Chapter 2: A Light That Shouldn't Break
"It is your light, Warden Holloway. So explain it to us. What was it doing in an Elder's bedroom at three o'clock in the morning?"
The Seat of the Patrol set the two halves of the Heartwick on the table between them. They lay on a square of black velvet like evidence in a jeweller's window, and the drop inside the larger half still pulsed, fainter than it had at dawn.
The Circle of Five met in a round room at the heart of Lanternhall, under a ceiling painted with the Compact's founding: seven Wicks with raised lanterns and a darkness running from them. Three of the five chairs were filled. The fifth had stood empty since spring, waiting for the autumn vote. The Seat of Law sat empty too, with Thistlewood's silver-headed cane laid across it by some clerk with a sense of ceremony.
Brynn stood at the rail. Emrys sat on the bench behind her, because they had made him walk from the east door and he had not been able to stand for long after that.
"I made it for my ward last night," she said. "He was wearing it when I went to sleep."
"And when you woke?"
"I went straight to Harrow Square. I didn't check."
The Seat of the Infirmary wrote that down. The Seat of the Patrol turned to Emrys. "Mister Vale. Where were you between midnight and dawn?"
"In bed," Emrys said. "I took my medicine and I slept. I don't remember anything else." He paused. "I know how that sounds."
"Do you."
"I would think it sounded convenient, if I were you. But it's the truth, and I don't have a better one."
Nobody on the Circle seemed to know what to do with that. The Seat of the Patrol cleared his throat.
"The Writ of Keeping makes the Warden answerable for the conduct of the Kept. An Elder of this Compact was attacked. The only object recovered from the scene belongs to both of you. I move that the Writ be revoked today and Mister Vale be held in the Undercroft pending inquiry."
"Seconded," said the Infirmary.
Odette Lark lifted one gloved hand. She did not raise her voice. She rarely had to.
"Nobody saw an attacker," she said. "Corvin is unconscious and cannot tell us what he saw. We have a vial, which anyone could have taken from a sleeping man's neck. If we revoke a Writ on that, we tell every Warden in this city that their word is worth less than a piece of glass." She looked at Brynn over her gold rims. "Give her seven days. If the young man is innocent, Brynn will prove it. If he isn't, she will be the first to bring him in. I have known her since she was one year old. I have never known her to do otherwise."
The Seat of the Infirmary looked at her notes for a long moment, and then withdrew her second. Two to one. Seven days.
The Seat of the Patrol pushed the velvet square across the table. "Keep your evidence close, Warden. You'll need it."
In the corridor outside, Thistlewood's clerk was waiting with a box of ledgers against his chest and the look of a man who had not slept. Brynn recognised him from the great hall the morning before.
"Warden. Is it true he'll recover?"
"The physicians think so. Why?"
"He took the Archive dockets home with him. The salt-silver ones. He said he'd go through them himself, line by line, because nobody else would." The clerk shifted the box. "They weren't in the house when the Patrol searched it. I checked the list twice."
Brynn wrote that down under the glass eye. Missing dockets. She did not know yet what it meant, only that a man with a torn-open roof had lost exactly one box of paper.
They crossed the courtyard slowly, Emrys's arm through hers. Above them the great lamp of the tower had grown a second ring of scaffolding overnight. Canvas hid the glass completely now, and something large was being winched up the south face on chains, wrapped in sacking, the workmen shouting to each other through the fog.
"What are they putting in?" Emrys asked.
"Renovations," Brynn said. "Odette said it'll shine brighter than it has in thirty years."
He watched the crate rise until the fog swallowed it.
* * *
On Tallow Lane, Brynn went through the house room by room.
Nothing had been taken. Nothing had been broken. The front door had been bolted from inside when she ran out at dawn, and it was still bolted when she came back. She climbed to the top floor and stood in the doorway of Emrys's room: narrow bed, washstand, the rebinding boards on the sill, his jumper folded on the chair.
The window was shut. But along the lower edge of the frame, on the inside of the glass, ran a line of frost as thin as thread. It was noon, and the day was mild.
She touched it. It did not melt.
"Did you open this last night?"
Emrys was sitting on the top stair, where the climb had left him. "No. I never open it. The fog comes in."
"You were hot. You had a fever last week."
"I didn't open it, Brynn."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she nodded, and wrote frost, window, inside in her notebook, and did not write anything after it, because she did not know what came next.
"I'm going back to Harrow Square," she said.
"I'm coming."
"You just climbed three flights and sat down on the last one."
"I can read things you can't." He held up the notebook he always carried, full of copied inscriptions from the hymnals and ledgers he repaired. "You said there was a mark on the beam. You don't recognise it. I might."
It was a fair point. She hated that it was a fair point. She carried him down the stairs.
* * *
The Patrol had roped off the Elder's house and put two Ember-rank juniors on the door. They let Brynn through because she outranked everyone they had ever met.
The upper floor was open to the sky. The fog had come in overnight and settled on everything, and the broken slates were slick with it. Brynn put Emrys on the one intact chair and brought the lamp close to the main beam.
The scorch mark ran the length of her forearm. In daylight she could see it more clearly than at dawn: a chain of small interlocking ovals, each burned into the oak as if by a hot wire, and at one end a shape like the head of a key.
Emrys stood up. She reached out to steady him and he waved her off, just once, and put his hand flat on the burn.
His eyes changed. It happened quickly, and she almost missed it: the grey went pale, nearly silver, the way a coin looks when light hits it at an angle. His lips moved. The word that came out was not Common, not the old liturgy in his hymnals, not anything she had heard on the docks. It had two hard syllables and it sounded like something being dragged.
He took his hand away. His eyes were grey again.
"What did you just say?"
"I don't know." He looked at his palm. There was nothing on it. "I don't know that language. But I know what it meant." He wiped the hand on his trousers, slowly. "It meant chain."
Brynn copied the mark into her notebook, link by link, and wrote the word beside it.
Then she took out the two halves of the Heartwick.
Every Wick was taught this in their second year and most never used it: Saltlight kept an impression of what it had been near. Not a picture, exactly. More like the dent a hand leaves in a pillow. A skilled Wick could read that impression back, if the light was strong enough and she was willing to spend enough of her own.
She closed her hand around the larger half and pushed.
The drop flared. For half a second there was something, a shape against a window, a sense of cold, and then her chest tightened like a fist, and the light went dull, and she was on one knee on the wet floor with her breath coming short.
"Brynn."
"I'm fine." She was not fine. She stayed down until her heart stopped stumbling. "It's there. Whatever happened last night, it saw it. But there isn't enough light in this to read by. I'd have to put my own in. All of it."
"All of what?"
"My flame." She got up. "A Pyre-rank reading takes a Pyre-rank light. If I do it, I might not have one afterward."
He was quiet. Then he said, "Then don't."
"Six days," she said, "and we'll see."
* * *
By evening she had read every Grey Hours file the Patrol would lend her, and some it had not meant to. The papers covered the kitchen table in drifts. Somewhere after the ninth file she put her head down on her arm to rest her eyes.
She woke to the smell of tea.
There was a blanket over her shoulders. It was the heavy one from the chest on the second landing, which meant he had gone up a flight and come down again with it, and it had taken him long enough that the kettle had boiled and been poured. The cup sat by her hand. He was at the other end of the table, sorting the files she had knocked onto the floor into their proper order, his hands not quite steady.
"You were cold," he said, without looking up. "Your hands were grey."
She looked at her fingers. The tips were pale.
"It's the weather."
"It's September."
The front door banged. Pip came down the passage at speed, saw Brynn wrapped in a blanket, Emrys two feet away, two cups of tea, and stopped so suddenly that his spectacles slid down his nose.
"Oh," he said. "Oh. I'll come back."
"Pip, it's not..."
He had already gone. The front door banged again.
Emrys set the last file on the pile. "What did he think it was?"
"I don't want to know."
Later, when she went up to wash, she stopped in front of the mirror on the landing. Her hair was the colour it had always been, copper under the lamp. Except at the temples, where for a width of two fingers the red had gone flat and dull, as if seen through smoke.
She pulled it back into its tie so that it didn't show, and went back down, and gave him his Hearthmoss in a spoon of honey. He said thank you.
* * *
Pip returned an hour later, knocked this time, and stood on the step with his hat in his hands and none of the embarrassment left on his face.
"Another one," he said. "Fish market, just after dark. A Dusk-born girl who sells eels off the Kettle Stair. Her brother saw the man who took her." Pip swallowed. "Big man. Shaved head. He had a scar around his wrist, the brother said. Silver. Like a chain."
Behind Brynn, at the table, something made a small, sharp sound.
She turned. Emrys was holding the spoon he had been stirring his tea with. It had stopped moving. A skin of white frost had spread over the bowl of it and up the handle, and was creeping onto his fingers.
He was staring at it as if it belonged to someone else.