The council took ten more days to come to a decision.
Marcus spent all ten of them in rooms, and came out of the last one at dusk looking like a man who had been carried a long way by something with an uneven gait.
"They're going down," he said.
Sito looked up from the rook. "The elves are?"
"The elves are going down, and we are going down with them, and that is the decision." Marcus sat, without any of his usual arrangement of limbs, and simply sat. "Forty of theirs and thirty of ours. Two months of supply, hauled in relays. Ithriel picked the Vradian half herself and I have not been permitted to see the list."
"Is that good?"
"It is the best outcome available and I did not ask for it, which I want you to notice." Marcus rubbed his eyes. "I asked for permission to dig. What I have been given is seventy people walking into that thing to find out how bad it is. Vaeneth pushed it through. He thinks I have been exaggerating."
"Have you?"
"No," said Marcus. "That's the part that's going to help me."
---
They went down eleven days later, and after that Thelvarion simply continued.
That was the strange thing about it. Seventy people walked into a hole in a hillside two hundred miles south, and the bridges still had elves arguing on them, and somebody still hammered something all morning, and the woman on the second terrace still put her spear through the swinging ring forty times without missing.
Sito's days did not change at all.
Which was how he came to spend the worst month in the recent history of two kingdoms having the best one of his life.
---
The first report came up on the eighth day.
Marcus read it off the crystal in the council room with the elders sitting around him and Sito standing in the doorway where he had decided he was allowed to stand.
The third level ended at thirty-one miles. Not collapsed. Ended, in a wall, with a stair cut down through it.
The fourth level was larger. The survey lead used the word 'larger' four times in a report of eleven lines, which Marcus said was not the sort of thing surveyors did.
Elder Vaeneth did not say anything about exaggeration.
---
"Again," said Ithriel.
"I've done it eleven times."
"You have done it eleven times slowly. Now do it at speed, and this time the second one is behind you before the first one finishes falling."
Sito got up out of the dirt, put both blades back in his hands, and did it again.
Ithriel did not teach the way the Old Master taught.
The Old Master taught a man to be correct. Ten thousand repetitions of the true form, and then ten thousand more, until the true form was what your body did when your mind had gone somewhere else.
Sito had two years of that in him and he would have it for the rest of his life, and he knew perfectly well it was the foundation everything else stood on.
Ithriel did not care about the true form. She had watched him do it for ten minutes on the first morning, said "that will do," and never mentioned it again.
What Ithriel taught was numbers.
"You are thinking about a fight," she said, on the fourth day of it, standing over him while he lay on his back trying to remember how breathing worked. "A fight has one adversary in it. That is not a thing that happens in real battle. That is a thing that happens in an arena, in front of a crowd, with a man standing by to stop it."
"I've been in a real one. On the road."
"You were in a wagon during a real one." She said it without cruelty, as a correction of the record. "Get up."
He got up.
"A duelist spends everything on the man in front of him, because there is no second man." Ithriel walked a slow circle around him, and every time she passed behind him he had to fight the urge to turn. "A soldier who does that dies to the third one. Not the second. The second is usually survivable. It is the third that kills you, because by then you are tired and your feet are wrong and you have stopped counting."
"So how do you fight three?"
"You don't."
Sito waited.
"You fight the ground," said Ithriel. "You fight the order in which they are able to reach you. Three men who can all touch you at once is three men. Three men in a doorway is one man, thrice." She stopped in front of him. "There is almost always a doorway. It will not look like a doorway. It will look like a rock, or a slope, or the gap between two carts, or the fact that the man on the left cannot see out of his right eye."
She handed him back the practice wood.
"Your body is going to be able to do things other people's bodies cannot. I do not know why and I have stopped asking. That is a gift and it is also the most dangerous thing about you, because a man who can win badly will never learn to win well. Now. Four of them. Go."
---
Naeva found out on the sixteenth day.
She turned up at the terraces looking for him because he was late to the branch, and what she saw when she got there was a human child being systematically dismantled by the most feared person in the Kingdom of Vradia in front of about sixty spectators.
Sito, on his back, heard her before he saw her.
"What are you doing to him."
"Oh no," he said, to the sky.
He heard Ithriel's footsteps stop. He heard a very long pause of a kind he suspected the terraces had not heard in some while.
"Princess."
"He is seven."
"It's fine, really," said Sito, from the ground.
"Be quiet." She came down the steps and stood over him and glared at Ithriel, who was four hundred years old and commanded the armies of the realm and was being glared at by a child in a skirt. "Why is he bleeding."
"He is not bleeding. That is dirt."
Naeva crouched, looked, and determined that it was dirt.
She stood back up, somewhat deflated, and rallied.
"He has to come to the branch."
"He may come to the branch when he can do the thing I have asked him to do."
"What is the thing."
Ithriel told her what the thing was.
Naeva turned and looked down at Sito with a completely different expression.
"You can do that," she informed him.
"I really can't."
"You can."
---
She came every morning after that.
She did not come quietly. Within four days Sito had acquired the loudest single spectator on the eastern terraces, an eight-year-old princess who did not understand a single thing she was watching and had extremely firm opinions about all of it, and who had worked out by the second morning that Ithriel would not throw her out.
"That was good!"
"Naeva, I lost."
"You still did good!."
"That's not—"
"It was better than yesterday. Yesterday you fell down and today you fell down over there." She pointed at there, triumphantly. "That is further."
Ithriel, who had never in four centuries run a training session with commentary, developed an expression that Sito could not read for about a week and then finally identified as a woman not permitting herself to laugh.
On the ninth morning Naeva shouted something in Vradian and forty elves on the upper terrace made a noise.
Sito, mid-exchange, ate a stick to the ribs.
"What did you say?"
"Nothing."
"Naeva."
"I said she fights like an old woman," said Naeva, "which is a joke, because she is."
Ithriel looked up at the princess for a long moment.
"Your highness," she said. "Would you like to learn to hold a sword."
"No thank you," said Naeva.
"That was not entirely a question."
---
The second report came on the nineteenth day.
The fourth level had been paced to forty miles north and had not ended. The expedition had sent two teams ahead and pulled them back when one of them stopped being able to give a consistent account of a gallery they had walked through twice.
There was worked stone down there. Cut blocks, set by hand, in a wall that the survey lead described as older than the rock around it, which was a sentence that made three elders stand up.
Marcus read it out twice. The second time, nobody interrupted.
---
"Play the one about the birds."
"You've heard it about two hundred times."
"Yes," said Naeva, from her side of the branch, without any sense that this was an argument.
So he played the one about the birds.
He had been playing for her most afternoons for a month by then, which had started as something he did while they were talking and had turned, without either of them deciding it, into something they came up here for.
She had opinions about all of it. She liked the marching one from the road, which she made him teach to four of her cousins, so that a song about a woman waving soldiers down a lane was now being sung badly by elven children eight hundred miles from the lane in question.
She did not like the one about the birds at first. She said it was too slow and that the tune went nowhere.
Then, about the third time, she stopped talking halfway through and made him play it again.
"Sing the last part again."
"And if you lose your place, my love, I'll be counting too."
Naeva was quiet for a while.
"Ours does that," she said.
"Does what?"
"Counting. In ours." She was looking out at the valley, not at him. "There is a song. It is old. It has the counting in it also."
"What's it about?"
"The mist."
"That's it? Just the mist?"
"It is a very long song about the mist," said Naeva.
---
She taught it to him over eleven days, and she taught it the way she taught words, which was to say relentlessly and with no patience whatsoever.
He had the sounds inside two days. That was the part that came easy now — he could hear a thing once and hold it, and had stopped being surprised by that about the same time she had.
What he did not have was the meaning.
"What does sellavaer mean?"
"It is the name."
"Names mean things."
"Not that one." She waved a hand. "Sing it again."
"Naeva, I'm singing a song and I don't know what I'm saying. What if it's about turnips. What if I'm going to sing this in front of my father one day and it turns out I'm singing about turnips."
"That would be very funny," Naeva agreed.
She translated the first two verses for him eventually, in her blunt, hole-ridden Epirian, and they were about what she'd said they were about.
The mist coming down the valley in the evening. The way it filled the low places first and then the high ones.
The way it came every night without being asked and was gone by nothing that anyone could point to in the morning, and was back the next evening, and had been doing this since before anybody's grandmother.
It was a very long song about the mist.
Then she stopped.
"That's not the end. There's another verse."
"Yes."
"So what's it say?"
"No."
"*Naeva.*"
"No." She pulled her knees up and looked extremely pleased with herself. "You will know it when you can read it. That is when."
"That could take years."
"Yes," she said. "It could."
---
He sang the whole thing for her on the last evening she taught it to him, all the way through, correctly, without knowing what half of it meant.
And somewhere in the fourth verse he looked up.
She was sitting with her back against the trunk with her arms around her knees, and she was looking at him with an expression he had not seen on her face before — not in a month of arguments, not on the terraces, not at the supper table where she had said an unforgivable thing to her brother in a perfect Epirian accent.
It was not an expression he had a name for.
He lost his place in the song.
"You stopped," said Naeva.
"Yeah."
"Why did you stop?"
"I forgot the next bit."
"You have not forgotten anything since you arrived," she said, and then, because she had heard how that sounded, went slightly red at the tips of her ears and looked out at the valley very hard.
Sito looked at the rook.
He was eight years old in four days and he had been an adult once and had absolutely no idea what had just happened.
He started the verse again.
---
The third report came on the twenty-sixth day.
There was a fifth level.
---
Ramsey had, over the course of the expedition, acquired approximately twelve words of Vradian.
Every single one of them was wrong.
It was not that he had learned them incorrectly. He had learned them perfectly, from elven children, who had spent a month and a half teaching a thirty-eight-year-old royal guard a vocabulary consisting entirely of things you would say to a dog.
He had been greeting the Queen's household staff with it for six weeks.
"They love me," he said, when Sito finally worked it out and told him. "Everywhere I go, your highness. Smiles."
"Ramsey, you've been telling the head cook to sit down."
"She always does it, and all."
"She's been humoring you."
"Then she's a lovely woman," said Ramsey, with dignity, "and I'll thank you not to spoil it."
He kept saying it. He said it to Elder Vaeneth on the last day, by accident, in a corridor. Vaeneth looked at him for four full seconds and then sat down on a bench.
Willem had to leave the corridor.
---
The name-day was the ninth of Weodmonth, and Sito had not told anybody.
He had not told anybody at home either, most years. It was a thing that got marked at the castle — a formal supper, the King observing the occasion, the Queen giving him something practical — and the only person who had ever made it feel like anything was Aunt Lia, who used to bake him something and then pretend she hadn't.
So he was slightly thrown when he came back from the terraces and found Willem, Ramsey and Osric standing in his room around a very small cake.
"How did you—"
"I'm your guard, your highness," said Willem. "I know when you were born. I know when everyone in the royal family was born. It's on a list."
"There's a list?"
"There's a great many lists."
The cake had come out of the Vradian kitchens and was made of something Sito could not identify and tasted mostly of honey and burnt nuts. Ramsey ate most of it.
Willem handed him something wrapped in a rag.
It was a horse. It was a terrible horse. The legs were four different thicknesses and the head was too big and one ear had clearly been an accident that got worked into the design.
"You said I'm a bad carver," Willem said.
"I said your daughter wouldn't care."
"Aye, well." Willem shrugged. "You can have that one. I'll make a better one for her."
Sito turned it over in his hands.
"This is your best one yet?"
"That," said Willem, "is the fifth one, and it is indeed the best thing I have ever made, and if you say another word about it I'll take it back."
Sito kept it.
---
Naeva found out that evening, because Ramsey told nine people, and was furious for a full hour about not having been told.
"You are eight."
"Since this morning."
"You did not say."
"It's not a big thing."
"It is a number," said Naeva, in the tone of someone making a devastating point. "Why do you have a number and not say it."
So he explained it to her: that humans counted, and why.
That every year was a step toward thirteen. That on the thirteenth name-day you stood in front of your family and your core closed its first ring and the light came up out of you, and the color said what you were and the brightness said how far you would go.
And he told her that for a commoner it was a Tuesday. That for a noble it was the single most important day of his life, and that for the heir to a kingdom there would be scholars with open books, and half the dukes of Epiria in the hall, and the record of it would go into the archive and stay there for four hundred years.
Naeva listened to all of it with her head tilted.
"We do that also," she said. "The light. But it is later and it is not a day."
"What do you mean it's not a day?"
"It is around fifty years. Somewhere in there." She shrugged. "It is not a *day*. Nobody comes. You tell your mother in the evening and she says good and then you eat."
"Fifty. And nobody makes a thing of it."
"Why would we? Fifty is nothing. My brother is ninety and he is still an idiot." She frowned at him. "Yours is at thirteen. With the hall and the books and the dukes."
"Yeah."
"And if the light is small?"
Sito thought about Osric's flat voice at a campfire.
"There was a duke's third son in Coldren," he said. "Few years ago. Whole hall watching, family on the dais, two scholars writing it down. And the light came and it was — " He held up two fingers, the way Osric had. "That much. You could've covered it with a cup."
"And?"
"And his father didn't look at him. And by midsummer he'd been sent off to run a grain estate four hundred miles from anywhere, and nobody in that family has said his name at a table since."
Naeva stared at him.
"That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard," she said.
"Yeah."
"No — " She sat up, genuinely angry now, in a way he had not seen. "No, I am not making a joke. That is stupid. The light is the light. It is not a thing he did. Nobody would care here. Nobody would even ask."
"Well, they ask at home."
"Then home is stupid," said Naeva.
Sito laughed, and let her change the subject, maybe if he was a commoner destined to be at the first circle his whole life he would've cared more.
---
The expedition came out of the ground on the fortieth day.
Marcus was in the council chamber when the crystal lit, with every elder in Vradia around him and Ithriel standing at the back with her arms folded, and Sito in the doorway where he was allowed to stand.
The survey lead spoke for a long time.
Five levels. Sixty-eight miles north confirmed, paced twice, and at sixty-eight the fifth level had not ended — they had turned back because they had walked out of the last of the relay supply and were four days from being unable to return at all.
Eleven dead. Four of them elven.
Worked stone on the fourth and fifth levels in seven places. Two of the seven had doorways in them, standing, with nothing on the other side that anybody had been willing to walk through.
And a core-reading, taken at the furthest point, that the expedition's mage had repeated nine times and then refused to sign her name to.
The room did not move.
"Say the number," said Elder Vaeneth, who had said that once before.
"Sixty-eight miles north of our mine mouth," Marcus said. "Fifty-seven of it under Vradia."
"And what is fifty-seven miles north of your mine mouth, ambassador?"
"Elder, I think you know."
"I would like," said Vaeneth, very quietly, "to hear a human say it in this room."
Marcus put the crystal down.
"The deepest point they reached," he said, "is under your southern groves."
Nobody in that chamber said anything for a long time.
Sito, standing in the doorway, looked down at the floor of the council trunk — living wood, fitted planks, over a thousand years of it — and thought about a man standing four paces inside a doorway in the dark, almost two hundred miles away, counting.
Then he thought about a branch eighty feet above him, and a girl sitting on it, and the fact that neither of them had known any of this while it was being measured.