quiet room, in a Beautiful City, which was the Truest and most terrible thing about them.

"I Wish there was another way," she said. "Aster is a nice Boy."

"I Know," he said.

They left it at that.

She picked up her book again. He went back to the window. The canal was still and the City was quiet and down the hall, in a room with light under the door, two Books were in the same room for the first time in centuries, and neither of them knew it.

 

Breakfast was the kind that happened naturally in Houses that Knew how to feed People — things appearing on the table without fuss, the Cook moving in and out of the Garden door with the ease of Someone who had done this many times, the Morning light coming through the climbing things on the wall and landing on the table in pieces.

Cal was already there when they came down, which Aster was beginning to Understand was simply how Cal was — always slightly ahead of the Morning, Always already Comfortable in whatever space he was in. He had saved seats without making a production of it, the way he did things he Meant.

Marian poured coffee with the Warmth of Someone who was Genuinely Glad to have a full table. Nigel asked Emrys something about StarTide with the easy Curiosity of Someone who found People Interesting, and Emrys answered with the particular careful charm he deployed when he was being assessed and Knew it, and was Choosing what to show.

It was a good Breakfast. That was the simple fact of it.

Gale sat on the windowsill.

He had been on the windowsill since they came down, which was not unusual. What was unusual was the quality of his attention. He was watching Marian and Nigel with both eyes fully open, the steady unblinking Focus he reserved for things he was examining seriously, and he had not looked away since they sat down.

Marian noticed first. She glanced at him once, the way you glanced at something that was looking at you, and then looked back at the table and said something pleasant to Ada about the City. But her hand, reaching for her coffee, moved slightly differently than it had a moment before.

Nigel noticed second. He looked at Gale directly, for just a moment, with the expression of someone encountering something they couldn't immediately categorize. Gale looked back at him with the expression of something that had been categorizing things for a very long time and was nearly finished.

Nigel looked away first.

Neither of them said anything about it. The conversation continued. The coffee was Good and the Morning was warm and Cal was Laughing at something Kasahn had said, and by the time they pushed back their chairs and gathered themselves to leave it was simply a Breakfast that had happened, pleasant and unremarkable.

 

Marian walked them to the Garden Gate.

"Enjoy the City," she said, with the Warmth that was entirely Real. She looked at Aster specifically, for just a moment, with something in her expression that was not quite an apology and not quite anything else. "Come back for Dinner."

"We will," Aster said.

She smiled. The Gate closed.

 

The Villa was very quiet.

Nigel stood in the front room and listened to the sound of the Group moving away down the Street, the Voices fading, Cal's Laugh carrying furthest and longest before it too was gone.

Then he went to the writing desk in the corner and sat down.

The letter was short. It didn't need to be long — the Council didn't require explanation, only information, and the information was simple. Asterys Bollard was in Inriva Almare. He was staying at the Bartum Villa. He had visited the Eastern Archive. He was Traveling with Tarsus, whose Parentage the Council already Knew and whose Presence here was its own Significant fact.

He signed it. Sealed it. Set it aside for the Courier who came at Midday.

Marian was in the Garden when he came out. She was doing something with the climbing plant near the wall, the same one she had been Tending yesterday Morning when the Group had left for the Archive. She didn't look up when he came through the door.

"Done?" she said.

"Done," he said.

She nodded once, her hands still moving among the leaves, and didn't say anything else.

The fountain ran in the centre of the Garden. The City went about its Morning outside the walls. And down in the older part of the City, nearest the Water, Aster and his Friends were already moving through Streets that Tarsus Knew, toward something that had been Waiting in the dark below the waterline for longer than any of them had been Alive.

 

The Submerged Quarter announced itself gradually — the Streets narrowing, the stones darkening, the canal beside them widening and slowing until it was less a canal and more a presence, the water very still and very dark and very Old. The Buildings here rose straight from it, their lower floors long since given over to the water, their upper floors still inhabited by People who had made their Peace with Living above something that had swallowed the ground floor centuries ago.

Tarsus moved through it with the particular Confidence of Someone Following something internal rather than external — not a Map exactly, more a sense of direction that had been sharpening since the Archive. His eyes were silver and Focused and he didn't hesitate at turnings.

"How do you Know where you're going?" Collette asked.

"The same way Aster Knew where to go in the Archive," Tarsus said, without turning. "You Learn to listen to things that are more than they appear."

They crossed a bridge so old that the stone had worn smooth underfoot, over water so still it looked solid, and came out into a small Square that was half submerged itself — the far end of it simply ending in water, the old stones continuing down into the dark below the surface, visible for a few feet and then gone.

Tarsus stopped.

He looked at the water for a long moment. Then he crouched at the edge of the Square where the stones met the canal and looked down into it with the focused Attention of Someone who could see further into dark water than most People could.

"There," he said.

"In the water?" Kasahn said.

"Below it," Tarsus said. "There's a room. The Building it was in is mostly gone but the room is still there, below the waterline. The Lance is in it." He stood. "I'll go down."

"Tarsus—" Aster started.

"I'm half Dragon," Tarsus said, with the mild Patience of Someone reminding People of a relevant fact. "I can hold my breath for considerably longer than you can. And I Know what I'm looking for." He looked at Aster steadily. "Stay here. I'll be back."

He went into the water without ceremony, without drama, the way he did most things — Simply and Completely, and then he was gone, and the water closed over him and was still again.

They waited.

Cal stood beside Aster and looked at the place where Tarsus had gone under and said nothing, which Aster was coming to Understand was one of Cal's Better qualities — he Knew when Silence was the Right thing and he didn't fill it unnecessarily.

 

The water was still for a long time.

 

Then it moved, and Tarsus came up.

He was holding something. Long, wrapped in something that had once been cloth and had become something else over the centuries it had spent underwater, but still Intact, still Whole. He came up onto the stones and stood and held it for a moment, water running off him, his eyes very silver.

"The Lance of Latimus," he said. "The Spear of Chaos."

Nobody reached for it. Nobody suggested using it. They all Understood, without discussing it, what Tarsus had said in the Archive — you Found it, you Secured it, you did not use it. That was the only Responsible thing.

"What do we do with it?" Emrys asked.

Tarsus looked at it for a moment longer. Then he looked at Aster.

"We take it somewhere it can't do harm," he said. "And we make sure no one else finds it first."

The water was still around them. The old City rose, dark stone and pale stone and the particular quality of a Place that had been standing long enough to have seen everything and stopped being surprised by any of it.

"Right," Aster said. "Let's go."

 

 

CHAPTER 13

 

 

They stood at the edge of the Older Quarter, where the Street narrowed to almost nothing and the canal beside them was very still, and Tarsus held the wrapped Lance and looked at each of them in turn with the expression he wore when he had Decided something and was explaining it once, clearly, without room for argument.

"I'm going into the Veil," he said. "Alone."

"Tarsus—" Aster started.

"Alone," Tarsus said again, not unkindly. "What I'm about to do — where I'm about to put this — I need you not to know the specifics. Any of you." He looked at Aster steadily. "If someone asks you where the Lance of Latimus is, I need you to be able to say Truthfully that you don't know. That's not a small thing. That's Protection." A pause. "Plausible deniability is Worth more than you might think, when the People asking questions are the kind who don't stop at asking."

A silence. The canal moved slightly beside them.

"How long?" Ada asked.

"A few hours," Tarsus said. "Go into the City. I'll find you when I'm done." He looked at Cal, who had been listening with the particular quality of Someone absorbing information and Choosing not to react to it yet. "Show them something Worth Seeing."

Cal looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded, once, with the Ease of Someone who had Decided to Trust a situation he didn't fully understand. "I Know a few places," he said.

Tarsus stepped into the narrow alley beside the canal and was gone, the way he was Always gone — Completely, without ceremony, as though the space had simply Decided to stop containing him.

They stood there for a moment in his absence.

"Right," Cal said. "Come on."

He took them West first, away from the Older Quarter, back into the part of the City where the Streets were wider and the Morning was fully established, and the light was doing its particular gold trick off everything it touched. He moved through it the way he Always moved — Unhurried, Certain, as though the City had been Waiting for him to arrive and was Glad he had.

"Where are we going?" Kasahn asked.

"The Glassmakers' District first," Cal said. "You'll want to see it before the Afternoon light. It's different then. Better in the Morning."

 

The Glassmakers' District was in the middle part of the City, on an Island connected to the rest of Inriva Almare by three bridges, each one older than the last. The smell changed as they crossed the final bridge — something warm and mineral underneath the salt air, the particular smell of things being made at very high temperatures, Ancient and specific.

The Workshops lined both sides of the narrow streets, their doors open to the Morning, and through them Aster could see the fires — not large, not dramatic, the particular orange-white of heat that had been carefully Maintained and Carefully directed. The glassmakers moved around them with the ease of People who had Grown Up next to fire and had stopped thinking of it as dangerous, and started thinking of it as a Tool, the way you Thought of any Tool you had used long enough.

But it was the glass itself that stopped him.

It was in the windows of the Workshops, on shelves visible from the Street, in the hands of the People carrying it carefully from one place to another — and it was not simply glass. It had a quality that Aster didn't have an immediate word for, something between translucence and luminescence, as though the light passing through it was not the same light that had entered it. Warmer. More specific. The color of late Afternoon even in the middle of the Morning.

"How do they do that?" Collette said, beside him, looking at a piece in the nearest window — a bowl, simple in shape, that was doing something with the light that bowls had no business doing.

"They don't entirely know," Cal said. "The Families have been Making it for Generations. The Technique passes from Parent to Child and some of it has been lost along the way and some of it has been added and at this point nobody is entirely sure which parts are original." He looked at the bowl with the expression of Someone who had stood here before and found it Worth standing in front of again. "They call it lumenware. There's a theory that the first glassmakers in this district were touched by something — an Old God, a Relic, something in the water. Nobody agrees on what. The glass just does what it does."

Gale, from Aster's shoulder, was looking at the bowl with both eyes open.

"The water," he said, quietly, to no one in particular.

"Gale," Aster said.

"It's in the water they use," Gale said. "Has been for centuries. Something Old, settled into the canal bed. The glassmakers don't know because it happened long before any of them were Born." He paused. "It's not dangerous. Just — Present. The way Old things are Present in Places they've been long enough."

Aster looked at the bowl again. Light moving through it like something Alive.

"Does it do anything?" Ada asked. "The lumenware. Beyond looking like that."

"It shows things Truly," Gale said. "Not always. Not on command. But sometimes, in the right light, at the right angle, you see what something actually is rather than what it appears to be." He settled his weight on Aster's shoulder. "The Families who can afford it keep a piece in every room. They say it makes dishonesty uncomfortable."

Cal looked at Gale with the expression he was developing specifically for moments when Gale said something that recontextualised everything. Then he looked at the bowl in the window.

"I've been in rooms with lumenware my whole Life," he said, after a moment.

"I know," Gale said pleasantly.

They moved on.

 

The Wall of Letters was in a Courtyard off the main canal, accessible through an archway so old that the stone above it had worn smooth, and the carvings that had once decorated it were suggestions rather than images — you could see that there had been Something there, Faces or Figures or Words, but the centuries had taken the specifics and left only the impression of Meaning.

Through the archway the Courtyard opened up, larger than expected, the kind of space that Cities sometimes hid behind unremarkable entrances as though they were keeping something for themselves. The walls on three sides were old stone, and they were covered — entirely, Completely, from the ground to as high as a Person could reach and then higher still where People had found ways to reach further — in Letters.

Not carved. Written. On paper, on cloth, on things that had once been other things and had been repurposed for this. Pinned, tucked into cracks in the stone, layered over each other in places where the wall had run out of room, so that the Oldest ones were buried under decades of Newer ones and existed now only as texture, as the particular thickness of accumulated words.

In the center of the Courtyard, on a plinth that was older than the wall and possibly older than the City, was a figure — not a statue exactly, more a presence rendered in stone, a Woman with her face turned slightly upward and her hands open at her sides, the posture of someone listening. The stone had been worn smooth by hands over centuries, the places people touched most — the hands, the hem of the robe, the base of the plinth — polished to a different quality than the rest.

"Serevane," Ada said, quietly.

"Yes," Cal said. "People have been writing to her here for as long as the City has been standing. Longer, maybe — the plinth predates the Buildings around it." He looked at the walls of Letters with the expression of Someone who had been here before and still found it Worth looking at. "They say she reads them. Nobody knows if that's True. But the Letters keep coming."

Aster stood in the Courtyard and looked at the walls and felt something he didn't immediately have a name for — the accumulated weight of everything written here, all the things People had needed to say to Someone who might Understand, all the Love and the fear and the Hope and the grief that had been pressed into the cracks of this old stone over centuries of People needing somewhere to put it.

He walked closer.

He hadn't meant to read one. He was looking at the texture of them, the layers, the way the oldest ones had become part of the wall itself — and then his eyes found words on a piece of paper that was newer than the ones around it, pinned carefully at eye level, the ink still dark.

 

I love someone who is going to be asked to carry more than is fair. I don't know how to help them carry it. I don't know if I'm allowed to try. Please — if you see them — tell them they don't have to be smaller to keep me safe. I already know the risk. I chose it anyway.

 

Aster stood very still.

He was aware, distantly, of Ada somewhere to his left, of Emrys behind him, of Cal giving People space in the way he gave people space when he Understood that space was needed. He was aware of Gale on his shoulder, very still, not looking at the Letter and not looking away from it.

He didn't know who had written it. He would never know. It had nothing to do with him.

It had everything to do with him.

He stepped back from the wall. Ada was there, beside him, without having made a sound crossing the Courtyard. She didn't say anything. She took his hand and held it and looked at the figure of Serevane on her plinth, face turned upward, hands open, listening.

After a while, Collette produced a piece of paper from somewhere and borrowed a pen from Cal and wrote something small and folded it and tucked it into a crack in the wall near the base, where the stone was warmest from the morning sun.

Nobody asked what she wrote.

They left the Courtyard through the old archway and back into the City, and Aster carried the Letter he hadn't meant to read with him the way you carried things that had found you rather than the other way around.

 

The Sunken Garden was in the oldest part of the Eastern Quarter, down a set of steps that descended from street level to somewhere that was neither quite inside nor quite outside — a Courtyard that the City had Built around and then above, so that it existed now in a kind of permanent shelter, open to the Sky through a gap in the Buildings overhead but Protected on all sides from the wind off the canal.

It flooded at high Tide. You could see the waterline on the walls — not one line but many, the record of centuries of Tides, each one slightly different, the stone stained in layers of color that were their own kind of History. At low Tide, which it was now, the Garden was fully accessible, the water retreated to a channel along one edge, and what it left behind was Extraordinary.

Things Grew here that Grew nowhere else in the City. Plants that had adapted over centuries to a Life that was half submerged and half not — low and spreading, with leaves that were thicker than they needed to be and a particular dark green that was almost blue, and flowers, small and very pale, that Bloomed only in the hours between Tides when the Garden was dry and the light came through the gap overhead at the right angle.

"They only bloom for a few hours," Cal said. "If the Tide timing is wrong you come down here and there's nothing. Just the green." He looked at the flowers with the expression of someone who had timed this correctly and was quietly pleased about it. "I checked this morning."

Emrys crouched beside the nearest plant and looked at the flowers with the focused attention he gave to things he found genuinely interesting. "How do they survive the flooding?"

"They close," Cal said. "Completely. You can't tell they're there when the water comes in. They just — wait. And when it goes out again they open." He paused. "The gardeners here say they've been doing it for as long as anyone has kept records. Nobody planted them. They just arrived, at some point, and stayed."

Aster sat on the steps that led down into the garden and looked at the flowers and thought about things that closed completely when the water came and opened again when it went out and had been doing it for centuries without anyone planting them or asking them to.

Gale climbed down from his shoulder and walked into the Garden with the careful deliberate steps of a Cat who had Decided that a Place was Worth investigating properly. He moved between the Plants with his tail up and his eyes very open, and at one point he stopped completely and sat down in the middle of the Garden and looked up through the gap in the Buildings at the Sky overhead.

He stayed like that for a long time.

Nobody disturbed him.

 

The Map Room was in a Building near the center of the City that had been many things over the centuries and was now a kind of public archive — not the Eastern Archive, which was older and more specific, but a civic collection, the kind of Place a City kept the things it wanted to Remember about itself.

The Map Room was on the second floor, and it was exactly what it said it was — a room with Maps. But not current Maps, not Navigational Charts or practical documents. These were Historical, the oldest ones behind glass, the newer ones — which was to say the ones from only two or three centuries ago — hung openly on the walls.

They showed Åsten as it had been Understood at various points in its History, even before it was called Åsten, and had been Known instead, as Astentier. The differences between them were the most Interesting thing about them.

Coastlines that had since changed. Cities marked that no longer existed, their Names in scripts that were still legible if you Knew what you were looking at. Trade Routes drawn in faded ink across Oceans that the most recent Maps showed differently — not wrong exactly, just earlier, the World in the process of Becoming what it was now rather than already arrived.

And Places marked that were not on any current Map. Not because they had been lost to the Sea or abandoned — but because they had been removed. Deliberately. The kind of careful erasure that left a ghost, a slightly different texture in the parchment, a gap in the logic of the geography around it.

Gale stood on the reading table in front of the oldest Map — the attendant had looked at him, and then at Aster, and then had Decided that some things were not worth the argument — and looked at it with the expression of someone reading a document they had complicated feelings about.

"Gale," Aster said. "What are the missing Places?"

"Some of them I Know," Gale said. "Some of them I Knew once and have lost. Some of them I never knew, and someone removed them before I had the chance." He was quiet for a moment, looking at a gap in the Northern Coastline where the geography made no sense without something to fill it. "This one was a City. I was there once. It was very Beautiful." Another pause. "It isn't there anymore. Not because it was destroyed. Because someone Decided it shouldn't be findable."

"Who?" Collette asked.

"The Order of the Old Gods," Gale said, simply. "They have been editing the World's Memory for longer than most People realise. Maps are easier than stone. Stone you have to destroy. Maps you simply redrawn."

The room was very quiet.

Cal was looking at the Map with an expression Aster hadn't seen on him before — not the easy Warmth or the Unhurried Amusement, but something more careful, more Considered. The expression of Someone who had just Understood something about the World they Lived in that they hadn't understood before, and was Deciding what to do with it.

"How much has been removed?" Emrys said.

Gale looked at the Map for a long time.

"Enough," he said, "that the World you Know is smaller than the World that Exists."

 

Tarsus found them on the bridge where Cal had first called Aster's name, which felt like the Right Place for it — the City spread out on both sides, the light doing its gold trick off the water, the Morning fully given over to Afternoon.

He was dry. He was empty-handed. His eyes were silver and very Calm.

"Done?" Aster said.

"Done," Tarsus said.

"Where—"

"You don't know," Tarsus said, not unkindly. "That's the point."

Aster looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded.

Tarsus looked at the Group — at the particular quality of People who had spent a Morning in a City that had given them things to Think about — and something in his expression shifted, very slightly, towards gold.

"Good Day?" he asked.

"Yes," Ada said. "A Very Good Day."

"Good," Tarsus said. He looked out at the City, at the light on the water, at the bridges connecting things that had no business being as close together as they were. "We should go back. Cal's Cook will have started on Dinner."

They went back across the bridge, into the warm gold Afternoon of Inriva Almare, and the City went on around them the way Cities did — indifferent and Beautiful and full of things that had been there long before they arrived and would be there long after they left.

The Lance was somewhere in the Veil, in a Place with no address, Known only to a half Dragon who had been Mapping the unmappable for twenty years.

The Letter to Serevane was still on the wall in the Courtyard, pinned carefully at eye level, the ink still dark.

The flowers in the Sunken Garden had closed with the incoming Tide, Patient and Complete, waiting for the water to go out again.

And in the Map Room, the oldest Map showed a World that was larger than the one anyone was Living in, with gaps where things had been removed by people who understood that the most effective way to make something disappear was to make it unfindable.

Gale rode on Aster's shoulder and said nothing, which was its own kind of Answer.

 

 

CHAPTER 14

 

 

This was a monumental occasion. The Archon, the Head of the Temples, the Eternal Voice of the Old Gods, was out on the Balcony of his Palace, about to give a speach to the People below. The Square was full of Believers, Pilgrims, Worshipers, Ordinary Folk, and Nobles. People had traveled for miles to get there. Some traversing great distances, and some simply, stepping out their front door. The Square, at this time, was overflowing onto the streets beyond it. People clamering to hear and see the Archon.

The City had changed overnight.

Not in any way you could point to specifically — the Streets were the same streets, the Canals the same canals, the light doing its same gold trick off the water. But the density of it was different. People everywhere, more than the day before, moving with the particular Purposeful quality of People who had somewhere to be and intended to be there. Pilgrims in traveling clothes still dusty from the road. Families with Children on shoulders. Nobles in things that cost more than most People earned in a year, moving through the crowd with the ease of People who had never had to navigate a space that wasn't arranged for their Convenience and had no intention of starting now.

"The Archon," Cal said, when they came out of the Villa Gate into a street that was already Three times busier than it had been the Morning before. He said it the way you said the name of weather — not surprised, just noting it. "He appears Today. I forgot it was Today."

"The Archon," Emrys said. Not a question. Just the word, placed carefully, the way Emrys placed things he was filing.

"The Head of the Temples," Cal said. "The Eternal Voice. He has a Palace on the Eastern Side of the City — he uses it when he's in Inriva Almare. The Square in front of it holds ten thousand People when it's full." He looked at the Street around them, at the press of bodies already moving in one direction. "It will be full Today."

"We should avoid the Square," Tarsus said.

"Yes," Cal agreed. "This way."

They went North, away from the main flow of the crowd, through streets that were quieter by comparison — which was to say busy rather than impassable, the overflow of a City that had run out of room in its center and was redistributing itself through every available channel. Cal moved through it with his usual ease, finding gaps, taking turnings that opened into slightly less crowded streets, Navigating by some internal sense of the City's geography that he had developed in the days since they'd arrived.

Aster followed, one hand occasionally on Ada's arm, keeping the Group Together by proximity and attention.

The Archon's voice reached them before they expected it.

Not loud — the distance was too great for loud — but carrying, the particular quality of a Voice that had been trained to reach the back of very large spaces and had been doing so for decades. It came over the rooftops and between the Buildings and arrived in the Street where they were walking as something between sound and presence, the Words not always fully legible but the weight of them entirely clear.

"— Children of the Old Gods, inheritors of the Balance—"

The crowd around them slowed slightly, instinctively, the way crowds slowed when something they had come to hear became audible. Heads turned. Someone nearby closed their eyes.

"— the darkness is not your enemy. The darkness is part of the Balance, as light is part of the Balance, as all things are—"

"Keep moving," Tarsus said quietly.

They kept moving.

The Street narrowed ahead where two crowds had met coming from different directions and were negotiating passage with the particular friction of large numbers of People who all Believed they had Somewhere more Important to be. Cal found a gap and went through it and Aster followed, and then Ada, and then—

Someone hit Aster's shoulder. Hard, from the left, the impact of a body moving with more force than the crowd around it warranted, and he stumbled half a step to the right. When he looked up, Cal was gone.

Not gone — ahead, still moving, not yet aware. Three steps, four, the crowd filling the space between them quickly, bodies pressing in from both sides. Aster opened his mouth to call out, and someone pushed from behind and he moved another two steps in the wrong direction. Now there were six People between him and Cal and the gap was closing.

"Cal—"

The crowd swallowed it. Too much noise, too many voices, the Archon's carrying tones still coming over the rooftops—

"— be not afraid of the darkness—"

Another shoulder. This one from the right, deliberate in a way he couldn't have explained but felt immediately, the specific quality of impact that was directional rather than accidental. He turned to look and there was just the crowd, faces he didn't know, People moving with the focused Purpose of People who had Somewhere to be.

He tried to move left, back toward where Cal had been. The crowd pushed right. He tried to stop, to hold his position, to give the others a fixed point to find — and the press of bodies made stopping impossible, the current of it too strong, and he was moving again without having chosen to move, further from the direction he wanted, further from the voice he was trying to reach.

'Ada,' he thought. 'Emrys. Tarsus—'

He couldn't see any of them.

The crowd was a sea and he was in the middle of it and every time he tried to move toward something Familiar, something moved him away from it, shoulder and hip and the anonymous pressure of bodies that had no faces he could hold onto, and the Archon's voice came over the rooftops with the Patience of something that had been saying the same things for a very long time—

"— the Old Gods watch over the Faithful—"

A gap opened to his right. Not large — just enough, a narrow space between two groups of Pilgrims that led into a side street, darker than the Main Road, quieter. His feet found it before his Mind had fully decided, the Instinct of someone who Needed to be out of the press of bodies and here was out, here was space, here was a breath—

He turned into the alley.

It was narrow and old, the Buildings on either side close enough that the Sky above was a strip rather than an expanse, the stone dark with the particular darkness of places that didn't get much direct light. It ran straight ahead for twenty feet and then turned.

It was quiet. After the crowd, the quiet was almost physical.

He stopped. Caught his breath. Turned to look back at the street he'd come from, at the flow of People passing the alley entrance without looking in, and tried to locate himself, tried to think about which direction the Villa was, which direction Cal had been moving, which direction—

There were five of them.

Not people. He Knew immediately, the way you Knew things that were wrong before you had the Language for why they were wrong. They were standing at the turn in the alley, between him and whatever was on the other side, and they had the quality of things that were present without quite being there — the particular not-rightness of Projections, human in shape but with the texture of shadow.

They hadn't followed him in.

They had been here already.

Aster stood very still and Understood, in the space of a single breath, that the shoulder and the push and the gap that had opened so conveniently to his right had not been the crowd at all.

He Reached for the Dawn.

It came — it Always came, it was His, it Knew him — and he shaped it into something Bright and Certain, and pushed it toward the Projections—

It dispersed.

Not blocked. Not countered. Just — dispersed, the Light finding nothing to hold onto, the Projections not solid enough to push against, the Dawn sliding off them the way water slid off stone and going nowhere. He tried again and the same thing happened, the Light scattering uselessly in the narrow space, as if they had been created in such a way that Light specifically had no effect. The Projections moved one step closer, and then another, with the patience of things that were not in a hurry because they didn't need to be.

Aster put his back to the wall. It was a dead end. He was trapped. The dark figures had spread across the width of the alley, blocking the entrance, advancing closer. 

And then Ada appeared beside him. They arrived all at once —  Emrys, Kasahn, and Collette, the particular displacement of air that came with Teleportation, the alley suddenly full of People who had not been there a moment before. Ada's eyes went immediately to the Projections with the Focused assessment of someone processing a situation very quickly. Emrys moved to Aster's left without being asked.

Tarsus stepped forward.

He looked at the Projections with the silver-eyed stillness of Someone who had seen worse and was already Thinking about what came next. Then he raised one hand and the temperature in the alley dropped sharply — not gradually, immediately — and a wall of Ice rose between them and the Projections, floor to ceiling, solid and absolute, the cold coming off it in waves.

The Projections stopped.

"Hold onto something," Tarsus said.

He changed.

Not slowly, not dramatically, but completely, the way he Always changed, the Dragon coming through the Person with the Ease of something that had Always been there, and was simply Choosing to be visible. He filled the alley, his serpentine body covered in soft silver scales, shimmering with irridescent colors as he moved. The others climbed on as quickly as they could.

Tarsus spread his wings, webbed like fins, designed for Sea and Sky, and then he was filling the space above the alley, rising above the roofline. He lifted them clear of the alley, above the rooftops, above the crowd, above the streets of Inriva Almare spread out below them in the golden Afternoon light.

The Archon's Square was visible from here — the mass of People, the Palace, the balcony where a small figure in white stood with his arms slightly raised, his Voice still carrying over the City below.

"— go in Peace—"

Tarsus carried them back to the Villa.

 

CHAPTER 15

 

Cal was in the Garden.

He was sitting on the low wall beside the fountain, not doing anything, which was the first sign — Cal was never simply sitting, he was always reading or talking or moving through a space with some quiet purpose. Just sitting meant he had been waiting long enough that he'd run out of things to do while he waited.

He looked up when the Gate opened.

He stood. Looked at Aster — at all of them, quickly, the assessment of someone checking that everyone was present and intact — and then looked back at Aster specifically, and something in his face that had been very carefully held together came slightly undone and then was held together again, all in the space of a second.

"You're back," he said.

"We're back," Aster said.

Cal nodded once. He didn't ask what happened. He looked at the Group — at Ada, who was close to Aster in the particular way she was close to him when something had been serious; at Tarsus, whose eyes were still silver; at Emrys, who was watching Cal with the quiet attention he gave to things he was measuring — and he put the pieces together without being given them and he didn't ask.

"Come inside," he said. "I'll get someone to bring something hot."

They sat in the large cool room off the Garden and nobody said very much for a while, which was its own kind of Conversation. The something hot turned out to be tea and bread and things to put on the bread, and Kasahn ate with the focused efficiency of Someone who had Decided that eating was the most useful thing they could do right now, and Collette sat with both hands around her cup and looked at the Garden through the open door.

Tarsus sat apart, as he sometimes did, and looked at nothing in particular with silver eyes.

Cal sat on one side of Aster, and Ada sat close on his other side, and neither of them said anything, and that was the Right thing. The Three of them in a row, the tea warm in their hands, the Garden visible through the open door with the Afternoon light moving through it.

After a while Aster said, "We should go Home."

Cal looked at him. "Today?"

"Today." He looked at his hands. "We have what we came for. There's no reason to stay."

Cal was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded, the nod of Someone who had heard something they didn't entirely want to hear and had Decided not to argue with it. "I'll walk you," he said. "Wherever you need to go."

"You don't have to—"

"I Know," Cal said simply.

They packed what little they had unpacked and were Ready within the hour.

Marian found them in the hallway with their bags.

The Warmth in her face when she saw them ready to leave was the same Warmth it Always was, and underneath it was the same something else, and she said, "So soon — stay, at least through Dinner, the City is—"

"We can't," Aster said. Gently. "But thank you. For everything. The Villa, the Garden." He paused. "The fish and lemon."

Something moved across Marian's face. Very briefly. There and gone before it could be named.

"Of course," she said. "You're Welcome here whenever you're in the City. All of you." She looked at him with the particular Warmth of Someone who Meant what they said and Wished, perhaps, that Meaning it were enough. "Aster. It's been a Genuine Pleasure."

"It has," he said. And that was True. That was the simple and terrible Truth of it.

Cal walked with them through the afternoon City, hands in his pockets, Unhurried, not asking where they were going or how they were getting there. He had Learned, somewhere in the days since they'd arrived, that there were questions Worth asking and questions that weren't, and he had a good Instinct for which was which.

The City was quieter than it had been that Morning, the Archon's crowds dispersed back into the Streets and Canals and Bridges, the Square empty again, the Palace balcony bare. Inriva Almare had returned to itself, gold and old and indifferent, the water moving in the canals the way it Always moved.

He said something Easy and Warm to each of them when Tarsus stopped at an unremarkable stretch of street beside a quiet canal. Kasahn, who received it with the particular Warmth he reserved for People he had Decided he liked. Collette, who Smiled at him with the Smile that Meant something Genuine. Emrys, who looked at him for a moment with the quiet assessment he gave to People he had Decided were Worth assessing and then nodded once, which from Emrys was considerable.

Then he looked at Asterys.

"Write when you're Home," he said.

"I will," Aster said.

Cal looked at him — at his Best Friend, in the afternoon light of a City that had tried to take something from them and failed — with the Easy Warmth that was never performed and never qualified, and never asked for anything in return.

"Good," he said. "Go on then."

Tarsus did something that Cal had no name for, and the Street was empty, and Cal was standing in it alone.

He stood there for a moment in the Afternoon light, looking at the place where his Friends had been, at the unremarkable stretch of wall and canal and old stone that was now simply itself again, containing nothing.

Then he put his hands back in his pockets and turned and walked back through the City towards the Villa.

Nigel heard them leave from the front room. The Gate, the Voices, Cal's footsteps following.

He waited until the House was quiet.

Then he sat at the writing desk and wrote one more letter. Short, as they always were. Asterys Bollard and his Companions have left the Villa this Afternoon and intend to return Home. He sealed it. Set it aside for the Courier.

Then he sat in the quiet of the empty Villa and looked at the surface of the desk and did not think about very much at all.

Outside, the City went on. The Canals moved. Somewhere across the rooftops the bells of the Archon's Palace rang the afternoon hour, the sound carrying over the Water the way sound Always carried in Inriva Almare — further than you expected, longer than seemed possible, arriving in places it had no particular reason to reach.

Marian heard them from the Garden and did not look up from her coffee.

 

CHAPTER 16

 

 

StarTide announced itself before Tarsus had fully closed the Veil behind them — the smell of it first, salt and something green and the particular warmth of a Place that faced the Water and had been doing so long enough that the water had become part of what it smelled like. Then the sound. Then the light, which was different from Inriva Almare's light — less gold, more open, the light of a Place that didn't have centuries of close-built stone to bounce off and had simply Decided to be Itself instead.

Aster stood on the Path above the Harbor and breathed it in and felt something in his chest that had been held carefully in place for several days release, quietly, without drama.

Home.

Gale made a small sound on his shoulder that was not quite a word and was not quite not a word. Aster reached up and scratched him once behind the ear, which was the closest thing they had to an acknowledgement that didn't require either of them to say anything.

"Right," Emrys said, beside him, looking at the House with the expression of Someone who had been somewhere Interesting and was Glad to be done with it. "Home."

"Home," Aster agreed.

The House Knew how to receive People.

That was the only way to describe it — not that it was large, though it was, or that it was well-appointed, though it was that too, but that it had the quality of a Place that had been holding People for a long time and had gotten very good at it. The kind of House that had a room for Everyone and something warm in the Kitchen regardless of the hour and a particular quality of light in the late Afternoon that made everything inside it feel like it was exactly where it was supposed to be.

Fintan was the first one through the door, which meant he had been watching for them. He looked at Aster for approximately one second and then launched himself at his knees with the full Confidence of someone who had never once considered that this might not be welcome.

"You were gone," he said, into Aster's leg.

"I was," Aster said.

"A long time."

"Not that long."

Fintan pulled back and looked up at him with the gravity of someone lodging a formal complaint. "I made a biscuit," he said. "It broke."

"I'm sorry."

"It was your fault," Fintan said, and went back inside.

 

Quint and Kaida had come over, which was its own kind of Welcome — Kaida with something she had made, because she always made something when People came Home, the particular Expression of Care she defaulted to when Words felt insufficient. Today it was a soup that smelled like the Best possible version of Coming Home, and she set it on the table without ceremony and told everyone to sit down in the tone that didn't invite discussion.

They sat.

Quint was at the end of the table with the expression he wore when he was Glad about something and had Decided not to make a production of it. Kasahn sat beside his Father and accepted a bowl from his Mother with the ease of Someone returning to a rhythm he had missed without realizing he'd missed it. Collette appeared from somewhere and took the seat beside Emrys and began eating with the focused Attention of Someone who had been in Inriva Almare for several days, and had found the food there perfectly Acceptable and was now Remembering what Home tasted like.

Aidan was at the head of the table with the particular quality of Someone who had been waiting and had Decided that waiting was Acceptable because the waiting was over now. He looked at Aster when he sat down — just looked, for a moment, the way Fathers looked at Children who had been somewhere and had come back — and then passed the bread without saying anything, which said everything.

Tarsus sat at the corner of the table and ate quietly and said very little, which was normal, and looked at the room around him with silver eyes that had gone soft at the edges, which was less normal and which Aster noticed and filed away.

Ada's hand found his under the table. He turned his palm up and held it.

It was a Good meal. That was the simple fact of it. The soup was Good and the bread was Good, and the light through the windows was the particular late Afternoon light that StarTide did Better than anywhere else, and for a while it was Simply that — People who had been somewhere difficult sitting around a table that Knew how to Hold them, eating something warm.

Afterward, Quint and Kaida said their goodbyes with the ease of People who Lived close enough that goodbye was never very final. Kasahn Embraced Aster briefly, and Collette kissed Ada on the cheek and told Emrys something that made him almost Smile, and then they were gone and the House was quieter and more itself.

 

Marina found Aster afterward.

Not immediately — she let the meal happen, let the Coming Home happen, let the particular exhale of Return run its course. She Understood timing the way she understood most things, which was to say Completely and without needing to discuss it.

She found him in the room off the Main Hall, the one with the window that faced the water, where he had gone without entirely deciding to go there, drawn by the particular quality of the View — the Harbor below, the boats, the Open Water beyond, the Horizon doing what Horizons did in StarTide, which was to suggest that the World was very large and mostly Navigable.

She came in and stood beside him and looked at the water for a moment without saying anything.

Then she said, "Tell me what happened in the City."

He told her. Not everything — not the lumenware or the Wall of Letters or the Sunken Garden flowers, not the things that were only His to keep — but the alley. The crowd. The Projections already waiting. The Dawn dispersing uselessly against them. Ada arriving with the others. Tarsus and the Ice and the lifting clear.

Marina listened without interrupting, which was one of her qualities — she gave things the space they needed to be fully said before she responded to them. When he finished she was quiet for a moment, looking at the water.

Then she looked at him.

"You are not to leave this House alone," she said.

Not raised. Not sharp. The particular quality of a Voice that didn't need volume because it had never needed volume, the voice of Someone who carried Primal Light and had thought carefully about what she was going to say, and was saying it once, clearly, because once was enough.

Aster looked at her. At the Steadiness in her face, the Warmth underneath the steadiness, the particular expression of Someone who Loved something very much and was not going to let that Love make her imprecise about this.

"Alright," he said.

Marina looked at him for a moment, as though she had prepared for an argument and was recalibrating in its absence. Then something in her face shifted, very slightly, toward something that was not quite Relief but was adjacent to it.

"Good," she said. "Come here."

She pulled him into a tight Hug.

He Hugged her back.

When they pulled apart, she looked at her Son with an expression that held everything.

"When did you grow up so fast?" She asked, not expecting an answer, just to say it.

Asterys shrugged.

Marina Smiled, and kissed his forehead.

"I Love you," she said.

"I Love you too, Mom."

They stood Together at the window for a while, looking at the Harbor and the Water and the Horizon, and she didn't say anything else and neither did he, and that was enough.

The rumors had not died down.

He became aware of this gradually, the way you became aware of weather — not all at once but in accumulation, small signs that added up to something larger. The way Aidan mentioned, too casually, that someone had come to the door asking questions while they were away and had been sent off with the particular efficiency of someone who had made a Decision and was not revisiting it. The way the Harbor had been busier than usual, people coming in from further along the coast, which was not unusual for this time of year and was also not entirely explained by the time of year.

The way Gale, sitting on the windowsill in the late afternoon, said, "They're talking about you in the lower Town," without looking up from whatever he was looking at in the street below.

"What are they saying?" Aster said.

"Various things," Gale said. "Some of them accurate. Some of them considerably more dramatic than the Truth, which is saying something given that the Truth is already fairly dramatic." A pause. "Someone is selling a story about the Dawn to a broadsheet in the next City. I don't know who. The story is mostly wrong but wrong in ways that are more interesting than the Truth, which means it will travel further."

Aster sat with that for a moment.

"Is there anything I can do about it?"

"No," Gale said pleasantly. "That's rather the nature of stories. Once they're out they go where they go." He looked at Aster with both eyes. "The question is not whether people will Know your name. They already do. The question is what they Know it for."

Aster looked at the ceiling.

"That's not comforting, Gale."

"No," Gale agreed. "It isn't."

That Night, after the House had gone quiet, Aster sat on the floor of his room with his back against the bed and the Book open in his lap.

He hadn't opened it since Inriva Almare. He wasn't sure why he was opening it now — not looking for anything specific, not asking it anything, just sitting with it the way you sat with something you trusted when you weren't sure what you needed.

The page was blank for a long moment.

Then, slowly, in the particular way the Book had of writing things that were true before they were legible, words appeared.

 

'The Dragon does not know what it carries. The darkness does. That is the difference.'

 

Aster read it once. Read it again. Sat with it in the quiet of his room, the Harbor dark outside the window, the House breathing around him in the particular way Houses breathed when everyone in them was finally still.

He thought about Tarsus. About silver eyes and ice rising in a narrow alley and twenty years of mapping something that changed every time you entered it. About the Lance, hidden somewhere with no address, Known only to one person in the world.

He thought about the Projections already waiting before he turned into the alley.

He closed the Book carefully and set it beside him and looked at the wall and did not sleep well.

 

 

CHAPTER 17

 

The Council met in a room with no windows.

This was deliberate. Windows implied a World outside, a context, a set of considerations beyond the room itself, and the Council of Darkness had found over many years that rooms without windows produced cleaner Decisions. The light in the room was controlled and constant and came from sources that did not change with the hour, and the figures around the table sat in black cloaks with hoods that hid their faces, so that the room contained not People exactly but presences, voices attached to shapes, identities that had been deliberately set aside in favour of something more collective and more cold.

At the head of the table sat Orthos Malus.

He did not wear his hood up. He had no need to hide his face in this room — everyone present knew who he was, and the ones who didn't were not the kind of not-knowing that a hood would address. He sat with the particular stillness of Someone who had been still for a very long time and had stopped thinking of stillness as an effort and started thinking of it as a condition, the way water thought of being wet.

The file was on the table.

Not open. Just present.

"The alley failed," said a hooded figure at the left end of the table. She said it the way you stated weather — not accusatory, not surprised, simply accurate.

"The alley failed," agreed the hooded figure across from her. "They had a Teleporter. We knew they had a Teleporter."

"We underestimated the response time."

"We underestimated several things." He looked at the file without touching it. "The Lance is gone."

A silence. The particular silence of People who understood what that meant and were Deciding how to feel about it before they Decided what to say about it.

"Gone where?" Orthos said. His voice was the voice of Someone who had never needed to raise it.

"The Veil." A pause. "Tarsus."

Another silence. Longer.

"He's been mapping it for twenty years," the woman said. "If he's put something in there—"

"It's gone," the man said simply. "We proceed without it."

Orthos looked at the file. "Then we use what we have."

Nobody argued. Nobody needed to. The file had been on the table since before the group left for Inriva Almare, and everyone in the room had known since before the alley that the alley was not the only option. It had been the preferred option — clean, contained, no formal process required. But the Council of Darkness had not survived as long as it had by having only one option.

"The Order will need to be informed," the woman said.

"The Order will be informed," Orthos said. "In the correct way. Through the correct channels. With the correct documentation." A pause. "Tarsus has done nothing wrong. That is precisely the point. The law does not require him to have done something wrong. The law requires only that he exist."

The file sat on the table in the controlled light of a room with no windows.

"And Bollard?" the hooded figure said.

"Bollard will watch," Orthos said. "That is sufficient for now. He will watch and he will understand, for the first time, that there are things he cannot protect the People he loves from." The stillness of him in the chair, absolute and Patient. "That understanding is worth more than anything the alley could have given us."

They left it at that.

 

The story arrived in StarTide on a Thursday.

Not all at once — stories never arrived all at once, they came in pieces, each piece slightly different from the last, the whole assembling itself gradually from fragments that didn't always agree with each other. But the core of it was consistent enough that by Thursday afternoon it was in the lower Town and by Thursday evening it had reached the Harbor and by the time Emrys came through the door with a broadsheet under his arm and an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral it had been in the House for approximately four minutes already, carried by Gale from the windowsill with the particular efficiency he brought to information he considered relevant.

Emrys put the broadsheet on the table.

The headline was large. The illustration beside it was larger — a Dragon above a City, rendered in the dramatic style of Someone who had not been there and had filled the gaps with Imagination, which meant the Dragon was considerably more enormous than Tarsus had been and the City below it was considerably more on fire than Inriva Almare had been, which was to say not at all on fire, but details of that kind had never slowed a good broadsheet story.

 

DRAGON SIGHTED ABOVE INRIVA ALMARE DURING ARCHON'S ADDRESS — RIDER IDENTIFIED AS BOLLARD HEIR

 

Aster looked at it for a long moment.

"Rider," he said.

"You were holding on," Emrys said, from across the table, with the expression of Someone finding something precisely as amusing as it deserved to be found.

"I was holding on. It wasn't — I wasn't riding him."

"The broadsheet disagrees."

"The broadsheet also has him breathing Fire over the Archon's palace."

"Artistic license."

Gale was looking at the broadsheet with both eyes open and the expression of something reading a document it had complicated feelings about. "The core facts are accurate," he said. "Tarsus did fly over the City. You were with him. The Archon's address was happening. Someone saw." He paused. "The rest is embellishment. But embellishment travels faster than accuracy and arrives in more places, so the distinction may not matter practically speaking."

From somewhere down the hall came the sound of Fintan, who was Three and had no interest in broadsheets and was engaged in something that involved a considerable amount of running and at least one thing being knocked over. Marina's voice followed, Patient and Clear, redirecting him toward something less structurally threatening.

Aster looked at the illustration. At the Dragon enormous above the rooftops, the Boy on its back rendered in dramatic silhouette, the City below caught in a moment of what the artist had clearly Decided was awe.

"Ada," he said, when she appeared in the doorway.

She looked at the broadsheet. Then at him. "You weren't riding him," she said.

"Thank you."

"You were holding on very tightly, though."

"Ada."

"I'm on the side of accuracy," she said, and came in and sat beside him, and looked at the illustration with the particular expression of Someone who had been there and was comparing the record to the reality and finding the gap instructive.

By the end of the week there were Three versions of the story circulating in StarTide alone.

In the first, Aster had Summoned the Dragon deliberately, as a demonstration of Power during the Archon's address, a direct challenge to the Order of the Old Gods. In the second, the Dragon had appeared unbidden, drawn by the Dawn, a Sign from the Old Gods themselves that Asterys Bollard was under Divine Protection. In the Third, which was the most dramatic and therefore the most popular, Aster had fought the Dragon single-handedly above the rooftops of Inriva Almare and had either defeated it or tamed it depending on which version of the Third story you encountered.

Tarsus came down from the hills on Wednesday and was informed of the Third version over tea at the Kitchen table.

He was quiet for a moment.

"Single-handedly," he said.

"That's what they're saying," Aster said.

Another moment of quiet. "I see," Tarsus said, with the expression of Someone filing information in a place reserved for things that were beneath comment but would not be forgotten. He drank his tea. "I'll go back up this afternoon."

"You don't have to—"

"I Know," Tarsus said simply. He looked at Aster with silver eyes that were Calm and Steady and gave nothing away. "I'll come back Tomorrow."

He did. He came back most days, in the particular way he had of being present without requiring anything from the space he was present in, and he drank tea and said little and watched the House with the silver-eyed attention of Someone keeping track of something Important, and then he went back up to the hills and the cave and whatever it was that Tarsus did in the hours when no one was watching.

Aster did not leave the House alone. He had said he wouldn't and he didn't, and Marina did not need to remind him. The House was full enough that not leaving alone was not the same as not leaving — Ada was there, and Emrys, and Fintan who was Three and therefore everywhere simultaneously and required a level of attention that left very little room for brooding. The People of StarTide looked at Aster with the particular quality of People who had Known Someone their whole Life and were in the process of revising what they knew, which was not unfriendly but was different from before.

He was getting used to different.

It was Gale who noticed first, which was usually how it went.

He was on the windowsill on a Tuesday morning, looking at nothing in particular with both eyes open, and he said, without preamble, "Something is moving."

Aster looked up from the table. "What kind of something?"

"The large kind," Gale said. "The kind that moves slowly enough that you don't notice it until it's already arrived." He was quiet for a moment. "People are Dreaming things they can't explain. Not here — further out, across the water, in places that don't usually talk to each other. The same Dreams, or close enough to the same that the differences don't matter. Something about Light. Something about a Name." He paused. "It's been happening for a few weeks. It's getting more frequent."

Aster set down what he was holding. "What Name?"

Gale looked at him with both eyes.

"Yours," he said. "Among others."

The room was quiet. Outside, StarTide went about its Morning, the Harbor moving, the Water doing what water did, the World continuing with the Patient indifference of something that had been continuing for a very long time and intended to keep doing so regardless of what any particular Person in it was feeling about it.

Down the hall, Fintan said something emphatic and then something crashed, softly, the crash of something small and not breakable, and Marina's voice followed again, and then Fintan's laugh, which was the laugh of Someone who had knocked something over on purpose and found this extremely funny.

Aster looked at the table. At his hands. At the Book, sitting closed at the edge of the table where he'd left it that morning.

 

'The Dragon does not know what it carries. The darkness does. That is the difference.'

 

He had read it every day since he'd come Home. It had not become clearer. It had become more present, which was different from clearer, and in some ways worse.

"Gale," he said.

"Yes."

"Is Tarsus alright?"

Gale was quiet for a long moment, looking out the window at the Harbor and the water and the morning going about its business.

"For now," he said.

 

 

CHAPTER 18

 

 

Aster saw him from the window.

He Knew who he was immediately — not by Name, but by the particular quality of him, the robes of pale gold and white, the soft steady glow of those ancient eyes. He had seen him once before, at a distance, standing with Lyra. She had called him 'Brother' and the word had carried the weight of something very old and very Certain of itself.

Lyra's Brother was standing in the Square below.

Aster was already turning from the window when Aidan appeared in the doorway behind him — already moving, already headed for the stairs, the same Recognition on his face that Aster felt in his chest. They went down Together without speaking and out into the Square, and Emrys followed, and Marina appeared in the doorway with Fintan on her hip and stayed there, watching.

Uriel looked at Aidan when he crossed the Square toward him.

Something moved across his ageless face — not quite grief and not quite apology and not quite its absence. The expression of Someone who Understood exactly what his presence Meant to the Person walking toward him and had come anyway, because coming anyway was what he was.

"Aidan," he said.

"Uriel," Aidan said.

They looked at each other across the small distance of the Square — the Man who had given up his Immortality for a Life in Caerwyn with Marina and their Children, and the God who had officiated his Wedding and raised a cup with Cade in the dark and found, perhaps for the first time in a very long time, that he had a Name.

"I'm looking for Tarsus," Uriel said.

Aidan received it. Not anticipated — received, the way you received something you hadn't seen coming and couldn't put down. His face did not change. His voice, when he spoke, was entirely level.

"Why."

"His trial has been called," Uriel said. "Before the Order. Lyra and his Father are already waiting."

The Square was quiet around them. StarTide going about its Afternoon, the Harbor below, the Water moving, the World indifferent to the thing happening in the Square above it.

"The Old Laws were changed," Aidan said. Not a question. An argument, delivered with the quiet precision of Someone who had been Present when things Changed and intended to say so.

"Some of them," Uriel said. "The Law in question was not among those changed."

Aidan looked at him. At the Steadiness of him, the soft glow of those ancient eyes, the particular quality of Someone who was not going to move and was not going to apologize for not moving and was not, in any way that mattered, on the wrong side of this — just on the other side of it, which was not the same thing, and was in some ways worse.

"He has done nothing wrong," Aidan said.

"I Know," Uriel said. "That is not always the relevant consideration."

A silence. The weight of it settling over the Square like weather.

Aidan looked at Uriel for a long moment. Then he looked at the Hills above the Town — the scrub and the rock and the Cave that faced the Morning, where Tarsus was, or had been, or was no longer.

Tarsus was already coming down.

He appeared on the Path above the Town before anyone had gone to find him, moving with the unhurried precision of Someone who had Felt something and had Decided to go toward it rather than away from it, which was very Tarsus. He came down through the scrub and onto the street and into the Square and stopped when he saw Uriel, and looked at him with silver eyes that were Calm and entirely without alarm.

He took in the robes, the steady glow, the particular quality of the stillness, and he Understood immediately.

"The Order," he said.

"Yes," Uriel said. "Your Trial has been called. Lyra and your Father are already waiting."

Tarsus was quiet for a moment — the quiet of Someone taking stock, the particular internal accounting of Someone who had navigated impossible things for years and was applying the same methodology to this one.

"What are the charges?" he asked.

"The Order will make that clear when you appear," Uriel said.

"I Know what the Order will do," Tarsus said, with the Patient precision of Someone who had been dealing with institutions for a very long time. "I'm asking what you Know."

Uriel looked at him for a moment. Then, quietly: "Your Parentage. What it means under the Law."

Tarsus absorbed this. His face did not change. His eyes did not change. He stood in the Square above the Harbor in the Afternoon light of StarTide and absorbed the information with the stillness of something that had Always Known, somewhere underneath everything, that this was coming — not the specific shape of it, not the timing, but the fact of it. The inevitability of being what he was in a World that had Laws about what he was.

"Alright," he said.

Uriel nodded once. "We can leave when you're ready."

Tarsus looked at Aster.

Aster looked back at him. At Tarsus — twenty years of the Veil, silver eyes, the Cave in the Hills, the Library yesterday and the amber jar and the Ice rising in a narrow alley in Inriva Almare. At the particular quality of his stillness, which was not the stillness of Someone who didn't understand what was happening. It was the stillness of Someone who Understood Completely and had Decided how to meet it.

"I've done nothing wrong," Tarsus said. Not to Uriel. To Aster.

"I Know," Aster said.

"Then there's nothing to be afraid of." He said it the way he said things that were True — simply, without decoration, without asking for agreement. "I'll go and I'll stand before them and I'll come back."

Aster looked at him. At the Calm of him. At the twenty years of Impossible things behind his eyes. He wanted to say something that was equal to the moment, and he did not have it, and Tarsus waited with the Patience of something that had been waiting for a very long time and had gotten very good at it.

"Come back," Aster said finally. It was not enough. It was all he had.

"Yes," Tarsus said. Simply. As though it were already Decided.

He turned to Uriel. "I'm Ready."

Uriel looked at Tarsus for a moment — at this Person who had done nothing wrong and was coming anyway with the Dignity of Someone who had never needed the World's permission to be What He Was. Something moved across his ageless face that was not quite grief and was not quite pride and was not quite its absence.

Then he did something that was not quite the Veil and was not quite not the Veil, and the Square was empty, and Tarsus was gone.

 

Aster stood in the Square for a long time after.

The Town went about its business around him. The Harbor was below and the water was moving and the Afternoon was doing what afternoons did — continuing, indifferent, the light moving across the rooftops in the particular way it moved in StarTide when the day was getting on and the shadows were starting to lengthen.

Emrys stood beside him and didn't say anything, which was the Right thing.

Aidan stood a little apart, looking at the place where Uriel had been, with the expression of Someone who had argued and lost and Knew that losing had been inevitable and had argued anyway, because there was nothing else to do.

 

'I've done nothing wrong.'

'Then there's nothing to be afraid of.'

 

Aster stood in the Square and looked at the place where Tarsus had been and felt something cold settle in his chest that had no name yet. Not understanding. Not knowledge. Just the particular cold of a door closing somewhere he hadn't known there was a door, in a room he hadn't known he was standing in, and the sound of it — quiet, final, the sound of something that had already happened before he understood it was happening.

He turned and walked back to the House.

Emrys walked beside him. Aidan followed. Marina was still in the doorway with Fintan on her hip, and she looked at Aidan when he reached her, and something passed between them that didn't need words, and she stepped back and let them in, and the door closed behind them.

The Square was empty.

The Afternoon continued.

 

CHAPTER 19

 

 

The Summons came before the Square had fully emptied.

Not a letter — a Light, small and precise, that found Aster in the doorway of the House and settled in front of him and resolved itself into Words that were not quite Written and not quite Spoken but were Understood Completely regardless. 'Asterys Bollard. The Order of the Old Gods requires your Testimony. You will come Now.'

Aster read it — received it — and looked at Emrys.

Emrys was already reaching for his coat.

 

Marina stood in the Front Room with her hands very still at her sides, which was how Marina looked when she was holding something large and not letting it show. She looked at her Sons — at Aster with the Summons still faintly luminous in the air between them, at Emrys with his coat already on — and something moved across her face that she did not try to name and did not try to hide.

"I'm going with them," said a voice from the doorway.

Fin was there.

He had come down from Whitecap Hill without being asked, the way Fin appeared when he was Needed — not summoned, not informed, simply Present, because he had been Fin Bollard long enough to Know when his Family required him before they knew it themselves. Marina looked at him with an expression that was not quite Relief and not quite Gratitude and was entirely Marina.

"You don't have to," Aster said.

Fin looked at him with the particular expression he reserved for statements that did not deserve a response. Then he looked at Marina.

"Go and be with Aidan," he said. "I've got them."

Marina looked at him for a moment. Then she crossed the room and put her hand briefly against his face — not a word, just the weight of it — and stepped back.

"Bring them Home," she said.

"Always do," Fin said.

 

The Order's Hall was not a Place Aster had words for.

They Arrived the way you arrived at places the Order controlled — not through the Veil, not through any mechanism Aster recognized, simply there, the World rearranging itself around the fact of the destination. One moment the Street outside the House. The next moment this.

It was Vast and it was Old and it was lit with a light that had no source and needed none, the particular luminescence of somewhere that had been holding Significant Things for longer than most of the World had Existed. The ceiling was lost in shadow. The floor was stone worn smooth by something that was not quite Time and not quite use but was the accumulated weight of every serious thing that had ever been Decided here. And in the floor, at intervals — carved deep into the stone, old enough that the edges had softened but the markings had not — were circles. Runic. Precise. The kind that had been there long enough to be part of the Hall itself, not drawn but grown, the Order's formal boundary made permanent.

Three of the circles were occupied.

At the far end of the Hall, behind a long table of something that was neither quite stone nor quite wood, sat the Order.

Aster took them in slowly, the way you took in things that were too large to receive all at once.

Uriel — robes of pale gold and white, face ageless, eyes glowing with the soft steady Light that was absolute without being violent. The Third Old God of Light and Justice, who had Officiated his Parents' Wedding and had stood in the Square this Morning and had come here anyway, because coming anyway was what he was.

Serevane — Goddess of Love and Beauty and the Moon and Time, her eyes old and careful and not unkind, watching the Hall with the Patience of something that had been watching Time pass for longer than almost anything, and had Learned to hold what it saw without flinching.

Maerath — God of Fate and Conflict, whose eyes found Aster the moment they entered and stayed there, with the particular Attention of Someone who had been watching a pattern for a very long time and was not surprised to see it continue. There was something in his gaze that went beyond the formal — something that had been accumulating since long before this Morning, since long before Aster was Born, since the first time a Bollard had refused the shape of what was supposed to happen.

Caldris — God of Creativity and Self-Expression, still and unreadable at the far end of the table, watching the hall with the quiet Attention of Someone who Understood what it Meant to Make something, and then be asked to sit in Judgment on whether it had the Right to Exist.

Death — seated between Caldris and Neraia, gray robes, unremarkable features, average height. Someone you might pass on the Street without a second glance, and then pass again, and never quite Remember. Except that the Hall Knew Death was there the way a room Knew when something had shifted in it — a particular quality of weight, of Attention, of Presence that had no equivalent and required no announcement. Death looked at nothing specific and Everything at once, with the mild Unhurried attention of Someone who had seen everything and was not in a hurry.

Neraia — Goddess of Water and Seas and Oceans, dark skin weathered like driftwood, hair loose and salt-tangled, wearing layered cloth in deep blue and green, strands of pearls at her throat and wrists. Her eyes were the color of deep water — not blue exactly, something darker and more Patient. She was watching everything with the stillness of the Ocean from a distance, measuring without judgment, the way the Sea measured all things that moved across it.

There were other seats at the table. Empty ones. The Hall Felt both vast and incomplete, the way a thing Felt when it had been Built for more than it currently held. Aster's eyes moved across them — the carved Symbols in the stone, the particular quality of absence that was different from vacancy, the sense of presences that had once sat here and did not anymore.

He noticed Fin go still beside him.

Two chairs, side by side. The Symbols carved into them were Fire and Lightning. Fin looked at them for a moment — just a moment, something old and complicated moving across his face, something that was not grief and not quite anger and was harder than either — and then looked away.

Then Fin's eyes found the Third empty chair.

It sat between Uriel's seat and where Lyra would have sat if Lyra were behind the table, slightly apart from the others, as though it had Always been there and Always would be. The Symbol carved into it was Light — the same Symbol as Uriel's, because they had been of the same domain, the same ancient inheritance, the same Family.

Fin looked at that chair for a long time.

Aster looked at Fin's face. At the particular quality of what was there — something older and quieter and more Personal than anything the Fire and Lightning chairs had produced. Something that had been carried for a very long time and had never gotten lighter.

He looked at the empty chair. At the Light symbol. At the space it occupied, exactly where a Third sibling would have sat, between the Brother who had reclaimed his Role and the Sister who had never left hers.

He Understood without being told.

Corwin's chair.

His Great Grandfather's chair.

Aster looked away because dwelling now on Corwin's passing would serve no one.

He locked it within himself, filing it away for later.

 

And then there was Lyra.

Not behind the table. To the side of it, within one of the Runic Circles carved into the floor, in a chair that was neither Defendant nor Judge, in the particular position of Someone who was both and could be neither. Her silver hair was loose. Her Light was banked low — not gone, never gone, but held carefully within the boundary of the Circle, contained the way the Hall contained everything it held. Her face was composed with the effort of Someone composing it deliberately, holding something enormous very still. The Goddess of Light and Compassion, sitting in a Hall where Compassion had no procedural standing.

Beside her, in his own Circle, stood Dartarius.

In Human Form — tall, black hair tinged with blue, silver eyes that held the suggestion of gold underneath, the quiet authority of something ancient that had Chosen to be here, in this shape, in this room, for his Son. He was not restrained beyond the Circle itself. He did not need to be. He stood within it with the stillness of something very old that had made its Decision and was not going to unmake it, and he looked at nothing except Tarsus, and his eyes, just once, shifted — the silver giving way briefly to gold before he pulled it back, the one thing the Circle could not entirely contain.

And Tarsus.

In his own Circle, before the table, in Human Form — silver hair, the same silver-gold eyes as his Father, the same quality of stillness that was not resignation but Decision. He could not Transform within the Circle. He could not open the Veil. He stood as the Human half of Himself while the Order prepared to rule on the Whole of What He Was, and he stood with the Complete Dignity of Someone who had done nothing wrong and intended the Hall to Know it.

He looked at Aster when they entered. Something passed between them that didn't need words. Then Tarsus looked back at the Order, and Aster took his place to the side with Emrys and Fin, and the Trial began.

 

The charges were stated formally, in the Language of the Order, which was precise and ancient and left no room for interpretation.

The Union of a God and a Dragon was Forbidden under the Laws of the Order of the Old Gods. The Offspring of such a Union Existed in violation of those Laws. The violation was not a matter of conduct or intent — it was a Matter of Existence. Tarsus had done nothing wrong. The Law did not require him to have done something wrong. It required only that he Exist.

Aster stood very still and listened to the charge and felt something in his chest go very quiet.

Lyra did not move. Dartarius did not move. Tarsus did not move.

Maerath's eyes were still on Aster.

 

They called him to Testify.

He walked to the center of the Hall and stood before the table and looked at the Order — at Uriel, at Serevane, at Maerath watching him with the Attention of Someone who had been waiting for this, at Caldris still and unreadable, at Death who looked back at him with mild Unhurried Attention, at Neraia whose deep-water eyes were Patient and measuring, at Lyra to the side with her silver hair and her Light banked low and her hands very still in her lap.

They asked him about the Dragon over the Archon's Palace in Inriva Almare.

He told them. The alley first — the Projections already waiting, five of them, the Dawn dispersing uselessly against them, the cold rising. And then the silver Dragon above the roofline, the lifting clear, the flight above the City. Tarsus had saved him from the Council of Darkness. He said it Clearly and Completely, because it was True and because Tarsus deserved to have it said in this Hall, in front of these Witnesses, on the Record of the Order.

"And did you know," Maerath said, with the particular precision of Someone who had been Waiting for this question, "whose Dragon it was?"

Aster looked at him.

"Tarsus is his own Dragon," he said. "He Belongs to no one."

A silence. Not the silence of an answer received but the silence of an Answer that had not gone where the question intended, and the Hall adjusting around it.

Maerath's expression did not change. "And do you know his Parentage?"

Aster could have said no. He had said no before, to harder People in harder Rooms, and Meant it less. He Knew how to lie. He had Chosen not to, Here, in this Hall, in front of these Witnesses — not because he couldn't but because Tarsus was standing in his Circle with silver hair and silver-gold eyes and the Dignity of someone who had done nothing wrong, and Aster was not going to be the Person who lied about him. Not here. Not anywhere.

"Yes," he said.

"State it for the Order."

He looked at Tarsus. Tarsus looked back at him — Steady, Present, entirely without accusation, because Tarsus had Always Known exactly who Aster was and had never once expected him to be otherwise.

Aster looked back at Maerath.

"His Father is Dartarius," he said. "His Mother is Lyra."

He said it clearly. Into the silence of the Hall, with the full weight of the Order listening and Lyra to his left, and Tarsus before him and Fin and Emrys behind him.

Lyra looked at him.

Not anger. Something more complicated and more ancient than anger — the expression of Someone who had Known this moment was coming and had not been able to stop it and was looking at the Person who had just Spoken the Truth in the hardest possible room to speak it in and finding, underneath everything, that she could not be anything but what she was about to be.

Grateful. Quietly, painfully, completely Grateful. Because he had not lied. Because even Here, even Now, Asterys Bollard had not lied.

Aster looked away. He could not hold it.

 

They dismissed him back to his place.

Lyra stood.

She did not ask permission. She simply stood, the way Someone stood when they had Decided that sitting was no longer something they were Willing to do, and the Hall went quiet in the particular way it went quiet when something Ancient and Significant Chose to Speak. She stood within her Circle — she did not step out of it, she did not test its boundary — but she stood, and her Light, carefully banked, was Present and entirely Hers.

She looked at the Order — at her Brother, Uriel, at Serevane, at Maerath, at Caldris, at Death, at Neraia — and she did not perform anything. She simply spoke.

"I Loved Dartarius," she said. "I Loved him then, and I Love him still. He has Always held the same for me. We have a Son." She paused, not for effect but because the Words were large and she was giving them the space they deserved. "I do not regret it. I did not then, and I do not now, and I will not stand in this Hall and perform a shame I do not feel."

She looked at Maerath.

"My Son has done nothing wrong. You have said so yourselves. He has spent over twenty years Mapping the Veil so that People lost in it could find their way Home, fighting for what is Right every time it was required of him, at whatever cost." A pause. "I will not apologize for Making him. I will not apologize for Loving his Father. And I will not apologize for Believing that a Law which requires a Person to answer for their Existence rather than their actions, is a Law that deserves to be examined."

She sat down.

The Hall was very quiet.

Death, at the table, had not moved. But something in the quality of Death's stillness had shifted — the particular Attention of Someone who had heard something True and was holding it carefully.

 

Fin was already moving.

Not with drama — though Fin was capable of drama when the occasion called for it, and he had Decided this occasion did not. He walked to the center of the Hall with the particular Purposefulness of Someone who had Decided that something Needed to be Said, and he was apparently the one who had to Say it. He stood where Aster had stood and looked at the Order with the expression of Someone who had Sailed under Impossible circumstances and come back and was not, in any meaningful sense, afraid of a table full of Gods.

"I'd like to Speak," he said.

Maerath looked at him with the expression of Someone looking at something that should not be in this Hall and was in this Hall regardless. "You are a mortal," he said. "You have no standing before this Order."

"I Know," Fin said pleasantly. "I'm going to Speak anyway."

A silence. Uriel looked at Fin with something that might, in a God, have been the very faintest edge of Recognition — of a Mortal who had stood before Impossible things before and had said the True thing anyway. He inclined his head, once. Permission, or something close enough to it.

Fin turned to the Order.

"I've listened to your Law," he said. "I Understand it. I'm not going to tell you it isn't a Law, because it clearly is, and you clearly intend to apply it, and I'm not under any illusion that I'm going to change that." He paused. "But I'm going to say this anyway, because someone should, and I'm apparently the one standing here.

"That Young Man" — he did not point, did not gesture, just let the words carry the weight of Tarsus standing in his Circle before the table — "has done more Good in his Life than ill. He has Protected those he Loves. He has fought for what is Right, every time it was required of him, at whatever cost. And you would have Someone answer — not for what they have done, but for the simple fact of Existing."

He paused.

"That's not Justice," he said. "That's just the Law. And those aren't always the same thing."

Maerath's expression did not change. "The Law—"

"I Know what the Law says," Fin said. "I'm telling you what it Means."

The Hall was very quiet.

Serevane was looking at Fin with the expression of Someone who had been watching Time pass for longer than almost anything and was watching it pass right now, in this Moment, in the particular way it passed when a Mortal stood in a room full of Gods and said the True thing anyway.

Neraia had not moved. But her deep-water eyes had found Fin and stayed there, with the particular quality of the Ocean when it recognized something that had Sailed it Honestly and without pretense. Her expression was Genuinely fond.

And Death — Death was watching Fin with the mild Unhurried Attention of Someone who had seen everything and was not in a hurry, and something in that Attention was not quite a verdict and not quite its absence.

It was not enough. Everyone in the Hall Knew it was not enough. Fin Knew it was not enough.

He had said it anyway. Because that was Fin.

He walked back to his place beside Aster and Emrys and stood there with the particular stillness of Someone who had done what they had come to do and was now waiting for the World to do what it was going to do regardless.

 

The Order deliberated.

Not long — the Order did not require long, the Law was the Law and the facts were the facts and the deliberation was a formality that the Order observed because it observed all formalities, correctly and completely. Lyra sat within her Circle with her Light banked low and her hands very still and did not look at Dartarius and did not look at Tarsus and looked at nothing in particular with the expression of Someone holding something so large that looking at anything specific would break it open.

Dartarius did not move. Did not make a sound. Stood within his Circle with his eyes on his Son and waited with the stillness of something very old that had always Known, somewhere underneath everything, that this was where it ended.

Tarsus stood in his Circle and was still.

Aster stood to the side and watched all Three of them and felt the cold in his chest that had had no name since the Square finally find one.

 

Uriel delivered the verdicts.

Quietly. Precisely. The way Uriel did everything — no more and no less than what was required.

Tarsus. Imprisonment. The terms stated formally, the duration unspecified, the conditions of the Order's containment applied with the full dignity the Order afforded. Not execution. Imprisonment.

Fin had moved something. Not enough. But something.

Tarsus received it with stillness. His silver eyes did not change. He stood in his Circle and received the verdict of the Order with the Dignity of Someone who had done nothing wrong and was not going to let them take that from him, not even Now, not even Here.

Aster looked at him. Tarsus did not look back. He was looking at the Order, Steady, Present, entirely Himself.

Then Uriel turned to Lyra and Dartarius.

Separation.

The word landed in the Hall the way significant things landed — not loudly, not dramatically, simply with the full weight of what it meant. Lyra and Dartarius. Separated. The Law applied to the cause as it had been applied to the consequence. What they had Made Together was the violation. What they were to Each Other was the risk. The Order would not permit the risk to continue.

Lyra closed her eyes.

Just for a moment. Just long enough to receive it. One tear glided down her face. Then she opened her eyes and she was composed again, holding it the way she had been holding everything since she sat down in that Circle — Completely, and at enormous cost, and without letting it show more than it was already showing.

Dartarius made a sound that was not quite a sound. Something deep and resonant that the Hall absorbed without echo, the particular grief of something very large and very old receiving the thing it had always Known was coming and finding that Knowing had not made it smaller. His eyes remained cold silver. His jaw was set. His hands clenched into fists at his side.

Uriel was silent for a moment. Not the silence of Someone who had finished. The silence of Someone who had one more thing to Say, and was Deciding how to carry it into the room.

"I Knew," he said.

The Hall went very still.

"I have Known since the Night he was Born. Lyra came to me because Corwin was Mortal, and I was the only Godly Brother she had left, who was able to sit at this table. She came to me with her Son, My Nephew, and she did not Know what to do." He paused. "I Counseled her to step back. To let Dartarius Raise Him. To allow the World to see a Dragon and look no further. I Believed that distance would Protect him." A smaller pause. "I was wrong. And I am sorry."

He was not speaking to the Order. He was speaking to Lyra, in her Circle, with her silver hair and her banked Light and the single tear already dried on her face. He was speaking to Tarsus, standing in his Circle with the Dignity of Someone who had done nothing wrong. To Dartarius, still holding himself together. He was speaking to the empty chair with the Light Symbol carved into the stone, to the Brother who had given up his Immortality and his seat and left them both to navigate this without him.

"I will accept whatever punishment the Order deems appropriate for my secrecy," Uriel said. "But Know that it was done out of Love. For my Sister. For her Son. I would ask the Order to weigh that."

The Hall waited.

Maerath looked at Uriel for a long moment with the particular expression of Someone performing consideration they had already completed. Then he looked at the others, and something passed between them that was not quite a Conversation and not quite an Agreement but arrived at the same place regardless.

"There is no Law in keeping secrets," Maerath said. "You were not complicit in the violation. You were aware of it. These are not the same thing." A pause. "No punishment is required."

The words landed in the Hall with a weight that had nothing to do with mercy.

Fin's jaw tightened. Aster saw it — the precise moment Fin Understood what had just happened. The Order had imprisoned a Young Man for Existing. They had separated two People who Loved each other for the crime of having Loved each other. And they had just waved off the God who had Known about it for over a century and said nothing, because there was no Law in keeping secrets, because Uriel was useful, because the Order needed the God of Justice at its table and was not going to remove him over something as inconvenient as consistency.

Lyra looked at her Brother.

Not with anger. Something quieter than anger and harder to name — the expression of Someone watching an injustice they had always suspected confirmed in plain sight, in the same breath as their Son's imprisonment, by the same institution that had just told them Love was a violation.

Uriel looked back at her. He did not look away.

Then Death spoke.

It was the first time Death had spoken in the Hall. The Voice was neither Male nor Female, neither Young nor Old, and it Arrived in the silence after the verdicts the way Death Always arrived — quietly, without announcement, simply Present.

"I have sat in many Halls," Death said. "I have heard many Verdicts." A pause, unhurried. "I do not often Speak. But I will Say this." Death looked at Tarsus — not with pity, not with judgment, with the particular Attention of Someone who Understood what it Meant to be separated from the World you had moved through, and Mapped and Loved for over a century. "What is done here Today will be Remembered. Not by me alone — I Remember Everything, that is simply What I am. But by the World. By the People in it." Another pause. "That is not a threat. It is an observation. The World is paying Attention."

Death said nothing else.

The Hall was very quiet.

 

Aster stood to the side and watched the Verdicts land and felt the cold in his chest settle into something with a name.

'This is my fault.'

He Knew, somewhere underneath it, that it wasn't. He Knew that Tarsus had flown over the Archon's Palace before Aster was ever on his back. He Knew that the Law was the Law and had been the Law long before Asterys Bollard Existed, and would have found its way here eventually regardless. He Knew all of that.

He named it anyway. Because that was what Aster did with things that hurt — he found the part that was his and he held it and he did not put it down.

'This is my fault.'

Emrys put his hand on Aster's arm. Not a word. Just the weight of it, Steady and Present, the particular Warmth of Someone who was not going to let him stand in this Hall alone.

Aster did not look at him. He looked at Tarsus, standing in his Circle, still and Dignified and entirely Himself, and he held the cold thing in his chest with both hands and did not let it show, and the Hall was very quiet, and the Order had Spoken, and it was done.

 

They came Home without Tarsus.

The Street outside the House was the same Street it had Always been. The Harbor was below and the Water was moving and the Evening was coming in over StarTide the way evenings came in — slowly, and then all at once, the light going gold and then amber and then the particular blue of the hour before dark.

Marina was in the doorway.

She looked at Fin first — the question she couldn't ask out loud — and Fin looked back at her and gave her the Answer she already Knew, the one she had been holding since the Square, since Uriel appeared and the World rearranged itself around his presence.

She looked at Aster.

He looked back at her, and she crossed the distance between them and put her arms around him and held him the way she had held him when he was small, and the World was too large and he did not know yet that he was going to be alright.

Something broke open.

He hadn't meant it to. He had held it through the Hall and through the Verdicts and through the walk Home — held it Carefully, Completely, with both hands. It had not been enough. His Mother's arms were around him. Tarsus was not coming Home. He was nineteen years old and Tarsus had been there his whole Life, and the cold thing in his chest came apart all at once, quietly, without warning, the way things came apart when they had been held too long by Someone who was not going to ask for Help.

He stood in the doorway of his House in the evening light of StarTide and wept.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just the way you wept when something was too large to hold and you had run out of the means to hold it — quietly, with his face against his Mother's shoulder. Marina held him and did not say it was alright, because it wasn't alright, and she Knew it, and he Knew it, and there was nothing to say that was equal to what had happened Today.

Behind him, inside the House, he could hear Aidan's voice — low, asking Fin something, receiving the Answer. The particular quality of his Father's voice receiving something he had been afraid of and had Hoped would not come and had come anyway.

Aster closed his eyes.

He thought about Tarsus standing in his Circle — silver-haired, still, the Dignity of Someone who had done nothing wrong and was not going to let them take that from him. He thought about Lyra closing her eyes for just a moment, just long enough to receive it, and the single tear that had followed. He thought about Dartarius — jaw set, hands fisted at his sides, holding himself together by force of Will alone.

He thought about Tarsus, who had Known him his whole Life. Who had carried him above the roofline in Inriva Almare. Who had come down from the Hills and knocked on the door before the sun was up because something was wrong and he had Known it. Who had stood in the Library and said 'that is what endings look like' with the Steadiness of Someone who had Decided how to meet things and met them.

Who was not coming Home.

Marina held him and the Evening continued around them. The World went on, the way it Always did — indifferent, ordinary, entirely unchanged. Aster stood in the doorway of his House with his Heart breaking and let it.

 

 

CHAPTER 20

 

 

The Morning came in the way mornings did after Impossible things — ordinary, indifferent, entirely unchanged. The light through the window was the same light it had Always been. The Harbor was below and the Water was moving, and somewhere in StarTide Someone was already at work, the distant sound of it carrying up through the quiet.

Aster was in the window seat.

He had been there since before the sun came up. He had not slept, or he had Slept briefly and badly and woken before the dark had finished, and he had come back to the window and sat in it, and watched the Sky change, and tried to take up as little space as possible.

He was not sure when he had started doing it. Somewhere between the Hall and the walk Home and the doorway and his Mother's arms. Somewhere in the Night, in the hours he had spent not sleeping, the Decision had made itself without his permission — that the smallest version of Himself was the safest version. For everyone. That if he could just become quieter, less present, harder to see, the People around him would have less to lose.

He Knew it wasn't logical. He Knew it the way you Knew things at five in the Morning after no sleep and a broken Heart — distantly, without being able to do anything about it.

Ada found him there.

She didn't say anything at first. She came upstairs in the early quiet and she saw him in the window seat and she crossed the room and sat beside him, close enough that her shoulder was against his, and she looked out at the Harbor the way he had been looking at it and she waited.

The silence between them was not uncomfortable. It was Ada's particular silence — the silence of Someone who Knew how to be Present without demanding anything from the presence. She had Always Known how to do that. It was one of the first things he had Understood about Her.

After a while she said, "Do you want to talk about it?"

Aster looked at the water.

"I don't know what I'd say," he said.

"That's alright," Ada said. "You don't have to know."

He looked at her then. She was looking at the Harbor, her profile Quiet and Steady in the Morning light, and she did not look back at him immediately, just let him look, let him take whatever he needed from the fact of her being there.

"He's not coming Home," Aster said. It was the first time he had said it out loud. It landed differently than he expected — smaller and larger at the same time, the Words too simple for what they contained.

"I Know," Ada said.

"I watched them do it. I watched them say the Word and I watched him receive it and he didn't—" He stopped. "He didn't let them see. He just stood there and he was entirely Himself and they took him anyway."

Ada was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "That sounds like Tarsus."

"Yes," Aster said. "It does."

She reached over and took his hand. She didn't say it was going to be alright. She didn't say anything. She just held his hand and sat beside him in the window seat while the Morning came in over StarTide and the Water moved in the Harbor below and the World went on the way it Always did.

It was Enough. It was not nothing.

 

Emrys found him next.

He appeared in the doorway of Aster's room with his hair still disordered from Sleep and looked at him in the window seat and said, without preamble, "You have that face."

Aster looked at him. "What face."

"The one where you've Decided everything is your fault and you're working out how to disappear." Emrys dropped into the chair across from him with the particular bonelessness of Someone who had not been awake long enough to have opinions about furniture. "I've been watching you make it for awhile. It's very recognizable."

"I'm not trying to disappear," Aster said.

Emrys looked at him.

"I'm not," Aster said, less certainly.

"Aster," Emrys said, with the Patience of Someone who Loved his Brother and was not going to pretend otherwise. "You're in the window seat at six in the morning trying to take up less space than the cushion. I Know what that looks like."

Aster opened his mouth and closed it again.

"It wasn't your fault," Emrys said. "Tarsus being Who He Is wasn't your fault. The Order being what it is wasn't your fault. You didn't make any of this happen." He paused. "And even if you had — which you didn't — disappearing wouldn't fix it. It would just mean we lost two People instead of one."

The Words landed somewhere Aster hadn't expected them to.

He didn't say anything. Emrys didn't push. He just sat in the chair with his disordered hair and his early morning Patience and waited, the way the Bollards Waited — Completely, and Without Going Anywhere.

 

Marina made Breakfast.

Not because anyone had asked her to. Not because food was going to fix anything. Because it was something she could do and she needed to do something, and the smell of it moved through the House the way Warmth moved through a House — slowly, and then all at once, until it was Everywhere.

She put a plate in front of Aster without comment. He looked at it.

"Eat," Marina said, in the tone that was not quite a request.

He ate.

She sat across from him while he did and she watched him the way she had Always watched him — with the particular Attention of Someone who Knew every version of his face and could read all of them. He could feel her reading him now. He didn't try to hide it. He was too tired to hide it and she would have seen through it anyway.

"I keep thinking about what I could have done differently," he said, without meaning to say it.

"I Know," Marina said.

"If I hadn't gone to Aethon. If I hadn't—"

"Aster." Her voice was quiet and entirely Certain. "Going to Aethon didn't cause this. Tarsus is Who He Is regardless of where you were or weren't. The Order is what it is regardless of what you did or didn't do. The Law that took him existed long before you walked through those Gates." She paused. "You did not make this happen."

Aster looked at his plate.

"Grandpa said it wasn't Justice," he said. "In the Hall."

"Dad's usually Right," Marina said, "when it Matters."

 

Aidan found him in the Afternoon.

Aster had moved from the window seat to the small bench at the back of the House, the one that looked out over the Garden and the rooftops and the water beyond. He had been sitting there for a while, not thinking about anything in particular, or Thinking about Everything and calling it nothing.

Aidan came and sat beside him.

He didn't say anything for a long time. He looked out at the water the way Aster was looking at it and he was quiet in the way Aidan was quiet — not empty, not absent, just Present without requiring anything in return.

After a while he said, "I Know what you're doing."

"Everyone keeps saying that," Aster said.

"Because it's very obvious," Aidan said, without unkindness. "I've done it myself. Decided that the Answer was to become smaller, harder to see. That the People I Loved would be safer if I took up less space." He paused. "It doesn't work. The People who Love you just have to work harder to find you."

Aster looked at his hands.

"I don't want anyone else to get hurt because of me," he said.

"I Know," Aidan said. "But that's not your Decision to make. The People who Love you have already made theirs." He was quiet for a moment. "Tarsus made his, every time. Every time he came down from the Hills. Every time he knocked on the door. He Knew what it cost and he came anyway." Another pause, smaller. "Don't make his Choice mean less than it does by Deciding it was a mistake."

Something shifted in Aster's chest. Not breaking open, not this time. Something quieter. Something settling.

He didn't say anything. Aidan didn't need him to.

They sat Together on the bench in the Afternoon light and looked at the water and the rooftops and the Harbor below, and after a while Aidan put his hand on Aster's shoulder briefly, the way he did, and then they were just sitting, the two of them, in the particular Peace of People who had said the necessary thing and did not need to say anything else.

 

Fintan found him before supper.

He came around the corner of the House at a run, the way Fintan did everything, and he saw Aster on the bench and he changed course without breaking stride and climbed up beside him with the Complete Confidence of Someone who had never once considered that he might not be welcome.

He was three years old. He did not know about the Trial or the Order or the Word separation or the particular quality of grief that had been sitting in the House since Yesterday. He Knew that Aster was here and that the bench was a Good place to sit and that the Water was Interesting if you looked at it long enough.

He climbed into Aster's lap and looked at the Harbor.

"Water," he said, with satisfaction.

"Yes," Aster said. "Water."

Fintan leaned back against him, entirely Comfortable, entirely Certain of his Welcome, and pointed at a boat moving in the Harbor below.

"Boat," he said.

"That's right," Aster said.

Fintan considered this for a moment. Then he tipped his head back and looked up at Aster with Fin's brown eyes threaded through with amber, and Marina's expression and said, with the complete seriousness of Someone making an Important observation, "You're sad."

Aster looked at him.

"Yes," he said. "I am."

Fintan nodded, as though this was information he had expected and Knew what to do with. Then he turned back to the Harbor and Settled more firmly into Aster's lap and said nothing else, because he was three years old and he Understood, in the way very small Children sometimes understood things, that the Answer to someone being sad was not Words. It was Staying.

Aster held him and looked at the Water and felt, for the first time since the Hall, something that was not grief. Not happiness. Not resolution. Just the particular Warmth of being held in place by Someone too small and too Certain to let him disappear.

 

Gale found him last.

After Supper, after Fintan had been put to bed, after the House had gone quiet in the particular way it went quiet in the Evenings — Gale appeared in the doorway and looked at him with the Ancient Unhurried Attention that Gale Always had, as if he had been part of this Family for longer than most things were Alive.

"You are still Here," Gale said.

"Yes," Aster said.

"Good," Gale said. "That is the only thing that is required of you Tonight. To still be Here."

And then Gale crossed the room and settled beside him, tucking his paws underneath him with the particular satisfaction of a Cat who had identified the correct place to be and intended to remain there. After a moment Aster's hand moved to his fur without quite thinking about it, the way hands did, and Gale began to purr — low and steady and entirely Content, the sound of it filling the quiet of the room the way Warmth filled a room, slowly and then all at once.

Aster sat in the quiet of the House in StarTide and listened to the Harbor below and the Breathing of the People Sleeping around him and the purring of the Cat beside him, and he did not try to be smaller than he was.

He was Still Here.

For Tonight, that was Enough.

 

 

CHAPTER 21

 

 

Tarsus didn't know how he'd gotten there. Or where he even was. One moment he'd been standing in the Hall of the Order of the Old Gods, and the next he was here.

The torches in the corners of the large stone room was glowing an unnatural shade of green. The light it cast was barely enough to see by, and cast flickering shadows on the walls. He'd found himself staring at the green fire. Really it was the only thing to look at in the room. 

There was no furniture, no windows, just the torches, the wooden door on the other side of the room, which was always closed, and the shallow pit he was standing in. Somehow, perhaps between the Hall and here, they had taken his shoes. Tarsus stood barefoot in the shallow pit, ankle deep in freezing water, with a Runic Circle in the stone floor below him.

As if that hadn't been enough, there was also an iron manacle around his neck, with a chain the connected it to the stone wall behind him. It allowed him the little range of motion that the Runic Circle provided, which was precisely two steps forward and two steps back. He'd discovered it was the same all the way around the Circle. He imagined he could also sit or lay down, but with the freezing water he hadn't yet had such inclinations.

He didn't know how much Time had passed. He had realized, some time ago, that the green torches never actually burned down or extinguished. Tarsus found this to be both a comfort, and unsettling in equal measure. After a time, the wooden door groaned as it opened.

Two figures walked into the room. Both wore black cloaks. And it was then that Tarsus was absolutely certain that he was no longer in the custody of the Order of the Old Gods. This was the Council of Darkness. One figure wore a hood, and Tarsus couldn't see their face. 

The other cloaked figure, Tarsus knew from his Father's stories. He wished he hadn't but he Understood why Dartarius had told him. Orthos Malus was a very bad man. And he was exactly as his Father had described. Angular features. Dark, piercing eyes. Atop his head he wore a black cowboy hat that looked like it had seen better days. He stopped at the edge of the pit, and regarded Tarsus for a moment.

"So this is what the offspring of an Old God and a Dragon looks like," said the Leader of the Council. 

"Let me out of this Circle," Tarsus said, "And I'll show you what it really looks like."

"No," Orthos said, "I don't think I will."

He clasped his hands behind his back and slowly paced back and forth.

"You see," he said, "I used to have quite the collection of Relics and Artifacts. I was something of a collector of sorts. But then, I return from my holiday in the Void to find that my Citadel is gone, and the Artifacts, nowhere amongst the wreckage."

He looked at Tarsus a moment as he was pacing.

"I Believe you've Found one. A certain Spear of Chaos." He stopped pacing and looked at Tarsus directly. "The Lance of Latimus. I wouldn't dream of using it. I'm not a fool. It isn't about what the Lance can do. Its about what the Lance represents. Position. Prestigue... Power." 

He clapped his hands together once. "Now then," Orthos continued, "You are going to tell me, where exactly in the Veil you've hidden it. And then you will take me there personally."

"I won't," Tarsus said.

"Are you certain? Because if you are, my Friend has a very interesting Gift, and you may wish to change your mind. Otherwise-" 

He stopped and looked at the cloaked figure who had stepped forward to the pit's edge. They raised their hands. Blue sparks of Electricity crackled at their finger tips.

"We don't want anyone to get hurt," Orthos said, pleasantly.

Tarsus looked at the Sparks and Understood immediately what they intended to do. He stood there in the shallow pit, bare feet in the water, and had read enough to Know what happens when lightning meets water.

"What'll it be, Son of Lyra? The Artifact, or the consequence of your refusal?"

Tarsus was quiet for a moment. He swallowed before he spoke. He looked the Leader in the eye.

"I won't do it. The Veil will remain closed to you, and you will never see that Spear again."

The cloaked figure extended its hand to the water. Tarsus Knew what was coming, and he Knew that even braced for it, it wouldn't be enough. Electricity crackled across the water's surface. The pain was sharp and total, running up from his feet to the rest of him in one instant that was shorter than a breath. 

Tarsus screamed without meaning to. Didn't even realize that he had. It was over quickly, and he stood there just breathing.

"Have you reconsidered?" Orthos asked.

Tarsus made himself look at him.

He breathed a moment, before he answered.

"No," Tarsus said.

"You're sure?" 

"Absolutely Certain."

The next current was longer. No less painful. He squeezed his eyes shut but it didn't help and the screaming followed, echoing in the stone room.

He gasped when it stopped. He was breathing hard. Shaking. He looked up at Malus with blurred vison.

"I will never yield," Tarsus said, his voice harsh.

"Again," Orthos said.

The next current brought Tarsus to his knees. This time he didn't look up.

"How about now?" the Leader asked after breathing became more manageable.

"Never," Tarsus said.

They shocked him again and again, until he had no strength left. Somehow the water was drained out of the pit, and Tarsus lay on the stone floor, curled up because the Rune circle wouldn't allow him to lay flat.

He heard footsteps, boots against stone. And then more pain as Orthos Malus grabbed a handful of his hair and lifted up his face.

"You will tell me where the Artifact is. Or break. Those are your options. There is no other choice."

"Its in the Veil," Tarsus said quietly. "Somewhere you'll never find it."

Orthos let go of his hair and Tarsus fell hard against the stone floor. He didn't move. He couldn't.

"You will prove useful one way or another," he heard Malus say distantly. "I will send word to StarTide. To Asterys Bollard. If he wants you Alive, then he will come alone. The Council will acquire the Dawn, and it will be all thanks to you."

The footsteps receded, the door groaned as it opened, and then closed again.

Tarsus didn't know where he was.

The last thing he thought about before the darkness took him was Maerath sitting at the table with the others of the Order, and Asterys with his Powers of the Dawn.

 

It was Spring in StarTide. The land smelled of wet dirt and Growing things. Birds sang their varied tunes. 

The Bollard Household had just finished Breakfast. Aster had been Present in a way. He didn't speak as much as he usually would have. He didn't snatch any of Emrys's Breakfast off of his plate.  But he listened to what the others had to say, and when asked his plans for the day, Aster told them he might visit the Cabin with Ada.

The old building needed some repairs. A rotten floorboard or two needed replacing. There was a bit of a draft somewhere that should be addressed.

Aidan asked if he needed a hand. Aster said he thought he could manage. Aidan nodded.

"Me Help!" Fintan said enthusiastically, looking up from the mess on his plate in front of him.

Aster Smiled a little. "Maybe someday," he said. "When you're older."

"Maybe you can Help Mommy," Marina said to her Youngest, "It's a laundry day, and I Know how much you like Helping with laundry."

Aster Knew that Fintan's Help with laundry tended to be more chaos than Help. He Knew that Marina Knew.

Fintan beamed Happily. "Me Help! Yaaay!"

Fintan's Happiness was infectious. Aster Smiled for real this time. The Dawn glowed softly around him, as if it had been waiting for the Smile to be present.

 

Emrys brought in the post before leaving for the Docks. Usually he'd file through it and take it to the Dining Room for Marina to find. But this Morning he stopped when he saw the Letter at the bottom of the pile. Aster was just grabbing his coat when he noticed Emrys go still with the mail in his hands.

"What is it?" Aster asked.

Emrys looked at his Brother for a moment. The expression on his face solemn and hard to read. Then he held out the Letter to Aster.

Aster took it, and then wished he hadn't.

It was addressed: 'Asterys Bollard, StarTide'. But the return address was what gave him pause. There was no return address. Only a Name and a Title— 'Orthos Malus, Leader of the Council of Darkness'.

At first, Aster wasn't sure if he should open it, and stared at the back of the envelope for a moment before he Decided. There was no wax seal, and it was just a plain envelope. He opened it.

Inside was a note.

 

'Dear Asterys,

We hope you are well, and that you've enjoyed your vacation from Aethon Academy. We would like to inform you that we have your Dragon. Tarsus is alive, and will remain so if you cooperate. Meet me at the address below. Please arrive Alone. None of your Friends or Family are invited to accompany you. I don't believe that I need to tell you what will happen to Tarsus should you refuse our invitation, or refuse to cooperate. Your attendance Alone is mandatory, and there will be no negotiation. We know you have the Book, so please bring it with you.

Sincerely,

Orthos Malus, Leader of the Council of Darkness

P.s. You should know that the Council had arranged for the arrest of Tarsus, and that the information about his parentage was supplied by our eyes and ears in StarTide. Our Power and influence continues to grow and spread across the whole of Åsten.

P.s.s. Nowhere is safe. There is nothing more you can do. Come Alone.'

 

The address was written neatly at the bottom of the page.

 

Aster read it over and over, and then looked at Emrys, who hadn't moved and was still looking at his Brother with Complete seriousness.

"Well?" Emrys asked quietly. There was no harshness in his tone, only the question.

For a moment, Aster couldn't speak.

"The Council has Tarsus. He wants me to go Alone."

 

 

CHAPTER 22

 

 

Marina read the Letter once.

Then she set it down on the table with the particular careful precision of Someone who was not going to allow themselves to react until they had Decided what to do about the thing they were reacting to. She looked at Aster. She looked at Emrys. Then she picked the Letter back up and read it again.

"Alright," she said.

She was already moving.

Aster watched his Mother cross the Kitchen with the Focused efficiency of Someone who had been in Impossible situations before and Knew exactly what the first step was. The first step was Always the same. You did not face Impossible things alone. You called the People who would come.

She sent Emrys for Fin and Charlotte. She sent Aidan next door for Quint and Kaida. She told Tim's Patrol Route to Aidan as he went out the door, because Marina Knew Tim's Patrol Route the way she Knew everything about the People she Loved — Completely, and without having to think about it. She sent word to Cade and Beatrix.

Then she came back to the Kitchen where Aster was still standing with his coat half on and she looked at him.

"Sit down," she said, not unkindly. "They'll be here soon."

Aster sat down.

Fintan, sensing the particular quality of the Morning without understanding it, climbed into his lap and stayed there. Aster let him. He put one hand on his little Brother's back and looked at the Letter on the table and tried to think clearly and found that he couldn't quite, not yet.

Ada arrived first.

She had been on her way to the House already, for the Cabin, and she came through the door with her coat on and her hair still down and she looked at Aster's face and stopped.

"What happened," she said. Not a question.

Aster nodded at the Letter on the table.

Ada read it. She set it down. She came and sat beside him and she did not say anything, because there was nothing to say yet, and Ada Knew the difference between the time for words and the time for presence. She put her hand over his on the table and stayed.

They came quickly, the way the Family Always came when Marina called. Quint and Kaida arrived with Collette and Kas, Collette's face already serious, Kas reading the room the moment he walked through the door. Cade and Beatrix came with them, Cade's expression shifting the moment he saw Marina's face into something that had seen hard things before and was ready to see them again. Beatrix went straight to Marina without a word, the particular solidarity of two Women who had been through Impossible things Together and Knew how to stand beside each other in them.

Fin and Charlotte came through the door with Marcus a step behind them. Fin had the look he got when something required him to be the Person he had Always been — Steady, Present, already Thinking. Charlotte's hand found Marina's arm briefly as she passed. Marcus positioned himself near the door without being asked, quiet and attentive, the way Marcus Always was.

Tim arrived in uniform, still carrying the particular alertness of Someone pulled off a Patrol Route, and he came in and looked at the assembled Family and then at Aster and said nothing, just moved to stand near Quint.

Cade looked around the room and then at Emrys. "You said Family Emergency," he said.

"Yes," Emrys said.

"Where's the Letter," Fin said.

Marina handed it to him.

The room was quiet while Fin read it. Charlotte read it over his shoulder. Marcus, when Fin passed it to him without comment, read it and handed it back without expression, which was its own kind of expression.

The Letter made its way around the room. Aster watched each face receive it. Quint's jaw tightening. Kaida's eyes going still and careful. Collette looking up at Aster when she finished with something in her face that was not quite fear and not quite fury but somewhere between the two. Kas reading it twice, the way Aster had, as though it might mean something different the second time. Cade's expression going flat and hard in the way Cade's expression went flat and hard when something had made him angry enough to be quiet about it. Beatrix pressing her lips together. Tim reading it with the particular attention of Someone whose job required him to assess threats and finding this one considerable.

When everyone had read it the room was very quiet.

Fintan, who had migrated from Aster's lap to the floor and was now sitting near Gale with the focused attention of someone attempting to Interest a Cat in a piece of string, was the only Person in the room not looking at the Letter or at Aster.

"He arranged the arrest," Quint said. His voice was even. "The Council gave the Order the information about Tarsus."

"Yes," Aster said.

Tim looked at the Letter again, then at the room. "If Tarsus was taken by the Order and is now in the custody of the Council," he said, with the careful precision of Someone working through it, "then the transfer didn't happen through legitimate channels. Someone inside the Order arranged it." He looked at Fin. "That would mean the Order has been compromised."

Fin was quiet for a moment.

"Maerath," he said. Not a guess. The particular quietness of Someone who had been in that Hall and had been turning it over since.

The room absorbed this. The implications of it — that the Order itself had been compromised, that the Trial had been engineered, that the imprisonment had always been intended to lead here — settled over the assembled Family like weather coming in.

"He wants you to come alone," Aidan said. He was looking at Aster with the particular expression of a Father who had already run through every version of this conversation and Knew where each one ended.

"Yes," Aster said.

"And you're considering it," Aidan said.

It was not quite a question.

Aster looked at his Father. "If I don't go, they'll hurt him. They likely already have." He paused. "The Letter says he's alive. It doesn't say he's unharmed."

The room was quiet again.

"He wants the Book," Emrys said.

"And the Dawn," Aster said. "He thinks if he has me he has both."

"Does he," Cade said. It was not a question either. It was Cade, who had Known Aster since he was small, making a point in the particular way Cade made points — briefly, and without elaboration, and Trusting the Person he was speaking to, to Understand it.

Aster looked at him.

"I'm not going to give him either," Aster said. "I'm going to get Tarsus."

"Alone," Emrys said.

"The Letter says—"

"I Know what the Letter says," Emrys said. "I'm asking if you actually intend to walk into the Council of Darkness alone."

Aster was quiet for a moment.

"I intend to walk in," he said. "What happens after that depends on what I find."

Fin looked at him for a long moment. The look of Someone who had made Impossible Choices himself and Recognized the shape of one being made in front of him.

"You're not going alone," Fin said.

"The Letter—"

"I Know what the Letter says," Fin said, with a quietness that closed the subject. "You're not going alone."

Aster looked around the room. At his Grandfather, Steady and Certain. At his Father, who had already made his Decision and was simply waiting for Aster to catch up to it. At his Mother, who had called every Person in this room because this was what Marina did in a crisis — she gathered the People who would come, and they came, and then they faced the Impossible thing Together.

At Ada, who was looking at him with the particular expression of Someone who had already Decided and was not going to be argued with.

At Collette and Kas, who had been with him in Inriva Almare when the Projections were waiting in the alley, who had closed around him then and were closing around him now.

At Cade, who had raised his cup when Uriel found his Name, who had been on Shadowlight at the Beginning of all of this.

At Tim, in his uniform, who was already Thinking about the address at the bottom of the Letter.

At Emrys, who had found him in the window seat and said it would just mean we lost two People instead of one.

He looked at all of them.

"Alright," Aster said quietly.

Not surrender. Agreement. The particular Moment of Someone who had been trying to Protect the People around him and had finally, fully Understood that they were not going to let him. That Together they would Protect Each Other, by Being exactly Who They Were.

"Alright," he said again. "Then we go Together."

The Dawn moved around him, soft and Steady, the way it moved when something True had been said.

Gale looked up from the piece of string Fintan had been trailing across the floor and regarded the room, and the People in it. Family, in every sense of the Word.

"Good," Gale said.

Fintan looked at the Cat with Complete Delight. "Gale talk!" he said, as though this were the most Remarkable thing that had happened all Morning.

It broke the tension the way only Fintan could break tension — Completely, and without trying, and with the infectious Certainty that the World was fundamentally a Good and Interesting place.

Aster Laughed. It was small and brief, and it Surprised him, the way Fintan Always surprised him, arriving in places he had no right to reach.

The Dawn glowed warm around him.

 

CHAPTER 23

 

 

The road to Ashvale Manor ran East along the Coast, where the Land flattened out before rising again into the low Hills that marked the edge of Brennan's Jurisdiction. Tim Knew it. He had walked this stretch of Caerwyn more times than he could count, in all weathers and all Seasons, and he walked it now with the particular Attention of Someone who was not walking it as a Patrol Deputy but had not stopped being one either.

They had left StarTide before dawn.

Beatrix had stood in the doorway of the Bollard House with Fintan on her hip and watched them go. Fintan had waved with great Enthusiasm, entirely Unbothered, already asking Beatrix something about Gale. Cade had looked back once. Beatrix had met his eyes and nodded, the particular communication of two People who had been Together long enough to say everything necessary without words.

Then they had turned and walked into the dark, and StarTide had fallen away behind them.

 

Beatrix Discovered, approximately forty minutes after the others left, that watching Fintan Bollard was not a task that could be approached with any degree of complacency.

She had Known this in theory. She had not fully appreciated it in practice.

He was in the Kitchen. Then he was not in the Kitchen. She turned around and he was gone and she Teleported to the top of the stairs and found him attempting to climb the bookshelf in the upstairs hallway with the focused Determination of Someone who had identified a Goal and saw no reason why furniture should prevent him from Achieving it.

"Fintan," she said.

"Up," Fintan said, by way of explanation.

She lifted him down. He immediately began moving toward the bookshelf again. She Teleported him to the Kitchen.

He looked around the Kitchen. He looked at her. He looked at his hands, where a curl of White Fire was forming at his fingertips with the idle inevitability of water finding a drain.

"No," Beatrix said.

Fintan looked at the Fire. He looked at her. He extinguished it with the air of Someone making a significant concession.

Charlotte had placed Warding on every surface in the room that could burn. She had done this almost as soon as they had Discovered that Fintan's Gift was Fire that burned pure white. Beatrix was Grateful for this in a way she had not anticipated being grateful for anything Today.

Gale, from his position on top of the highest Hitchen cabinet, observed all of this with the expression of Someone who had seen everything and expected nothing different.

The Manor sat at the end of a long approach, stone walls and dark windows, the kind of Building that had been old before anyone currently Living had been Born. It did not look like a place where terrible things happened. It looked like a place that had simply been here long enough to have seen them.

Tim stopped the Group in the tree line at the edge of the Grounds.

"Servants entrance," he said quietly, nodding toward the East side of the Building. "There's a door. It won't be the one they're watching."

"How do you know they're not watching it?" Emrys asked.

"Because they're expecting one Person to walk through the front," Tim said. "They'll be watching the front."

Fin looked at the Manor. His hand was resting on the hilt of his sword with the ease of Someone who had been doing that for forty years.

"Aster goes first," Aidan said. It was not a question.

"Aster goes first," Aster said.

He looked at his Father. Aidan looked back at him with the expression of a Man who had made Peace with something difficult and was not going to let the difficulty show.

"Keep him talking," Marina said. "Not long. Just long enough."

"I Know," Aster said.

Ada looked at him. She had said what she needed to say on the road, quietly, when they had fallen a few steps behind the others, and Aster had listened and nodded and held her hand briefly in the dark. It had been enough.

He left the tree line and walked toward the front of the manor alone.

The door opened before he reached it.

Orthos Malus stood in the doorway in his black cloak and his battered cowboy hat and regarded Aster with the pleasant expression of Someone who had been expecting exactly this.

"Asterys," he said. "I said we would meet again."

"You have Tarsus," Aster said.

"I do," Orthos said. "Come in."

The Entrance Hall was cold and dim, lit by torches that burned green — not the green of anything natural, but the green of something that had been made wrong deliberately, their light casting shadows that moved slightly out of step with the People making them. Aster felt the wrongness of it before he understood it, the way you felt a change in weather before the clouds arrived.

Orthos walked ahead of him with his hands clasped behind his back, unhurried.

"I appreciate your cooperation," Orthos said. "I had wondered if you might bring company."

"The Letter said to come alone," Aster said.

"It did," Orthos agreed pleasantly. He glanced back at Aster. "And yet."

Aster said nothing.

Orthos smiled and kept walking.

"I want to see him," Aster said. "Before anything else. I want to see that he's alive."

Orthos considered this for a moment. Then he nodded, as though it were a reasonable request that cost him nothing to grant.

"Of course," he said. "This way."

The door to the room was at the end of a stone corridor and Aster heard the silence of it before Orthos opened the door — a particular quality of quiet, the kind that accumulated in a place where Someone had been held for a long time.

Then the door opened and the green light spilled out and Aster walked through and stopped.

The room was wrong in a way he Felt before he understood it. Stone walls, no windows, the green torches in the corners burning their unnatural light. A shallow pit in the floor with a Runic Circle carved into the stone below it. A chain on the wall, iron and heavy, connected to a manacle. And on the floor of the pit, curled on his side because the Circle wouldn't allow him to lay flat, barefoot and still —

Tarsus.

Aster's chest did something that was not quite breathing.

The hooded figure was already there, standing in the green torchlight against the far wall, still and silent, watching. Aster looked at it for a moment and looked away. He filed it. He kept his face still.

"He's alive," Orthos said, from behind him. "As Promised."

Tarsus's eyes opened. They found Aster across the room with the slow focus of Someone coming back from somewhere far away, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

Then Tarsus said, his voice rough and very quiet, "You brought them."

"Yes," Aster said.

"Good," Tarsus said.

The door behind Aster opened.

They came in the way the Family did everything — Completely, and without hesitation, and from more directions than the Council had accounted for. Ada had put Quint and Kaida, Collette, and Kasahn, through the servants entrance the moment Aster had cleared the front door. Tim and Marcus had come through a ground floor window on the West side with the quiet efficiency of People who had done harder things. Aidan and Marina and Emrys had come through the Entrance Hall behind Aster, following the path he had left open. Fin came through last, Charlotte a step behind him. Fin's sword was already drawn, and he took in the room with the single comprehensive look of Someone who had been in enough fights to Know immediately where the danger was.

The Council came through the door and out of the shadows simultaneously — four figures in black, moving with the coordinated Certainty of People who had prepared for a fight even while expecting compliance. The room, which had been still a moment before, became very loud very quickly.

Aster brought the Dawn up.

Light pushed outward from him, directed and deliberate, finding the edges of the Council's darkness and holding against it. It wasn't perfect. He was still Learning the shape of what he could do with the Dawn in combat, and the Council Members were formidable in ways that required him to move and think and adjust, the Light responding to his Focus the way fire responded to Breath. He pressed one Council Member back toward the wall and felt the resistance of it, the way the darkness pushed back, and held his ground.

Across the room Marina and Kaida had found each other without needing to speak.

Kaida's Starlight came up first — silver-white and precise, the Light of something Ancient and cold and entirely Certain — and Marina's Primal Light rose to meet it, warmer and more immediate, the two of them finding the same frequency the way two instruments found the same note. They turned it on the Runic Circle Together.

The Circle resisted.

It had been Built to hold something that was half Old God and half Dragon, and it Knew how to resist Light — the Runes carved to deflect and absorb and hold. The stone floor cracked along one line and sealed itself. Kaida pressed harder. Marina pressed harder. The Starlight and the Primal Light wound around each other and pushed into the Runes and the Circle cracked again, deeper this time, and held.

It did not break. But it was weakening.

Aidan's blade moved through the green torchlight, Ancient Fire bright along the edge of it. Quint's Primal Darkness pulled at the Council's footing. Collette worked with the focused stillness of someone opening a Black Hole with surgical precision, drawing a current away before it could land. Kas moved through the Dark Matter the way he Always moved — Certain, Quiet, exactly where he Needed to be. Tim and Marcus had engaged two Council Members near the door, swordplay fast and close in the confined space. Fin moved through the center of the room with the economy of Someone who had been fighting longer than most People present had been Alive. Charolette fought with him, Shielding him with Warding Magic, creating Barriers, and using her Light for offense. She kept her attention between Fin and the Circle, waiting for her moment to Help Tarsus.

Fin wasn't what he used to be. He was slower now, and he felt it in his back with every turn, but he still gave it everything he had. He and Char moved as one unit. He Fought and she Defended. She shot out her Light and Fin blocked someone coming up behind them. He didn't complain, but Charolette Knew.

It was in the chaos of it — a Council Member stumbling back, catching the hooded figure's cloak — that the hood shifted.

It pulled back for just a second before a hand came up and pulled it forward again. But in that second, in the green torchlight, Aster caught a profile. Dark hair going grey at the temple. A jaw he had seen before, across a dining table, in a house in Inriva Almare.

The hand that pulled the hood back up caught the torchlight for just a moment.

Gold. A signet ring. A Family Crest stamped into the metal — the same Crest Cal wore on the smaller ring he never took off. The same ring his Father wore.

The thought arrived and he couldn't push it away fast enough and for one half second he was not entirely in the room —

The Electricity came wide and without warning, the way a storm came, filling the space between one breath and the next. It caught Emrys and Kaida and Marina and Aster all at once — sharp and total and merciless — and Aster went down on one knee with the current running through him and Understood in his body, in one terrible instant, exactly what Tarsus had endured in the pit. Not abstractly. In his bones and his blood and the breath that wouldn't come properly for a moment that lasted too long.

Orthos was already moving.

He crossed the room with the calm deliberateness of someone who had already Decided how this ended, and Fin saw him coming and moved to intercept and a Council Member stepped into his path and the moment closed. Orthos's hand came up and pressed against Aster's forehead —

And the World became something Aster had no name for.

Dark and cold and deliberate, pouring into him like water into a sealed room — filling the spaces between his Thoughts, finding the edges of everything he Knew and beginning, methodically, to soften them. Not pain. Worse than pain. The sensation of his own Mind becoming unfamiliar to him, the things he was Certain of losing their edges, his Mother's face and the window seat and the Harbor and Tarsus saying 'you brought them' — all of it beginning to thin, to drift, to become smoke where it had been solid.

He could feel it happening and he could not stop it, and he did not know what it was and that was the worst part — that there was no name for it, no frame for it, nothing to hold onto except the Knowledge that something was being taken and he could not make it stop.

The Dawn did not wait for him to ask.

It came up from somewhere below Thought, below Choice, below anything Aster could have named or controlled — not a decision but a Refusal, total and immediate, the Light rising in him like a Tide that had been held back and simply stopped being held. It Recognized the violation the way a body recognized wrongness, and it Answered it the only way it Knew how.

The room filled with Light.

White-gold and absolute, pouring into every corner of the stone room simultaneously. The green torches went out. The Runic Circle — cracked and straining from what Marina and Kaida had done to it — went entirely dark and did not come back. The chain fell from the wall. And everyone in the room went down, Friend and enemy alike, the Light too Complete and too sudden for anyone to stand against it. Fin hit the floor. Aidan hit the floor. The Council Members crumpled where they stood.

Orthos's hand left Aster's forehead.

The silence that followed was very loud.

Aster was on his knees. He was breathing. The room was dark except for the Light still coming off him, softer now, settling back into the quiet glow it usually kept. His Thoughts were His Own. All of them. He checked, the way you checked for something you were afraid to have lost, and they were all there — his Mother's face, the window seat, the Harbor, Tarsus saying 'you brought them'.

All of it. Still His.

Orthos was gone. The hooded figure with the Electricity was gone. The other Council Members were gone — disappeared in Shadow between one moment and the next, taking their wounded and leaving nothing behind but the cold stone room and the extinguished torches and the broken Circle.

Aster thought about the moment the hood fell. The Familiar features, the gold signet ring catching the torchlight. He pushed it aside, filed it away, and Hoped he wasn't right.

Charlotte was at the pit. She had been at the pit before the Dawn hit and she had stayed through it, her Warding up around herself and Tarsus both when she realized someone had meant to harm him, and she was kneeling beside him now with her hands already working, Light Magic moving through her palms and into him, Quiet and Steady and entirely Focused.

Tarsus was looking at the ceiling.

"Hello Charlotte," he said, his voice very rough.

"Hello Tarsus," Charlotte said, without looking up from her work. "Lie still."

"I am lying still," Tarsus said. "I don't think I could do anything else."

"Good," Charlotte said. "Keep doing that."

Fin pulled himself up slowly from the floor, with the expression of a Man who was going to have opinions about his back Tomorrow and was setting them aside for now. He looked at Tarsus in the pit and his expression did the thing it did when something had made him angry enough to be very quiet about it.

Aster crossed the room and knelt at the edge of the pit. Tarsus turned his head and looked at him, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

"You brought all of them," Tarsus said.

"Yes," Aster said.

"I told you not to come alone," Tarsus said.

Aster looked at him. "You didn't tell me anything. You weren't there to tell me anything."

Tarsus was quiet for a moment. "Fair," he said.

Aidan crouched beside Aster. He looked at Tarsus in the pit and then at Charlotte.

"Can he be moved?"

"Soon," Charlotte said. "Give me a few more minutes."

"Take what you need," Aidan said.

The Family gathered in the room around the pit, in the dark with the broken Circle and the extinguished green torches, and they waited the way the Bollards and Lamonts waited — Completely, and without going anywhere.

Tim was already at the door, looking back down the corridor, his hand on his sword. His expression was the expression of Someone who was going to have a great deal of paperwork to file in the Morning and considered it entirely Worth it.

Marcus stood at the other side of the room and said nothing, which was what Marcus did, and which meant everything was as under control as it was going to get.

When Charlotte said Tarsus could be moved, it took Aidan and Emrys and Quint to get him out of the pit and up the corridor and out into the Morning air, and Tarsus bore it with the Dignity of Someone who had Decided that Accepting Help was not the same as being helpless.

The Sun was up over Caerwyn.

Tarsus stood in it — leaning heavily on Emrys, barefoot on the grass, considerably worse for wear — and he turned his face up to the light the way he Always turned his face up to the light, and he Breathed.

Aster stood beside him and said nothing.

After a moment Tarsus asked, "The Veil is still closed?"

"Yes," Aster said.

"Good," Tarsus said. "That's what Matters."

The Dawn moved around Aster, soft and warm in the Morning light, and for the first time since the Letter had arrived it Felt like something other than a warning.

 

Beatrix, at that precise moment, was standing in the Bollard Kitchen watching Fintan attempt to give Gale a hat he had constructed from a dish towel.

Gale was tolerating this with the Ancient Patience of something that had Survived considerably worse.

The hat fell off. Fintan picked it up and tried again.

"He likes it," Fintan said, with Complete Confidence.

Beatrix looked at Charlotte's Warding, still quietly holding on every surface in the room that could burn, and Decided that some things were simply beyond her jurisdiction.

"I'm sure he does," she said.

 

CHAPTER 24

 

 

The first Morning Tarsus woke in the Bollard House, he stayed in bed until the sun had fully cleared the Harbor.

Not because he was asleep. Because the bed was warm and the room was quiet and no one was going to come through the door, and he had Learned, in the days in the pit, to be very still when nothing was happening to him. It had been a way of conserving something. He wasn't sure he needed to do it anymore, but his body hadn't caught up to that yet.

Eventually he got up.

Marina had put him in the room at the back of the House, the one with the window that caught the Morning light. He stood in it for a while with his hands around a cup of tea that someone had left outside his door and he looked at the Harbor and the rooftops and the Water beyond and he Breathed.

The Sun was warm on his face.

He stayed there until the warmth of it had reached somewhere deeper than his skin.

He ate Breakfast with the Family. He didn't say much and no one required him to. Fintan, who had been informed that Tarsus was a Guest and should be treated Gently, lasted approximately four minutes before climbing into his lap, and showing him a drawing he had made of Gale that bore only a passing resemblance to any Cat that had ever Existed.

"Gale," Fintan said, pointing at it with great Confidence.

"I can see that," Tarsus said.

Fintan beamed and showed him the drawing again from a slightly different angle, in case the perspective had been the issue.

Gale, from his position on the windowsill, regarded the drawing with the expression of Someone who had opinions about the likeness and was Choosing not to share them.

Tarsus looked at the drawing and then at the Cat, and then at Fintan's face, open and Certain and entirely Uncomplicated, and something in his chest that had been very tight for a long time loosened slightly.

"It's Very Good," he said.

Fintan accepted this as no more than his due and climbed down to show the drawing to Emrys instead.

On the second day Charlotte declared him well enough to be left unsupervised, which Marina interpreted as well enough to sit in the Garden, which was not quite the same thing, but Tarsus didn't argue. He sat on the bench at the back of the House in the Afternoon light, and Aster came and sat beside him and they were quiet Together for a while in the way they had Learned to be quiet Together, without it meaning anything was wrong.

After a while Tarsus said, "I'm going to contact Uriel."

Aster looked at him.

"I Know," Aster said.

"I can't hide from the Order," Tarsus said. "And I wouldn't want to. They need to know what happened. What Maerath did." He paused. "And I want my Parents back."

He said it simply, the way he said most things — without performance, without apology. It was True and he saw no reason to dress it as anything other than what it was.

"What do you think they'll do?" Aster asked.

Tarsus considered this for a moment. "I think they'll release them," he said. "Speaking against me now would require explaining why. And the Answer to that question leads somewhere none of them want to go." He was quiet for a moment. "I'd do them a service by coming forward. They Know it. I Know it. The mathematics of it are not complicated."

Aster looked at the Harbor.

"You're going to walk back into the Order Hall," he said.

"Yes," Tarsus said.

"After what they did."

"After what Maerath did," Tarsus said, with the particular precision of Someone who had Thought about this Carefully and arrived at a distinction that Mattered. "The Order is not Maerath. The Law that took me was wrong. That doesn't mean the institution is beyond repair." He paused. "Someone has to tell them what happened from the inside. It should be me."

Aster was quiet for a moment.

"Alright," he said.

"You're not going to argue," Tarsus said.

"Would it Help?"

Tarsus considered. "No," he said.

"Then I'm not going to argue," Aster said.

They sat Together on the bench in the Afternoon light and looked at the Water, and after a while Gale appeared from somewhere and settled between them with the Satisfied air of a Cat who had identified the correct place to be, and Tarsus put his hand on his fur without thinking about it, and Gale purred, and the Afternoon went on.

He called Uriel the next Morning.

He went to the Garden alone, early, before the House was fully awake, and he stood in the light and he said the Name quietly and waited.

Uriel came the way Uriel Always came — without announcement, without transition, simply Present where he had not been a moment before, his robes pale gold in the Morning light, his ageless face carrying the particular expression of Someone who had been expecting this and had been waiting with Patience.

"Tarsus," he said.

"Uriel," Tarsus said. "I need to speak with the Order."

"I Know," Uriel said. "I have been waiting for you to be Ready."

"I'm Ready," Tarsus said.

Uriel looked at him for a moment — the long, unhurried look of Someone reading something carefully. Then he nodded.

"Then we will go," he said.

The Order Hall was exactly as Tarsus Remembered it. The high vaulted ceiling. The long table. The Old Gods in their seats, watching him with the varied expressions of Beings who had Existed long enough to have Learned to keep most of what they Thought off their faces.

Maerath's seat was empty.

Tarsus stood before them, and he told them everything. The transfer. The pit. The green torches and the Runic Circle and the chain. Orthos Malus and the Council of Darkness operating on Caerwyn soil, in a Manor Belonging to Lord Edran Ashvale, using information that had come from inside the Order itself. He told them without embellishment and without anger, in the Precise and particular way he told things when the telling Mattered, and the Hall was very quiet while he Spoke.

When he finished he said, "I am asking for two things."

The Old Gods waited.

"The first, is that you investigate how the Council obtained information from within this institution, and that you address what you find." He paused. "The second is that you release my Parents. Lyra and Dartarius. Whatever the Law says about their Union — they have served this Order Faithfully. They have done nothing wrong. I would like them back."

The silence in the Hall was the silence of Beings doing mathematics.

Tarsus had been right about the mathematics. He watched it move across the faces of the Old Gods one by one — the calculation, the Recognition, the Understanding that speaking against him now required Answering questions none of them wanted to Answer. He had walked in voluntarily. He had submitted to their process. He had informed them of a breach in their own institution at personal cost. The Old God who raised a voice against releasing his Parents would be the Old God who had to explain why.

No voice was raised.

Uriel looked at Tarsus with something that was not quite a Smile but Lived in the same place.

"The Order Accepts your Testimony," he said. "And Grants your request."

They brought Lyra and Dartarius into the Hall.

Tarsus had not seen his Mother since before the Trial. He had not seen his Father since the Hall, across the distance of the Verdict, Dartarius's face doing the thing it did when something had broken his Heart, and he was not going to let it show.

Lyra came through the door first.

She was exactly as she Always was — tall and Certain, the Light of her moving around her the way Light moved around something that had Always been made of it. She saw Tarsus and she stopped.

Then she crossed the Hall in three strides and she Held him, and all the Dignity of the Old God of Light went somewhere else entirely, and Tarsus held her back with both arms and his face against her shoulder and he did not try to be composed about it because there was no one here he needed to be composed for.

Dartarius reached them a moment later and his arms came around both of them — the Dragon who had Loved an Old God and Built a Life at Starfall Sanctuary, who had told his Son stories about the People he should Know and the things he should be afraid of — and the Three of them stood in the Order Hall holding each other with all dignity gone and none of them caring even slightly.

It was over.

They were Together.

That was all that was required.

Lyra and Dartarius returned to Starfall Sanctuary.

It was where they Belonged — Lyra as its Keeper, Dartarius as its Guardian, the two of them back in the Place that was Theirs in the way that some Places were Simply and Completely Yours.

Tarsus Knew he could visit whenever he wanted. He could step through the Veil one Moment and be there in an instant. None of them said 'Goodbye' because it wasn't Truly a goodbye at all.

Tarsus walked with them to the edge of the City and watched his Mother's Light carry them upward, and his Father's wings catch the air, and he stood there until they were gone from sight.

Then he went back to StarTide.

He went back to the Bollard House and Marina fed him and Fintan showed him a new drawing, this one of what appeared to be a boat but might have been Gale from an unusual angle, and Aster sat across from him at the table and said nothing because nothing needed to be said.

That Evening, when the light was long and golden over the Harbor, Tarsus went to the Hills above StarTide.

He stood at the edge of the high ground and he looked out over the Town and the Water and the Sky, and he let the Change come the way it Always came — not a decision exactly, more like a door opening that had Always been there. The Dragon rose where the Young Man had been, silver-scaled and iridescent, catching the Evening light in colors that shifted as he moved, and he spread his wings and the air caught him and StarTide fell away below.

He flew.

Not towards anything. Not away from anything. Just the air and the light and the particular Freedom of being exactly What You Were without apology or explanation, the Harbor and the rooftops of StarTide spread out below him like something he had Always Known and was only now seeing clearly.

Aster was in the Garden when Tarsus passed overhead.

He looked up. Tarsus banked once, low enough that the shimmer of his scales caught the Evening light above the rooftops, and then climbed again into the Sky, and Aster watched him go with his hand shading his eyes and something settling in his chest that had been displaced since the Hall.

Ada came and stood beside him.

She didn't say anything. She looked up at the Dragon moving through the Evening Sky above StarTide and she stood close enough that her shoulder was against his, and she Waited the way Ada waited — Completely, and without requiring anything from the waiting.

After a while Aster said, "He's Alright."

"Yes," Ada said.

"He's going to be Alright."

"Yes," Ada said again, with the particular Certainty of Someone who had Decided this was True and saw no reason to qualify it.

Aster looked at the Sky where Tarsus had been and Felt the Dawn moving around him, soft and steady, the way it moved when something True had been said, or something Right had happened. He didn't try to quiet it. He had been trying to quiet it for a long time, and it had never worked, and he was beginning to Understand that it wasn't going to.

The Light was part of Him. The People around him were part of Him. The House behind him with its noise and its Warmth, and Fintan's drawings on the Kitchen table, and Gale on the windowsill, his Mother's voice and his Father's hand on his shoulder — all of it was part of Him. And none of it could be made smaller by his trying to make Himself smaller, and he had Known this for a long time without quite being able to Live it.

He was Living it Now.

Not perfectly. Not all at once. But the trying to disappear had stopped, somewhere between the window seat and the Garden, the bench, Fintan in his lap saying 'you're sad' with the Complete seriousness of Someone who Knew exactly what to do about it, which was to Stay. The Family had Stayed. Ada had Stayed. The Dawn had Stayed, moving around him whether he wanted it to or not, Refusing to be diminished because he was afraid.

You could not hide from the People Who Knew You. Not really. Not when they had seen every version of you and Chosen You anyway, with full information, every time.

That was what it was to be Known.

Not Loved despite the difficult parts. Known — all of it, the fear and the light and the trying to shrink and the Dawn that wouldn't let him — and Chosen anyway, Completely, without reservation.

Aster stood in the Garden in the Evening light with Ada's shoulder against his and the Dawn warm around him, and Tarsus somewhere above in the Sky over StarTide, and he did not try to be smaller than he was.

He was exactly Himself.

Inside the House, Fintan was showing Emrys the drawing of the boat that might have been Gale.

"Boat," Fintan said.

"That's Gale," Emrys said.

Fintan looked at the drawing. He looked at Emrys. "Boat," he said again, with finality.

Gale, from the windowsill, declined to comment.

The waves lapped against the Shore. People went about their Lives. StarTide, and Everyone in it, was Simply Themselves. Completely. Unashamedly. Known and Loved.

 

 

THE END

 

(The Story Continues in Book 3— The Åsten Chronicles: Asterys — When Dawn Shines (Book 3) )

 

 

EPILOGUE 

 

 

The Parlor was warm, which Orthos found faintly irritating. He had not chosen this House, and he would not have chosen a fire this large, but Maerath felt the cold more than he used to, and there were things Worth tolerating in the interest of a useful conversation.

Maerath was in the chair nearest the hearth. He looked diminished. That was the word for it. Not injured, not broken, but smaller than he had been, as though the exposure at the Order Hall had taken something from him that had not yet grown back. Orthos supposed it had. Being seen was its own kind of wound.

"They'll be Celebrating," Maerath said. He was looking at the fire.

"Yes."

"Tarsus is Home."

"Yes."

A silence. The fire shifted. Maerath turned his head slightly, not quite looking at Orthos, the way he did when he was working toward something he wasn't sure how to say.

"We underestimated him," he said finally.

"We underestimated the Boy," Orthos said. "It was an error in our assessment. It will not be made again."

Maerath said nothing. He Understood, as he Always understood, what was not being said.

Orthos stayed until the conversation had reached its natural end, which was not long after. There was nothing more to discuss tonight. The shape of what came next was already clear to him, had been clear since Ashvale, since the moment the Dawn had filled that room and he had felt, for the first time in longer than he cared to examine, something that functioned like alarm. He did not need to speak it aloud. He needed to write it down, which was a different thing entirely.

He found the Journal where he always kept it now.

He wrote for some time.

'Ashvale was a failure of my own making. I will not distribute the blame elsewhere. That is not what this is for.

I have miscalculated. The Dawn is not simply Light. I have faced Light before, in Lyra's hands, in the hands of those who carried it before her, and I believed I understood what I was facing. I did not. What stood in that room at Ashvale was not Light in the way I have known it. The Boy and the Dawn are not separate things. I do not yet have the language for what they are becoming together, and that troubles me more than the loss of the Manor.

I will not make the same approach twice. I will learn the shape of what he is before I move again. I will be patient. I have always been patient. That has not changed.

What has changed is that I am careful now. In a way I have not been careful in some time. I will not write the word. But I am writing this down and I will burn it, which is the closest I come to honesty.

Unmaking him was always the intention. I had almost succeeded with Lumen before the escape. My Gift had never failed me before, and it did not fail me then. Lumen's memories burned as cleanly as any I have taken. That he got away before the work was finished was a matter of circumstance, not capability.

I will succeed again. The Boy is not Lumen. But the principle holds. There are methods I have not yet employed. There are approaches I have not yet tried. I will be patient. I will be thorough.

He is strongest when he is not alone. I have seen that now. I will plan accordingly.

He is nineteen years old. He is afraid of himself. Those things are still true. They will not always be.

                                                  Asterys'

He looked at the Name for a long moment. Then he continued, wrote three more lines he did not reread, and set the pen down.

When he was finished he tore the page out carefully, along the binding, and held it to the candle.

He watched it catch. Watched the fire move across his own handwriting, consuming the careful sentences, the assessments, the conclusions he had reached alone in a warm room while StarTide Celebrated. The edges blackened and curled inward. The Name went last. 'Asterys'. The letters closing on themselves one by one until there was nothing left but ash and the faint smell of smoke.

He set the remains in the grate.

He closed the Journal.

Outside, somewhere far to the North, Regalis was already in motion. He had seen to that before Ashvale. Whatever happened at the Manor, the work in the Capital would continue. The Letters had been sent. The seats were filled. The City that looked, as it Always looked, like a Place where everything was proceeding correctly, was proceeding correctly. Just not in the direction anyone outside this room understood.

He was not finished.

He had barely begun.