Chapter 8: The King Who Wouldn't Be
Emrys Vale could now tell every vampire in Vellmarch what to do, and he could no longer remember what her burnt porridge tasted like.
He told her so at eight in the morning, in the kitchen of the Crooked Kettle, with the spoon still in his hand.
Brynn had made porridge because eleven people had come out of the Undercroft with nothing in them, and porridge was the only thing she could make. She had made it in Lisette's biggest pot and burned it, as usual, and the eel-seller had eaten two bowls anyway and said it tasted like home. Emrys had taken a spoonful, and held it in his mouth, and his face had gone very still.
"I can't taste it," he said.
"It's burnt. There's not much to taste."
"No. I mean I can't." He put the spoon down carefully. "It's warm. I can feel that it's warm. But there's nothing else. And I've been trying to remember what it tasted like the first night, when I said it had a charcoal note, and I can remember saying it. I can't remember the taste."
Brynn looked at the white lock at his temple.
"That's what it cost," she said. "Last night."
"I think it's part of it."
She found she was furious, and that there was nowhere to put it. Not at him. At the seal, at the storm, at eight hundred years of whatever it was that had decided a man should pay for saving eleven people by losing the taste of the one thing she could cook for him. It was a small thing. It was absurd to mind it this much, with a city at stake.
She minded it very much.
"It's a stupid thing to lose," she said. Her voice came out rough.
"Brynn." He waited until she looked at him. "I still remember your heartbeat. Exactly. Slow, and even. I could count it for you."
She did not say anything. She crossed the kitchen and put her arms around him, and after a moment he put his around her, and they stood like that by Lisette's stove, in front of eleven people and a row of cats, and neither of them cared.
* * *
Lisette was the first to speak when they sat down.
"I knew," she said, "the first time you brought him in. The bell of him. I have been alive two hundred years and I have never heard a note like it, but I knew what it was the way you know your own mother's voice in a crowd." She turned her teacup on its saucer. "I said nothing because the moment anyone said it aloud, somebody would come for him. I made him the strong tea, the kind for the old ones, so that whatever was holding him down would hold a little less. That was all I could do."
"Thank you," Emrys said.
"Don't thank me. I was wrong to wait."
Oren spoke next. He sat on the floor by the door because none of the chairs would take him, with the eel-seller asleep against his arm.
"I was on the leash eleven months," he said. "It is like being a passenger. You see everything. You can do nothing." He looked at Emrys. "That night, when you spoke, it went slack. Only for a while. You said take me home, so I did. I knew the house; I had been in it that night already. I put you in your bed, bolted the door from inside the way you'd left it, and went out through the dark by the window. Then it was dawn, and the leash pulled tight again, and she had me back by breakfast."
That was why the door had still been bolted. That was why there had been nothing, in the morning, but frost. Brynn added it to the rest.
* * *
Casimir came at nine, and went down on one knee on Lisette's floor in his dark cloak.
"Every House in the Conclave felt you wake," he said. "Every one. The Dray, the Corvo, the Ashen Houses on the north shore who haven't spoken to us in fifty years. They are all asking the same thing this morning. Whether it is true. Whether there is a Progenitor again, and if so, what he will do." He looked up. "Take the seat. Unite them. There will never be another Night of Broken Glass if there is a head to the Houses again."
Emrys was quiet for some time.
"Last night I cut sixteen chains," he said. "I could feel every one of them. How tight it was. How much the person inside it didn't want it." He shook his head. "I've only just got out of one myself. I'm not going to become a chain for anybody else."
"Then what will you do?"
"Stop her," Emrys said. "And then go home and sleep, I think, if Brynn's landlord hasn't changed the locks."
Casimir looked at him for a long moment. Then he rose, and bowed, not as deeply as a courtier to a king, but as one man to another he has decided to respect.
Vesper, in the corner, burst into tears. "But you would be a wonderful king."
Brynn found a clean handkerchief in her pocket and handed it across without comment. Vesper took it, blew her nose, and looked at Brynn with new and startled respect, as though the attendant had turned out to be something else entirely.
* * *
Thistlewood arrived at ten in a hired chair, carried by two Patrol juniors who had apparently decided the Seat of Law outranked the Patrol's search for an escaped Kept. He had the ledgers with him.
"Seven years ago," he said, before he had sat down, "there was a raid on the Dusk Quarter. You were on it, Warden. Your first as a Blaze."
Brynn went still.
"It was requested by the Archive. On grounds of suspected unlicensed alchemy. There was none. I have read the report." He put his finger on a line. "Nine persons detained. Six released. Three recorded as transferred to religious care, Lowmere." He looked up. "A woman, an old man, and a boy of twelve. It gives the boy's name. Tam."
The kitchen had gone very quiet.
"The boy on the canal steps," Brynn said. "I didn't get to him. They told me he was..."
"He's alive," said Emrys. "He built the fence at the Quiet Bell this summer. Sister Agathe wrote it in her letter. He sends his greetings."
Brynn put her hand over her mouth. She had not cried in front of anyone since she was fourteen. She did now, briefly, silently, not from grief, and nobody in the room said a word about it.
Then she wiped her face on her sleeve and asked for paper.
While Pip went to find some, she held out her right hand, palm up, the way she had done ten thousand times since the night she was lit, and called for light. Nothing came. Not a spark. There was only the cold place in her chest and her own grey fingers. She closed the hand and put it in her pocket. That was how it would have to be, then.
* * *
"When I was nine," she said, "Odette used to take me up to the tower workshop on Sundays and teach me to read engineers' drawings. She said a Wick should understand the machine she lives inside." She was drawing as she spoke. "The great lamp on the tower isn't just a lamp. It's connected to every Speaking Lamp in the city. The horns, the gas pipes, all of it runs back to Lanternhall. When they sound the alarm, it goes from the tower to every street at once."
She drew the tower, the lamp, and a crate on chains rising up its south face.
"That crate went up five days ago. Whatever's in it, it's been built to sit inside the great lamp. She called it renovations. She said it would shine brighter than it has in thirty years." She drew the flask Emrys had described beside it, and tapped it. "And now she has a piece of the first blood in a bottle."
"A crown for the lamp," Emrys said slowly. "It lights up with what she took from me, and it sends it out through every lamp in the city."
"At dawn," said Brynn. "Because the order is to go and meet the sun."
She laid out the plan the way she had laid out raids for six years. Thistlewood would call an emergency session of the Circle at midnight, under the Seat of Law's authority, and put the evidence before the other Seats. Pip knew the gas mains better than anyone in the Compact; he would go into the tower's pump room and cut the lines that fed the Speaking Lamps. Lisette and Vesper would move every Nocturne in the Dusk Quarter down into the canal tunnels, where there were no lamps at all. Casimir would take the north shore.
"And the two of us go up the tower," Brynn said.
"You don't have a flame," Thistlewood said.
"No." She looked at Emrys. "But I've got him, and he's got me."
Later, when the others had gone to their tasks, Emrys found her on the Kettle's back step, watching the sky over the harbour go dark as a bruise.
"Brynn. When this is over," he said, "I want you to meet me as a free man. Not your Kept. Not anyone's. And then I want to ask you something properly."
She did not answer straight away. Then she nodded, once.
* * *
The Stormtide's second night came in at eleven, harder than the first.
Thistlewood's session never opened.
At a quarter to twelve, every Speaking Lamp in Vellmarch sounded at once. Not the alarm. A voice, soft and clear and very familiar, carried down every pipe to every street corner in the city.
"Citizens of Vellmarch. This is the Seat of Records. The Circle of Five is safe, and in my care. Last week, a creature calling itself a half-blood tore the roof from an Elder's house and escaped from the Undercroft. It has a name. Emrys Vale. It is the thing our founders died to destroy." A pause, very gentle. "Do not be afraid. At dawn, the great lamp will be lit, and after tonight, no child in this city will ever be afraid of the dark again."
Vesper came down the canal path at a run a few minutes later, her ringlets plastered flat by the rain.
"They're inside Lanternhall," she gasped. "Pip saw it from the pump-house yard. Nocturnes in the great hall, dozens of them, with silver on their wrists. They took the Circle as it sat down. The Elder too. He was shouting about procedure when they carried him out."
Emrys had closed his eyes. "I can feel them. New ones. She had more than fifteen." He opened them again. "Forty-two. All around the tower. None of them want to be there."
"She kept a reserve," Brynn said. "Of course she did. She taught me to."
The Patrol would be hunting Emrys by name now, in every street. The Circle was gone. The one man who could open a legal session was a hostage. And the dawn was six hours away.
On the Kettle's back step, Brynn had heard every word through the horn at the end of the lane, and she had known the voice that said them better than her own.