Chapter 5: The Ward Who Said No
Brynn had given him the medicine for twenty-two nights. She had measured it herself, stirred it into honey herself, and handed him the spoon herself, and every night he had said thank you.
He told her at breakfast. He put the green notebook on the table between the teapot and the burnt toast, opened it to the page, and held her Ward-lamp over it so she could read it in his mother's hand.
Whoever gives it to him knows exactly what they are doing.
"I know you didn't," he said, before she could speak. "I want that understood first."
Then he told her the rest. He turned back to the paragraph he had skipped and read it aloud this time, all of it. The first blood. The root of every line. It cannot be taken out of him without taking his life, and so no one must ever know it is there. He told her about the bells he had heard in the Crooked Kettle, and the wrong note far off like a rope pulled tight, and what Casimir had said about the Morrows. He told her he thought the girl on the doorstep might not have been joking.
When he had finished, Brynn sat for a long moment without saying anything.
"You read this last night," she said. "Before the storm."
"Yes."
"And you told me it wasn't clear."
"It wasn't. I wasn't sure." He did not look away. "I didn't want you to have to choose between me and the Compact before I knew if there was anything to choose about."
"That wasn't yours to decide."
"No," he said. "It wasn't. I'm sorry."
She stood up, went to the sink, and stood there with her hands on the edge of it. She was angry. She could feel it, hot and clear, and she made herself look at what it was actually about. It was not about what he might be. She found, looking, that she did not care very much what he might be. It was about the one night he had decided she could not be trusted with it.
And under that, colder: twenty-two spoons.
"I gave it to you," she said to the window. "Every night. I made sure you didn't miss one."
"You were told it would help me sleep."
"I didn't check. I'm a Pyre-rank Warden. I check everything. I didn't check that."
"Brynn." He waited until she turned round. "Where did it come from?"
* * *
The Infirmary of the Compact occupied the whole west wing of Lanternhall, and its dispensary kept a ledger of every bottle that left it, signed and sealed. Brynn found the page for Hearthmoss in under ten minutes. There were twenty-two entries in the last three weeks, one for each night, all marked for Holloway, B., Warden, for the Kept. They had been sent up in batches to the Glasswater Archive for collection, because the Archive had asked for them.
The authorising seal beside each entry had been scraped off. Carefully, with a blade, leaving only a pale oval in the paper.
"Who requested these?" she asked the dispensary clerk.
He looked at the page and went pink. "The seal would say, Warden."
"The seal's gone."
"Then I couldn't say. We get so many."
She walked back along the corridor slowly. Odette had handed her the bottle across the tea table, from the Infirmary, and asked whether he was sleeping. Brynn turned that over once, looked at it, and set it down. Odette had carried it up because she was kind and because Brynn had been busy. Someone in the Archive had put in the requisition, a clerk, someone junior, someone who had been paid by the same woman whose purse smelled of chamomile. Odette would want to know. Odette was in session with the Circle all day, and it would keep until tonight.
It would keep, she told herself, and did not examine why she was relieved.
She climbed to the top of the Glasswater Archive anyway. The tea room was empty, the pot cold, the gold spectacles folded on a stack of requisition forms. Brynn tore a page from her notebook and wrote on it standing up.
Someone in the Archive has been sending Hearthmoss for Emrys and hiding the seal. It's been hurting him. I've stopped it. I'm going to find out who. Come to Tallow Lane when the session ends. B.
She left it under the teapot, where Odette would find it before anything else, and went home.
Odette did not come that night. A Patrol runner brought a note instead, in the familiar small handwriting: The session runs late. Tomorrow, my dear. Be careful. O.
Brynn read it twice and put it on the mantelpiece. It was a perfectly ordinary note. Later she would remember it as the last thing Odette ever wrote to her that she believed.
* * *
That night there was no honey and no spoon. The brown bottle went into the tin box where she kept evidence, with a label in her own hand: Hearthmoss. Archive requisition. Seal removed.
By the next afternoon Emrys had eaten two full meals, which he had not done since she met him. At four o'clock he stood at the foot of the staircase in Tallow Lane and looked up.
"Don't," he said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
He climbed. The first flight, one hand on the rail. The second, more slowly, stopping twice. Brynn stood at the bottom with her hands in her coat pockets and her jaw set and did not follow, because following would have meant catching him, and catching him would have meant he had not done it. On the third flight he stopped on every step. On the last one he sat down.
Then he stood up again, and took the last step, and was on the landing.
He looked down at her over the rail. He was breathing like a man who had run a mile, and he was smiling.
"Fifty-one steps," he said. "Tell Pip to put it on the slate."
* * *
In the evening, while he rested, he remembered more about the glass eye.
"It was held over my chest," he said. "Not my face. Someone moved it slowly, like they were looking for something. And when it reached here," he touched his breastbone, "it glowed. Blue. Bright enough that I could see the hand holding it. A glove."
"What colour?"
He shut his eyes. "Pale. I don't know. It was dark."
Brynn wrote it down. Then she took the larger half of the Heartwick out of its velvet, closed her hand around it, and pushed.
She did it carefully this time, a thread of light instead of a flood. The drop inside warmed. For three seconds she saw it clearly, as if through a keyhole: the window of the top room on Tallow Lane, the frame, the fog outside, and a shape passing across the glass. Big. Broad-shouldered. The shape of a head with no hair on it.
Then the pain came, a hard fist under her ribs, and the edges of the room went grey, not dim but grey, the colour drained out of the wallpaper and the lamp and her own hand.
She let go. The colour came back slowly. Not all of it.
When she looked up, Emrys was kneeling on the floor in front of her chair. He had her hands in both of his.
"Your hands are like ice," he said. "They've been like this for a week. And your hair." He did not touch it. "It's going grey at the sides. What is it?"
"It's called Guttering," she said, after a moment. "When you use too much light, the flame starts to go out. It usually comes back."
"Usually."
"Usually."
"You were going to put all of it into that glass," he said. "For me."
"For the truth."
"For me," he said again, and she did not argue.
* * *
The roof of the house on Tallow Lane was flat, with a low parapet and a chimney stack and a view across the Dusk Quarter to the canal. The fog had lifted for once. There was a moon.
They sat with their backs against the chimney. After a while, Emrys held out his hand, palm up, on the slate between them. He did not reach for her. He only left it there.
Brynn looked at it for some time. Then she put hers into it.
It was the first time either of them had reached for the other for no reason except wanting to. His fingers were cool and still slightly ink-stained. Hers were cold. Neither of them said anything about it.
"I need to say something," she said eventually, "and I need you to let me finish."
"All right."
"While the Writ stands, I'm responsible for you in law. Anything you do is mine. Anything I ask you, you might feel you have to say yes to, because of where you're standing." She kept her eyes on the canal. "So while the Writ stands, I'm not allowed to think about this. About whatever this is."
He was quiet for a moment. He did not let go of her hand.
"Then I'll wait," he said. "Until I'm not your responsibility any more."
They sat for a while longer. The canal moved below them, silver where the moon caught it.
"If it's true," he said. "What she wrote. What Vesper called me."
"Then you're a man who says thank you for burnt toast," Brynn said, "and who pulled my apprentice out of a canal, and who can climb fifty-one steps now. That's what I know. The rest is a word."
"It's a very large word."
"I've carried heavier things up those stairs," she said, and felt his hand tighten on hers, briefly, before it relaxed again.
Below them, someone was running up Tallow Lane.
It was Vesper, without her bow, her ringlets coming down, her skirts gathered in both fists. She stopped at the foot of the house and shouted up at the roof.
"Warden! The Circle has had new evidence! A witness! They say they saw him in Harrow Square that night. They've voted. They're coming now."
* * *
They came four minutes later: eight Wicks of the Patrol in full grey, with lantern-chains lit and a warrant sealed by two Seats of the Circle. The Writ of Keeping was suspended pending the new evidence. Emrys Vale was to be taken to the Undercroft. Warden Holloway was to surrender her lantern-chain and remain at home under inquiry, for complicity.
"What witness?" Brynn said.
The captain of the Patrol, a Blaze-rank woman named Harker whom Brynn had trained beside for six years, would not quite meet her eyes. "A night porter from the Archive. Swears he saw Mister Vale crossing Harrow Square at a quarter to three, alone, with the Elder's window lit behind him." She held out her hand for the chain. "Two votes to none, Brynn. The Seat of Records abstained. She said she couldn't vote against you, and she couldn't vote against the evidence."
It sounded like Odette. It sounded exactly like her.
Brynn's hand went to her belt.
Before she could draw, Emrys stepped out of the front door past her, into the lamplight, and held up both hands.
"I'll go with you," he said to the Patrol. "I'm going willingly. Warden Holloway hasn't done anything wrong."
He walked down the step without looking back. She understood later that he had not looked back because he knew, if he did, she would fight all eight of them.