Meanwhile, on Raea's side.
Once she was clear of the Greybridge District the rain had eased considerably, and there were faint signs of the sky clearing.
Raea sat in the carriage the Judgment Tribunal had arranged, the silver-white longsword laid across her knees, her damp coat still carrying the faint smell of rain-wet earth. The wheels ground slowly over dark flagstones, and the tightly packed apartment blocks outside the window fell away behind her one by one.
Greybridge was in the busiest hour of its day.
Workers hurrying to the factories passed under the awnings with their shoulders hunched. Carriages delivering goods or passengers or doing whatever else jammed the narrow junction, and several women with cloth bags full of vegetables argued endlessly over a few copper coins outside a bakery.
Washing nobody had taken in yet hung between the eaves, rainwater dripping from the corners of the cloth into the gutter along the street.
Raea had been watching the direction she came from the whole time.
Only when the carriage turned the corner and the house with Elaine shut inside it vanished completely did she slowly draw her eyes back.
The young master should still be sitting on the edge of the bed. What was she doing right now?
Leafing through the books she had left, perhaps, or perhaps already at work studying the seal by the window. At the thought Raea's fingers tightened slightly, the pads of them pressing into the cold silver inlay of the scabbard. She regretted it a little; she felt now that she should have used a different Sacred Object, or that even a Sealed Object would have been acceptable.
Because the seal she had set was only meant for Elaine, or for an ordinary thief, that sort of thing...
She had never imagined that after so many years she would meet Elaine again.
The day House White dismissed her, Raea remembered, it seemed to have been raining.
Thanks to Castibury's climate, overcast and wet the year round, plus the thick smoke pouring out of the various factories recently built on the outskirts, the city gave the impression of being permanently damp and grey.
The flagstones in front of the manor were soaked, the neatly trimmed shrubs in the courtyard beaded with fine drops, and several carriages stood waiting outside the black iron gate. Raea waited quietly under the eaves with a wooden box of clothes and personal effects in her arms.
The butler handed her a heavy purse.
Where compensation was concerned, House White had not shortchanged her. The severance in that purse far exceeded several years of an ordinary maid's income: enough to rent a better house, enough to support a fresh start at a reasonably respectable life.
Raea took the purse, thanked him politely, and looked much as she always did.
As she turned to go she heard the iron gate swing slowly shut behind her, wet metal grinding with a dull sound. The familiar white manor was covered over by the high wall a piece at a time, until all that remained was one corner of the second floor, and the window that belonged to Elaine.
She stood where she was for a long time.
Rain came down off the eaves without stopping and soaked the flagstones at the edge of her shoes. The purse in her hand was undeniably heavy, and Raea could hardly feel that it was there.
She was only thinking about what Young Master Elaine would be doing today.
Elaine always lost track of time over anything to do with Sealed Objects, and never liked strangers handling the things in her room. She had left, and Elaine still filled her head entirely.
The carriage crossed the wide, quiet streets of the Old Crown District, and the neat rows of manors around it gradually thinned. Pavements laid with pale stone gave way to ordinary mud-and-lime roads, and the elegant courtyards and carved walls fell away behind.
Once she was into the Greybridge District the streets grew abruptly crowded.
Low apartment blocks pressed against one another, laundry strung across from window to window, damp coal smoke sitting down on the roofs. A delivery cart squeezed slowly through the crowd, its wheels rolling into standing water and throwing up a spray of dirty water flecked with mud. The bakery near the corner was getting ready to close, and the smell of scorched wheat mixed with the rank smell of the gutter and came in together through the half-open carriage window.
The room Raea had rented was on the third floor of a grey-white apartment block.
The wooden staircase was very narrow and gave a dry creak at every step. The room held only a single bed against the wall, an old table and chair, and a wardrobe that wouldn't shut properly. The edges of the wallpaper had taken damp, and the window looked straight out at the mottled brickwork of the next building, so even in daylight not much of it got in.
She set the wooden box on the floor and dropped the purse on the corner of the table.
The room was very quiet. Raea had no particular requirements of a place to live; ordinarily she had almost no concept of money either.
It was not that she was wealthy. It was more as though she had been born without much interest in such things.
She sat on the edge of the bed, fingers slowly closing on her skirt, and Elaine was still in her head. She had even begun to envy whoever had replaced her in looking after Elaine.
Greybridge was too far from the Old Crown District.
Even by carriage the journey took a long time. If something really did happen to Elaine, by the time the news reached here it would already be over.
The thought came to her once, and never left her head again.
A few days later Raea went back to the letting agent.
With the severance House White had given her, plus the wages she had saved over the years, she bought a small apartment on the edge of the Old Crown District. It stood on an unremarkable side street with an old clock shop below it, its window frames already faded, and broad sheets of dark green vine climbing the wall along the street.
It was two or three blocks from the White manor. Not too far.
It was nowhere near as respectable as the White manor, and the price was still shockingly high.
Raea did not hesitate. The window of the second-floor room faced exactly the right way. Push it open and, over the slanted roof of the clock shop and a row of plane trees, you could just make out the garden along the side of the White manor.
Standing at that window, the agitation that had been pressing on her finally thinned a little.
She moved the desk over to the window and adjusted the position of the bed. Once the chair was set she sat down and tried it, and raised her head.
From here she would know the moment Elaine went out.
She did not feel she had done anything strange.
That severance had come from House White in the first place, so using it now to make certain Elaine stayed within her sight was, of course, nothing if not fitting.
At first Raea only sat by the window when her day's work was done, watching the White manor across two or three blocks, waiting for the light in Elaine's room to come on before she could settle to anything of her own.
Later she gradually memorised the hours Elaine went out and came home. If that window lit a little later than usual she would throw on a coat at once and walk a circuit of the nearby streets, and only after seeing Elaine come back with her own eyes would she return to the apartment as though nothing had happened.
Through all of it, Elaine noticed nothing whatsoever of Raea's watching.
And because the family was steadily declining, House White could no longer afford to hire high-ranking Seal-Bearers to protect its members.
Meanwhile, strangers occasionally came near Elaine.
Raea would patiently memorise their faces, then find a way to establish their addresses and identities. She did not consider this behaviour surveillance. As Raea saw it, the young master had never been good at telling malice from anything else, not since childhood, and she was merely clearing away the dangers that might be there.
What genuinely made her uncomfortable was the new maid who had replaced her at Elaine's side.
The woman had obviously never had proper training. Raea could not make out her face across that distance and still found her movements far too clumsy, everything she did short of careful.
As House White declined further, fewer and fewer carriages stopped outside the manor, and the servants left one after another.
Raea ought to have been worried at first. Instead something inside her slowly went quiet.
As House White came down piece by piece, the difference in station standing between the two of them was disappearing as well, like the furniture and the assorted marvels being carried out of the manor.
And as she saw it, the fall of House White might not necessarily be a bad thing.
The way Raea understood it, only once Elaine had lost all that elevated station would she finally need somebody. And that somebody could naturally only be herself.
"How very lucky." Sitting in the carriage, Raea murmured it to herself, and on that ordinarily cold face a faint flush and a smile gradually appeared.