Longwind

Chapter 15: No Grey Road

Chapter 15: No Grey Road

The rain stood still in the air over Greywater March, and Gareth Voss was on his knees under it, and neither of those things was going to change until the shape in front of him decided they should.

He was not there. What stood in the Greywater garden had been made to Aldric's measure and wore his face—black robes worked with gold, a ring of dragons round the hem—and it could hold a province still and put a grown man on the stones. Aldric himself was in the Chimehall, with his eyes shut, listening to rain on a different roof.

Voss had got two words out so far, the right two, and they were doing him no good.

The censer lay in the boy's arms. A few hundred strands of light stood up out of its open lid. They had been screaming when the shape first came down—Aldric had felt that all the way into the hall, a hiss through his teeth—and now they lay quiet along the boy's sleeve like something asleep.

He knew that light. He had set the seals on it himself, strand by strand. The light was his brother's.

He looked up, past the ruin of the west roof, at what was left of the fire over the March. Spent. Scattered. Still hanging there the way a smell hangs in a room.

"The Rebuke at Greywater March," he said. "Did Aren Aurelian draw it?"

He said the whole name. The realm called his brother the Third Prince; the clerks wrote it into the rolls that way; Aldric had never used it in his life.

They had come out of the same night, the two of them. The elder first, with nothing in him the light would take—no root, no Degree, a mortal's count of years. Then the younger, born at the Third Degree, with a root so clean the Pole-light went into him unasked. Aurel needed a prince the light would take; the crown went down to the younger, and nobody in the realm had ever thought it strange. He had never wanted the chair. He had never wanted anything, and had never found the lack of it worth mentioning.

The boy went down onto both knees in the wet and got his answer out.

"Your Highness. The Rebuke was not the Third Prince's doing. The Pole-light of the March went out—it vanished, without cause—and the Third Prince, who is ill, took pity on the cities and gave his own light to hold them."

"Vanished," Aldric said. "Without cause."

"Yes."

The boy was lying, and the lie was not built to last the hour. Aldric did not press him for it. He had not come for the boy.

He raised two fingers. The censer lifted out of the boy's arms and came to him, and the light came up off it and wound itself around his knuckles, all of it, quiet.

"That is the Third Prince's," the boy said, fast. "He left it at the Greywater house. Lord Voss was going to send it back."

"Greywater's Gareth Voss," Aldric said. "Death."

Voss lifted his head off the stones.

"Your Highness. Greywater March is where the medicine of Aurel is made. Every draught in the realm comes out of my fields. I hold the Sage-King's warrant, under his own hand. You cannot kill me."

Aldric was looking at the light on his fingers.

"He laid hands on the light of Aurel and went at the seals on it, meaning to keep it for himself," he said. "Thirteen cities stood in the fire tonight for it. Lennart Greywater holds the seal of Greywater March. Lord Provost, until I say otherwise."

The boy let his breath out without a sound and said, "Yes."

Voss's face went from white to red in one breath.

"All I ever wanted," he said, "was to be kept alive the way he is kept alive. Where is the crime in that?"

Aldric did not answer him. Voss's voice got louder; that was the only change in him.

"To keep that man breathing—you, and Emrys Lorne, and Ivo Ashmere, and the rest of them—Aurel has done what Providence will not forgive. You went against the fate that was written for him. When he was dying, Selwyn Quill walked into the Chancery and brought a soul back out through the door." He had to stop for air. "He is kept alive by half the court. And for wanting a little of the same, I am to be put to death."

None of it was new. Aldric listened to the end of it anyway.

Then he raised his hand again, and a charm of violet and gold went out of it into the man's forehead.

The shape had nothing left to hold. It came apart.

In the Chimehall, with his eyes shut, Aldric turned his hand over and laid it back on his knee.

Wind came back into the garden all at once, and the rain with it. Lennart caught the censer out of the air with both arms and held it against his chest.

The charm in the man's forehead turned, slowly, into a chain. It went around him twice, thin as thread, and where it lay it opened along its length into blades, and the blades went into him by inches. Voss screamed, and the scream went up over the March and came back off the roofs.

In the yard, a servant who had been standing with one foot lifted finished the step he had started a long time ago, and went on about his work, and never knew he had stopped.

Lennart had waited to feel something turn over in his stomach when it started. It did not come. He found that he could have stood there all night.

He crossed the flags to where the man lay, and crouched down, and stayed there, close enough to be heard.

"Uncle."

Voss got a hand into Lennart's sleeve and pulled himself up on the cloth. "You mongrel. I should have killed you years ago."

"You should have," Lennart said. "Instead you go first."

He let the man hold on to him. He kept his voice down; there was nobody else in the garden, and he kept it down anyway.

"What was done to Willa's eyes. Who put the poison in me. The years, all of them, in the order they happened. And when you come up before the Chancery, Uncle, tell my parents. All of it. They will want to hear it in your voice."

Voss came up off the stones with both hands. The chain folded him back down at the waist, and he still got a fistful of Lennart's sleeve and dragged himself in close, and the blood came out of his mouth faster than the words did.

"Then you come with me."

Lennart did not pull the sleeve out of his hand. He leaned down, so that the last of it would be only for the two of them.

"I forgot one thing," he said. "In Aurel the guilty are struck off the Roll of the Dead. That is the sentence you have got. No Grey Road, Uncle. No Passing Bell. Nobody at the desk to write the name back in."

Voss's mouth filled with blood and he could not get it out. The hand in Lennart's sleeve shook hard enough to move the cloth.

Then, from the far end of the garden, feet came running on the flags.

"Brother! The Rebuke is gone—it lifted off the whole March at once, it's—"

Gil Voss got five steps in before he understood what he was smelling. He had thought the blood was Lennart's. He had come up the path expecting the usual thing: his brother standing over Lennart, and Lennart's back opened.

Then he saw. He stopped where he was.

"B—brother?"

Voss's eyes came round to him. Something went across his face and was gone.

"Go," he said.

Gil ran into the chain. It opened him across the wrist; he got the arm back, and the blood came.

"What—what is this?"

"Aurel's high justice," Lennart said.

Gil Voss was not quick, but he knew what high justice was. His knees went out from under him and he came down on the flags and wept, and reached for his brother with both hands and could not reach him.

Voss got his arm up and shoved him off with what he had left. "You i***t. Go."

"No."

Behind them, past the wreck of the door, somebody was walking toward the garden. Slowly. No hurry in it at all.

Voss's eyes stayed on Lennart. The blood came up over his lip and down his chin, and he did not look away. He got the name out first, and the rest would not come.

"Lennart. You—you can't."

Thunder broke over the Chimehall, and the rain came down with it.

The hall did not change. It looked less like the rooms of a crown prince than like a place a man would go to be cold on purpose: black stone from the floor to the roof, and the only color in it the lotuses, cut into the pillars and laid in gold, going up in a ring.

Aldric opened his eyes.

He looked down at his fingers. There had been a few hundred strands of his brother's light wound around them. There was nothing on them now.

"Cast the Lots," he said, toward the dark end of the hall. "Aren Aurelian. His road, three days."

The Springwind envoy came out of the dark to take it, and went. The rain kept on.

He came back in half a quarter of an hour with the Lots on their stand and read off what they had given.

By heaven's leave he walks.

An old account is settled in a garden walled on four sides.

He is not kept.

And he will not be kept.

"When?" Aldric said.

"Within three days, Your Highness. The Lots give a span; they do not give a day."

"Where?"

"At the Bright Terrace. He keeps a meeting with an old friend."

Aldric shut his eyes. For the length of one breath, something in him came loose—small, and unfamiliar, the way a rope goes slack when the weight comes off it.

He opened them. The envoy had gone still. He had seen it—the first time in all his service—and it was gone.

"Send to Tobias," Aldric said. "Aren Aurelian is to be in the Chimehall before he stands on the Bright Terrace. If the order is disobeyed—kill."

"Yes, Your Highness."

The envoy bowed and went out, and the doors shut behind him, and the Chimehall went back to being a cold room with gold flowers on the walls and rain on the roof.

Author’s Note

Lennart has spent this whole book being the one who keeps his voice down in an empty room, and this is the chapter where we find out what that costs him — and what it doesn't. I kept waiting for him to break, and he kept not breaking. The thing that got me is the sleeve. He doesn't pull it free. He lets the man hold on.

What did you feel when the chain opened — relieved, or a little sick?

If you'd like to read ahead, the chapters on my p*****n run past this one: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang