"Understood, Ser. At a walk."
Gavric picked his pen back up and did not watch me go, which I understood was its own kind of courtesy. A man who spent his days reading boot mud knew exactly what was walking behind him with a full cask at its throat, and he chose to give me the privacy of his back.
I passed the sentry at the gate at a walk, too, and let the menu dissolve unchosen over my shoulder. The safe option, for once, was a thing I got to pick on purpose. The torc went with me, of course. It weighed what it weighed, and it climbed.
Downhill through market week. Carts queued nose to tail toward the gate. A knife-grinder sang his wheel awake in the lee of the wall. Apprentices hauled crates, and the coin-weight at my throat became a key-weight, and then stopped being a weight at all and became heat, a pressure like a hand held too long over a stove.
TORC CHARGE: 93%
TORC CHARGE: 95%
NOTE: THE HUM IS NOW AUDIBLE TO ENTITIES WITHIN 10 FEET.
A DOG HAS STOPPED BARKING.
The dog was the one I heard go.
Somewhere behind the stalls, the barking that had run all morning cut off mid-note, and the silence where it had been was worse. The hum had crossed from my teeth into the bones behind them, a wet finger circling a glass rim, constant, patient, and now it was no longer mine alone.
Ninety-seven percent announced itself in the street.
The big carter, mid-pitch, halfway through heaving a hay bale up onto his load, stopped. His hands stopped. The bale slid and thumped into the mud, and he stood there holding the shape of a lift with nothing in it. A cooper turned his head, all the way, unhurried. An apprentice slid off his crate and landed wrong and didn't notice, and his eyes flooded black from the centre out, as ink dropped in milk. Down the row, the fishmonger was still pricing his catch at full volume, and his voice thinned as he went, because the men had stopped answering him. The first man in this town to treat me like a wallet was losing his customers to me one by one, and I was twenty feet away and had done nothing at all but walk.
TORC CHARGE: 100%
AMBIENT BLEED COMMENCED.
[BROK'S WARNING APPLIES. PICK YOUR NAIL.]
One sentence of choosing. Biggest, nearest, already turning.
The carter.
I caught his wrist, a forearm like ship's cable, and hauled, and he came with me the way a barge comes with a tug, through the cooper's open yard-gate, back among the stacked barrels, out of the street's sightline. Straw-choked mud. The smell of hay and horse and cold morning. I got two fingers on the clapper where it hung at my throat, and turned it, and pressed.
The ring was silent, and total. It went through him the way a hammer goes through a nail.
He dropped straight down, kneeling in the mud, and bowed toward me, hands on his thighs, head bent, like the sun had come up in the wrong place and he was the only one who'd seen it. Behind me, out through the gate, the street un-glazed in three heartbeats. I heard the market pick its noise back up, the cooper's mallet, the fishmonger finding his voice and his outrage. Nobody the wiser.
Except the farmer.
He came up off his knees and got his hands on me and apologised for it, both at once, and I got a look at him in the barrel-shadow.
Twenty-five or so, curly hair full of chaff, a neck burned brown by the sun where his face was only pink, shoulders built by ten years of bales. Big harmless hands, shaking. And a front lacing his trousers could not argue with, tented and spreading a damp shadow, while his mouth ran on ahead of it.
"Miss, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I never, there's a girl, in Marrenford, I've got a girl in Marrenford—"
"Then think of her." I had his laces already. "After."
I shoved him back against the cart's wheel and straddled him and sank down onto him, and that was the whole of round one.
He bucked like a stung horse and came immediately, bellowing into his own fist, a week's worth and then some, jerking up into me through all of it while I held his shoulders and let the clapper's work finish doing me the courtesy of meaning nothing at all yet.
And he didn't soften.
He swelled, harder, thicker, and his eyes came up flooded and appalled and starving.
"Again."
His voice cracked in the middle of the word.
"Miss, please—"
"I know. Neither can I."
I rolled my hips, slow, and felt him jump inside me.
"Fuck me, Carter."
The middle rounds went by in straw and mud. He laid me down in the straw behind the cart and folded me until my ankles were by my ears, and worked that thick farm-boy cock in steady stamping strokes while his own first load frothed white rings around the root of him.
plap, plap, plap
And I came apart once, gushing over his balls, my own spray darkening the straw. Then he stood up with me still on him, forgot entirely that he was holding me, and simply held me, hands under my thighs, and walked me up the side of the cart while I clung to his neck.
The cart rocked on its axles and groaned like a ship. My second finish ran down his sac and dripped into the mud, and he apologised into my hair and did not stop.
Round four was in the cart bed, and by then he'd stopped apologising and started talking. The weather. Marrenford, and the road, and something about a horse. I pulled his face down and kissed him to shut him up, and it backfired, because he groaned into my mouth and the talking moved inside me somehow, words against my lips, and he flooded me with the fullest load of the morning while I felt my belly go warm and round with it, sloshing faintly when I moved, obscene and unmistakable.
And then he cleared.
Mid-embrace. Still inside me, softened at last, the charge spent and his own stamina handed back. I watched the black drain out of his eyes from an inch away, and his face did the whole familiar route: confusion, horror, and then something new, a helpless blushing awe that brought the pink up his neck to meet the sunburn.
"Ma'am."
His voice came out small for a man his size.
"I don't, I mean, I—"
A pause with visible weather in it.
"I did have a girl in Marrenford."
"You said."
Another pause. Longer.
"Had," he said.
He set me on my feet in the mud with ridiculous gentleness, and then crouched and straightened my skirts with those big, clumsy careful fingers, like a man folding a flag he had no rank for. Then he stood, and put his hat in his hands, and what came out of him next came out steady, nothing like the glaze-eyed kneeling of ten minutes ago.
"Joss. Cartwright's yard, keep road."
He swallowed.
"If ye ever need a cart, or a pair of arms, or anything. Any hour. I'll be there 'fore the bell's done."
He loaded a fallen bale one-armed into the cart, tipped his hat to me though it was still in his other hand, an imaginary tip, a tip in spirit, and drove out through the yard arch like a man walking on a boat.
The chime came, and it brought a bill.
TORC DISCHARGED: 100% → 0%
RING RESOLVED: 1 ENTITY.
COLLATERAL: 0.
ENTITY SATISFIED (×4 LOADS): CARTER "JOSS," LV 2
POST-RING FLAG: TETHERED.
THE SYSTEM HAS QUESTIONS. THE SYSTEM IS BILLING SOMEONE.
+20 EXP — 35/400
I stood in the straw and read it twice.
Satisfied, resolved, zero collateral, and one new word doing all the heavy lifting. Tethered. The system had questions and was billing someone, and neither of those sentences had an address on them, and Joss had a girlfriend this morning and had her no longer, retroactively, in a single past tense.
Brok's warning had said changed. He had said it like weather coming. I filed it in the crowded drawer and pulled my skirts straight.
Vael was at the yard gate. She had been, I suspected, for some time, arms folded, watching the street where a dozen men had stumbled and righted themselves for no reason anyone could name.
"Fourth night, green fire," she said. "And this morning, a street that forgets itself for a breath, then mends."
She unfolded her arms and turned west.
"Adding a page."
She walked off toward the drowned willows, and the menu hung in the cold air behind her, patient as ever.
[THE STAG] / [SCOUT THE HALL] / [FOLLOW VAEL]
I picked the grey woman, and the chapter of my legs went with her.
It took twenty minutes to catch up, and when I did, on the boardwalk stretches where the keep road remembered it was built over marsh, she didn't turn her head.
"Half a mile back you stepped on the boards like you wanted me to hear you. Good."
A pause of two planks.
"If you'd crept, I'd have made you go home."
The west gate was shut, per the Viscount's order. Oak, black with age, a bored sergeant with a halberd and a ledger of his own. Vael's lead seal on its cord reorganised his whole posture.
"Dusk bell, sister. Past it, I log whoever's out."
"Log away." She was already through. "She's with me."
He looked at me and saw what there was to see: a comely woman in a fine gown, the torc doing its quiet drinking, and shrugged with one shoulder and wrote nothing. The bolt crashed home behind us, and the small grey letters ticked over in the corner of my eye.
TORC CHARGE: 0% → 6%
GATE GARRISON PROXIMITY LOGGED.
I was in a sergeant's ledger now. Paper had started following me around.
The causeway ran out ahead of us, grey planks over black water, drowned pasture on either side, dead trees standing knee-deep in their own reflections.
Mist came in sheets and took the world away in instalments. And the frog choruses, which should have been a wall of sound, cut out in patches. Whole yards of hush, where the water lay unnaturally still, as if something had asked the marsh for quiet and the marsh had agreed.
"In this province they call us grey sisters," Vael said, walking.
"What we are is lamp-keepers. We own lamps we never light."
She had one on her belt, brass, shuttered like a book.
"A lamp lights itself; we write a page. Pages go to a library you'll never see."
Three planks.
"Four nights ago, every lamp in this province lit green."
Every lamp. Not the willows. The province.
"Fen-fire is yellow," she went on. "It burns cold over peat gas, it hangs low, and it doesnae watch anyone."
She said the word the way she set her boots down, evenly.
"Green means attention. Something has leaned close against the world here, and where it leans, the skin of things rubs raw and burns. It started the night you came out of the deep Valdris."
We walked. The hush moved with us in patches.
Then, flat as slate:
"You didn't light the fires. You're what they lit to look at."
I walked on that for a hundred yards of plank before I trusted my feet with anything else. Suspect to exhibit, in one sentence. The crowned thing had said FOUND, and I had been carrying that word around like a debt. It was worse as an invitation. Things that get found get kept. Things on display get watched.
"Ask," Vael said. "You're chewing on it."
"Who pays for it? The lamps, the pages, you. Kings pay for armies. Churches pay for choirs."
I'd had the question since the taproom, in one form or another.
"Somebody pays for lamps nobody lights."
For the first time all day she looked almost pleased, a degree of warmth entering the flat grey like sun on a ledger's edge.
"Old treasuries. Dead men's wills. We're paid out of the past, so nobody alive can order us to stop looking."
She faced front again.
"That's the whole design."
"Here," she said, and we had arrived.
The drowned willows stood sunk to their shoulders, their branches like hands pleading at a sky that had ignored them for years. And among them, spaced like candles at a table, four flames.
Green.
They were knee-high, and they burned on nothing. No fuel beneath them, no wick, no char, not so much as a scorch on bark or water. Cold light, and it threw our shadows the wrong way, out toward the water, away from the flames, as if the light came from behind us and there was nothing behind us but plank and mist.
The water's surface beneath each flame lay untouched, smooth for days.
[ANOMALY PROXIMITY]
THERMAL OUTPUT: NONE.
FUEL: NONE.
SHADOW INTEGRITY: WRONG.
this is not fire. this is atten
this is not fire. this is atten
[ DO NOT ANSWER THE…
The window stopped. Not closed. Stopped, mid-word, mid-sentence, the way a man stops when a hand settles on the back of his neck.
I took out the compass, because it was the only instrument I owned that had ever admitted to knowing anything. It came up cold. The needle spun once, twice, like a dog turning before sleep, and pinned.
Not on Vael. On the nearest green flame.
It held there, quivering, certain as north.
"It is not supposed to do that," I said.
Vael looked at the needle, at the flame, and unhooked the brass lantern from her belt. She opened its shutter. Inside, the wick, dry, unlit, untouched by anything but years, blossomed green on its own, a soft cold bloom in the little glass house.
She looked at that for a long time. Then the shutter closed, with a click like a verdict.
"Confirmed, then," she said. "Fourth page."
The flames leaned.
All four at once, slow, synchronised, the way a field of sunflowers finds its sun, and the sun was me.
Cold light slid across the still water, climbed the planks, pooled around my boots. And under the marsh-silence, in the hiss of their burning, there was almost-shape, almost-words, pressure against the insides of my ears like a voice at the far end of a long hall, saying something with my name in it, or saying something that would have my name in it if it finished.
"F——"
[WINDOW TERMINATED]
The whole world blinked.
Not the light. The world. One frame of everything- planks, mist, willows- gone like a skipped page, and my knees went with it.
Vael's hand was on my arm before I finished dipping, her grip like fence-wire.
"It noticed you noticing."
She was already turning me.
"That's enough. We walk. Now."
We made it six planks.
The peat bulged.
Once.
Twice.
And then a dozen points lifted in a neat ring across the causeway's width, right where the green light had pooled, right where the ground still steamed faintly, and I understood that the lights had baited it.
Days of patient attention, and the ground had ripened.
Caps unfurled from the black muck like opening fists, pale honey-gold, wetly shining.
And between them, rising, came the sovereign.
Seven feet of it. A fungal lord in the ruin of a court, flesh like wet marshmallow stretched over stone, a broad dripping cap for a crown, and a fringe of gills hanging down past where a chin would be, rippling like a beard in water.
It had no eyes at all, and it faced me with its whole body.
Its regalia moved.
A skirt of rooting tendrils shifted around its base like slow eels feeling a current. And clustered at its pelvis, beneath the fringe, was a crown of fruiting rods, thick and pale and weeping steadily, gleaming.
It breathed out.
Pink-gold dust rolled over me in a soft cloud, and it smelled, absurdly, like Dolv's bakehouse. Honey. Warm yeast. Wet earth. It coated my tongue and filled my lungs before the thought to hold my breath finished forming.
ENTITY: MYCONID SOVEREIGN + RETINUE — MAGICAL THREAT, LEVEL 5
NOTE: SPAWNED OUT OF SEASON. OUT OF, FRANKLY, SPECIES.
STATUS EFFECT ACQUIRED: [SPORE-BLOOM]
AROUSAL: CLIMBING. BODY WARMING FROM THE INSIDE.
REASONING: INTACT (FOR NOW).
BLOOM PEAKS AT FULL SATURATION. THE RING WILL WANT TO PLANT SOMETHING.
TORC: 6% → 19%. IT IS DRINKING FROM THE RETINUE.
IT IS ALSO [ERROR], DRINKING FROM THE FIRE.
IT SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO DO THIS.
The sovereign raised both long arms. Unmistakably courteous. Unmistakably an invitation. The gill-beard rippled with shaped non-speech, syllables of moving air, and behind it the dozen lesser caps swayed in time, all together, like a congregation.
"It's blooming," Vael said, flat as ever, "and its bloom wants a warm host for the spawn-cup. Congratulations. It is the most polite thing you will meet today."
Her hand drifted toward the shuttered lantern.
"Your call, my lady. I'll write the page either way."
NEW SIDE QUEST: THE UNLIT LAMP
LEAVE THE WILLOWS WITH THE GREY SISTER'S LORE CONFIRMED.
BE INSIDE THE WALLS BEFORE THE DUSK BELL.
REWARD: 60 EXP, GREY SISTER'S WHISTLE
(SUMMONS VAEL ONCE. SHE HAS SEEN EVERYTHING. SHE IS UNBOTHERED.)
FAIL CONDITION: CAUGHT PAST DUSK BEYOND THE WALLS.
THE MARSH'S NIGHT COURT WILL HOLD AUDIENCE WITH YOU UNTIL DAWN.
THAT IS A EUPHEMISM. MOSTLY.
The spores were already in my blood, and they were working. A honeyed warmth unspooled low in my belly, patient and thorough. My nipples had gone stiff against the gown's silk, two small insistent facts I could feel with every breath, and my breath was going shallow without my permission.
Reasoning intact, the window said, for now, and I could feel the parenthesis ageing in real time.
The sovereign waited, arms open, patient as a thing that blooms once a century can afford to be. Behind it, the four green fires burned on nothing and watched me the way an audience watches a stage.
The menu unfolded, and for the first time in this world, it had four doors.
[ACCEPT THE COURTSHIP] / [MOONLACE THE SOVEREIGN] / [RING THE BELL] / [STAND BEHIND VAEL]
STATUS: [SPORE-BLOOM — RISING ▲]