Chương 97: The Long Road

They put him in a covered wagon meant for prisoners, though nobody called it that out loud. Auditor Prewitt had been precise about the word choice — escort transport — and precise, too, about the fact that the door locked from the outside regardless of what anyone chose to call it. Voss rode alongside on horseback, close enough to the wagon's small barred window that Keth could see him whenever he leaned forward. Kael rode on the other side.

Neither man had spoken more than a handful of words to Prewitt or her soldiers since Stillharbor's gate had closed behind them, and the silence between the two escorts and the four gray-coated soldiers had taken on a texture Keth could feel through the wagon's thin wood — not hostile exactly, but coiled, the particular quiet of men who trusted each other and trusted almost nothing else in this convoy at all.

"You're staring at the window again," Voss said, the third time Keth caught himself pressed close against the bars.

"I keep expecting the wall to still be there," Keth said.

"It's been an hour. It shouldn't still feel wrong."

"It'll feel wrong for a while yet." Voss's own eyes didn't leave the road ahead of them, scanning it out of an old habit Keth doubted he'd ever fully lose.

"I left that wall behind once myself, when they moved me to the archive. Took the better part of a year before I stopped listening for its bells every evening."

The road ran east through country Keth had never once had reason to see — low hills gone brown and bare with early spring thaw, a scatter of farmsteads with smoke rising thin from their chimneys, ordinary people going about ordinary lives who paused, every so often, to watch the convoy pass with expressions Keth couldn't quite read from this distance. Curiosity, mostly.

Sometimes something closer to fear, though he couldn't have said whether that fear was aimed at the Census soldiers or at whatever they were escorting. Kael brought his horse close to the wagon's window near midday, when the road widened enough to allow it.

"How's the arm," he asked. Not gently, exactly — Kael had never once managed gentle in the whole time Keth had known him — but carefully, the particular care of a man asking a question he genuinely wanted an honest answer to.

"It doesn't hurt," Keth said.

"It just feels like it's not entirely mine."

"That's an honest answer." Kael's jaw worked once.

"I've read every report Wyeth ever filed on you, boy. None of them prepared me for whatever this actually is."

"Nothing prepared me for it either." Something almost like a dry, humorless smile crossed Kael's face.

"No. I suppose it wouldn't have."

They stopped that evening at a garrison waystation, half-fortified, more supply depot than proper fort, and Prewitt allowed Voss and Kael to share the meal Keth was given, though she made it plain, without ever raising her voice, that this was a courtesy and not a right.

"You could refuse this," Voss said to her, once the soldiers had withdrawn to the far end of the mess hall, low enough that only their small table could hear it.

"There's no formal charge yet. No ruling. You could simply escort him home." This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

"I could," Prewitt agreed, spooning stew with the same unhurried patience she brought to everything.

"I won't. And before you ask me why, Reckoner, understand that my reasons aren't cruelty. I've seen what happens when the Census discovers something like this after the fact instead of before it. I would rather this boy sit through a process that treats him as a person than disappear into one that treats him as a discovered problem. The second version exists. I've seen it happen to others. I'd rather not watch it happen to him."

"That's not comfort," Kael said.

"No," Prewitt said.

"It rarely is, in my position. But it's honest, which I understand this family has some particular fondness for." Voss's eyes flicked briefly to Keth, something complicated moving behind them, and Keth understood, watching it, that Voss had heard his own old lesson handed back to him by a stranger and hadn't quite decided yet whether to be comforted or unsettled by it.

"Tell me about him," Prewitt said, later, when the hall had mostly emptied and only the four of them remained at the table.

"Your brother. Not the reports. I've read every report the Census has ever filed on Elian. I want to hear what isn't in them." Keth looked at her for a long moment, surprised by the request, surprised further by how much he wanted to answer it despite everything.

"He gave me half his bread once," Keth said finally, "because I'd given mine away to someone else and he noticed before I'd said anything about it. He used to hum when he was nervous — not a real song, just a sound, the same one our mother used to make, though he barely remembered her face by the time I knew him.

He carried me through a breach when I was fifteen and he was seventeen, and everyone always talks about how strange he was, how calm, but nobody ever mentions that the whole reason any of it mattered was that he loved people first and was strange second." Prewitt was quiet a moment, something unreadable moving behind her flat, patient eyes.

"That's not in any report I've read," she said.

"Thank you for it."

"Why does it matter to you?"

"Because in three days, boy, a room full of Archons is going to spend a great deal of time discussing what your brother was. I intend to make certain at least one person in that room remembers he was also a person who shared his bread." She stood, gathering her own bowl, her expression giving away nothing further.

"Sleep, if you can manage it. Tomorrow's ride is longer."

Keth did not sleep well, though he tried. The wagon's narrow bunk creaked with every shift of the horses outside, and somewhere past midnight he gave up entirely, sitting instead with his back against the wagon's wall, his altered arm resting pale and strange across his knees. He heard Voss's low voice outside before he properly registered the words attached to it.

"—not asking you to change the outcome," Voss was saying, to someone Keth couldn't see through the small window.

"I'm asking whether there's any version of this where I'm permitted to stand beside him when it happens. That's all I'm asking, Prewitt."

"That request isn't mine to grant." Prewitt's voice, flat, unhurried, carried clearly on the cold night air.

"The tribunal decides who stands where. I can tell you I've seen you filed under 'commanding officer of record' in every document I've prepared for this. That's not nothing."

"It isn't everything either."

"No," Prewitt agreed.

"It rarely is." A long silence followed. Keth pressed his good hand flat against the wagon's cold wood, listening to two people who barely knew each other quietly agreeing, in their own careful way, that neither of them had the power to properly fix what was coming.

The castle came into view on the fourth day, and Keth understood, the moment he saw it, exactly why nobody had bothered describing it to him beforehand — no description would have properly prepared him for the actual scale of the thing. It sat at the exact center of four converging roads, each one running true from a different horizon, and behind it rose walls that made Stillharbor's own black stone barrier look, by comparison, like something built by children playing at fortification.

Towers climbed past what Keth's eye wanted to call reasonable, banners from all four districts hanging heavy and still in windless air, and above the whole vast structure sat a silence that had nothing natural in it at all — the particular quiet of a place built, deliberately, to remind anyone approaching it exactly how small they currently were.

"Regional Command was the largest thing I'd ever seen," Kael said, quiet, drawing his horse alongside the wagon window.

"The first time I came here, I thought that had prepared me for this. It hadn't."

"How many people work inside it," Keth asked.

"More than you'll ever properly meet." Kael's jaw tightened.

"The Thirteen themselves are somewhere in there. Nobody outside their own attendants has ever confirmed exactly where." Voss said nothing at all, his eyes fixed on the rising walls with an expression Keth had learned, over a year and a half, to recognize as the particular stillness the old man wore whenever something frightened him too badly to properly voice.

The gates opened for them without ceremony, soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms waving the convoy through with the flat, practiced disinterest of men who processed convoys like this on a regular schedule, and Keth pressed close to the wagon's bars, watching the outer wall's shadow swallow them whole.

"Whatever happens in there," Voss said, his horse falling into step directly beside the window, his voice dropping low enough that it felt, for a moment, like the two of them were the only people left in the whole convoy, "you are not walking into it alone. I don't care what Prewitt's paperwork says about where I'm permitted to stand. I will find a way to be close enough that you know it."

"I know," Keth said, and found, to his own surprise, that he mostly believed it. The wagon rolled on, deeper into shadow, and somewhere ahead of them the castle's inner gate began, slow and enormous, to open. End Of Chapter Ninety Seven