Ottilie Brandt delivered Concord's ruling in the chapel, in the same cold voice with which she had delivered the news of late Patriarch passing to the branches of the Adeptus families.
The elders sat in a row behind her.
The Herzog stood at the back, hat in his hands.
Rita sat in her chair, a little thinner than before, her knuckles white on the armrest.
"Reinhardt Frost is stripped of name, seat, and claim," Brandt said. "His rapier has been destroyed and his estates forfeited. The Concord has issued a writ for his capture. The Black Market's links to this house will be pursued."
Faust, at the back of the chapel, did not let himself breathe out.
"As to the Frost seat. The Concord has weighed the late Patriarch's testament and the matter of the struck name." The Warden's gaze moved to him, flat and unreadable.
Faust bowed his head with perfect solemnity.
"The Concord has, however, been unable to find any decree against them. In the circumstances, and in view of the young man's conduct before the tower, the seat is conferred upon Isfrid Ernst Frost. He may take up the position upon the completion of his Accolade."
Rita let out a breath.
"With one condition," said Brandt. "The Concord will appoint a regency council of three elders to administer the house until his thirtieth year. The boy will complete his accolade as his grandfather ordained, and return, and then he may sit."
Isfrid stood at the head of the chapel in his grey coat, Frost sealed as a cane at his side.
He was white and exhausted and thinner than he had been a month ago.
"I accept," Isfrid said.
"You are not given a choice," said Brandt.
"I know." He lifted his chin. "I accept anyway."
Only a flicker, only a muscle at the corner of her mouth. She inclined her head to the boy, very slightly.
"Then you are Frost," she said. "Do try to live. I hope you succeed."
With that she bowed.
Isfrid wanted to ask something about his grandfather. After all there wasn't a person in a world who knew him better than Ottilie. He bit his tongue, knowing damn well she'll not tell him anything.
The regency council was announced next, and Faust listened with half an ear, filing each name away the way he filed every face that might one day become a problem. Two of the three elders he judged to be dry old men who valued their own comfort above any cause and would sign whatever kept the estate quiet. The third was the youngest of the furred crows, the one who had shifted toward the horse in the garden. He was a narrow, watchful man named Aldric Voss, and when his eyes met Faust's across the chapel he smiled with a politeness that offered nothing at all.
'Keep an eye on that one,' Faust thought. 'He has already decided which way the wind blows, and he has not yet decided whether he approves of it.'
Afterwards, in the cold of the portico, Ottilie Brandt stopped beside him on her way to her carriage. She did not look at him. She looked out at the white lawns and the black stump of the fallen tower.
She climbed into her carriage without waiting for a farewell, and it rolled away through the snow.
They buried Isbert on the last day of the month, in the cold clear morning he had promised.
The Concord had gone, the carriages with them.
The Herzog and Rita had gone back to the ducal seat, with a long embrace and a promise to write. The estate lay quiet under a fresh fall of snow, and Isfrid walked out alone to the family plot, on the hill behind the broken tower, with the cane in his hand.
Faust followed at a distance. He did not intend to intrude. He just stood therre, among the dark yews and watched the boy kneel in the snow by the new mound of earth, and found that he could not make his feet carry him away.
After a time, Isfrid spoke without turning.
"You can come over, you know. I can hear you breathing."
Faust walked across the snow and sat beside him on the cold ground, his good coat soaking through at once. For a while they both looked at the grave.
"How many have you buried?" Isfrid asked.
It was not a question Faust had been asked in a very long time.
"My mother and my father. Both my brothers. Wilhelm's boy, who was nine, of the sweating sickness. Ludwich, who was a prig and my enemy and, it turned out, my friend. Elena." He counted, almost to himself, on the fingers of the hand with the dark scar. "Four hundred and nineteen patients, whose names I remember. Some number of soldiers. A great many friends I have forgotten the faces of, which is the worst of it. And now Isbert."
Isfrid was silent.
"I do not tell you this to frighten you, godson. I tell you because you will do it too. You will stand at graves for a very great while."
"Does it get easier?"
"No." Faust considered. "It gets familiar. It is a different thing. You learn the shape of it. You learn where it will hit you hardest, and you learn to carry the knife in a different hand." He gave a short, dry laugh. "I am told that is called wisdom. It feels remarkably like being tired."
Isfrid's mouth quirked. It was not quite a smile.
"He said you cheat at cards."
"Isbert Frost never lost a hand of piquet in his life and never admitted it. He was a monstrous hypocrite and I loved him like a brother." Faust looked at the mound of fresh earth, and a long breath went out of him, and for the first time in many years he said it aloud. "I shall miss him dreadfully."
Isfrid leaned, awkwardly, the way a boy leans when he does not know how to ask, and set his head against Faust's shoulder.
Faust did not move. He had been a physician for a century and knew very well when a patient needed to be touched and when he needed to be left alone. This was neither. This was a third thing, and it had no name in any of his books.
Perhaps sympathy?
"I keep thinking I should have been faster," Isfrid said, after a while, to the snow. "In the yard. If I had been faster, Hans would be alive. If I had listened to you in the first place. If I had not been so stupid—"
"Hans is dead because Reinhardt Frost is a coward who pays other men. He does not deserve wielding Frost. The rest is arithmetic you will torture yourself with for years, and it will not bring him back." Faust kept his voice level. "I am not telling you to stop. You will not stop. I am telling you that you should write the names down. It helps. I have a notebook. It is rather thick."
"You write them down?"
"All of them. Hans. The maids' husbands in the north tower, who did not get out. The mercenary at the gate whose name I never learned, and whom I drove into killing his friends." Faust's voice caught on the last of it, and he let it. "I do not forgive myself for that one. I merely remember it. This helps me remain human."
Isfrid turned his head against Faust's shoulder and looked up at him, red-eyed.
"That seems a heavy thing to carry."
"It is. That is rather the point." Faust smiled, very slightly. "Grief is only love with nowhere to go, godson. I find it better to let it ache than to pretend it was never there. After all the pain is what makes us alive."
They sat that way in the snow until the sun was high.