Riven
968 Words
Not Aera. Riven.
The name my mentors gave me. My grandmother used it. Which means she knew my mentors, not knew of, but knew them directly, knew what they called me, wrote my name in their notation.
Inside the package: three letters sealed with plain wax, dated separately. And underneath the letters, wrapped in a second layer of oilskin: the teaching tools. The exact ones, the carved practice rods, the notation chart, the set of calibration markers that the Scholar spent two months making me use until I could read frequency through them blindfolded. I have an identical set in my pack. My grandmother had a set. Same maker, same hand.
I take the letters and sit on the cellar floor.
The first is dated eleven years ago. The handwriting is the Scholar's, spare, precise, exactly as I remember it from fifteen years of lesson notes and marginal corrections. My throat does something involuntary. I press the letter flat on my knee and read.
Riven. By the time you find this, you will know some of what I'm about to tell you and will be angry about the parts you don't yet know. This is appropriate. Be angry precisely and then set it down, because imprecise anger costs you more than it costs the people who deserve it.
Your frequency is not a gift or an anomaly. It is the original signal. The system currently classifying you as null was built over it, which means the instruments built within that system cannot detect you. This is not a flaw in you. This is a record of what was constructed on top of you.
There are three people in the capital. You will find them through the problems you're already trying to solve. Don't let the finding look deliberate.
The Veilwright has always known you would come. What they don't know is what you'll have learned by the time you arrive.
I am sorry for the manner of this. I had reasons. Most of them were right. One was cowardice and you will identify which one immediately.
—S
I fold it carefully. I open the second.
The second letter is four years old. It gives me the shape of the plan, the capital, the three people, the Abyss, the architecture. It says: arranged things can still be real. Remember the difference. I read that line three times.
The third letter is six months old. The last thing the Scholar wrote before going silent.
If you're reading this and I haven't spoken to you, we were moved before I could reach you. You know what that means and I need you not to let it slow you down. What you feel about it is real. Feel it on the road. Don't stop moving.
The Veilwright will position the moment they know you're in the city. You have a window. Use it.
I should have told you who I was. I should have told you every day. I didn't because I thought the work needed to come before the love and I was wrong. The work and the love were the same thing the whole time. I see that now and I'm sorry I didn't say it when you could hear me.
Find the cellar. Find the tools. When you understand the tools, you'll understand why I couldn't.
Go.
I sit on the cellar floor for a while.
Then I fold all three letters and put them in my pack and go upstairs and find Cael in the kitchen eating bread and watching the door with the focused patience of someone who has decided waiting is active work.
"I'm leaving in the hour," I tell him.
"Ashport," he says immediately.
"Yes."
"Gray market. Sable Ashveil."
I look at him. He shrugs. "The Ashveil name was in the Veilwright correspondence. Father's correspondence, from eight years ago. I read it when I was twelve."
"You read your father's correspondence at twelve."
"Someone had to." He tears a piece of bread. "Ashveil's mother knew Grandmother. They were involved in something together, before — before whatever happened. Father doesn't know what. He never asked." A pause. "Grandmother said asking was dangerous and he was always better at believing her than arguing."
He's seventeen and he's been quietly building a picture of all of this for five years from fragments his father didn't know he'd found, and the picture he's built is not far off from the one I'm holding. I look at him and feel something I don't have a precise word for — a combination of recognition and grief and something that might, given time, become pride.
"Don't open the door to anyone with Celestial Court credentials," I say.
"Obviously."
"Don't go through any official channels looking for information about me or the classification."
"Also obviously."
"Cael." I wait until he looks up from the bread. "If something comes before I'm back — any frequency signature you can't identify, anyone who knows details they shouldn't, anyone who asks about documents in the study"
"I know where the tunnels are," he says.
I stare at him.
"Grandmother showed me," he says. "Four exits off the property. She made me learn them." He meets my eyes steadily. He's trying to look older than seventeen and almost succeeding. "She said: someday your sister will need you to know these. So I learned them."
My grandmother knew I was coming back. She spent the years between my departure and her death leaving things for me. Letters, tools, exit routes. She spent the last years of her life building a map for someone she'd never held a conversation with, in a language nobody alive except me and two other people could read.
I go out the back door before anyone can see my face do whatever it's doing.
- Writer
