The Council's archive has twenty-four shelves for the time of the War. The thirteenth is empty and always has been. The archivists dust it every week.

The Council's archivist, private correspondence

Chapter 22

The Attack

The last school trip to Tés Aváir before the Winter Solstice holiday fell on a Wednesday in the second week of December.

It was a tradition. Every year group went into town to buy presents and winter clothes and all the things you need for a holiday. I was shopping for a holiday I had no home to go to. For most students it was a day of celebration. They walked in groups down the high street, in and out of shops, with laughter and chatter and money jingling in their pockets. The stalls in the marketplace had opened again for the occasion, and they smelt of roast chestnuts and hot apple cider and the spiced, heavy smell of mulled wine that rose from copper jugs and settled over the square like a warm cloud.

The sky was grey and low, and the air was cold but not sharp, the kind of December day that is mild enough that you don't freeze but cold enough that you can see your breath, and the sun was nothing more than a paler patch behind the clouds.

The three of us walked down the high street together. Retia with her hands in the pockets of her robe and Fulmen on her shoulder, alert and quiet as always. Ahra with Lynx in his arms because the lynx refused to walk on the cold cobbles, and his face half buried in the lynx's warm fur. Alôpex ran at my feet and sniffed at everything, and her black eyes took note of every face we passed.

We bought a few things. A new quill for Ahra (his old one had snapped for the third time). A book on advanced strategy games for Retia, which she found in a second-hand bookshop in a side street. A small bottle of ink for me that changed colour depending on what you wrote.

It was normal. Everything was normal.

And then it wasn't normal any more.

The sound came first. Not a scream. A bang. The kind of bang you hear when magic hits stone, a hard, dry crack that echoes between the walls of the houses and sends the birds up off the roofs in a wild cloud of wings.

Everyone in the marketplace stopped. Heads turned. Eyes searched.

Another bang. Closer this time. And now the screaming started.

It came from the eastern end of the marketplace, from the street that led down towards the third district. People began to run, not towards the sound but away from it, and in their faces was a fear that said what was happening was not something you could look at and walk on past.

"Chris," said Alôpex in my head. "Magic. Strong. And blood."

"Blood?"

"I can smell it."

Retia was already moving. Not away from the sound. Towards it. She ran with Fulmen lifting off her shoulder and flying ahead of her, and her robe flapped out behind her, and her feet were quick and sure on the wet cobbles.

"Retia!" shouted Ahra.

She didn't stop.

I ran after her. Ahra followed, with Lynx jumping down out of his arms and running at his side. We pushed our way against the stream of people fleeing the other way, shoulders and elbows and faces white with panic. Ahra's scent of warm bark and honey was close at my side, sharper now, mixed with adrenaline and something sour that was his fear. And over all of it the smell of fear from everyone else, the metallic smell human bodies give off when they are frightened.

What we found when we reached the street was chaos.

I smelt them before I saw them. Burnt wood and ash, heavy and dense in the cold air. The same base note as the man on the quay.

Four men in ordinary market clothes, worn woollen coats and caps pulled down over their foreheads, stood in a half circle around a group of students. First years. Our year. I knew them: Torin with the red hair, Sera, and a boy and a girl with the two plaited branches of Ästonie on their sleeves, whom I knew from the dining hall. They stood pressed up against a wall with faces white with terror. Torin was bleeding from his forehead. Sera was holding her arm tight against her body, bent at an angle that said something was broken.

The men weren't big. They weren't dramatic. They just stood there, four people you would have walked past at a stall without looking at twice, and they moved with the controlled calm you have when you have done something many times and aren't afraid of it.

One of them raised his hand towards the bleeding student, and his fingers shaped something that wasn't a spell but glowed anyway, a dark, reddish light that quivered in the air.

Retia got there first.

She came from the side. Not from the front. From the side, through a narrow alley between two buildings, and she hit the nearest man with a force that was too great to come from a fifteen-year-old girl alone. There was Dherak in it, without a single word. Her hand caught hold of the collar of his coat and yanked him backwards, and he stumbled and fell, and his concentration broke, and the dark light went out.

"Ignis!" shouted Retia.

The blue flame struck the cobbles in front of the second man and sent a sheet of fire across the street. The man leapt back. The other two drew away.

And then I was there.

I didn't think. That is the most important thing to understand. I didn't think about what I ought to do. My body moved, and my legs carried me, and my head was empty except for one word that filled everything.

"Defluo."

The world dissolved. The taste of copper. White light. And then I was standing behind the third man, the one who still had his hand raised towards Torin and the others, and my hands caught hold of his arm and twisted it back, and he cried out in surprise and pain, and his magic fell apart.

I had teleported three metres. It wasn't controlled. It was instinct. Pure, raw Dherak finding a way through my body and out into the world because there was no time to think. The price came at once: a dizziness that made the street tilt under my feet, a taste of copper in my mouth stronger than ever before, and my hands shaking from the Dherak that had run through them too fast and too wildly.

The man I was holding wrenched himself free with a movement that was trained and fast. He rolled away from me and came up in one gliding motion that said he had done it many times. His coat fell open, and I saw something beneath it: a leather waistcoat with knives in holders, three of them, short and sharp, and his hand found one of them with the automatic ease of muscle memory.

Alôpex sprang at his hand. Her teeth snapped at his fingers, and he jerked his hand away and kicked at her, but she was already out of reach, light and fast, and she growled the deep growl that said next time she wouldn't snap, she would bite.

The fourth man drew a short sword. Bright steel that caught the grey light. He raised it at me.

Ahra was there. "Scutum!"

The invisible shield flickered in the air between me and the blade, and the sword struck it with a sound that was deep and metallic and rang through the whole street. Ahra staggered back from the force of it, his face white, but the shield held.

All four began to withdraw. Not in panic. In control. They backed towards the alley, and one of them threw something onto the cobbles, a small ball that burst into a cloud of black smoke that filled the street and covered their retreat.

When the smoke lifted, they were gone.

But Retia had caught one.

Not one of the four. A fifth. A man who had been standing in the shadow of a doorway keeping watch, and who had tried to leave when the chaos began. Retia had seen him. Of course she had. Retia saw everything.

She had hit him from behind and pinned him against the wall before he had time to turn, and her forearm lay across his back with her whole body weight behind it. Her other hand held his wrist twisted up behind his back in a grip Professor Haltora had shown us in combat, and the man's face scraped against the rough bricks as he tried to get free. Retia was smaller than him and lighter than him, but she had surprise and the angle and an anger that was stronger than both.

Her knee was bleeding. She had fallen when she tackled him, and the wet cobbles had torn her trousers and grazed the skin, and there was a dark streak of blood running down her shin. She didn't notice.

"Let go of me," said the man. His voice was calm. Professional.

Retia didn't answer. The ash lay heavy around him, heavier the closer I came, as if it sat in the skin and not in the clothes. Her grip tightened, and she twisted his hand round so that the palm faced upwards.

In the middle of it, burned in and old, with glossy white edges like a scar that healed long ago: a ring with a sword through it.

"It's the Thief King's mark," said Ahra behind us. He was leaning against the wall with Lynx pressed against his legs, and his voice was thin.

Retia's face changed. Not dramatically. By a single millimetre. The millimetre that says something you were afraid of has now been confirmed. Her shoulders went up towards her ears, and I saw her swallow, twice, as if something were stuck in her throat.

It was her father's signature mark. The same symbol Fulmen had seen on the building in the third district. And now this man, this man who had kept watch while children were attacked, wore the same mark burned into his hand.

Her grip loosened. Only for a moment. Only for that one split second when you let go because your brain is understanding something your body isn't ready for. And the man wrenched himself free and ran.

Retia stood with her back to the wall, looking down at her hands. They were shaking.

"Retia," I said.

"The mark," she said. Her voice was flat. Completely flat. "It's my father's people. My father's people attacked students."

She looked up at me, and there was nothing in her eyes. Not anger. Not grief. Nothing. It was worse than either.

The Tuerier patrol arrived three minutes too late. They secured the street, treated the injured students, and asked questions none of us answered honestly. None of us said anything about the mark in the man's hand. It was Retia's father's mark, and it was hers to tell. Professor Haltora came shortly afterwards with his wolf and a face that was tighter than I had ever seen it. His scent of iron and night air was sharper than usual, heated by what was either anger or fear, and I couldn't tell which.

He looked at me. Looked at Retia, at her bleeding knee. Looked at Ahra, who was pale and holding on to a wall on shaking legs. Looked at the injured students. Said nothing for a long time.

"Back to the ferry," he said at last. "Everyone."

We went. My legs were soft from the Dherak I had used, and every muscle in my body felt as if it had been emptied and filled again with something heavier. The sweat was cold on my back under my robe. Alôpex walked close at my feet, her fur still bristling, her breathing fast.

The four of them supported each other down towards the quay. Sera held her broken arm against her chest and clenched her teeth with every step, and her eyes, which had always been warm and kind, were glassy and far away now. Torin walked with his eyes closed and the blood congealing on his forehead, and the Ästonie boy held him under the arm. The girl cried quietly, without a sound, with tears that ran and ran and that she didn't try to stop.

Retia walked at my side and said nothing. Her hands hung at her sides, and they were still shaking. Her face was closed the way faces close when what is behind them is too big to let out, and her scent was different, sharper, with a bitterness under the roses that hadn't been there before.

I stood at the rail of the ferry and held on with both hands. My legs were still unsteady, and the cold wind cut through my sweat-soaked jumper under my robe, and I was shaking, not from the cold but from what was slowly draining out of me, the last of the Dherak and adrenaline finding its way out of my muscles.

"Chris," said Alôpex in my head. She was sitting at my feet, looking up at me. "That attack... it was coordinated. Planned. They knew where the students would be."

"Yes," I said. And I thought: why? Why attack students openly in the middle of a marketplace? The men had moved like people who had done it before, calm and without a wasted movement. People like that kept to the dark, in alleys and cellars, not in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses. It made no sense. Unless it wasn't about the attack.

"And while everyone was looking at the marketplace, something else happened," said Alôpex. "I can feel it. Something changed on the island. Something to the north."

To the north. The mountain.

I looked across the water towards the island of Déynáir. The castle lay there in the grey light, and the mountain rose behind it, and for a split second I thought I saw something. A flash of light on the side of the mountain, faint and quick, gone before my eyes could focus.

The attack was a diversion. Someone had used the chaos in town to do something on the mountain while everyone was looking the other way.

And Retia's father's people were part of it.

Surain came that same night.

I lay in my bed and couldn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Retia's hands shaking, and a palm turned up towards the grey light. In the other bed Nihil was breathing slowly and evenly, and I didn't know whether he was asleep.

Alôpex lifted her head from my neck. "He's here," she said in my head. "By the river."

She didn't need to say who.

I took my boots in my hand and crept to the door. Behind me the blanket rustled on Nihil's bed, but he said nothing, and I didn't look back.

The lawn was stiff with frost and crunched under my boots. The moon was half and cold, and the river lay black and wide in the light, ten metres now, with a rim of ice along the bank that creaked faintly when the current tugged at it.

Surain stood at the water's edge in his brown robe. I caught his scent before I could see his face: wet earth and animal fur and old metal, and beneath it the fire that had gone out long ago. His shoulders were wet with mist, as if he had been standing there for a while.

"I heard about it at the quay," he said. "I took the last ferry."

"You said you would come back."

"I did say so." He didn't look at me. He looked at the water. "Boots off."

I pulled them off. He walked out into the river without taking off his own, up to his knees, and I followed. The cold bit at my ankles, then my shins, and I breathed. Four. Hold. Six. I could do that. I had been able to since Maka showed me by the river.

"It isn't the cold tonight," said Surain. He took my wrists. His fingers were rough and dry and very warm, and he pushed my hands down into the water, all the way down, until I stood bent over and the water reached my elbows. "Close your nose."

I closed it, the way Gopaltu had taught me. Breathe through the mouth. Think of cold water. It wasn't hard. I stood in it.

"Water remembers," he said. "Feel what it remembers."

For a long time I felt nothing but the cold crawling up my forearms, and his hands that didn't let go. Then I stopped waiting for it.

It didn't come as a scent. It came as pressure. First one hand against mine, just beneath the surface, like when someone reaches out for you in the dark. Then another. Then many. Hands that had been in this river before me, cold and frightened and stubborn, children and adults, for hundreds of years. One day a year, the last day of December, when the river was at its narrowest and someone walked across it to show they could. They weren't there. It was the water that remembered them. The current ran through my fingers, and they ran with it.

I pulled my hands up. They steamed in the cold air.

"It was the ones who crossed," I said. "The last day of the year."

Surain nodded. "It isn't something you do. It's something you stop standing in the way of." He let go of my wrists. "One day you will have to find your way in water you can't see. Remember that."

He didn't ask about the attack. He didn't ask about Retia or about the mark in the man's hand. He just stood there with the water round his knees until my teeth stopped chattering, and then he walked up out of the river and down towards the quay without saying goodbye.

By the time I came down to breakfast, the first ferry had sailed. He had said he would come back, and he had come. No other adult had done that.