Chapter 6: What the Heartwick Saw
To learn the truth, Brynn would have to burn the one thing that made her Brynn Holloway. She had made up her mind to do it before she had time to be afraid.
That was at dawn, sitting on the bottom stair of an empty house with the two halves of the Heartwick in her lap. The Patrol had left a man at the end of Tallow Lane to watch the door. Her lantern-chain was in a locked drawer in Lanternhall. Emrys had been in the Undercroft for nine hours.
At dusk, Pip knocked. He had a sealed paper in his hand and an expression of great seriousness.
"Summons," he said. "From the Seat of Law. Inquiry into the Harrow Square incident. The Warden is required to attend in person." He lowered his voice. "He's awake, Brynn. He asked for you by name."
The Patrol man at the end of the lane read the seal twice and let them pass. A summons from the Seat of Law outranked a house arrest. Thistlewood, it turned out, knew that very well.
* * *
Emrys had not slept.
His cell in the Undercroft was dry and clean and lit by a single gas jet behind a grille. The guards had taken his coat and his boots and his belt. They had not searched his shirt very carefully, because he had walked in with his hands up and he looked as if a strong wind would finish him. Inside the shirt, against his ribs, were his mother's green notebook and Brynn's Ward-lamp, its little door shut.
He could hear them through the wall.
Not with his ears. The bells, the same as in the Crooked Kettle, but here there were many of them, close by, beyond the stone to his left, and every one of them was wrong. Each note was muffled, as if a hand had been laid over a ringing glass. And threaded through all of them was the pull he had felt from the tea room, the rope drawn too tight, except that now he was close enough to feel that it was not one rope. It was twelve.
There was a ventilation grate low in the left wall, a hand's width high. He lay down on the floor and put his eye to it.
On the other side was a long vaulted room with cots along both walls. There were people on the cots. Most were asleep, or lying very still. The nearest was a girl with her hair tied in a fisherwoman's scarf, and on her wrist, where it lay on the blanket, was a thin raised scar shaped like a chain. Silver. Every wrist he could see had one. The eel-seller, he thought. From the Kettle Stair. So she was here, and alive, and so were the others.
At the far end, a very large man sat on the edge of a cot with his head bowed. His head was shaved. He looked up, as if he had heard something, and his eyes found the grate across the whole length of the room.
He knew Emrys. Emrys saw it. The man's mouth opened and worked, and nothing came out of it, and then, slowly, he lowered his head again in a small, deliberate bow and kept it there.
A shaved head. A chain scar. Pip's words on the doorstep came back to him: big man, shaved head, a scar around his wrist. This was the man who had taken the eel-seller. And he was sitting among the people he had taken, with the same scar, and could not speak.
* * *
Elder Corvin Thistlewood received them in his private rooms in the Law wing, propped up in a chair by the fire with a rug over his knees and a bandage around his head. He looked older than he had in the great hall. He did not look any less cross.
"Sit down, Warden. You too, whatever your name is."
"Quill, Elder."
"Sit down, Quill." He pointed his cane at a thick copy-book on the table. "The dockets I took home were stolen from my house on the night I was attacked. The thief did not know that I copy every figure I read into this book in my own hand, because I do not trust clerks. Four requisitions for salt-silver from the Glasswater Archive in one quarter. Salt-silver is used for exactly two things. Polishing Ward-lamps, which the Archive does not have, and alchemical binding seals, which it is not licensed to make."
He pulled a second paper from under the rug. It was a leaf from the Infirmary ledger, Brynn saw, the Hearthmoss page, removed by order of the Seat of Law.
"Someone scraped these seals," he said. "They did not scrape the impression left in the page beneath. I had it raked with lamp-black this morning." He put his finger on one pale oval, and in it, faint but clear, was the outline of a key. "That is the Archive's seal. Somebody in that building has been binding things and poisoning your ward, Warden, and I intend to know who. I have a list of eleven clerks."
"There's a faster way," Brynn said.
She took out the Heartwick.
* * *
Every Wick learned in their second year that a reading could be pushed as far as the reader would pay. Brynn had never gone past a thread. Now she closed both hands around the larger half of the glass, and opened the flame in her chest all the way, and poured it in.
Light came out between her fingers. Pip said something. She did not hear what.
The Heartwick showed her.
The top room on Tallow Lane, at night. Emrys asleep, the vial on its cord at his throat. A cold draught; the window frame whitening with frost from the inside. A shape that came through the dark by the window, not through the glass, the way Nocturnes stepped through shadow: large, broad, shaved head, a silver scar around one wrist. He lifted the Heartwick off Emrys's neck with two fingers, very gently, and was gone.
Then Emrys, sitting up in the dark with his hand at his throat where her heartbeat had been. Getting up. Walking, eyes open and unseeing, down fifty-one steps and out of a front door he unbolted with his own hand and left standing open to the fog. Walking through fog, following something she could not see.
Harrow Square. The Elder's bedroom. Thistlewood asleep. The big man standing over the bed with one hand raised, and the Heartwick in his other fist, and on his wrist the chain scar burning faintly with a sign at its end like the head of a key.
Emrys in the doorway, barefoot.
"Stop," he said, in the voice from Cutgill Alley. "Leave him. Take me home."
The big man froze. Something pulled him one way, and the voice pulled him the other, and the pull ran out of him and into the house like lightning finding the ground. The beam above them scorched along its length in a line of links. The roof came up and away with a sound like a ship's timber breaking. The Heartwick fell from the man's hand and split on the floor.
And Emrys fell with it, onto his knees in the plaster, and before his eyes closed he said one word, quite clearly.
"Brynn."
The big man stood over him for a long moment. Then he picked Emrys up as easily as a child and stepped into the dark.
* * *
Emrys waited until the guard's footsteps had gone to the far end of the corridor. Then he took the green notebook out of his shirt, and the Ward-lamp, and opened the lamp's door over the last page.
He had never reached it before. The last two leaves were stuck together at the corner with a blot of old grey wax, and he had not wanted to tear them. Tonight he worked them apart with a thumbnail, very slowly. Under the lamp, the last page did not show writing. It gave out sound.
A woman's voice, very quiet, as if it came from the next room.
"If you are hearing this, my darling, someone has held a Wick's light to this page who loves you enough to lend it. Good. Then listen. When the founders of the Compact killed the last Progenitor, the first blood did not die. It hardened into a stone, and they called it the Nightheart and locked it away. My partner at the Archive and I were set to study it. We found what they had hidden for eight hundred years. The first Progenitor was not a pure Nocturne. He was half-blood, like you. The first blood can only live in a body that is both."
A pause. The sound of breath.
"She wanted a vessel she could put on a leash. I was carrying you, and I knew she would come for you when she worked it out. So I took the stone and I ran, and in the storm I gave it to you, the only place she could never take it from. I did not hide it in you, Emrys. It became you. You do not carry the first blood." The voice broke, then steadied. "You are it."
The lamp's light shook in his hand. Everything he had been told he was, for twenty-three years, rearranged itself around that.
* * *
In the Law wing, Brynn opened her hands.
The Heartwick was dark. The drop inside was very small. The fire in the grate had gone grey, and the copy-book was grey, and Pip's face was grey, and when she looked down at her own hands they were the colour of ash, and the place in her chest where the flame had been since she was lit at fourteen was only cold.
Thistlewood was staring at the scorch-mark she had copied into her notebook. His face had no colour either, but she could no longer tell whether that was him or her.
"The thing that was in my room," he said. "The half-blood. It told the other one to leave me."
"He," Brynn said. "He told him."
She tried to stand. The floor tilted, and Pip caught her under the arms before she hit it.
"Quill." Thistlewood had not moved from his chair, but his voice had changed. "If the Patrol finds her like this, she will be in a cell by morning and nothing she saw tonight will be heard. Is there somewhere they will not think to look?"
"The Crooked Kettle, Elder. In the Quarter."
The old man's mouth tightened at that. Then he picked up the copy-book and the Infirmary leaf and pushed them across the table.
"Take these as well. Do not let them out of your hands." He looked at Brynn, and for the first time since she had known him there was no contempt in it at all. "I was wrong about a great many things this week, Warden. I dislike it intensely. Go."
Far below Lanternhall, in the dark of the Undercroft, the first thunder of the Stormtide rolled over the city and shook dust from the vaults. And the door of Emrys's cell swung open on well-oiled hinges.
The woman who came in was small and silver-haired, a pin shaped like a key in her hair, white silk gloves on her hands. She set down a tray with a teapot on it. The steam smelled of chamomile.
"Hello, child," said Odette Lark. "Your mother was my dearest friend."