Chapter 4: Tea, Thunder, and Other Lies
Emrys had been called a great many things in twenty-three years. The sickly boy. The burden. Duskling. Nobody had ever called him Your Majesty, and certainly nobody had done it while he was being carried across the Dusk Quarter night market in Brynn Holloway's arms because he had fainted for the second time that day.
"Your Majesty should not be jostled," said Lady Vesper Dray, trotting beside them with her skirts in both fists. "Is there not a litter? A carriage? I could send for a carriage."
"He's fine," Brynn said.
"He is unconscious."
"He's mostly unconscious. He's listening to every word."
He was. He kept his eyes shut, because it seemed the most dignified option available.
Behind them, Pip carried Lisette's list and Brynn's notebook and said nothing, in the loud way of someone saving it all for later.
* * *
Brynn had decided by the time they reached Tallow Lane that Vesper was a joke. Not a cruel one. The Dray were the oldest and richest House in the Veiled Conclave, and its young people were bored, and a Dusk-born who made thugs kneel in an alley was exactly the kind of story they would pass around the salons. A bored young noblewoman had heard it and come to see.
"Progenitor is a title from a children's book," she told Emrys, when he was on the kitchen bench with a blanket. "Like the Moon King, or the Lady in the Well. There hasn't been one in eight hundred years. The Compact's founders saw to that."
"She seemed very sure," Emrys said.
"She's twenty. Everyone is very sure at twenty."
Vesper had not gone home. She had stationed herself on the front step of the house like a small ornamental guard dog, and when Brynn opened the door to bring in the milk, she looked up.
"Is His Majesty resting? Have you brought him water? You should bring him water. You are his attendant; surely you know these things."
"I'm his Warden."
"Yes, his attendant." Vesper smiled at her kindly, as if she were being helpful. "Is there a difference?"
Brynn closed the door, somewhat harder than she needed to.
Emrys, on the bench, had his face in the blanket and his shoulders were shaking. It was, as far as she could tell, the first time she had heard him laugh properly in three weeks.
* * *
Lord Casimir Dray arrived an hour before sunset in a carriage with the Dray bat worked in silver on the door.
He was tall, fair, with ash-blond hair swept back from a face that looked thirty and had looked it for more than a century. His cloak was wine-red velvet, fastened at the throat with a silver clasp in the shape of a bat. He bowed to Brynn on her own doorstep, precisely as deep as the Treaty required for a Pyre-rank officer and not an inch deeper.
"Warden Holloway. I have come to collect my sister, and to apologise for her."
"You don't need to apologise."
"I disagree. She has been kneeling on your step for three hours, which the neighbours will find difficult to explain." His eyes, dark red and very steady, moved past her shoulder to the kitchen, where Emrys was sitting up. They rested there a moment longer than politeness called for. Then they came back to her. "The Conclave holds its autumn reception at the end of the month. I would be honoured if you attended. Officially, as the Compact's guest. Unofficially, because I would like to see what you look like when you are not preparing to hit someone."
Brynn opened her mouth and found she had nothing to put in it.
Emrys stood up.
He did it carefully, one hand on the table, and walked the six steps to the door with more steadiness than he had managed all day. He stopped beside her. Then, without a word, he reached up and turned down the collar of her coat, which had been caught up on one side since the alley, and smoothed it flat.
"It was crooked," he said.
"Thank you," said Brynn.
Casimir looked at the collar, then at Emrys, and something in his expression changed, not much, the way a card player's does when a hand is laid down that he had not expected.
"Mister Vale," he said. "Vesper tells me you are from Lowmere. I knew a family who came from that way once. The Morrows. Scholars." He paused. "It is a small House now. Nearly gone. There was a son, I think, who died in one of the sweeps, some twenty years ago. A great pity. They kept very good libraries."
"I'm sorry to hear it," said Emrys.
"Yes," said Casimir. "So am I." He bowed again, collected his sister from the step by one elbow, and was gone before the lamplighters reached the end of the lane.
* * *
The post came at seven. There was one letter, addressed to Emrys in a careful, old-fashioned hand, and a parcel wrapped in oilcloth and string.
"Sister Agathe," Emrys said. His voice had gone quiet. "From Lowmere. I wrote to her the first week and asked her to send my mother's things."
The letter was short. Sister Agathe hoped he was eating. She had found the book at the back of the vestry cupboard, where his mother had asked it to be kept until he was grown. She hoped it would be of use. At the very end, squeezed in below her signature: Tam sends his greetings, and says to tell you he has finished the fence.
"Who's Tam?"
"One of the Sisters' boys. He came to Lowmere about seven years ago, from the city. Quiet. Good with his hands." Emrys was already untying the string.
Inside the oilcloth was a notebook bound in dark green leather, water-stained at one corner. He opened it. The pages were blank.
He turned them one after another. All blank. He held a page to the kitchen lamp and there was nothing, not even the dent of a pen.
"She wouldn't send me an empty book," he said.
Brynn took one of the three small lanterns from the chain at her belt. They were Ward-lamps, clear salt-glass the size of a fist, and every Wick carried them lit with their own light. She opened the little door and held the lamp over the page.
Writing came up out of the paper like frost on a window. Small, slanting, crowded to the edges. A woman's hand.
Emrys went very still.
"Saltlight ink," Brynn said. "Only shows under a Wick's light. Your mother was Compact?"
"She was an alchemist." He was not looking at her. He was reading. "Hold it steady, please."
She held it steady. He read in silence for what felt like a long time, turning the pages slowly, and she watched his face change and close and change again.
"What does it say?"
He looked up.
"She put something on me," he said. "When I was born. A seal. She calls it a Hushbind." He found the line with his finger and read it aloud. "I have bound you, my darling, to keep safe what I had to hide in you. It will make you weak. I am so sorry. When you are grown, and far from here, it may be lifted." He turned a page. "And my father's name. She never told me. Anselm." He stopped. "Anselm Morrow."
The name sat between them on the table.
"Does it say what she hid?"
His eyes went back to the page. Below the line about the Hushbind there was another paragraph, dense and underlined twice, that began with the words the first blood. He read it through once. Then he turned the page over.
"Not clearly," he said.
It was not a lie. The paragraph was not clear. He told himself that, and knew while he told it that it was the first thing he had ever kept from her. The reason was simple enough. If the paragraph meant what he thought it might, then the girl on the doorstep had not been joking, and Brynn was a Warden of the Compact whose founders had killed the last Progenitor eight hundred years ago. She would have to choose between the people who had raised her and the man sleeping in her spare room. He did not want to be the thing that made her choose. Not until he was sure there was a choice to make.
* * *
The storm arrived at eleven, hard and close, straight off the harbour.
The first crack of thunder went through the house and through him in the same instant. Emrys had always thought of his fear of storms as a child's fear that had never been outgrown. Tonight, for the first time, he understood it was not fear. Something in his chest rang when the thunder struck, like a bell hit with an iron bar, and it hurt, a deep ache under the breastbone, and in the ringing he could hear, very faintly, a woman's voice chanting words he did not know.
He did not notice he had made a sound until Brynn was there.
She did not ask. She sat down on the bed beside him and put her arms around him, simply and firmly, the way she did everything, and held on. He had his forehead against her shoulder. Her coat smelled of rain and lamp oil. The thunder came again and he flinched, and she did not let go.
"It's her," he said into her shoulder, when he could. "When it thunders, I can hear her. She died in a storm. I was six. She'd been ill for weeks, and that night she sat up with me and said the words over and over, and in the morning she was gone."
Brynn was quiet for a while.
"Odette found me when I was one," she said. "My parents were Wicks. They died in a raid on the Quarter, the year after the Treaty nearly broke. She took me home from the orphans' ward because nobody else would. She's the only mother I remember." A pause. "So I don't know what yours was like. But I know what it is to have one person."
The storm moved off toward the east. Neither of them moved for some time after it had.
When she stood up to go, she unclipped the Ward-lamp from her belt and set it on the washstand beside his bed, its door open, its light small and steady.
"If the thunder wakes you," she said, "there's some of mine here."
* * *
It was after two when he gave up on sleep, took the green notebook from under his pillow and held it open beneath the Ward-lamp.
He turned back to the paragraph he had not read aloud. Then past it, to pages he had not reached, where his mother's hand grew smaller and faster, as if she had been running out of time.
Never let him take Hearthmoss. It tightens the Hushbind. Given night after night, it will close the seal until his heart can no longer beat against it. And it will make him shine, to anyone who has the lens, like a lamp in a window. Whoever gives it to him knows exactly what they are doing.
Emrys read it three times.
Then he looked at the saucer on the washstand, where Brynn had left the spoon she had given him his medicine on tonight. There was still a little honey on it.