Chương 55: 23-3.Confession, Anomaly, and Stew

"Then bring your tray and get out here."

"The elven tradition of hospitality is truly a warming experience." She looked at me with the temperature of deep space.

"Say one more word and I'll make sure you don't get to experience today's wind either." I sighed, stood up, stuffed the bread into my mouth, and took a swig from the wooden cup beside my tray. The next second I nearly spat it across the table.

"That's not for drinking," Jessi said, approximately one beat too late.

"... Why didn't you say something earlier?"

"I assumed the young master could tell that was hand-washing water." I looked down at the cup in my hand—a thin film of oil floated on the surface, two herb leaves drifting in slow circles through the lukewarm water. A brief silence followed. Alvira's brow creased.

"What exactly is your daily life like?"

"Evidently," I said, "something considerably closer to the raw fundamentals of survival than anything you'd recognize as aristocratic." I set the cup down, kept my face neutral, and walked out with her. Behind me, Jessi's laughter came through at a volume she had clearly attempted to suppress and entirely failed to. The ground outside the kitchen was worse than the ground inside. The banquet hall at least had flagstones.

Out here, it was pure mud—last night's snowmelt mixed with whatever the kitchen had been throwing out the back door, producing a consistency that made a sound underfoot both unfriendly to boots and vaguely insulting to the person wearing them. A little further along, a makeshift wooden pen had been thrown up against the wall. Several pigs were rooting through a pile of rotting vegetable scraps with the single-minded dedication of creatures who had never once questioned their life choices.

The smell was comprehensive. Comprehensive enough to make a person lose their optimism about the day before it had properly started. Alvira walked to the shadow along the wall and stopped. I crouched down beside her, propped one elbow on my knee, and looked at her.

"All right. Remote enough out here, and the pigs aren't known for their discretion. What did you want to talk about?" Alvira didn't answer immediately. She looked at the far wall first, then at the grey-white sky pressing low overhead, as though she was confirming something. The movement was small, but it was enough to make the loose, scattered alertness I'd been carrying since breakfast quietly tighten up.

"Something felt wrong last night," she said at last.

"You mean the way Conrad was looking at Erina?"

"That was one part of it." Her voice wasn't loud. It was just colder than the morning air.

"I mean this fortress." I raised an eyebrow.

"Vasach Fortress?"

"Yes." She said the word and then stopped, as though even she was reluctant to commit to what came next.

"It's too quiet." I looked around. The voices from the kitchen, the grunting from the pig pen, the distant bark of drill commands from somewhere across the yard, the wind cutting through gaps in the tower walls—all present and accounted for.

"With respect, this place is approximately ten thousand miles from quiet."

"Not that kind of quiet." Alvira's brow drew together.

"Something deeper." She pressed her hand against her knee, fingers tightening slightly.

"Normally, wherever I am—wind, water, fire, earth—there are small responses. Even in the most desolate places. But here there's nothing." I looked at her for two full seconds.

"You mean elemental spirits?" She nodded.

"Not one." I didn't answer immediately this time. If anyone else had said that to me, I'd have started by wondering whether they'd had too much to drink at last night's banquet and were now seeing enemies in the air. But Alvira wasn't someone who made jokes about this kind of thing. She liked using me as a sharpening stone on a regular basis, but that had nothing to do with her willingness to fabricate stories about her own perceptions. Love what you're reading?

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"Could it just be the cold?" I tried the optimistic angle first.

"Cold doesn't account for this." She looked at me.

"This isn't sparse. It's empty." The word empty landed, and something moved along my spine—not quite fear. More like the feeling of reaching for something that had always been there and finding the space where it used to be. The body noticing the absence before the mind catches up. I turned my head and looked out at the stone walls and towers rising unevenly in the distance. The morning light was pale and flat, the kind that ought to make everything visible and clear.

But somehow, under that brightness, the walls looked darker than they should. Not like stone being illuminated. Like something was slowly drawing the color out of them from the inside.

"I felt it in the banquet hall last night," Alvira said quietly.

"Everyone was talking, drinking, testing each other. Everything looked normal. But I kept feeling like something was missing—like one layer had been taken out."

"Missing a layer?"

"Like the whole place was separated from the outside world by something very thin and very dry." She chose her words carefully.

"Like this fortress and everything beyond it weren't connected to each other." That description brought Conrad's face back to me—the smile that had never once slipped, not even at its edges. And the half-sentence I'd caught drifting through that corridor, the one I'd pretended not to hear. The daughter of Varaen the Third. Fifty thousand heavy armored cavalry. They'd spoken quietly. But those words had gone in like iron nails, and they were still in there. I didn't say any of that.

I just asked, evenly: "You suspect Conrad?" Alvira glanced at me.

"What I'm questioning isn't whether something's wrong with him. It's how far wrong it goes." Very Alvira. Direct, and deeply uncomfortable. I let out a quiet, involuntary laugh.

"Reassuring as always. I'd been operating under the assumption that the worst of it was the few thousand soldiers in the fortress and whatever trouble might be coming from outside. Apparently the situation has declined to be even slightly considerate of my preferences."

"If your life ever actually became considerate of your preferences," Alvira said, "I'd suspect the whole day was a hallucination."

"My sincerest gratitude for your unwavering assessment of my circumstances." She ignored the deflection and brought her gaze back to the fortress itself.

"One more thing."

"Go ahead."

"Conrad doesn't like me."

"I noticed," I said honestly.

"The way he looked at you was like someone had slipped a blade of ice into his sleeve that he wanted to throw away but didn't dare."

"It's not because I'm an elf. It's not because I stand with Valdorin's side." She paused.

"It's because he can tell that I can see something is being hidden here." Wind rolled around the corner of the wall, carrying kitchen scraps and wet mud. From somewhere in the distance came the ring of metal on metal, then the muffled shout of a soldier's command. Vasach Fortress looked, by every visible measure, exactly as it should—orderly, even, functioning. More orderly than most places in the Northern Reaches. Which was precisely what made the unnatural neatness of it so deeply wrong.

Like a body that had been arranged too carefully. I pushed that thought back down before it could finish forming. It was too early in the morning to be doing that to myself.

"So," I said, looking at her, "you didn't drag me out here just to revisit the question of how I made someone cry last night?" Alvira finally turned her head and gave me a look that could have stripped rust.

"I'll settle that account with you separately."

"Ah. So I have the privilege of waiting in line for my execution." She didn't take the bait.

"I thought Conrad was simply caught up in the capital's complications," she said quietly.

"Now I'm not sure that's all of it." I was quiet for a moment, and slowly let my back rest against the cold stone wall.

"Have you noticed," I said, "that whenever something brushes up against me, the scale of it automatically upgrades?"

"Yes," Alvira said, without a moment's hesitation.

"And it usually upgrades in the most inconvenient possible direction."

"Deeply moving vote of confidence."

"It's not confidence. It's empirical observation." I pulled one corner of my mouth up and looked overhead. From this angle, I could see the shadow of the tower falling at a diagonal across the yard—a dark spike pressed into the grey-white sky. The clouds were moving slowly. Too slowly, with a kind of sluggishness that made me think, without quite meaning to, of something that shouldn't have stayed in one place and had been staying there far too long anyway.

"Don't alert the others yet," I said. Alvira frowned.

"You're certain?"

"If Lucas knows too much, he'll spend tonight checking the door bolt every time he rolls over. Jessi—" I thought about it, "—she'd probably ask whether the monster was edible while still chewing her dinner. Matthews is steady, but until we know what kind of wrong we're dealing with, putting everyone on edge doesn't help us." Alvira studied me for a moment, then nodded, once.

"What are you planning to do?"

"Watch," I said.

"Watch what Conrad decides to do next. Watch how long this fortress can keep pretending nothing is happening." She let out a quiet breath—the kind that was compressing something. Impatience, maybe. Or the particular anxiety of someone whose instincts were already screaming but who couldn't yet act on them.

"I hate this feeling," she said.

"So do I."

"Like standing on ground that's been hollowed out."

"Worse than that." I looked at the grey sky beyond the wall's end and said slowly: "Like the ground is still there. But the world forgot to follow." Alvira went still for a moment. She looked at me—as though there was something she'd been about to say—and then swallowed it back. I didn't ask. There are some things that lose their particular quality of wrongness the moment you put them into precise language.

And besides, I had the persistent feeling that Vasach Fortress itself was something holding its breath—that if we pressed one more time, it would let the surface slip, and show us whatever was underneath the layer of normalcy it had been maintaining. From the pig pen, a long and deeply unpleasant squeal split the air. Alvira and I both turned to look at the pig currently driving its snout into the mud with what could only be described as personal conviction. Two seconds of silence.

"I don't know why," I said, "but I just had a very bad feeling."

"Has there ever been a time in your life when a feeling you had turned out to be good?" Alvira said, without expression.

"Fair point." I stood up and knocked the mud off my knee.

"Right. Let's head back. While things are still willing to pretend they're only things." Alvira rose beside me. The cold edge in her expression hadn't softened. Before she turned away, she looked one last time at the layered stone walls and towers of Vasach Fortress, deep and stacked and silent.

"Cedric," she said.

"Mm?"

"I don't think this place can keep the pretense up much longer." I looked at her, and produced a smile with very little warmth in it.

"Funny."

"Same." Then we walked back, one after the other, across the cold wet mud. The noise of the kitchen came flooding back into my ears—broth smell, charcoal smoke, the knock of blade on board, someone being comprehensively cursed at—all of it rushing back in as though the conversation we'd just had was something I'd imagined. I knew it wasn't. Because from this moment forward, Vasach Fortress no longer looked to me like a fortress. It looked like a mouth that hadn't fully opened yet.