Chương 4

The charcoal track did not forgive haste. Elara learned its temperament within the first mile. Roots crossed the twin ruts at irregular intervals. Soot-blackened ground hid soft patches that swallowed a hoof to the fetlock without warning. The grey mare picked her way through patiently, but every stumble travelled up Elara's spine and reminded her that she had not ridden without a saddle since she was nine. Ahead of her, the mercenary was dying.

He had started the ride mostly upright, occasionally giving instructions. By the time the sun dropped behind the treeline, he was folded over Mirelle's shoulder, his cheek knocking against her back with each step of the bay. Mirelle had not commented. She had simply taken the reins from his slackening hands, adjusted her seat to bear the weight, and ridden on with the bleeding killer slumped against her back like an overlarge, badly behaved child. Blood had soaked through his brigandine at the right side.

In the failing light, the stain looked black. It had spread down Mirelle's cloak where his body pressed against her, and dried into the coarse wool in patches of ugly brown. Twice during the last mile, his arm had slipped. The third time, Mirelle wrapped it around her waist without speaking. Elara guided the mare closer.

"How much farther?"

"I am not sure, my lady." Mirelle's voice was level.

"He said the track meets the eastern road at a burned stump shaped like a chair, but I have yet to see it." About an hour later they found the stump. The eastern road beyond it was proper Academy stonework, crowned and drained, pale under a rising three-quarter moon. The mare's hooves rang on it. After the soft treachery of the charcoal track, the sound was almost indecent. Elara glanced around into the dark between the surrounding trees. Shadows lay thick under the pines.

She could feel them the way another woman might feel a draught against her skin — every pooled patch of darkness a standing invitation, patient and familiar. If she opened herself to them, she could send her senses down the track for half a mile, could know what waited at every bend. She kept her awareness closed and rode on in ordinary blindness, the way she had trained herself to do since she was eleven years old. Water. She was a Water mage. She was only ever a Water mage.

The man bleeding on Mirelle did not know what she was. He had sold her without knowing, and un-sold her without knowing, and Elara had spent the entire afternoon failing to construct any version of him that made sense. She had assembled and discarded theories as they made their way through the growing darkness. He wanted a larger payment from House Vey. Plausible, except that would have been a stupid move to play, and he didn't strike her as a stupid person. He was working for a rival of the original buyers?

No, that didn't make sense either. Perhaps the matter was simpler, and the fiend had merely developed a conscience at the last moment. It was possible, but Elara was not eager to accept the most convenient excuse. It was sensible to believe he was running some scheme too sophisticated for her to see.

"Lights," Mirelle said, interrupting her thoughts. Elara looked up, and it was then she noticed it. Asterhall announced itself first as a glow diffused through the trees, then as a line of lamps climbing a distant slope, and finally, when the road crested the last rise, as walls. Elara had seen renderings. Every child of a noble house had. The last time she saw an illustration of the academy — then in the back of a tome in her mother's study — was when she was twelve.

Pale stone rising in terraces up the hillside, lamplit windows scattered across towers like a second field of stars, and beneath it all the gatehouse: an arch tall enough to admit a loaded hay wagon with a mounted man standing on top of it, flanked by lanterns burning behind blue glass. Seeing Asterhall now in person confirmed the faint suspicion she had that the renderings had not properly conveyed its true scale. Two wardens came out from the gatehouse as they approached.

Blue cloaks, long iron-shod staves, and expressions that travelled rapidly from boredom to something much more alert as the lamplight found the party's details.

"Hold there." Elara drew rein. Beside her, the bay gelding stopped — and the mercenary, deprived of the rhythm that had been holding him in place, simply continued forward.

"Saints—" Mirelle exclaimed. She reached back and caught at his brigandine, but his weight dragged the cloth through her fingers. He struck the ground on his right side with the stiff clatter of velvet-wrapped steel and limbs. His head bounced once. The sound was small and hard. The mercenary lay where he had landed, face turned against the stone, one arm folded under him at an angle no conscious man would tolerate. The lamplight was unkind.

It showed the mud, the dried blood sheeting his right side from ribs to knee, and the fresh blood beneath, still wet. For a moment, Elara imagined that she could not see him breathing. She was off the mare before she had decided to dismount. Her legs took her weight poorly after the long ride, though she remained upright and crossed to him. The lamplight gave enough light for an examination. His skin was pale beneath road dirt, his lips grey. The linen he wore was saturated from the lower ribs to the hip.

Worried, she watched his chest. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Nothing.

"…Is he dead?" Mirelle asked, hesitant. The sudden absence had left her crooked in the saddle, one arm still reaching down. Elara lowered two fingers beneath his nose and waited. A thread of warm air touched her knuckles.

"No," she exhaled.

"He is still alive." Before the relief could fully settle, a shadow settled over her.

"Mistress." The older warden's voice, above her, was careful in the manner of a man of his station.

"Step away from that man and give an account of yourselves. The gate is closed to unmarked parties after dusk."

"We are not an unmarked party." Mirelle snapped, dismounting with rather more dignity. She stood beside the bay, spine straight. If the blood soaking her cloak troubled her — which Elara knew without uncertainty that it did — none of it reached her voice.

"You are addressing Lady Elara Vey, seventh daughter of Lord Casmir Vey, an admitted student of this Academy, and I am her sworn companion. Our escort was attacked on the King's Road." The wardens exchanged a glance in which Elara read the entire problem. Two women, no colours, no coach, no escort — except a man dressed as an escort, who wore a mercenary's brigandine, and whose blood was all over both of them.

"Attacked," the older one repeated.

"By whom?"

"By two of our own hired guards, who had sold her ladyship to parties unknown. This man refused the contract and killed them both." Mirelle's delivery was rather flat.

"He has been paying for it since midday."

"He's one of the hired swords?"

"He was." The younger warden looked down at the mercenary with an expression that had made up its mind.

"Then he goes to the holding cells and the watch surgeon can see to him when—""No." Elara heard her own voice before she felt herself decide to use it. Both wardens looked at her. So did Mirelle, and there was a warning folded into that look — my lady, consider — which Elara understood perfectly, but was at the moment inclined to ignore. The sensible course was obvious. Let them take him. He was a confessed conspirator; he had said so himself, standing in the road with the gold at his feet.

Whatever he was to the wardens — criminal, witness, complication — he would remain alive enough to answer questions, and Elara would pass through this gate as an unaccompanied victim of an attack, which was the simplest and safest thing she could possibly be. She owed him nothing. He had accepted money to deliver her to people who wanted her, and there were very few things a buyer could want with the seventh daughter of House Vey. The thought of it had been sitting under her breastbone all day like swallowed ice.

He had also put himself between her and a sword, and been run through for it, and had ultimately gotten both of them here.

"He enters under my name," she said. The older warden's brow creased.

"My lady, if this man is—""He is a witness to a crime committed against a student of this Academy, and he is the reason that student is standing at your gate rather than in a cellar somewhere." Elara rose from beside the mercenary.

"He will be taken to the Academy infirmary. Whatever questions the Academy wishes to ask him can be asked when he is capable of answering. I claim responsibility for the cost of his treatment against House Vey's letters of credit, over my own seal."

"The Academy will want him under guard, my lady."

"Then guard him in the infirmary." She held the man's gaze.

"Or explain to your registrar, in the morning, why the sole witness to the purchase of a noble student died in a cell within sight of your gate." Silence, of the kind that attended arithmetic.

"Mistress Saye," Elara said, without turning.

"My admission packet." The blue leather case was already in Mirelle's hands. She had carried it against her chest through the ride, and she presented it now unmarked and dry, with the small ironwood casket atop it. The Academy countermark showed on the packet's seal even by lamplight. The older warden examined it. Whatever he found there rearranged his posture by several degrees.

"Stretcher to the gate, as well as some extra hands," he said to the younger one.

"And send a runner up to the infirmary. Tell them there's a sword wound coming, half a day old." John woke to sunlight, the smell of crushed herbs, and a very dull throbbing in his side. He catalogued things in order of importance. He was alive. He was lying in an actual bed, under actual linen, in a long whitewashed room with tall windows. His side ached with a deep, buzzing wrongness, like a limb that had fallen asleep and was reconsidering the arrangement, but the hot wet tearing of yesterday — was it yesterday?

— had gone. Someone had removed his armour, his clothes, his boots, and, he confirmed with a discreet sweep of one hand, everything else. Also, a woman was watching him from the foot of the bed. She was perhaps fifty, grey-streaked hair bound back, sleeves rolled and pinned, wearing a green sash over practical robes. Her hands were stained faintly brown at the fingertips.

"You're finally awake," she said.

"Sit up slowly or not at all." John chose not at all. It required no effort and matched his life philosophy.

"Where—""Asterhall infirmary. You arrived the night before last." She came around the bed and pressed two fingers against his right side without asking. Warmth spread from the touch, green and probing, and somewhere under his skin things shifted in a way John elected not to think about closely.

"Good. The muscle is knitting straight."

"The night before last." His voice came out as gravel.

"You slept through a day. Blood loss will do that." She straightened.

"You are a very lucky man, whatever else you may be. The blade travelled along the outside of the abdominal wall. Through muscle, front to back, an inch of channel the whole way — and it touched nothing that mattered. A thumb's width inward and it takes the bowel, and then no mage in this school saves you. You'd have died of the rot in four days, screaming."

"Huh," John said.

"Good to know." He remembered Harl's point punching in under the brigandine, the maul-strike of it. An inch. He'd have preferred not to know the margin, actually, but the woman seemed like the type who considered accurate information a form of kindness.

"You healed me," he said.

"Wood mage?"

"Third Circle." She said it the way a woman states her age: without vanity, daring comment.

"Unfortunately for you, that meant I can only convince flesh to close and knit. Conjuring blood out of the air is the feat of a more powerful mage. What you lost, you lost. Your body will replace it in its own time." She was already moving toward a tray on the side table, restacking rolled bandages.

"You will eat what is brought — liver, greens, red wine, no arguments — you will not stand today, and you will not put weight through that side for a week. The muscle is knitted, not seasoned. Tear my work, and I will be annoyed with you."

"Understood, ma'am." That earned him a single sharp glance. Touchy about her age then, John noted without a word. Point taken; do not vex the powerful flesh mage. She gathered her tray and left, and John heard, through the closing door, a brief exchange in the corridor. Two voices. Male. Bored in a very specific way. Guards. Ah, John thought. Right. He was under guard.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling beams On the bright side: he was alive, Elara was — presumably — alive and inside the walls of the safest place in three kingdoms, and the abduction had failed. The plot he remembered had called for a tollhouse, a rival faction, years in a cellar. Whatever happened now, that exact future was off the table. He'd managed that much with a dagger, a strip of cut leather, and possibly forty per cent of his blood. On the not-so-bright side: he had confessed. Out loud. To the victim.

You were paid to kidnap me? Yes. At the time it had seemed the fastest way to get two frightened women moving; in the sober light of an infirmary with guards outside the door, it had certain drawbacks as a legal strategy. He was, John suspected, about to learn a great deal about this world's justice system from the inside.