Chapter 18
1479 Words
Chapter 18 — Sixty-One Questions
The Alpha of Ironridge was up to his elbows in a rotten grain sack when a voice at knee height said, "Excuse me."
Kade looked down.
Four feet of crown prince stood in the granary yard in a very good coat, holding a notebook in one hand and a freshly sharpened pencil in the other. Two royal guards hovered eight paces back wearing the faces of men composing letters of resignation.
"Young highness."
"I'm going to study you," Ash said.
Kade wiped his hands slowly on his thighs. "Study me."
"You're the largest unknown quantity in my life and you stand outside my bedroom door all night." Ash opened the notebook to a clean page. "Mother says never guess at a thing you can measure. So I'm going to measure you. I'll walk two steps behind. I won't touch anything. You may ignore me completely — in fact I'd prefer it. Observation is contaminated by performance."
"By what?"
"People behave differently when they know they're being watched."
"Ah." Kade considered the small serious face. "And if I say no?"
"Then I'll write down that you said no," Ash said, "and everyone will think about why."
There was a pause in the granary yard.
"All right," said Kade.
And that was how the Alpha of Ironridge acquired a shadow the height of a fence post.
The valley found it hilarious inside of a day.
By the third morning half the district had invented reasons to be near the wagon line. The Alpha lifting sacks, sweating through his shirt in the cold, and a small voice beside him saying, "You've been at this eleven hours. Is that for my mother's benefit?"
"No."
"Would you tell me if it was?"
Kade set the sack down and thought about it. "Yes. Because you'd know anyway."
Ash wrote that down and underlined it twice, and old Pettit had to go behind the wagon and have a cough that lasted some time.
At the field boundary hearing on the fourth day, two farmers shouted at each other for forty minutes over eleven feet of ditch, and Kade decided against the louder one, and the loser stormed off, and into the silence came:
"That's the second time this week you've ruled against the man doing the shouting. Is that a rule, or is it coincidence?"
Every wolf in that field stopped moving.
"It's not a rule."
"Then what is it?"
Kade rubbed the back of his neck. "A man who's shouting has usually decided he's going to lose. Nobody bellows about a thing they think is going their way." He shrugged, awkward. "It's not evidence. It's just — you notice where a man's put his weight."
Ash's pencil moved fast. "That's good," he said, with real approval, and Kade Sinclair went red to the ears in front of forty of his own people.
Cole found him at the well that night, drowning his head in the bucket while the small figure sat cross-legged on the wall making notes about his drinking.
"Sixty questions in four days," Cole murmured.
"Sixty-one."
"You know he's not being sweet."
"I know exactly what he's doing."
"He's building a case against you, Kade."
Kade came up out of the bucket and pushed his wet hair back, and when he spoke his voice was rough in a way that had nothing to do with the cold water.
"He's five years old, Cole, and he doesn't hate me. He's auditing me." He looked at his own hands on the well rim. "Do you understand what that took? Everything he's ever been told about me is true, and he still decided the fair thing was to go and look for himself first. Nobody taught him that. He came out of a river with it."
"And if the audit goes against you?"
"Then it'll have gone against me honestly," Kade said, "which is more than the last one did."
On the sixth morning it rained, and Ash caught him lying.
The granary line ran long that day, and near the back of it stood a boy of about seven with nothing in his hands, and Kade — who had been on the line since before light and had not eaten since the previous noon — took the bread out of his own coat and put it in the boy's, and said something to him, low, and the boy nodded and ran off.
Ash was waiting when he turned around.
"What did you say to him?"
"Nothing."
"You said four words. I counted your mouth moving."
Kade sighed. "I told him not to mention it."
The pencil didn't move. Ash stood in the rain with his hood dripping and frowned at the page.
"Why?"
"Because if it gets about that the Alpha's giving away his ration, then half this line stops taking theirs out of pride, and the other half stops trusting the count." Kade said it flat, uncomfortable, wanting to be somewhere else. "It's not a kindness, highness. It's arithmetic. Write it down as arithmetic."
"You lied to a child to hide something good."
"Yes."
Ash considered this for a long moment, rain running off his nose.
"I don't have a column for that," he admitted.
"Then make one," Kade said, and went back to the sacks.
The forge, on the eighth day, was where it stopped being funny.
Ash sat on the anvil with his heels swinging while Kade worked the bellows, and there had been a comfortable quiet for a while, and then the boy said:
"I've been saving one. Knox says I'm a coward if I don't ask it."
"Ask it."
"When you said the words. On the dais." The heels stopped swinging. "Did it hurt you too?"
The bellows sighed out and did not fill again.
"Yes," Kade said.
"Good."
"That's fair."
"It's not about fair." Ash's voice had gone very small and very steady. "It's about whether it works. Because Knox and I have a theory, and the theory is that if it hurt, then some part of you knew she was innocent the whole time — and you did it anyway." He looked up. "That's worse. Do you see? If it hurt, it's worse."
Kade set the bellows handle down.
He crouched, slowly, until he was below his son's eye level, and the forge crackled orange between them.
"Write this down," he said. "Word for word. Ready?"
Ash lifted the pencil.
"It's worse. He agrees."
The pencil scratched. Then stopped. Ash read it back to himself twice, frowning, the way he did when a sum came out wrong somewhere in the middle.
"You're supposed to argue," he said.
"No."
"Everybody argues. I've watched you argue in the yard all week." His voice had begun to wobble and he was clearly furious about it. "You're supposed to say it was complicated, or I was grieving, or the elders lied to me — those are all true, I checked them, I checked every one — and then I'd write down that you made excuses, and then I'd know—"
"Ash."
"I had it all worked out." The pencil was shaking. "You were supposed to be a bad man and I was going to prove it and then it would be finished."
"I know."
"So why won't you fight me?"
"Because you're the one person alive I've got no right to win against," Kade said.
The boy sat on the anvil in the forge light with his notebook open on his knees and his face doing something complicated, and for a moment he looked exactly like what he was, which was five.
"I don't like this," he said at last.
"I know."
"It was easier before I met you."
"I know that too."
Ash slid down off the anvil, tucked the book under his arm, and made it halfway to the door before he stopped, without turning around.
"Alpha."
"Highness."
"My mother has a drawer she doesn't open in front of anybody. Knox thinks it's jewelry." A pause. "It isn't."
Kade went very still. "Ash—"
"I'm not telling you what's in it. That's hers." The small voice was carefully flat. "I'm telling you it's there, and that she goes to it on the bad nights, and that there have been three bad nights this week." Another pause, longer. "You said you were a wall. Walls should know which side the wind comes from."
He walked out into the rain.
He went straight past his mother, who had been standing in the doorway of the forge for some minutes, and did not register her at all — still frowning down at a page where the numbers refused to add up.
Sierra stayed where she was, one hand white on the doorframe.
Across the smithy, Kade rose out of his crouch and looked straight at her.
- Writer
