Dumpling clicked, and it was not a warning.
I knew the difference by now. The warning click was a lock turning. This one was the soft, settling sound it made for people it had been introduced to, and I heard it twice in a row, one after the other, from the porch.
"Family," said Toby, from the floor beside my bed, where he had been drawing a hen. "Two of them."
I lay still and listened. A knock. The front door. The creak of the hall. A pause, and then, unmistakably, the careful, grave sound of someone wiping their feet.
Left. Right. Left again, to be sure.
"Oh," I said, and my eyes stung. "Margaret."
She did not hug me.
She came into the bedroom in her gray veil with her walking stick and stopped at the foot of the bed, and I watched her look at me, at the pallor, the quilt, the stool beside me with the gardening manual open on it. Then her eyes went to the line of gold stitches where the blanket had slipped, and the silver creeping out around them.
Her gaze stopped on the last stitch, the one that had gone gray, and stayed there. Her mouth went very thin.
"Elise Ashford," said Sister Margaret. "Sit up."
"I'm not supposed to."
"I did not say get up. I said sit up. I need to see your face."
I sat up. It took Noctavia, who had appeared at my back like a shadow, to slide two pillows behind me. Sister Margaret watched her do it. She watched the way my wife's hand rested for a moment between my shoulder blades before she took it away.
Then she crossed the room, sat on the stool, and took my wrist in her dry, cool fingers.
"The cathedral gates were shut the morning after the sky went dark," she said. "Tomas climbed the east wall to fetch me, and it has taken us until now to get past the road wardens. He saw the sky turn black from the tower that night, and I have not seen that boy so frightened since he was twelve." She turned my hand over. "Tell me what was used."
"A knife," I said. "White. With blue letters."
Her fingers tightened.
"Valeria's prisoners called it the Mercy," said Noctavia quietly, from the foot of the bed.
Sister Margaret did not move. For a long moment she sat there holding my wrist, looking at nothing. Then she let it go, folded her hands in her lap, and said, in a voice I had not heard since I was eleven and had broken a window:
"I taught you to read so that you could be killed by their paperwork."
"Margaret..."
"No." She raised a hand. "I am being angry. I would like to be angry for one minute, quietly, and then I will be useful."
We let her.
She was angry for about a minute and a half. She sat very straight on the stool, with her eyes closed and her lips moving slightly, and I realized after a while that she was praying, or something like it, and that it was not a gentle prayer.
When she opened her eyes, she said, "I have never heard that name."
"Vael said the Council commissioned it."
"Vael." She said it like a name she meant to remember. "Yes. Tomas told me. The one who slipped away."
"I offered him tea," I said.
"Of course you did." She almost smiled. It vanished. "I have never heard of the blade. But I have been in that cathedral for forty years, and I know the Council has a drawer it does not open. There are rumors. A name. The Lantern Office. Nobody speaks of it. Nobody has ever been seen entering or leaving. A senior sister once asked about it, in my hearing, and was transferred to a convent in the north the following week."
"The Lantern Office," Noctavia said softly.
Margaret looked at her. "You know the name."
"Clara does."
"Ah." Margaret's gaze went to the doorway, where a tall girl in a gray coat stood with her arms wrapped around herself and her chin lifted very high. They looked at each other for a moment, an old woman and a girl, neither blinking.
"I would like to talk to you," said Sister Margaret, "when you are ready. Not before. I am not in a hurry."
Clara swallowed. "...Okay."
"Good."
Tomas had not come upstairs.
I found him in the kitchen, an hour later, when Noctavia carried me down because I would not stop asking. He sat at the end of the table with a cup of tea going cold between his hands, and he looked a hundred years old.
"Tomas," I said.
"Hero Ashford." He did not look up. "I need to tell you something."
"Tell me over tea."
"I don't think I deserve the tea." His voice was thin. "It's that I... When I came to the cabin, in the beginning, with the sandal. The Council asked me to remember everything. They said it was so they could pray for you properly." His hands began to shake. "I counted the windows. I counted the doors. I told them where the garden fence ended and where the road bent, and how many beds there were. I thought I was being thorough."
Nobody spoke.
"They used me," said Tomas. "I was so proud to be asked. I was proud, and I drew a map."
Noctavia stood at the stove with her back to the room, very still. She didn't say anything. I could see her shoulders working as though she were choosing, one word at a time, not to say something she would regret.
"Tomas," I said. "Look at me."
He did, slowly. His eyes were red.
"You asked if you could remember the chickens," I said. "Do you remember that? You stood in my garden with your sandal in your hand and asked permission to remember the chickens." I tried to smile, and it hurt, and I kept it there anyway. "A spy doesn't ask. You were a boy who was given a job he didn't understand. That's all."
"I should have known."
"You should have been told the truth. Nobody told you." I held out my hand across the table. "That's theirs to carry. Not yours."
He took it. His fingers were shaking. He bent his head over our joined hands, and Sister Margaret, who had been standing in the doorway, crossed the room without a word and laid her hand on the back of his neck, as she must have done a hundred times when he was small.
Noctavia put a cup of tea down in front of him without turning around, and went back to the stove.
It was Sister Margaret who said it.
We had sat down to a late lunch. The soup was good. Toby had positioned Dumpling on the table as a guest of honor, and Clara had eaten nothing. Sister Margaret put down her spoon, folded her hands, and said, with the air of a woman setting down a heavy parcel:
"Vael has reached the cathedral."
Nobody moved.
"He came in the night. Tomas saw him from the tower, running down the north road, and he did not stop at the gate. He went straight to the Council chambers." She looked at me, then at Noctavia. "I do not know what he said. I know that by morning, three of the Council had been sent for from other cities. I know that the doors were locked."
"They know she's alive," said Noctavia.
"They know she is alive, and they know where she is, and they know what you are capable of." Margaret's voice was very level. "I do not think they will send another knife. I think they will send officials."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means a summons, with a seal. It means a hearing. It means a house with a lot of paper." She closed her eyes briefly. "It means they will make this lawful. And a thing that is lawful cannot be fought with a sword."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"You cannot stay in this house," said Sister Margaret.
I felt Noctavia go still beside me.
I waited for her to argue. I waited for her to say that it was our home, that she had planted a tomato, that she would rather burn the cathedral to the ground. I had seen her say less over a stolen cup.
She didn't.
"I know," she said.
It was so quiet I almost didn't hear it. She was looking at the little yellow flowers in the jar on the windowsill, long dead, still standing, because nobody would throw them out.
"I have known since Vael ran," said Noctavia. "I have only been waiting for someone to say it so that I would not have to be the one."
I looked at her.
She did not look at me.
I thought of the crooked chimney, and the vegetable patch, and the little room upstairs that was no longer empty. I thought of all those mornings, before the children and after. I thought of her sitting in the garden, in the rain, watching a patch of dirt, and learning how to wait.
I did not say anything.
I didn't know what I thought. And that, I realized, was the most frightening thing of all.
That evening, I couldn't sleep.
The fever had come back at dusk, lighter this time, and Sister Margaret had finally left for the guest room, which was a blanket on the kitchen floor that she had refused to let anyone improve. The house was quiet. I lay propped on pillows beside the open window and listened.
I heard Clara first.
She was sitting on the stairs, as she always does when she thinks nobody is awake. I could tell by the way the third step creaked. She wasn't moving. She was only sitting there, in the dark, holding something against her chest.
Then I heard the small, careful tread of bare feet.
"Clara," said Toby, very quietly. "Are we leaving again?"
A long silence.
"I don't know," said Clara.
"You're packing."
"I'm not packing."
"Your bag's on the stairs."
I heard her breathe in, and it shook.
"I'm sorry," said Clara. Her voice was thin and frayed. "I'm so sorry, Toby. I thought we had it. I thought this was the place. I thought if we just stayed..."
"It's okay."
"It isn't. I always... I always do this. I always run, and it's always my fault, and I'm so tired of..."
A third set of footsteps. Soft. Unhurried.
"May I sit?" said Noctavia.
Nobody answered. I heard the stair creak as someone shifted over, and the whisper of a skirt, and then silence, thick and warm, of three people sitting very close together on a staircase.
"I have a rule," said my wife, "about this stair. I'm told it's the third one that creaks. Nobody should sit on it alone."
"I wasn't alone," said Clara, defensively.
"No. You weren't." A pause. "You are not leaving tonight."
"I know."
"Neither are you, Toby."
"Okay!"
"But I want to be honest with you, because you deserve it." I heard her draw a slow breath. "I don't know where we're going. I don't know what the house will be, or the garden. I don't know what we will do about the village or the hens. I know that we may have to leave. I won't pretend that we won't."
Toby sniffled.
"I don't know where we'll sleep," said Noctavia. "But I know who we'll sleep next to. That part is not in question. Not for me. Not for Elise. Do you understand?"
A very long silence.
"...Clara?"
"...Yes," said Clara, in a voice that was almost unrecognizable.
"You are not a problem I'm solving. You are not a debt. You are mine." My wife's voice dropped, low and fierce and gentle, all at once. "I decided that weeks ago. It's not a decision I'm going to un-decide because of a few men with lanterns."
Somebody was crying. It may have been all three of them.
"Not yet," said Noctavia, very softly. "Whatever we do, we do it together. And not tonight."
"...Okay," whispered Clara.
"Come. Both of you. It's cold, and I have a very good blanket."
I heard the stair creak. I heard the pad of two sets of feet, one heavy and one light, and the click of a door. A little while later, from the kitchen, Sister Margaret's voice said sleepily: "Is someone humming?"
"No," said Noctavia, from the next room.
She was.
She came back to me near midnight.
She sat on the edge of the bed, in the dark, and took my hand without a word.
"You heard," she said.
"Yes."
"I wasn't sure how much to say."
"It was exactly right."
She was quiet for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice was small.
"Elise. Do you want to leave?"
I looked at the ceiling. At the old beam above the window, which I had been meaning to ask about. At the room around us, where I had been so happy.
"I don't know," I said. "I really don't. I don't know where we'd even go."
"No," said Noctavia. "Neither do I."
She laid her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her. Outside, in the garden, the tomato leaned against its stake and rustled in the wind, and nobody in the house had any idea what the morning would bring.
We stayed there like that for a long time.