Ash and Silver

by Carol Berg

  Already the truth of the adventure was fading. If Siever wasn’t sharing my bread, I’d doubt my reason.

  “Now we know you can get back and forth safely, you can fetch your sister and the Wanderers,” he said.

  Stupid with fatigue, it hadn’t even occurred to me. “Yes, certainly, though to bring them here . . . It will be complicated. But yes. As soon as possible.”

  “So here . . . Where might that be?”

  “The island hospice,” I said, “only it isn’t a hospice anymore. It’s a military fortress, very secure and very secret. Which is why I’ll need to make arrangements before bringing my sister and the Cicerons. And why, if anyone finds you, they’re not going to like it. Tell them your fishing boat got swept out to sea from Ynnes—that’s a fish town up the coast—and capsized. I’m guessing you can feign a state of half-drowned, half-starved confusion.”

  “Likely so.” He grinned as he scooped the last soggy bread into his mouth, then wiped his hand on Tomas’s cloak and extended it my way. It was still trembling. “My blessings, Lucian de Remeni-Masson.”

  “Lord Siever.” Though it was neither pureblood nor Order custom, I touched his hand and bowed. “And for now, please call me Greenshank.”

  Happy that my own hand was no longer shaking, I picked up the empty mug and the telltale leaf and turned to go.

  “Greenshank, is that blood on your back?”

  • • •

  Visiting the infirmary was not going to unravel my confusion of business, but bleeding to death wouldn’t help, either. A quick stop at the barracks laver for a jar of water and a towel and I hurried to my sleeping cell. The lower left side of my jaque was, indeed, awash with blood. My nut-paste-infused shirt was no better. I did my best to blot the ripped-open wound with the towel, then wrapped a spare strip of bandage I kept for such necessities tightly around. It was not the most pleasant thing I’d done all day.

  I’d no clean clothes. My kit, weapons, and mail lay where I’d dropped them the previous evening. Traces of rust already stained the steel like creeping poison. I rummaged in my kit and found a shirt less bloody than the one I’d taken off and threw my habergeon over it. It looked silly to wear heavy mail about the fortress when not on watch, but I’d naught better. Training made a good excuse for everything.

  The bells announced the time. Eleventh hour of the morning watch. Abandoning the bloody towel beside the rest of the mess, I sped through the passages to Inek’s office. The wax tablet sat as I’d left it the day before we’d gone to Val Cleve. I left a notation that I was speaking with the Archivist at eleven, and another assigning Dunlin and Heron to meet me at the docks at third hour of the afternoon watch for a navigation exercise. Meeting at the docks allowed me to see Fix.

  I threw the stylus on the table and ran for the Archive Tower, slowing only when I felt a surge of seeping warmth under the bandage. I had no time for healers.

  A tall writing desk sat just outside the Seeing Chamber, allowing the Archivist or his second to supervise the copying of pages from their rarest books. The Archivist sat on the high stool, with a sheaf of papers at one hand, and another page in front of him. He seemed to be transferring notations from different pages in his stack to the new page. He glanced up.

  “Have you no manners, paratus? No respect?” He spoke through gritted teeth. “What tasks have you set higher than a tutorial appointment with the Knight Archivist of the Equites Cineré?”

  He threw down his pen and scattered enough sand on his newly marked page to serve a copyist for a tenday, before setting the page carefully on his stack.

  My jaw twitched. Too many matters of importance were clamoring for attention to care for anyone’s pique. But Order discipline and my hopes to unravel mysteries forced me to care about the third most powerful knight at Evanide. And he held all hope for Inek.

  Thus, with strict adherence to ritual, I sank to one knee, laid fist to breast, and lowered my eyes. “My apologies, Knight Archivist. I intended no disrespect.”

  “Come with me.”

  He snatched up his sheaf of pages, leaving his pens unwiped, ink unstoppered, and sand everywhere.

  “Second!” he bellowed as we swept into the passage to behind the Hearth of Memory. “Clean up the mess on the copy desk!”

  In moments he was unsealing the door to the relictory. He pulled a scroll from the clutter on his writing table and unrolled the portrait of Inek.

  “What do these marks signify?” He pointed to the embossing I’d drawn on Inek’s silver bracelet.

  “Naught in themselves,” I said, though he should know that. As on my own bracelets, the embossed or engraved symbols were easily recognizable locations to carry spellwork.

  “The embossed shapes are not unique,” he said. “Only the borders differ. I’ve tried every possible variant of repeated circles and addressed all likely semantics in my attempts to derive the trap spell’s pattern, but to no avail. As Inek came here with you in mind, perhaps you can extract the meaning.”

  Repeated circles . . . great gods, how could I not have noticed? The raised circle did indeed have meaning for me. Inek wanted to tell me something.

  “Was Inek wearing a silver bracelet when you found him, Knight Archivist?”

  “I don’t recall it.” He looked at the heaped confusion of books, boxes, and implements as if confounded. “But I’d have stripped it off him with his belt and weapons. Steel, silver, enchantments . . . They interfere with my work.”

  He peered under the worktable and shook his head. Then, fingers to his masked temple, he turned slowly, surveying the relictory.

  “Pssh.” As he completed a full circle, he waved his hand at a stack of baskets and boxes heaped in the corner. “Second must have stowed them over there. Fool’s a packrat.”

  We dismantled the mound of miscellany. Or rather the Archivist watched as I set aside a crate of glass piping, a rolled lap rug, a crock of ink, spools of bookbinder’s string, another of dried honeycombs, and innumerable sealed packets. Under a box of parchment scraps, a familiar leather jaque and gray linen shirt lay neatly folded atop a flat, open crate. In the crate lay Inek’s swordbelt, sword and dagger yet sheathed, along with his boots and spare dagger, his eating knife and spoon, the bronze medallion of a knight-retired, his kerchief, a ring bearing two keys and an iron stylus, and his waist pocket, sewn with a brass ring he could use to fix it to a saddle or a pack or his belt. No bracelet.

  I sat back on my heels. I’d been so sure. Unless . . .

  A search of the waist pocket yielded the worn leather-bound journal where Inek kept notes on his students’ performance and a single band of embossed silver.

  The bracelet was not at all the same as the one in the drawing, but one of its features was a small raised circle exactly like that on my own bracelets. At my touch—mine, not Inek’s—the embossed circle hummed with faint magic. Marshal.

  I almost dropped the bracelet, but wariness kept the strip of silver turning in my hands. Might he have given more? A raised circle with a spike in the middle tickled my finger. Damon.

  No surprise.

  I turned it again. A raised circle with an inner circle. Archivist.

  Sky Lord’s grace . . .

  Each of the three spells vanished at its first expression. No other enchantment bound to Inek’s bracelet was open to me—or anyone else, I’d guess.

  So three names. No hierarchy between them.

  On my bracelets Inek used the raised circle to tell me the initiator of my missions, so I knew to watch for hints of his purpose. Was he telling me that my mission as Damon’s righteous warrior was not solely Damon’s? I hated that thought. Damon was easy to despise. I wanted the Marshal to be worthy of his grace. I wanted to trust the Archivist with Inek’s healing. . . .

  “What does it mean?” said the Archivist, his patience exploded. “Something, clearly.”
<
br />   “The circle carried a name,” I said.

  Of all people in the Order, the Archivist was likely a judge of truth and lies. So why not tell him some truth?

  “Inek used the circle on my bracelets to tell me the author of my missions or exercises. He linked this circle on his own bracelet to the name of Curator Damon. Perhaps he was telling me of the Marshal’s plan to make the curator my new guide.”

  “Damon is your guide, too?”

  Oddly, it was not the appointment of an outsider as an Order guide that struck the Archivist rigid. Nor even that the guide was Damon. But rather the realization that I was not the only person assigned to Damon’s mentoring. So who else was? And if the Archivist was Damon’s collaborator, why didn’t he know?

  “Indeed, I have given Curator Damon my submission, as the Marshal approves. Could Inek have been telling me the author of Inek’s own mission? A reassurance that Damon had ordered him to retrieve my relict, not knowing that it was destroyed or enspelled. Yet they’d surely have come to you. . . .”

  The Archivist had turned away, fidgeting with his pages.

  I didn’t need to ask the next logical question. He’d know it.

  And indeed his answer came with his back to me, as if I might be able to judge his truth through the mask. “Inek came to me several times over the past two years to request your relict. He had serious concerns about you and your place here. He repeated his request a few days before the accident, highly anxious. He spoke of threats. But as before, I told him that the old Marshal had forbidden anyone to view your relict, and neither the old Marshal nor our present one had given me permission to release it. Access to relicts is a training matter, as are guides and outsiders; training matters are the Marshal’s province, not mine.”

  The damning truth remained unspoken: The Archivist’s province was preserving the relicts, and he had failed. Failed to secure it. Failed to report any mention of threats or my relict’s destruction to the Knight Defender. The Archivist’s name on the bracelet suggested those failures no accident.

  “Would that I could change my decision,” he said. “Rules are made for important reasons, and yet critical events . . . dire circumstances . . . do require them to bend from time to time. But how could I expect—? And for it to be Inek, of all people, honorable, disciplined . . .”

  He whirled on me, fists raised, and magic rose in a stifling, invisible wind that whipped and billowed his rust-red robes. Worms wriggled in my head. Moth wings darkened my seeing.

  “Why you?” he bellowed. “They told me you were nothing, a weakling paint dabbler who’d been seduced into murder.”

  Dizzy and nauseated from the pulsing magics, I dropped to one knee, and vomited words.

  “Commander Inek should not have violated your ruling.” My voice shook like every other part of me. “Likely my persistent weakness and insubordination made him curious about why Curator Damon chose such a stupid lout for his mission. The curator should have told him. It’s this talent I have to create revealing portraits. Curator Damon has told me I’m to be his instrument . . . his broom to sweep the corrupted Registry clean.”

  Cold silence swallowed the gale of power and fury. The Archivist shoved a stool next to a worktable across the room and swept a litter of books and pages aside. “You arrogant twit,” he spat as he sat down to work. “Get out of here.”

  The Archivist had seemed truly regretful that the spell trap caught Inek. Yet his angry slip gave credence to the truth the bracelet spoke. He had known the trap was there.

  Why did it bother him so much that I was the focus of Damon’s attention? Damon was one of the three the bracelet named. The Archivist clearly had not told Damon my bent had been returned or that I had seen the dust of my relict’s destruction when Damon showed me my imprisonment. And no sooner had I given my oath to Damon than the Marshal revealed the curator’s broken talents and his odd departure from the Order. The Archivist, the Marshal, and Damon might be the initiators of my mission for Damon, but they did not share everything. Was that what Inek wanted me to understand?

  Still puzzled, I returned the bracelet to the crate, rose, and retrieved the portrait I’d set aside while delving. If only the man it portrayed might speak to me—tell me how the three men were linked or what the Archivist meant that I had been seduced into murder. They’d told me I was not a murderer, delivering the news by way of a memory prick—a fragment of memory recognizable as truth.

  As I carried the portrait across the chamber, I examined it for more clues—the shape of the blood droplets, the figures in the pool, his weapons, his bracelet again. . . .

  My breath caught. It required all my discipline to keep moving and offer the portrait to the Archivist. He didn’t look up from his book.

  “I plan to visit Commander Inek this afternoon to report on his cadre’s performance at Val Cleve,” I said. “Adjutant Tomas thinks it foolish, but I feel it’s a matter of respect. Were there other questions about the portrait that I might address before I go? Perhaps some of these other symbols on his garb might be significant. . . .”

  As if called to his senses, the Archivist snatched up the portrait from my hand, rolling it so tightly the parchment must be near cracking.

  “Clearly the spell pattern in the mail and neck chain were the significant revelation,” he said through clenched teeth. “The circle pattern of the bracelet was a clever insight on your part. Naught else remains a mystery. Be about your duties, Greenshank, and arrive here promptly tomorrow with your cadre or I’ll drag you before the Disciplinarian, be you Damon’s chosen instrument or no.”

  “Dalle cineré, Knight Archivist.”

  He did not respond, so I bowed to his back and left.

  Surely the Archivist knew what the bracelet suggested. Symbols and history were graven in my bones, and if in mine, then certainly in his. The engraved border of the sketched bracelet’s edges comprised two decorative bands. The outer band showed a repeated pattern of the five implements of the Order’s blazon—sword, whip, pen, staff, and hammer. The inner showed a flower and slashed crescent, linked within a circle. The flower was the royal lily of Navronne; the slashed crescent was the Goddess Mother’s signature of death and rebirth. The linked symbols were repeated in an unbroken circle that explained so much of Damon’s strategy of the past months—my missions, his questioning. As if writ in fire, the bracelet told me what Inek had learned, and why he understood his life was forfeit.

  Damon’s aide Fallon had told me that the Sitting of the Three Hundred had all the signs of a move of power as we’ve not seen in Navronne since the Writ. And truly, if I guessed right, that must be so. Damon, the Marshal, and the Archivist had not initiated a mission solely to purge and reform the Pureblood Registry. They were planning the death and rebirth of Eodward’s kingdom as well.

  CHAPTER 28

  “. . . And then I answered the Archivist’s summons,” I said, “and even a half day on, I’m not sure I believe what I learned.”

  It was near midnight and Fix sat at the small table in his cottage devouring the last of an enormous leek pie. Rough breathing whispered from the hastily assembled cot in the corner.

  At the afternoon’s navigation exercise with Dunlin and Heron, the boatmaster had bustled me aside long enough to order Evanide’s uninvited visitor and me to his residence after nightfall. We’d spent two hours getting Siever warm and fed. Fix wrapped him in an enchantment that aided a warrior’s ability to sustain himself on low rations, as well as one that relieved pain without dulling the mind. We hoped the two would help Siever hold to life until he could take nourishment from normal food. Now he slept, while I shared the tale of Xancheira’s fate.

  “So what did the portrait have to tell you?” asked Fix, scraping his dish with a spoon.

  My theory was so outrageous, I couldn’t just blurt it. So I presented my case as a man of the law might, in the way Bastien had giv
en evidence to the Danae back in Palinur.

  “I’ve assumed Damon was testing my Order training these last months—my loyalty, my diligence, my doubts and temper. The missions yielded interesting observations, but nothing any knight could not have done better. But look at the missions themselves. Damon sent me to observe Bayard at the moment he forever disgraced his father’s name by allying himself with the Harrowers. Just days later, he showed me the horrific truth that the Registry had used the Harrowers for slaughter of purebloods, before telling me the victims were my own family. Then he sent me to observe Osriel, near a battlefield where the prince’s diabolical practices were sure to be made clear. And Damon made sure I saw not just the Registry’s cooperation in my own degradation, but in Perryn’s plot to forge a dead king’s will. He’s asked me over and over, ‘Which prince is worthy?’ And how did I please him best? By saying, ‘None of them.’ Only then did he make me his servant. Then, today, I looked closer at Inek’s portrait. . . .”

  I laid out the story of Inek’s silver bracelet and my outlandish conclusion. “Am I mad to believe Damon, the Marshal, and the Archivist are plotting to take the throne of Navronne itself?”

  The Knight Defender’s fingers flexed and curled about his spoon as if it were a dagger’s hilt.

  “Gah!” he spewed, after a shivering moment of immense control. “I’d call Damon a lunatic, but he is the farthest thing from it . . .”

  Surely what angered him most was the same that plagued me: the fear that Damon’s course was right. How could a kingdom so blighted with corruption prosper in these cursed times? Yet any cleansing forced by blackmail and murder was surely cursed as well.

  “. . . and both of my counterparts involved. Though I’ve only spoken to the Marshal once in the flesh, I’d have wagered my life on his honor. How is a man to believe in anything?”

  His fury invited no simple answer.

  “If they’re partners, then why would your submission to Damon dismay the Archivist so sorely? Because you’re a player, too, of course.” The Defender’s glare sprayed needles in my direction. “Your damning portraits terrorize the Three Hundred families into doing whatever Damon wants. Pureblood warriors would be a formidable force to reshape a kingdom, even if they’re not Order trained. And certainly the slaughter of your family brings your righteous voice to speak of corruption. But Damon has all the portraits he needs from you . . .”