Seven Lives, One Enemy

Chapter Six: Perpetua's Question

She's standing two steps above me with her cane planted like a full stop at the end of a sentence, silver braid catching the last of the courtyard light through the stairwell window, and she doesn't ask if I'm all right. Perpetua never asks that. She asks smaller questions and expects you to hand her the real answer anyway.

"You corrected Merrin's treatise today." Not a greeting. "Eleven years out on the founding date. He's been teaching that date for six years and no one's caught it before you."

"It was wrong."

"It was wrong for six years. You've read that treatise a dozen times and never once bothered to fix it." She comes down one step, close enough now that I can smell the ink and beeswax that follow her everywhere, the same smell as the vault, and I have to work not to flinch from it. "So either you had an unusually thorough morning, or you needed somewhere to put your hands that wasn't shaking."

I should have known better than to think the sleeve covered it well enough.

"I didn't sleep." True, in the narrowest possible sense.

"No." She studies me the way she studies a suspect document, not unkindly, just thoroughly, cataloguing the collar I've turned up wrong, the color still missing from under my eyes. "You didn't sleep. And you've checked that courtyard window more times today than I've seen you do in two years combined, and you're standing on this staircase right now angled toward the door the way you'd stand if you expected to need it."

"I always count exits. You taught me that."

"I taught you to notice rooms. I didn't teach you to fear them." Her voice doesn't sharpen, exactly. It just goes very still, the way water goes still right before it's about to move. "Something happened last night."

It isn't a question, so I don't have to decide whether to lie to one. I look past her instead, at the window, at the ordinary grey evening going on without any idea what's in it now, and I feel the whole shape of what I could tell her rise up in my chest and then fold itself small again, the way it's been folding itself small since dawn.

I could tell her about Sela's second file. About the box that shouldn't exist inside it, the shard, the seven lives, the man with the scar who chose not to finish what he came to do. Any single piece of it would be enough to end my career the moment it left my mouth, and all of it together would very likely end more than that.

"A bad dream," I say instead. "Worse than usual. It's happened before."

"Not like this." She says it too fast for it to be a guess, and something in my stomach goes cold and careful, because that means she's noticed before, more than once, filed it away the way she files everything, and simply never said. "Thessaly. I've known you since you were five years old and reciting a war three centuries dead like you'd fought in it yourself. I know what your ordinary looks like. This isn't it."

"I'm fine."

"You're upright. That's not the same thing, and you know it, or you wouldn't have chosen those particular words instead of the truer one."

For one long moment I almost do it. I almost open my mouth and let six weeks of forged reports and one impossible night come pouring out onto this staircase where anyone could round the corner and hear it, because she is the only person in the world who has ever once looked at me like the things in my head might be real instead of broken, and some starved, tired part of me wants that so badly it aches worse than the birthmark still smarting faint under my collar.

I don't do it. I think of the lead box, the handwritten warning scratched into it. Do not open. Do not catalogue. Do not remember. I think of a man's hand shaking around a hilt and a single drop of blood left behind like a confession neither of us said out loud. Whatever I'm carrying now isn't only mine to hand off, not yet, not until I understand it well enough to know what I'd actually be putting into her hand.

"I'll tell you," I say, "when there's something worth telling."

Perpetua looks at me a long moment, and something crosses her face I don't have a name for, not quite hurt and not quite worry, something older than both, and I wonder, not for the first time, what exactly happened to teach a woman to hide her own feelings that thoroughly behind briskness and bone needles and a cane she plants like punctuation.

"There already is," she says. "You simply haven't decided I've earned it yet."

She doesn't say it unkindly. That's the worst part. She says it the way she'd note a filing error, plainly, without blame, and then she reaches out and straightens my collar herself, two efficient fingers, the kind of small correction she's made a hundred times over the years, and for one unguarded second her hand pauses right over the place where the mark burns hottest, like she can feel the heat coming off my skin and has decided, deliberately, not to ask about that either.

"Go home," she says. "Sleep, if you can manage it. And Thessaly." She's already turning, cane finding the next step down, but she pauses long enough to look back. "Whatever it is. Be careful who else finds out before I do."

I watch her go, silver braid swaying with each measured step, and I don't move from the stairwell until the sound of her cane has faded entirely, because it's easier to stand still in the dark than to walk home wondering how much of tonight she already knows and simply hasn't said.