The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 18

Nothing happened for four days, which is its own kind of thing happening.

It was not the whole room. I want to be accurate about that, because for the first day I thought it was, and that turned out to be the worst of it.

It was Celeste, who was perfectly courteous throughout. She said good morning. She asked after my health once. She had made her point in front of everyone, so she no longer needed to make it again.

It was Rosalie, who did the actual work. A conversation that had been going before I sat down and was somehow finished by the time I did. A place at a table that turned out to be taken. Rosalie can do that with her back to you.

Isabelle smiled at me across the winter garden twice and did not come over either time, which I did not hold against her. Isabelle has been afraid of rooms her whole life.

Clara went on drawing.

Eleanor asked me at breakfast on the second morning whether a longbow could be drawn from horseback, listened to the entire answer, argued with part of it, and did not appear to have noticed that anything had happened to anyone. I have never been so grateful to talk about equipment.

And Eliza was exactly the same as she had always been, which nobody seemed to have told her was a choice.

⸻

The Selection did not stop for any of this.

That is the part I had not understood until I was outside it. From the middle of a thing you cannot see its shape. From the edge you can see nothing else.

Celeste had begun walking with Cassian after the council sittings. Not alone. There is always a clerk, and the corridor is public, and it is entirely correct. She has learned what he reads. Twice now I have heard her ask him a question about the southern grain tariffs that she already knew the answer to, and both times he answered it properly, and both times Vivienne was near enough to hear what he said.

Vivienne does not compete for the corridor. She waits until a room has gone quiet and then says four words in it.

Julian holds court wherever he stops moving. Rosalie is usually the first one there, with her hand somewhere on his sleeve. Isabelle laughs at everything either of them says. He lets all of it happen exactly as he always has.

The difference is what occurs when they leave.

They do leave. Somebody is always wanted somewhere, and the group around him thins out over an hour the way groups do, and Eliza is the one still sitting there when it does. That is the whole of it. She does not arrive first. She simply does not go.

He does not send her away either. Four days running now.

Her afternoons are his afternoons. She still comes to breakfast, still asks about my lessons, still tells me everything. She only tells me later than she used to.

He looked at me once, across the long table, and I put my eyes on my plate before he could finish.

I have not been alone with him since the map room. He has not sought me out. He would not.

⸻

On the fourth day I went looking for somewhere with nobody in it.

The portrait gallery is a corridor that thinks it is a room. It runs the length of the south wing, and every king this country has ever had is on that wall in order.

I found Aldren about two thirds of the way down.

He was a thin man, which was the first surprise. I had built somebody broader in my head over the years. He was painted holding a rolled document, as though the painter had asked him to hold something and that was what was nearby.

It was the accord. Of course it was.

A man in a chair, three hundred miles from anything, signed that. It kept the north out of a rebellion, which was the right decision, and I have never once been able to argue against it. It also meant no crown levies, which meant no crown money, which meant the road stops at Ashfell, which meant the garrison was thin, which meant two weeks.

"That's Aldren."

I did not jump, but it was close.

Cassian had come in from the north end with papers under one arm, on his way through to somewhere else, which is what that corridor is actually for.

"I know."

"Most people don't." He stopped a reasonable distance away and looked up at the same face.

"He was twenty-six. He wrote afterward that he had bought the north with the north's own money."

"He was right."

"Yes."

That is the thing about him, I have not gotten used to. Most people, when you say something like that about their family, will find a way to soften it. He simply agreed and let it stand.

"My brother came to me two nights ago," he said. "About a passage above Ashfell."

I turned my head.

"He talked for forty minutes." A pause. "He doesn't hold a subject that long."

"Was he right?" He added.

"Yes."

"How much of it was yours?"

"All of it."

He took that without blinking. Somehow worse than being doubted.

"He said it took two weeks."

"It did."

"He didn't say how you knew." A pause. "I don't think he asked."

A servant crossed the far end of the gallery and kept going.

"Your registration says your father is dead. It doesn't say when."

He had built that out of a form and forty minutes of his brother talking.

"Seven years ago," I said. "The autumn raids."

"The column from Ashfell."

"Fourteen days." My voice went faster. I let it. "East fence. That's the side the road comes in on. He was thirty-eight."

He didn't say he was sorry. He didn't make any of the noises people make so a room can start again.

"Thirty-one others," I said, because somebody had to. "One village. Four more that autumn."

"I know the number."

"Then you know nothing's changed. The pass is open. The garrison is thin." I heard myself keep going. "If it happened tomorrow it would take fourteen days again."

He was quiet long enough that I thought I had gone too far.

"I was in the room," he said.

I looked at him.

"When it was decided. I was twenty." He was still facing the painting.

"It wasn't cruel. That's the part I can't explain to people. Three men, a map, a supply figure. All of the arithmetic was correct."

"And the fourteen days?"

"The right answer to the wrong question."

Nothing I had would go against that.

"Nobody asked what was at the other end of the road." A beat. "I didn't ask either."

He shifted the papers under his arm.

"Do you know what's at the other end of this room?"

"More kings."

"Four more. Then my father." A beat. "Then a space."

I looked. There was one, past the King, where the wall was lighter because a frame had never hung there.

He went out through the north door.

I stayed where I was for a while, looking at the empty place at the end of the room.

He had known the number.