Greaves was asleep in the corridor chair, upright, one hand on his sword, and he had clearly been that way all night. Theo stood over him for a while. He'd seen that exact posture on loading docks, on people who had been told to guard something and decided it meant themselves. He took the blanket off his own bed and laid it over the captain's knees, then went away quickly, before the man could wake up and have to pretend he hadn't noticed.
The keep's books arrived at seven, carried by a woman who looked as though she'd been awake since the previous Tuesday.
She had brown hair pinned so tight it pulled at the corners of her eyes and a thin scar through her left eyebrow, and she held three ledgers against her chest like she expected someone to take them. Ledger supplied the name before she'd reached the door. Wren Hollis, quartermaster's clerk.The register entry sat right behind it. Theo made himself look at her face instead. A bread knife, in arc eight. She would have to get very angry first, and as far as he could tell she hadn't gotten around to it yet.
"The captain said you asked for the accounts." She set them on the table without bowing. It wasn't quite rude. It was the careful, flat non-rudeness of someone who'd been thanked too rarely to expect it. "You've never asked for the accounts, my lord."
"I'd like to see them."
"Here is what they say." She didn't open the books. She didn't need to. "Grain for eleven days. Nineteen horses, down from forty. Three hundred and forty silver in the strongbox, which is what you left in it. And we owe the Merchant League four thousand one hundred gold, with interest compounding on the first of every month. I want to be clear that I haven't taken any of it."
"I didn't think you had."
"Everyone else does."
Theo opened the top ledger. Neat columns, small tidy handwriting, corrections initialed and dated. At the back of his head Ledger was reading the same figures off the walls and the stables and the cellar, and when he lined the two up they matched. Not close. Exactly. To the copper.
"You're checking me," Wren said. She'd been watching his lips move.
"I'm checking us. It matches."
"To the copper?"
"To the copper."
She went still. For a moment the flatness slipped, and what was underneath looked about nineteen. "I've kept those books for six years," she said. "Nobody has ever checked them and had them come out right."
"They're very good books." He meant it, and his voice did something unprofessional on the way out. "Wren. How bad is it?"
She told him. The keep couldn't feed itself past the middle of the month. The League had cut off credit. Winter was forty days away, and the Marches had never once gotten through a winter without importing grain. "There's the Monster Lands," she added, and when he looked up she was almost smiling, which was a terrible thing to see on her. "The goblins in the Wood have more grain than they can eat. It's quite well known. Of course, no Ashcombe has been able to talk to them in thirty years."
"Why not?"
"Your father tried once, my lord." She left it there.
For reference, Ledger offered, the goblin villages of the Wood run a grain surplus of roughly six hundred measures, and a smoked-fish surplus I can't estimate. I have this from a map I did not draw.
"Where did you get a map?"
I would rather not say. It was the second time in two days it had sounded uncomfortable, and Theo filed that away.
* * *
Pell Vandry was on his knees in the middle of the courtyard, a stick of chalk in one hand and a brass instrument like a bent ruler in the other, muttering. Hundreds of small chalk marks covered the flagstones. He had drawn a ring around every thread of residue.
"Don't step there," he said, without looking up. "Or there. Or honestly anywhere." Theo stopped where he was. "Lord Ashcombe. Do you know who made this circle?"
"I thought I did."
"You didn't. It's too old, and the hand is wrong. Yours would be…" Pell waved the ruler. "Hot. This is cold. This is someone who'd done it before and didn't enjoy it." He pointed with the chalk. In the north corner, half under ash, a tiny mark was cut into the stone: a ring with three short bars stacked beneath it, like lines in a column of figures. "That's the signature. I've never seen it, and I've seen every registered ritual signature in the Veyran archive, because I was expelled from the Academy for asking whose idea they were."
Theo looked at the mark. Something at the back of his skull tightened.
I know that mark, said Ledger. I cannot tell you where I know it from.
"Doesn't ring a bell," Theo said, out loud.
"Mm." Pell finally looked up. He had the face of a man who'd been right so many times that people had stopped speaking to him. "You're a terrible liar, Lord Ashcombe. Don't worry. I'll find out on my own. I enjoy that." He turned back to the stone, and then added, almost shyly, "It's a real pleasure, by the way. I've waited my whole life to see a circle do something it wasn't built to do."
He meant it so completely that it was a little frightening.
Vandry is fond of you, said Ledger, as Theo walked away. I would be careful with that.
* * *
Ledger had kept the entry open since the night before. Ivo Ashcombe, age 11. East library. Theo had been walking around it all morning, the way you walk around a bill you haven't opened.
The east wing was cold in a way the rest of the keep wasn't. The library was a long room with high windows and perhaps four hundred books, and at the far end an old man snored in an armchair with a book open on his chest. Beside the window a boy sat at a desk too large for him, in a coat too large for him, wearing gloves with the fingertips cut off. He had a pen in his hand. When Theo walked in he put the pen down, stood, and bowed from the waist with the precision of someone who'd practiced.
"Brother."
"Don't," said Theo. "Please. Sit."
Ivo sat. He kept his hands flat on the desk where they could be seen. He had Dain's gray eyes, which looked entirely different in a face with nothing mean in it yet. He didn't look afraid, and that was the part that took the floor out from under Theo. He looked like he'd been afraid for so long that it had worn smooth and turned into manners.
"You've never come here," Ivo said. "Not since Father died."
"I know."
"Four years."
"I know." Theo looked at the notebook under the boy's pen. Columns, dates, small neat handwriting. Six years of reading inventory sheets meant he couldn't help reading it upside down. 7th of Frost. Brother at breakfast. Quiet. Hands unsteady. Avoid east stairs. And below it: 4th of Frost. Brother smiled at breakfast. Unclear why. Avoid for three days.
He stopped reading.
"It's useful," Ivo said, without apology. "To know when to be somewhere else."
It was a very good log. Dated, cross-referenced. Theo had worked for managers who couldn't have produced one half as clear. He had read arc five. He had read why an eleven-year-old picked up a cup of wine, and he'd thought at the time that it was too big a thing to come out of a child. He had been wrong. It had been coming out of this child for years, in neat columns.
"I'm sorry," said Theo.
"For what, specifically?"
It was a perfect question, and Theo almost laughed."Everything specific. And some things I don't know about yet."
"That isn't an answer."
"No."
Ivo studied him. "I heard it last night. From here. A sound like a lot of people deciding not to scream." His voice stayed perfectly level. "I thought it was finally me."
Something went through Theo's chest, and it wasn't the curse. "No. It was never going to be you."
"How would you know?"
"I wouldn't have let it."
Ivo didn't believe that, and didn't pretend to. But he reached for a stoneware jug on the desk, and two cups, and poured."It's the only thing I'm allowed to pour," he said. "Master Holloway says wine is for people with more years."
A cup, held out in an eleven-year-old's cut-off gloves. Theo's body went cold from the scalp down. A cup of wine, the register had said, and his whole spine remembered it.
This is milk, said Ledger, with great patience.
He took it. He drank it. It was milk, warm and a little scorched on the bottom, and he sat there holding the empty cup. Ivo hadn't taken his eyes off Theo's hand. It hadn't hesitated. It hadn't shaken either, which Theo thought might be a minor miracle.
"You used to make Wren taste everything first," Ivo said slowly.
"I'm trying something different."
"What?"
"I think it's called trust. I'm not very good at it yet."
Something moved in the boy's face. It wasn't a smile. It was the place where one would go, if there were ever one to spare.
Ivo opened the desk drawer. For a long moment he held very still. Then he took out something small and laid it on the desk between the jug and the cups, and slid it two inches across the wood. A scrap of paper, burned black along three edges, in a hand Theo didn't know and somehow recognized.
"I found it in the grate the morning you burned Father's study. I kept it. In case you ever asked."
"I'm asking."
"I know," said Ivo. "That's why it's on the desk."
Theo picked it up. The ink was brown, the writing quick and narrow.
…if it comes due before you are ready, do not use the circle. It was never meant for anyone. Go to the lake in the Wood. Ask for the one who keeps the accounts. Say your mother's name, and
The rest was ash.
He read it three times. The Duke had known. The Duke had left the circle as a last resort and left this beside it, and Dain, nineteen and terrified and alone, had burned the page and used the circle anyway.
I would prefer not to comment, said Ledger.
It was the first time in two days that Theo had heard it sound afraid.