Crownhaven. The Royal Academy. The same night.
The second night bell struck just as Milo began talking about cows for the third time that night.
Ren lay fully dressed under the blanket, waiting. He had been waiting since the first bell, and he had used the time to fix the route in his mind. Page 212. The west wing, down the stairs, through the door at the end of the corridor into the little court with the well. Across the court, in the shadow of the wall, to the archway. Through the archway into the north wing. Along the long corridor to the end.
Archive.
He threw back the blanket and got up. Slowly. The bed creaked all the same. Milo smacked his lips in his sleep and turned to the wall.
Ren took his coat from the hook. He left the sword. A commoner creeping through the corridors at night with a dwarven sword would raise more questions than one who simply could not sleep.
At the door he stopped and listened. Nothing. Only Milo, and somewhere below the soft groaning of old wood contracting in the night cold.
He opened the door.
The stairs were the hardest part.
They were old and worn, and every step had its own voice. Ren walked at the edge, where the wood was firmer, the way Owen had taught him on the ladder to the hayloft in Fernwick. Never in the middle. In the middle they’re softest. At the edge the wood bears.
On the first landing, outside the locked door to the girls’ rooms, he heard Bea mumbling in her sleep. Something about sand in her eyes. He went on.
Below, at the foot of the stairs, was Gilby’s room. The door stood open a crack. Behind it was darkness, and Ren heard slow, even breathing.
I’m a very light sleeper.
Ren held his breath. He set his foot on the second-to-last step, right at the edge. Then on the last. Then on the stone floor.
The breathing behind the door did not change.
He slipped through the door at the end of the corridor into the night.
The little court lay still in the moonlight. The well in the middle cast a long shadow. Ren kept to the wall, where it was darkest, and walked fast without running. Whoever ran drew attention. Whoever walked was just someone who had somewhere to go.
Above him, on the other side of the Academy, two windows were still lit in the upper-class residence. The same two, side by side, right at the top.
He did not look.
The archway was unlocked. Beyond it began the north wing, the oldest part of the Academy, which Ren had so far only seen from outside: dark stone, narrow windows, a roof on which the moss gleamed in the moonlight. There were no dormitories and no classrooms here any more, Milo had said, who had it from Bea, who had it from some kitchen boy. Only storerooms. Old books. Things nobody needed any more and nobody wanted to throw away.
The corridor was long and cold and smelled of dust. Ren counted the doors. Seven on the left. Six on the right. And at the end, under a low stone arch, a single door of dark, iron-bound wood.
It stood open a finger’s breadth. Behind it there was light.
Ren laid his hand on the wood. He felt the fire in his chest, warm and ready. And beneath it the other thing, which had not quite settled since the afternoon.
He pushed the door open.
The archive was bigger than he had expected.
A long, vaulted room, so deep that its end vanished into darkness. Shelves up to the ceiling, crammed with books, scrolls, bundles of papers tied with faded ribbons. It smelled of old leather and dust and a little of mice, like the attic room, only stronger.
In the middle stood a long table. On the table a lantern, its shutters closed but for a narrow gap, so that only a thin golden strip of light fell across the wood.
And beside the lantern, on a chair, with a book on his knees, sat Silas Merrow.
He did not look up when Ren came in. He turned a page.
“Close the door.” He still did not look up. “All the way. It sticks. You have to lift it.”
Ren closed the door. He had to lift it.
Then he stood there in the middle of the room and did not know what to say. On the way here he had thought of a hundred sentences, and none of them seemed right now.
Silas closed the book. He laid it on the table, took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. Without the spectacles he looked older. More tired. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he had not slept for many nights.
Then he put the spectacles back on and looked at Ren.
For a long time.
“You don’t have his eyes,” he said at last. “I always thought you’d get them. When you were small, everyone said you’d look like him one day. But you have your mother’s eyes.” He was silent for a moment. “The rest you have from him. The way you stand. How you hold your head when you’re thinking. At the gate, on your first day, for a moment I thought I’d seen a ghost.”
“That’s why you looked at me like that.”
“That’s why I looked at you like that.” Silas smiled faintly. “And then I noticed Edmund staring at me, and Cedric, and half the queue. And I gave you some foolish advice about sword grips and went back inside and was sick in my room for an hour.”
Ren did not know what to say to that.
“Sit down.” Silas pointed to a second chair. “And drop the Master. In here I’m not your teacher. In here I’m the man who gave you a book about the constellations on your fifth name day, which you never read.”
“I did read it.”
“You didn’t. Your father told me you looked at the pictures and used the rest as a stand for your wooden knights.”
Ren sat down.
And for a moment, a brief, strange moment, he was not in a cold archive in Crownhaven. He was at home. In the library at Ravenhold, under the big window, with a book full of stars on his knees, and somewhere in the house his mother was laughing.
He swallowed.
“Lucian,” Silas said quietly.
No one had called him that in seven years. Not even Owen. Owen had not dared, not even in his sleep, not even when they were alone, deep in winter, where no one could hear them.
Ren looked at the table. At the thin strip of lantern light.
“Don’t say that,” he said. His voice was rough. “Please. Not here. If I hear it, then …”
He did not finish the sentence.
Silas nodded slowly. “Ren,” he said. “All right. Ren.”
They talked for a long time.
Silas asked about Owen. Ren told him about Fernwick, about the hut and the sheep and the winters on the training ground, about Odell with his one tooth and Bodvar with his wagon full of dwarven nails. Silas listened, and sometimes he laughed softly, and once, when Ren told him how Owen had sworn because he had to buy him new boots for the second time in one winter, he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and pretended it was the dust.
Then Ren told him about the orc. About the lightning. About the burning that had eaten its way up his arm from the wrist, and the scars it had left behind.
Silas listened to that too. But he no longer laughed.
“Show me the arm.”
Ren hesitated. Then he undid the three buckles and pushed the leather bracer back.
Silas drew the lantern closer and opened one shutter a little further. The light fell on Ren’s forearm. On the scars that ran from wrist to elbow, branching like the twigs of a tree in winter, like cracks in ice, pale and silvery on the skin. Read the latest chapters at g.com.
And on the spot at the wrist where the skin had split open again that afternoon. Red and raw, not large, hardly as wide as a fingernail.
Silas said nothing for a long time.
“He had this too,” he managed at last. “Your father. Not as bad. But he had it. When he was seventeen, in the first year, before he had learned how to guide it.” He pushed the lantern back. “He hid it, just like you. Under long sleeves. I only saw it because I once found him in the library at night with his arm in a bucket of water.”
“What did he do?”
“Learned.” Silas shrugged. “He stopped locking it away. That was his mistake at the beginning, and it’s yours. You treat the lightning like a dog you shut in a shed so it won’t bite anyone. But a dog you lock up doesn’t stop being a dog. It just gets angrier. And one day it breaks the door down.”
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Ren thought of the afternoon. Of the ice lance in the mist. Of the crackle that had shot up from the depths like the crack of a whip, without his calling it.
“Today.” Ren spoke quietly. “In the circle. I didn’t call it. It came by itself.”
“I know. I saw.”
Ren looked up.
“From the library window.” Silas nodded towards the darkness behind the shelves, as if a window lay somewhere there. “I watch every first combat lesson. Have done for nineteen years. I saw you drop your sword, and I saw you snatch your arm to your chest, and I saw the hairs on your arm stand up before you did it.” He looked at Ren over the rim of his spectacles. “I wasn’t the only one watching.”
“Greaves.”
“Greaves. And the Winterhall daughter, who was standing in front of you. And the princess.”
Ren felt himself go cold. “They didn’t see anything. It wasn’t a spark. It was nothing.”
“For you it was nothing. For someone who knows what to look for …” Silas let the sentence hang in the air. “You have to learn to guide it, Ren. Not lock it away. Guide it. Slowly. One heartbeat. Then two. The way your father learned. Otherwise what happened today will happen again. Only next time you won’t drop the sword. Next time it’ll be too late for that.”
“Where?” Ren laughed, short and bitter. “Where am I supposed to practise? I sleep under one roof with forty others. Gilby hears every step. If I strike a spark on the training yard, half the Academy sees it.”
Silas reached into the pocket of his robe and drew something out. He laid it on the table, in the strip of lantern light.
A key. Old, heavy, of black iron, with a bit that looked like a little comb.
“The old bell tower. Behind the north wing, above the wall to the river. The bell cracked thirty years ago, in winter, and since then no one climbs up there. The stairs are rotten, and the Rector won’t spend the money to repair them.” He pushed the key across the table. “Your father practised there. At night. For a whole year. Up in the bell chamber it’s stone, not wood, and the walls are so thick that you can’t see anything from below if you stay away from the window. I’ve kept the key ever since.”
Ren stared at the black iron.
Your father practised there.
He took the key. It was cold and heavy and felt in his hand like the ring on his chest, on that evening in Fernwick when Owen had given it to him. Like something someone had kept for a long time. For him.
“One heartbeat.” Silas raised a finger. “No more. Not at first. And if the arm splits, you stop. At once. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Good.” Silas leaned back. “Then to what you’re really here for.”
“You want to know what happened that night.”
Ren nodded.
“I don’t know everything. I wasn’t there. I was here, in Crownhaven, in my room, and when the bells started ringing I thought it was because of the name day.” Silas took off his spectacles and began to polish them on his sleeve, although they were clean. “The next morning the crier came. The morning after, two men in purple came to my door and asked me to the palace.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a scholar. And because everyone knew I was Aldwyn’s friend.” Silas put his spectacles back on. “They laid the letters before me. The letters found in his chambers. To King Kaldrun, under the mountain. They asked me whether it was his handwriting.”
He fell silent. Ren waited.
“I looked at them. For a long time. I read them line by line, every word, every curve. And then I said: no.” Silas looked at his hands. “I said Aldwyn Ravenmoor had the worst handwriting in the entire kingdom. That he had dictated his letters for twenty years because no one could read them when he wrote them himself. That he would never in his life have written a letter to a king that looked as clean and straight and neat as these. I said it was a forgery. A good one. But a forgery.”
“And then?”
“Then they thanked me.” Silas laughed softly, without any joy. “A clerk wrote everything down. They showed me politely out. And when the findings of the inquiry were published, three weeks later, they stated that all the witnesses questioned had confirmed the letters were genuine.”
Ren stared at him.
“All of them.” Silas nodded. “Me too. My name was on the list. At the very top. Master Silas Merrow, Royal Academy, scholar of scripts, confirms.”
“Mast—” Ren corrected himself. “You said nothing? You let it happen?”
“A week after the publication a man stood at my door.” Silas looked at him, and for the first time that evening there was nothing tired in his eyes. Only something hard and cold that Ren had seen once before, in the theory hall, behind the lenses of his spectacles. “He wore no colours. He didn’t introduce himself. He was tall and had a scar, right across his nose, as if someone had tried to split his face in two. He said he had heard I had a good memory, and that at an academy that was a valuable quality. And that a bad memory sometimes came on quite suddenly at my age, overnight, and that afterwards one remembered nothing at all. Not even how to breathe.”
The man with the scar.
Ren had seen him. Only once, on a bridge over the Calder, on the last night he had been called Lucian. A face over the edge. A voice that laughed.
“I had a sister,” Silas said quietly. “Back then. She lived in Brackenhollow, with her husband and two children. He knew her name. He knew the children’s names.” He shrugged, a small, helpless movement. “So I said nothing. For seven years I’ve had to hear one of my students say House of the Traitor at least once in every year. And I say correct. Every time.”
Ren looked at the table.
Correct. And wrong.
“I’m sorry.” Silas’s voice could hardly be heard. “I know it changes nothing. But I’m sorry.”
Ren was silent for a long time.
“Owen told me once,” he said then, slowly, “that my father met you in the library. Because you both wanted to borrow the same book.”
Silas blinked. “He told you that?”
“He said you argued for a week over who should read it first. And in the end you read it together. A chapter every evening. Aloud.”
Silas looked up. Then he laughed, a small, choked laugh that got stuck somewhere between laughter and something else.
“It was a dreadful book. On the history of tax law in the Westmarks. We both only wanted it because the librarian had said it was too difficult for students.”
“You couldn’t have done anything,” said Ren. “Not against him. Not alone.”
“Perhaps.” Silas took off his spectacles and polished them again. This time they were not clean. “But now I’m not alone any more, am I?”
“What happened to him?”
Ren had not meant to ask the question. He had resolved not to ask it. He knew the answer. He had known it for seven years, since the night on the stairs when he had seen his father for the last time, in the white light, hand raised, before ten, twelve, twenty masked men. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
But he asked it all the same.
Silas did not answer at once. He looked into the strip of lantern light, and Ren saw his jaw working, as if he were chewing on something hard.
“Officially,” he said at last, “Aldwyn Ravenmoor resisted arrest and fell in the fight. So the report says. So the crier proclaimed it.”
“And unofficially?”
“Unofficially I don’t know what happened to him.” Silas held his gaze. “There was no grave. No execution, no body displayed on the Square of the Crown, as is done with traitors. That always puzzled me. The king loves to make an example. And here he could have had the greatest example of his whole reign, and he didn’t.”
Ren felt his heart begin to beat faster.
“What does that mean?”
“It means nothing. It means I don’t know.” Silas spoke slowly and distinctly, the way he spoke in the theory hall when he wanted someone to remember a word exactly. “Listen to me, Ren. I don’t know. For seven years I’ve asked, carefully, in places where no one would think me curious. I’ve found nothing. No file. No witness. Only this hole where a body ought to be.” He leaned forward. “If you’re hoping now, then you’re hoping for a hole. That’s dangerous. Holes are deep. You can fall in and never climb out again.”
Ren sat very still.
For seven years he had not hoped. He had forbidden himself. In the first months in Fernwick he had dreamed every night that his father knocked at the door of the hut, with blood on his forehead and a tired smile, and every morning he had woken and it had been Owen kicking the bedpost. And at some point he had stopped dreaming. Because waking up hurt too much.
“I’m not hoping,” he said.
“Good.”
But they both knew he was lying.
“One more thing.” Silas rose and took the lantern from the table. “And then you go back, before Gilby notices your bed is empty.”
Ren stood up too.
“Duke Winterhall has eyes at this Academy.”
“Dunmore?”
“Dunmore?” Silas snorted. “Dunmore is a coward who smuggles a slip into a pouch for Valemont gold so that a spoiled boy gets his duel. He’s a dog, Ren. He barks for whoever fills his bowl, and he trembles when Greaves looks at him. No. Dunmore isn’t what you need to be afraid of.”
“Who, then?”
“I don’t know.” Silas rubbed his forehead. “That’s the problem. I only know there’s someone. For seven years letters have been going from this Academy to Ravenhold. Not by the post. By messengers who wear no colours. Once a month, sometimes more often. I only noticed because I don’t sleep at night and because you can see the back gate from the library window.”
“And what’s in them?”
“That I don’t know. But I know that four years ago Winterhall had a student fetched away from here, in the middle of the year. A boy from Eastreach, from the country around Ravenhold, who had asked too many questions about the old ducal house. In the library, of the masters, of the older students. He was curious, nothing more. A boy whose grandmother had served in the castle.” Silas’s voice grew very quiet. “His name was Corwin. He never came back. His family received a letter saying he had entered the duke’s service. Nothing more.”
Ren felt the key in his hand. Cold and heavy.
“That’s why the book.” Ren only understood it as he said it. “Instead of a letter.”
“That’s why the book. That’s why I don’t look at you when we pass in the corridor. That’s why I had you say House of the Traitor in front of the whole class today.” Silas laid a hand on his shoulder. It was light and thin and covered in ink stains. “Whoever Winterhall’s Eye is: he heard you today. And he heard a commoner from Fernwick calling the House of Ravenmoor exactly what everyone else calls it. That was the point.”
“And the princess?”
Silas hesitated. For the first time that evening.
“The princess,” he said slowly, “is a riddle I haven’t solved yet. She spoke to me at the Touchstone. She told me to clean the stone so that no one would see things that aren’t there. I don’t know whether that was a warning, a threat or a favour.” He took his hand from Ren’s shoulder. “She hears too much, Ren. More than a girl her age should hear. Be careful with her. And even more careful with the other one.”
“Emilia.”
“She is the daughter of the man whose people killed your mother.” Silas said it calmly, without harshness, the way you state a fact. “And she is the cleverest girl I have seen at this Academy in nineteen years. That is a dangerous mixture. For her. And for you.”
He went to the door, lifted it and opened it a crack. Beyond lay the corridor, dark and still.
“What do you want, Ren?”
The question came so suddenly that Ren did not answer at once.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you want here? At this Academy. In this city.” Silas’s gaze grew sharp. “Do you want to kill Winterhall? Do you want to kill the king? Do you want to burn down everything they took from you?”
Ren thought of the fountain. Of a girl with white hair. Of a house with smashed windows and the words HOUSE OF THE TRAITOR over the door, and of Agnes laying lavender on the steps.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Then listen to me before you do know.” Silas spoke quietly and quickly. “If you kill Winterhall, you’re the son of a traitor who murdered a duke. They’ll hang you, and they’ll say they were right. A raven hatches ravens.” He paused. “But if you prove what he did … if you prove the letters were forged, who forged them, who gave the order … then you’re not the son of a traitor. Then you’re the heir of Ravenmoor. And then they hang someone else.”
He opened the door a little further.
“Revenge is easy, Ren. The truth is hard. But only one of them gives you back your house.”
Ren went back the same way.
Through the long corridor. Through the archway. Across the court, in the shadow of the wall, past the well. The two windows on the top floor of the upper-class residence were dark. He felt the key in his pocket, cold against his hip, and the ring on his chest, warm.
There was no grave.
He did not let the sentence into his head. He left it outside, in front of the door, like a dog that must not be let in.
He knew Silas was right. A dog you shut out does not stop being a dog.
The door to the west wing was still open. He slipped inside and closed it behind him, slowly, a finger’s breadth at a time, until the lock clicked softly shut.
Then he turned round.
At the foot of the stairs, on the bottom step, sat Warden Gilby. In nightshirt and coat, the stiff leg stretched out, the enormous bunch of keys on his knees. A candle stood beside him on the floor, casting flickering shadows on the wall.
He looked at Ren. His small, watery eyes were wide awake.
Ren stopped. He felt the blood rushing in his ears. He searched for a lie. He had not been able to sleep. He had needed fresh air. He had –
“The third step from the bottom,” said Gilby.
Ren stared at him.
“That one creaks. Even at the edge. Anyone going for walks at night ought to skip it.” Gilby reached for the candle and heaved himself up by the banister with a quiet groan, the stiff leg first. “I’m a very light sleeper, Harlow. And I have a very good memory.” He limped to his room and stopped once more in the doorway. “But sometimes I forget things. When I’m tired. I’m often tired.”
The door closed behind him.
Ren stood alone at the foot of the stairs, in the dark.
Then he climbed them, at the edge, where the wood was firmer. And the third step from the bottom he skipped.