5th of Darkfall, 412 AH
The guard outside my door turned out to be shorter than I'd remembered her.
I'd seen half a second of her in the corridor yesterday, a wide-eyed flicker before she'd shut it down, and my mind had supplied someone tall. The actual woman waiting in the hall when Aldric opened the door stood half a foot over me and not much more.
She was lean, in a dark uniform, with shoulder-length black hair and a sword secured close against her hip. Her blue eyes had none of yesterday's surprise.
"Young master." She inclined her head. "I'm Ren. Her Grace assigned me to you. From now on I'll be by your side."
"I know," I said. "I saw you yesterday."
She didn't ask how I knew. Whatever she'd been told about her difficult charge, she was keeping it to herself.
If she was going to follow me everywhere, I needed to know her limits before an experiment depended on them. What she'd stop. What she'd report.
Please don't be another pair of hands pulling me off the interesting parts.
"What did she tell you to do with me?" I asked.
"Keep you alive," she said. "Stay close enough to manage anything that tries to change that."
Babysitting, then, dressed up with a sword and the duchess's name.
"And if I go somewhere I shouldn't?"
She folded her hands behind her back. "Then I bring you back, young master. On your feet, if possible."
I probably should have expected that.
"I want to see the garden," I said, and set off down the hall.
I made it perhaps eight strides before I noticed I couldn't hear her behind me.
I stopped. Ren hadn't moved. She hooked a thumb over her shoulder toward the other end of the corridor.
"The side entrance is this way, young master."
"Right," I said. "Of course it is."
It was not of course anything. I had one corridor of a house in my head and a great deal of confident guessing. So I let her lead. Following solved the navigation and let me watch how she moved.
The side door led onto a flight of three stone steps, and the air that came up to meet me was cold.
I stopped in the doorway and took a deep breath. After a day in a sickroom, the autumn air came in like a different medium entirely, clean and carrying the smells of turned earth and leaf-mould from a garden receding for winter.
The view I'd surveyed from the window the night before resolved into ground truth. The lawns were drying back in flat, dead patches before the frost. Stone paths ran out from the house in three directions. Hedges stood taller than I did, clipped square. A fountain sat drained for the season, its basin holding nothing but leaves.
Off to the left a training yard with a rack of practice weapons. Outbuildings, a stable, a line of the perimeter wall holding the whole estate inside it, and along the top of that wall, small with distance, figures patrolling it.
Ren stepped past me. Her eyes scanned the hedges, the outbuildings, and every human in sight before she put herself between me and the lawn. Inside her own walls, on a morning quiet enough to hear the hedge-shears. I could respect the enthusiasm.
I went past her.
People were everywhere. Three working the hedge, someone carrying water toward the stable, a figure raking leaves from the fountain, two more by the outbuildings, and the patrol on the wall.
And every one of them close enough to count was a woman.
Yesterday's corridor had given me three women out of three, enough to record as a pattern. Today it was becoming a rule. I stopped on the path and counted.
I left the wall patrol out, seven women were already enough to be sure. Since I'd woken in this body, the only men I'd seen were my father and Aldric. That gave me twelve clear sightings so far: ten women, two men. Small, but lopsided enough that who happened to be nearby no longer explained it. Something structural was producing it.
"How many guards does the estate have?" I asked.
"Forty-something," Ren said at once. "Working in three shifts."
"And how many of them are men?"
Silence, then her eyes widened a fraction before she answered.
"None, young master."
None. The answer was about the estate but the fact that the question surprised her was saying things about the world.
A fact like that wasn't going to come apart on a lawn. It was a question for Pemberton once the promised lessons started, or for a library. A house this rich must have one somewhere.
The perimeter wall had had my attention since the stairs. The corridor grooves had carried a faint prickling under my fingertips the night before; here I had hundreds of yards of carved stone to compare. I crossed the lawn.
Broad grooves branched across the base of the wall, all wider than the one in the corridor. At intervals, one opened into a shallow, hand-width depression before narrowing again.
I put my palm on bare stone between two grooves. Cold rock, nothing more. A fingertip in the nearest groove brought back the prickling from last night, weaker here but spread over more skin.
The corridor groove had been narrow enough to focus the sensation into a tight thread. These wider channels diluted it.
I tested three in succession: one broad, one narrower, then a junction where two branches met. The narrower groove felt sharper than the broad one; the junction felt stronger than either. Width weakened the sensation. Convergence strengthened it.
Ren watched from my shoulder and let me continue. Aldric had pulled me away yesterday. Why had he minded when she didn't?
"Who maintains these?" I asked. "When they wear, or crack... who recuts them?"
"The estate keeps an artificer on payroll," Ren said. "Wards, gate-work, household pieces. She handles it all."
"I'd like to meet her."
Ren paused. "I'll ask. If she has time, I'll bring her."
She took the request without asking what I wanted with an artificer. I'd expected a fence or a wall. Instead, she answered what she knew, offered what help she could, and otherwise let me work. This arrangement might actually work.
I followed the wall.
I sampled as I went, putting a fingertip in the grooves every few yards. Near the main gate, the grooves converged into a knot three times as dense as anything I'd touched and crowded around the opening like nerves in a hand. I put my finger in.
A hard pulse shot up my finger, and I jerked away. The prickling sensation from earlier turned into a sharp sting.
Ren moved before I'd lowered my hand, stepping between me and the gate and pulling my forearm down.
"Don't touch it." Clipped, and a degree harder than anything she'd given me all morning. "It's dangerous."
And here I'd thought the pain meant keep going.
The grooves were densest around the gate, the wall's only opening, and the sting had been strongest there too. Whatever the ward did, it concentrated at the weakest point.
Reading it like I had been, a finger in every groove, had just stopped being possible with Ren at my shoulder. I was still thinking about what to do next when the greenery caught my eye.
It was moss, a broad green stripe and the only thing in the garden that looked properly alive. Everything else was dying back for the season; this grew soft and saturated in the cold, tracking the wall's base. I crouched.
It grew inside the grooves, and thinning over plain stone. Densest where I'd expect the strongest leak.
I sat back on my heels and let the hypothesis assemble itself: the wards leaked. Mana was something moss could use, and the nearest Moss had fattened on the runoff. The moss was basically mapping the ward's grooves for me. A living indicator.
Was the moss feeding on mana?
It needed a test, and the test practically designed itself. Two samples. One scraped from directly over a ward groove, where the moss was thick, and one from a baseline patch as far from any groove as I could find, so the variable I was isolating was proximity-to-ward and nothing else. If the ward-adjacent sample was healthier than the baseline, the leak was real and the moss was eating it; if they did the same thing, I had a wall-loving plant and a coincidence.
"I'll need two containers," I said. "A pot I can scrape these into. Jars, a tin, anything that'll hold a sample without crushing it."
Ren raised an eyebrow but didn't ask why I wanted to bottle moss. She stopped a woman carrying a basket toward the house and sent her for jars. A few minutes later, two squat stoneware jars came from the kitchen quarter, their loose lids sitting over the mouths rather than sealing them.
I turned one over in my hands. Loose lids were right for live moss since it needed air. Anything I wanted to preserve would dry or spoil. Eventually I'd need containers that sealed.
I had the first jar in hand and was looking for my baseline patch when I heard a shout.
"KLAUS!"
It arrived loud, and I turned. A shape was crossing the grass at a dead sprint, small and getting bigger at a rate that didn't match how small it had started. I had time to register child and fast before she hit me square in the stomach. The top of her head struck my sternum hard enough to knock a grunt out of me, and both arms locked around my ribs with a grip that had no business coming off a frame that size.
I went back half a step.
"Nobody told me you were outside, I asked Aldric and he said you were with Mother and then I went to find you and you weren't with Mother, you were here, and I asked Father where you went but Father was talking to someone about the horses, so I just looked." She ran out of air mid-clause, gulped, head still pinned to my chest, and the next part came out flattened. "You weren't there."
My hand went to the top of her head. I wasn't quite sure whether to push her away or not.
She tipped her head up, cheeks pink and still breathless from the run. Her father's eyes. None of the gray Mother and I shared.
"You look less dead," she said.
I'd take it as a compliment.
"Thank you," I said it drily.
"Before, you looked really dead." She pulled back far enough to inspect me. "They wouldn't let me touch you. They said your head was broken."
"It wasn't exactly—"
"Father said it was." She wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. "He cried." She reported it as fact.
I was still thinking of an answer to that when her eyes went past me to the wall, to the green band I'd been crouched over. "Are you looking at bugs?"
"Moss," I said.
"Why?"
"I think the mana in the ward makes it grow."
She dropped into a crouch, knees to her chest and face close to the stone. "Can I touch it?"
"Go ahead."
She poked it once, carefully. Then came a quick flurry with the same finger. "It's squishy."
"It's alive."
"Obviously." The contempt was total. I crouched beside her and had to admit that someone who didn't speak in layers was restful. Everyone else in this house made me guess at what lay underneath. Rosabel said what she meant, then moved to the next.
Down at her level I could see the moss did exactly what I'd hoped, thinning toward the dry stone and thickening inside the grooves along the foot of the wall, probably feeding on whatever the ward let slip. If the growth tracked the leak that precisely, the surface map was real. I reached past her and scraped a thumbnail-load off the thickest part into the first jar.
"Sera said you're pretending."
I looked up from the moss. She was watching me, the moss forgotten.
My stomach dropped.
"Pretending what?" It came out too quick and too level. I'd have caught the lie on anyone else.
"To be nice." She was scraping a fleck of stone off her own thumbnail now. "She said you'll be mean again."
My stomach climbed back off the floor. Not a problem. I'd rather she thought I was pretending to be nice than realized I wasn't her brother at all.
"She's wrong," she said.
She considered the moss. "You were only mean sometimes." She crossed her arms. "You never wanted to play with me."
So that was the previous occupant, described by the most honest person in the house. He wasn't around to answer for it. And while I may have inherited his face and name, I had not inherited the obligation to defend his conduct, only to live underneath the memory of it.
Her crossed arms lasted about three seconds.
"There's a cat. In the stables. She has babies." She threw both arms wide to indicate the magnitude. "Four of them, and one is orange, and I asked if I could have the orange one and Mother said 'we'll see,' and 'we'll see' means no."
She grabbed two of my fingers in a grip that meant business. "Come, I'll show you." She was already towing me toward the stables.
I let myself be towed. The second sample wasn't taken and the experiment wasn't finished, but the moss had the one quality that recommended it above almost any research subject... It was not going anywhere. It would be exactly this alive on exactly this wall in an hour, which was more than I could say for the patience of the person currently dragging me off it.
Refuse her now and she'd be back inside the hour, louder. The detour would cost me less than the negotiation.
I rolled my eyes at the back of her head. The math favors the cat.
Behind us, Ren collected the empty jar and brought it along.
"You're weird now." She was grinning when she said it.
(Rosabel Pic)
Spoiler
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