Marcus disappeared.
Not literally. He was in Thelvarion the entire time, and Sito saw him at meals, and once or twice in a corridor moving fast with an armful of paper.
But from the morning after the audience the Master of Diplomacy became a man with no hours left over, and what he was doing with them was sitting in small rooms with elders who had come a long way to be unhappy.
"Three today," he said on the second evening, dropping into a chair and letting his head go back. "Two hostile, one pretending not to be. I have four days before the northern three arrive and I intend to spend all of them being agreed with by people who will change their minds the instant somebody more senior walks in."
"Can I help?"
"You can stay out of the rooms, your highness, and let the word child stay a thing they associate with the boy who spoke plainly about a frightened man in a hole." Marcus opened one eye. "You were extremely useful on that terrace, which I say with the full understanding that you had no idea what you were doing."
"I had some idea."
"You had none. You were terrified and you told the truth because you had nothing else on you." Marcus closed the eye again. "Do not learn from it. The moment you can do that deliberately, it stops working."
---
So Sito had ten days and nothing to do with them, which was a state he had not been in since he was five years old.
He found the training ground on the second morning.
It was not an arena. There was no arena.
It was a series of flat root-terraces stepped down toward the eastern river, with the water running loud enough that a shout carried about twenty feet and no further, and perhaps two hundred elves on them at any hour of the day doing things Sito did not have names for.
Nobody stopped him. Nobody welcomed him either. He stood at the top terrace for a quarter of an hour watching a woman put a spear through a swinging ring of woven bark forty times without missing, took his own space on an unused corner of the lowest step, put his wraps on, and got to work.
By the fourth day it had become a routine, and routine was the only thing he had ever been given that he actually liked.
Sunrise: the rook, on the branch, because Naeva had stopped pretending it wasn't his branch too.
Morning: the terrace, four hours, forms and footwork and the two blades until his arms shook.
Afternoon: whatever Naeva was doing, which was usually Naeva avoiding something.
Evening: dinner with Marcus if Marcus existed that day, and with Willem and Ramsey if he didn't.
---
Ramsey had, by the fifth day, become the most popular human being in the history of Vradia.
He did not speak a word of Vradian. This turned out to be completely irrelevant. He had somehow acquired an audience of nine or ten elven children who followed him at a distance of about six feet everywhere he went, and the whole basis of the relationship was that Ramsey could dislocate his left thumb.
He could put it back, too. That was the part they liked.
"It's not a trick," he explained to Sito, on the terrace by the water, with four of them sitting in a row watching him like he was a public execution. "I did it falling off a wall when I was eleven and it never set right. Now it just — goes."
He did it. The children made a sound of collective horror and delight.
"Ramsey, that's disgusting."
"It's a gift, your highness."
One of the children said something in Vradian, urgently.
"He wants you to do it again," Sito said.
Ramsey looked at him. "You understood that?"
"He said again. It's one word. Don't get excited."
"Right." Ramsey did it again. More horror. More delight. "How do you say 'no more' in elvish, I'm running out of thumb."
"I don't know that one yet."
"Learn it fast."
---
Willem's two weeks looked entirely different, and Sito only worked out what he was doing on the sixth day.
He'd been following the guard on and off since they arrived, mostly out of boredom, and had assumed Willem was just walking.
Willem walked a great deal. He walked in the morning before his watch and in the evening after it, always alone, always at the same unhurried pace, and he stopped a lot and looked at things.
On the sixth day Sito followed him for two hours and realized the route was not random.
Willem was walking every bridge in Thelvarion.
"You're mapping it," Sito said.
Willem didn't turn around. He was standing at the junction of two rope walks about a hundred and forty feet up, looking down at a stone terrace below.
"I am."
"Why? We're leaving in a week."
"Four ways off this bridge," Willem said. "Down to that terrace if you don't mind a broken ankle. North walk, which goes to the granary trunk and has a ladder at the far end. South walk, which is a dead end, and I'd want to know that before I ran down it. And the rope itself, if somebody cut the north side, would swing you into that trunk there." He pointed. "There's a window."
Sito looked at the window.
"You've been doing this the whole time."
"Every day since we arrived, your highness."
"But nothing's going to happen."
"No," Willem agreed. "Nothing is going to happen."
He started walking again, and Sito fell in beside him.
"Then why?"
Willem was quiet for about thirty paces.
"Because I don't know this place," he said. "At home I could get you from the throne room to the north gate blind, in the dark, with a broken leg, and I know which of those doors bar from the inside and which don't. Nineteen years of walking the same halls. Here I know nothing, and you are seven, and you go out windows."
"That was one time."
"It was one time so far." Willem stopped at a rail and looked out. "It'll take me about eleven days to do the whole city. I'll have it by the time we leave and then we'll leave and I'll never use any of it."
"That's a lot of work for nothing."
"It is exactly the right amount of work for nothing," said Willem. "That's the job."
He pulled something out of his coat pocket then, without any particular ceremony, and turned it over in his fingers while he looked at the view.
It was a small wooden horse. Badly carved. The legs were four different thicknesses and the head was too big.
"What's that?"
"Nothing. Something to do with my hands." He put it away.
"Who's it for?"
Willem sighed.
"My daughter," he said. "Elsa. She's six. She asked for a horse before we left and I have made her four of them on this road and thrown three in a river." He shook his head. "I'm a terrible carver. I was a terrible carver nineteen years ago and I have not improved, and every time I finish one I look at it and think, she'll know I tried and didn't manage it."
"She won't care."
"No, she won't. That's not the point of it." Willem started walking again. "Come on. There's a stair on the far side I haven't counted."
---
Naeva was mortified about the branch for approximately one day and then decided to deal with it by never mentioning it again, which Sito respected enormously.
What she said instead, on the second morning, climbing up and sitting down like she owned the place, which she did, was this:
"You did not say you were the prince."
"You didn't say you were the princess."
"I did not have to. Everyone knows what I am."
"Yeah, well." Sito shrugged. "Everyone knows what I am too, back home. That's sort of the problem with it."
Naeva thought about that for a second and evidently found it acceptable, because she reached into the bag over her shoulder and dropped a book on the wood between them.
"Now," she said. "We trade."
"Trade what?"
"You want words. I want words." She tapped the book, which was full of Epirian grammar and had a spine that had been cracked by somebody who hated it. "I give you Vradian. You give me Epirian. Not this Epirian. Real Epirian. The one your guards use."
Sito looked at her.
"You want me to teach you to swear."
"I want you to teach me… useful things," said Naeva, with immense dignity, and then, after a pause: "Yes."
---
She started him on forty words and he had all forty by the end of the afternoon.
She hadn't planned to give him forty. She'd planned to give him eight, because that was what her own tutor gave her in a week and she'd thought eight was generous for a human. She gave him eight, tested him, gave him eight more, tested him, and by the fourth round had stopped planning anything and was simply naming things and listening to him hand them back.
On the third day she tried the first eight again without warning.
He had them.
On the fifth day she tried them again, along with everything from days two and three, sixty-odd words fired at him out of order while he was in the middle of restringing his rook.
He had all of them, except one, which he got on the second attempt and then apologized for.
Naeva sat back against the trunk and looked at him for a while.
"You are not writing them down," she said.
"Where would I write them down?"
"That is not — " She made an irritated noise. "I am asking why you do not forget. You should forget. People forget. My brother forgot the word for river nine times."
"You have a brother?"
"Do not change what we are talking about."
"I'm not changing it. I just didn't know you had a brother."
"I have two and they are both idiots and we are talking about you," said Naeva. "Why do you not forget?"
Sito put the rook down.
It was, he realized, a fair question, and he had not thought about it once.
He'd noticed that things stuck.
He'd noticed it with the Old Master's drills and with the names of every servant in the castle and with four thousand pages of Epirian law he'd never made the slightest effort to memorize and could quote at his father over dinner.
He'd put it down to having an adult's head on a child's shoulders, which was true and which explained absolutely none of it, because Phil was just like any other man and forgot simple things occasionally like where he left his keys.
"I don't know," he said honestly.
"Hm," said Naeva.
---
He could not, however, actually speak the language, and by the seventh day this had become a source of considerable entertainment for her.
The problem was that Vradian verbs did not care about tense nearly as much as they cared about whether the thing you were talking about was alive.
Not alive as in moving. Alive as in growing. A standing tree took one form. A fallen log took another. A carved bowl took a third, unless the bowl was made of something still green, in which case it went back to the first one for as long as that lasted.
Water in a river was alive. Water in a cup was not. Water in a cup you were about to give to somebody was, apparently, a different thing again, and when he asked why, Naeva looked at him like he'd asked why fire was hot.
"Because you are giving it."
"So?"
"So it is going somewhere."
"Naeva, that's not—"
"You asked. I answered. You are angry because the answer is easy." She waved a hand. "Say the one about the bridge."
He said the one about the bridge. He got every word right and every verb wrong, and told her, in flawless vocabulary, that the bridge had been dead for two hundred years and was presently being eaten.
Naeva laughed so hard she had to grab the trunk.
"Again," she wheezed.
"No."
"Again!"
---
He taught her eleven words of real Epirian over the same period. She learned all of them immediately and deployed them with a precision that genuinely frightened him.
On the eighth day she used one of them on her older brother at a family supper, in front of the Queen, in an accent so perfect that nobody at the table was initially sure they'd heard it.
Sito heard about this from Ramsey, who had heard it from an elf, who had been serving.
"She said what?"
"I'm not repeating it in front of you, your highness, I've got a shred of decency left." Ramsey was delighted. "Whole table went silent. The King laughed. The Queen, however, did not laugh."
"Is she in trouble?"
"She's confined to the family trunk for three days and she told her mother it was worth it."
Sito put his face in his hands.
"I'm going to get executed."
"Probably," Ramsey agreed cheerfully.
---
On the ninth morning, somebody watched him train.
He noticed on about the fourth minute, which he was later quite proud of, because she had not done anything to be noticed.
She was standing at the top terrace with her arms folded. Not tall, for an elf — shorter than Thaen by a head, and built compact in a way that none of the others were, with grey in dark hair cropped close and a long coat that had been mended so many times it was mostly mending. There was no insignia on her anywhere.
The other elves on the terraces had not stopped working. But the noise on the two steps nearest her had gone down by about half, and nobody was walking behind her.
Sito kept training.
He was running a sequence he'd been chewing on since the road — a problem he'd had against Marcus, where anything that started with his left hand committed his hips a fraction early. He had twelve versions of the fix. He ran them in a rotation, four at a time, and threw out whichever one felt worst, and replaced it.
He got through about forty reps.
When he finally stopped and turned around, she was standing eight feet away, and he had not heard her cross fifty yards of open stone.
"You have been here eight days," she said.
"Nine, ma'am."
"Nine." She looked him up and down without any particular expression. "You are the human boy. The prince."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I am Ithriel."
The name meant nothing to Sito, so he bowed, because bowing was free.
Behind her, on the upper terrace, about forty elves who had absolutely been pretending not to watch stopped pretending.
---
"That sequence," she said. "How many times have you done it?"
"This morning? Forty, about."
"How many of the forty were the same?"
Sito blinked.
"None of them."
"I know," said Ithriel. "I counted eleven variations in ten minutes. I want to know whether you knew."
"I—" He thought about it. "Yeah. I know. I'm trying to fix something and I don't know which fix is right, so I run them all and throw out the worst one."
"Who told you to train that way?"
"Nobody."
"Your master?"
"My master would've hit me with a cane. He wants ten thousand of the same one." Sito scratched the back of his neck. "I do that too. I do it in the afternoon. This is just — this is for when I don't know the answer yet."
Ithriel was silent for a moment.
Then she stepped back three paces, picked up a length of practice wood from the rack behind her without looking at it, and held it loose at her side.
"Come at me."
"Ma'am?"
"You have two swords and I have a stick and I am four hundred years older than you," said Ithriel. "I will not be injured and neither will you. Come at me."
---
He came at her.
The first exchange lasted a second and a half. He committed, she wasn't there, and the stick touched his ribs before he had finished arriving.
The second lasted about two seconds. He didn't commit, she came to him instead, and the stick touched the same ribs from the other side.
Sito backed up, breathing hard, and looked at her properly.
She had not moved her feet. Not once. In two exchanges she had not taken a single step, and both times he had ended up somewhere she was already standing.
'Okay,' he thought. 'So she doesn't chase. She makes you come to a place and then she's at the place.'
He stopped trying to hit her.
On the third exchange he went in wrong on purpose — badly, obviously, leaving his whole right side open, the sort of mistake a seven-year-old makes when he's flustered and losing. And Ithriel, who had been reading him accurately for two exchanges, read him accurately for a third time and put the stick where the mistake was.
She was correct. It was a mistake. He'd just made it a quarter second earlier than she'd have wanted, and he was already falling out of it when the stick arrived, and his left blade came up flat and took the wood a hand's breadth from her fingers and turned it aside.
It was not a hit. He didn't touch her. He had not come remotely close to touching her.
But for about a third of a second, Ithriel's weapon went where she had not intended it to go.
Every elf on the terraces saw it.
She stepped back and lowered the stick.
For a long moment she said nothing at all, and Sito stood there with his heart hammering and his ribs aching and absolutely no idea whether he was about to be praised or thrown in the river.
"Who taught you that," she said.
"The Old Master. He's the—"
"No."
Sito stopped.
"The footwork is his, or somebody's," Ithriel said. "The grip is a school. The way you hold the second blade is something a man taught you and you have not yet made it yours. All of that I can see and all of that is ordinary, for a gifted child."
She took a step closer.
"I am asking about the other thing. I am asking who taught you to lose on purpose in a way that is close enough to a real mistake that somebody who has been fighting for four centuries buys it."
Her voice had no heat in it at all. "That is not a technique. Nobody drills that. That is a thing a man works out after a long time of being beaten by people better than he is, and you are seven years old."
Sito's mouth was dry.
"I don't know," he said.
Ithriel looked at him for a while longer.
She had also, at some point in the first exchange, felt the thing Thaen had felt at the border — the low steady wrongness of a body carrying far more than it ought to be carrying, with nothing at all in the middle of it to hold the weight.
She did not mention that either.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Same hour. Bring the swords."
She put the practice wood back on the rack and walked away up the terraces, and every elf she passed inclined their head as she went.
Sito watched her go.
"Who is that?" he said, to nobody.
An elf two steps up, sharpening something, answered without looking at him.
"That is Ithriel," he said, as if that settled it, and when Sito kept looking at him blankly, he added: "The King has a warden for the border and a council for the trees. For everything else there is Ithriel."
---
The word came up out of the ground on the tenth day.
Sito was on the terrace when it happened. He knew something had happened because Osric came down the steps at a run, which Osric did not do, and because Marcus was behind him moving faster than Sito had ever seen him move, with a communication crystal still lit in his hand.
Marcus did not stop. He went straight past, up, toward the council trunk, and Sito went after him, and nobody told him not to.
They got the whole of it in the doorway of a room full of elders.
Four teams had gone down the stair into the third level on the morning after the audience. Twenty-four men and women.
Nine had come back out.
They had paced north for six days and had not found the end of it. They had turned around at around twenty five miles, not because the level ended, but because they were down to four days of water and had lost a team in a gallery they could not describe afterward without their voices changing.
Twenty five miles. On top of the eleven that lie under Epirian soil.
And at the far point they'd reached, before they turned back, the survey lead had put her lantern against the north wall and found a stair going down.
"There's a fourth level," Marcus said, into a room that had gone completely silent. "We don't know how far north it runs. We don't know if it's the last one."
Elder Vaeneth had gone the color of wet paper.
"How far under us," he said. "Say the number."
"Approximately twenty five miles confirmed." Marcus put the crystal down on the table. "Elder, I am going to be honest with you, because I have decided that is the only card I am going to play in this room from now until I leave. Twenty five is not the number. Twenty five is how far a frightened woman walked before her water ran out."