Tuerier patrols in Tés Aváir's third district report a 340% rise in unauthorised use of magic over the past three months. The captains in the area claim this is normal. It is not.
Internal report to Tuerier Command, December
Chapter 21
Retia Walks Away
It was Retia's idea.
Not the impulsive kind of idea Ahra would have had, the kind that comes out of your mouth before your brain has checked it. Retia's idea was the other kind: the kind that has lain ripening in silence for weeks until it is hard and polished and unavoidable.
"I want to find him," she said. It was a Friday evening in the First-Year Room. The fire was burning low and crackling faintly, and the air smelt of beech wood and the tea Ahra always brewed in the evenings, a herbal blend his grandmother sent him that smelt of camomile and something sweeter I didn't know. We had waited until the others had gone up, and now it was just the three of us and our Amícûs and the orange glow of the fire. Ahra's scent of warm bark and honey mingled with the tea and the smoke, and it was the smell I had begun to connect with feeling safe: the evenings when it was just us. "Not wait for Cajis to see him again. Not hope. Find him."
Ahra put his cup down on the arm of his chair. Too hard. Tea slopped over the rim and ran down the chair, and he mopped it up with his sleeve without looking down. He looked at me. I looked at Retia.
"How?" I said.
"Cajis saw him by the harbour. We start there." Her fingers lay flat on the arm of the chair, and they didn't move. Retia not moving was Retia who had made up her mind. "Tomorrow. I've asked for permission for a day in Tés Aváir. You're coming with me."
That wasn't a question either. And she had only asked permission for herself. I didn't think of that until afterwards.
"Me?" said Ahra.
"Not you. Chris." She looked at Ahra. "If all three of us go, people will notice. And we don't know who notices what here."
Ahra opened his mouth to protest, but something in Retia's look made him shut it again. He looked down into his teacup and nodded.
"Be careful," he said.
Before we went up, I told them what I hadn't told them. About Surain in the niche in the wall. About the clearing and the river, and that he would train me every time he came. He had said I should tell my friends, and I had waited for two days.
Ahra looked at me over the rim of his cup. "Why didn't you say so before?"
I opened my mouth. I wanted to say that I had needed to keep it to myself for a while. That it was mine. That there were reasons. And then I heard how it would sound: like Edrin, like Kalmin, like Hanne. Like all the adults I was angry with.
I closed my mouth again. About the mountain and what Arcanus had said about my father, I still said nothing. I noticed that, and I did it anyway.
Retia said nothing. She just looked at me and nodded, as if she had got an answer anyway. Ahra drank his tea. The fire settled in the grate with a small, sighing sound.
When I got up in the dark, Nihil stirred in the other bed. He said nothing.
We took the early ferry on Saturday morning. It was seven o'clock, and the sun wasn't up yet, and the quay was almost empty. We stood on deck, just the two of us, and the ferry rocked slowly out from the shore. Retia's scent was stronger in the morning cold, salt wind and wild roses, and it mingled with the sea air.
We didn't say much on the way. Retia stood at the rail looking towards the horizon with the focused stillness she always had before she had to do something hard. I stood beside her with my hands wrapped round a cup of hot tea from the ferry's little tea counter, and the warmth of the steam curled up towards my face.
"Are you scared?" I said.
"No," she said. Pause. "Yes. But not of him. Of what I'll find out."
It was the most honest thing she had said about her father. Not that she was afraid of the man. That she was afraid of the truth. And I knew that. I knew that better than most.
December had come to Tés Aváir. The city lay under a low grey sky that threatened snow but didn't deliver it, and the wind off the sea was cold and raw and carried a smell of salt and seaweed and something metallic that reminded me of the Dherak smell the passages always had, only outdoors, spread out over the whole city.
The streets were half empty. It was too cold to go out without a reason, and the people who were out walked fast, with their robes pulled tight and their hoods up and their faces bent down against the wind. The stalls on the quay were shut, and the flowers that had stood in pots the last time we were here had been replaced by empty pots with withered stalks.
We went down towards the harbour. Retia walked in front with quick, determined steps, and her robe flapped in the wind, and Fulmen sat on her shoulder with its feathers fluffed out against the cold. I walked behind her with Alôpex in my hood and my hands deep in my pockets.
The harbour was a broad quay of black stone with iron bollards and a smell of tar and salt water and fish. The boats lay moored and rocked slowly, and the surface of the water was dark and restless, and the sound of waves hitting the edge of the quay was hollow and rhythmic.
"Here," said Retia, and stopped. "Cajis said it was here."
We stood still and looked. The harbour was almost empty. A couple of fishermen were working on a boat a little way down the quay, with rough hands and weather-beaten faces. A woman walked past with a basket of fish and didn't look at us.
We waited. The cold crept in slowly, the first quarter of an hour through our boots, the next quarter of an hour through our trousers, the third quarter of an hour through the cloth of our robes. My feet went numb first, then my fingers, then the tips of my ears. I pulled my hood up and tucked my hands under my arms and stamped my feet on the cobbles every now and then, and the sound was hollow and lonely in the empty harbour.
Retia stood completely still the whole time. Two hours. Her eyes were fixed on the streets that led down to the harbour, and she didn't move, and she didn't complain. Her body was upright and motionless, and there was something in that stillness that reminded me of the discipline I had found for myself in the cold water: the ability to let the cold be there without fighting it. I had taught her to stand in the river. She hadn't learned this from me. It had been in her all along.
A fishing boat came back and moored at the quay with the sound of ropes being thrown and wood grinding against stone. The fishermen hauled in nets heavy with catch and ice, and the smell of fish and salt and cold sea drifted over to us. A gull screamed. Another answered.
"Retia," I said after two hours. "He's not coming."
"Wait."
"It's December. It's cold. We've been standing here for..."
"Wait."
I waited.
He didn't come. But something else happened.
A man walked past us on the quay.
He came from the street that led down towards the third district, and he walked with a stride that is neither too fast nor too slow, steps you deliberately keep neutral. Medium height. Brown robe. Hood up. Hands in his pockets. Nothing remarkable. Nothing at all.
But as he passed us, two things happened. The first was that his head turned a centimetre towards Retia, and his steps stopped for a split second, half a step cut short and corrected again, so brief that you would only notice it if you had spent your whole life watching how people move.
I had spent my whole life doing it.
The second thing was his scent. It hit me.
Burnt wood. Ash. Something bitter. The same scent as Drax in the animal shop. The same base note. Not identical, but from the same family, the same world, the same kind of darkness.
"Retia," I whispered. "The man who just went past. He looked at you."
Retia turned round. The man was already twenty metres away, heading for a side street. His steps were too controlled. He wasn't walking at random. He was walking away.
"Fulmen," said Retia quietly. The falcon took off from her shoulder and flew silently out over the quay, high enough that the man wouldn't notice it, low enough to keep watch.
We waited. Fulmen circled. And five minutes later it came back and settled on Retia's arm, and Retia closed her eyes and listened to what the falcon had seen.
When she opened her eyes, her face was white.
"He went into a building. The third district. There were two men outside keeping watch." Her voice was flat. Controlled. "And on the door there was a symbol. A ring with a sword through it."
"What is it?"
"My father's mark," said Retia. Her fingers clenched at her side, slowly and hard, and she held her fists for three seconds before she let them go again. Her jaw was working as if she were chewing something that wasn't food. "He uses it on his letters. The ring with the sword and an N. Niram." She said the name as if it were a stone she had kept in her mouth too long. "Or, he used to use it. Before he stopped sending letters."
We stood still on the quay. The wind tugged at our robes and pulled at Retia's hair. The waves struck the stones with the hollow, monotonous sound water makes against stone in winter, heavier and slower than in summer. Somewhere out in the harbour a fishing boat clanged its bell.
"He knows I'm here," said Retia. Her voice wasn't frightened. It was angry. But it wasn't the kind of anger that explodes. It was the kind that freezes. The kind that settles in your jaw and in your hands and in your shoulders, which go up and stay there, and which doesn't go away just because you want it to. "My own father sends people to keep an eye on me. Instead of coming home and sitting down at the table and eating with us."
Her eyes were bright, but the tears stayed where they were. Retia didn't cry. Retia refused to cry over a man who wasn't there. It was her strength and her wound, and they were the same thing.
"Retia," I said.
"Let's go," she said. "I've seen enough."
She turned and walked. Her steps were quick and hard and struck the cobbles with a sound that said she was walking away from something she couldn't run from.
We walked. Back through the cold streets, past the shuttered shops, past the Tuerier patrol going the other way with quick steps. Retia walked fast and said nothing, and her steps were sharp on the cobbles, and there was something in the way she walked that said something inside her had grown harder in the last two hours.
On the ferry home she stood in the bow looking ahead towards Déynáir, and the wind tore at her hair, and her face was stiff and closed.
"Thanks for coming with me," she said without turning round.
"Of course."
"I mean it. Thanks for just being there. Without trying to make it better."
I said nothing. I stood beside her and let the wind take our silence and carry it out over the water. Déynáir appeared ahead of us, the castle drawn against the grey winter sky, and it looked the way it always had, solid and warm and safe, but I knew now that that wasn't all it was. Under it there were passages that pointed towards a mountain with something sealed up inside it. And behind that front of safe walls and warm fires there were people keeping secrets big enough to break families apart.
Retia leant against me a little. Not her hand this time. Her shoulder. Just a centimetre of contact through two layers of robe. But it was there.
"We'll work it all out," I said. "Everything about your father. Everything about mine."
She said nothing. But she nodded. And her shoulder stayed against mine, and we stood like that as the ferry came in to the quay, and we walked like that as we went ashore, and we walked like that the whole way up towards the castle in the December dark.
Nihil was sitting on his bed with a book when I came into the room. The lamp was burning, and the ermine's white snout poked out of his sleeve. He didn't look up.
"Haltora asked for you at lunch," he said. "I said you were in the library."
It was the first time he had lied for my sake. I didn't know what you said to that, so I said thanks. He turned a page.