The Oath Keeper

Chapter Seven

She came into the palace archive like weather — all red braid and elbows and fury — and announced, to the room at large, that the Lumeris thieves had broken the world and someone ought to admit it.

"Good morning to you too," I said, from behind my stack of border ledgers.

She stopped. She had expected a courtier, probably. What she found was me: giftless, ink-stained, in yesterday's riding dress, with a pencil behind my ear and Dorian's signet ring warm on my finger. "You're the truth-thief," she said.

"Former. The truth-thief is retired. There's a signet ring and everything." I turned a page. "You're Ilsa. Corvin's apprentice. You hate us."

"Not you," she said, which was fair enough of her. "The breaking. My master says — my master says the world's bindings were the loom, and your husband and you cut the threads."

"Your master is courteous about it," I said. "That's the only difference between him and everyone else in Veyne who says the same thing."

She opened her mouth, closed it, and crossed her arms. "You stole a crown's power."

"I did." I kept my eyes on the ledger. It was true, and it was mine, and she didn't get to have the part of it that was mine. "Your master singed his sleeves handling wild magic. We all have our hobbies."

The door banged — a second arrival, late, out of breath, with a satchel of scroll-cases banging against his hip and ink under his fingernails like he'd been fingerprinted by a library. "Sera! Nessa sent everything she could find — " Tomas stopped. He looked at Ilsa. Ilsa looked at him.

"Tomas," I said, delighted in spite of everything. "Youngest full keeper of the Bellhaven archive. Tomas, Ilsa, Corvin's apprentice and resident storm. Ilsa, Tomas, who has read every oath-tongue fragment in Lumeris and will now tell you about it at length."

They did not so much as nod to each other.

"An archive keeper," Ilsa said, "is someone who reads about a craft."

"A smith's apprentice," Tomas said, "is someone who hits a craft."

I poured tea. I had learned, in the three months since my gift burned out, that the slow way worked if you gave people room to be themselves near a warm cup. By the second cup they were arguing — loudly, precisely, in the old tongue and the new — about whether a primer-word or a smith's tempering carried an oath's weight. By the third cup, Ilsa had produced from her apron a strip of vellum covered in old-tongue fragments and Tomas had gone quiet in the particular way scholars go quiet when they are reading, which is its own kind of surrender.

"Where did you get this?" he asked.

"My master." She tapped the vellum. "He's been tuning the border blooms. The small ones, Karst-side. Trying to — " She caught herself. Her eyes flicked to me.

"Tuning," I said mildly, and set down my teacup. "Interesting word. Tuning is what you do to an instrument you intend to play."

Ilsa's red braid had come half undone, and she looked suddenly very young, and very certain, and very afraid all at once. "Someone has to tend them. Since your husband scattered everything, the blooms are just — happening. People swear and get caught. My master keeps them gentle."

Tomas had gone still over the vellum. "These primers," he said, slowly, "aren't old. The tongue is — Ilsa, the conjugation here is wrong. No, not wrong. New. Somebody's been writing it fresh."

"My master is the finest living master of the old art — "

"Of the old art, yes," Tomas said. "This isn't old." He looked up at me, and his eyes were ink-dark and serious. "Sera. Somebody is seeding these."

Ilsa went white under her freckles. Then she did the thing furious young people do: she attacked. "You know nothing. You read scrolls. My master has spent ten years at the Gray Forge, ten years trying to mend what your kind broke — "

"My kind?" Tomas said.

"Keepers," she spat. "Thieves. You hoard words the way misers hoard coin, and then you spend them like they aren't real."

"They're real enough to write down," Tomas said, and held up the vellum. "Which is why I know these aren't ten years old. These are this season, Ilsa."

She snatched the vellum back. Her hand was shaking. She didn't leave — she gathered the papers too neatly, too fast, and fled like someone who has just been told the floor is lava.

When the door closed, Tomas let out a breath. "She's brilliant," he said, furious.

"She's loyal," I said. "Which is worse."

I went back to my ledger, but I wasn't reading. Tuning. Primers, newly written, in old-tongue conjugation that Tomas — archive-trained, exact — called new. A smith tending the blooms like a gardener tends a hedge: pruning here, feeding there. Keeping them gentle.

Or keeping them ready.