Page 52 of Broken Vow

It passed overhead, carrying on toward the barracks walls before disappearing over them. Only then did Rainthorn let out her breath.

“That,” she said, “is not a bird.”

“Then what is it?” Selene’s voice had lost its playful edge.

“A sending. A familiar, the same as our Tsuki, only made by other hands for uglier work. Nobody gives a familiar a wrong number of legs by accident. That’s a mark. Whoever made it wanted it known, to the few who can read such things, exactly whose creature it is.” She gathered up her paper of seeds, tucked them away, and eased herself down off the wall with the care of old knees. Her face held no lingering amusement. “It’s flying straight for the barracks where an emperor stood grieving at the sky this morning and got turned back by his own knights. I don’t like the shape of that. It means someone with very old and very ugly craft has taken an interest in this business, and interest from that quarter is never a kindness.”

“Can you tell whose it is?” I asked.

Rainthorn looked at me, something weighing behind her pale eyes.

“Not from a glimpse in a lane, no. But a three-legged crow sent out in broad daylight is a loud thing for a careful practitioner to do, and loud things leave echoes. I have ways of listening that you don’t, child, ways I keep to myself because they aren’t safe even to keep. Give me a day, two at most. If that bird answers to anyone whose name was ever spoken in the circles I came up in, I’ll find the thread of it.” She adjusted her shawl. “Not standing here, though. We’ve been in the open long enough, congratulating ourselves on how clever we are. If a coven can sit and watch a barracks, child, then a barracks, and things a great deal worse than a barracks, can sit and watch a coven. Home, all of us, now.”

We went.

* * *

We had not gone three streets before we walked straight into Auden.

He came round the corner of a cooper’s yard with the loose, hard stride of someone walking off a temper he was too disciplined to show. He was out of his silver veil, dressed in plain travelling clothes, a deep russet coat over dark wool, nothing like the silver and grey he wore on duty. He pulled up short when he saw us. For half a breath, all four of us stood in the street, the coven and the captain, none of us having prepared a word.

Selene recovered first. I watched her draw breath, that bright, dangerous, interrogating warmth already kindling, and I knew she was a heartbeat from taking Auden apart on the open street for every scrap of what had happened in that hall. Gently, mercilessly, just as she had over tea.

Rainthorn caught her by the arm.

“Selene. The dyer’s. We’re late, and the man won’t hold the indigo past noon for love nor coin.” It was a flat invention and Selene knew it, but Rainthorn’s grip warned her not to argue. Over Selene’s shoulder, the old woman gave me a brief, sharp look I understood completely. She had not forgotten the temple. She knew what the night before had meant, and she was clearing the street for me.

“We are buying indigo, apparently,” Selene said, making even her surrender graceful. “Captain, you look like a man who has had a morning. I am sure Liora will be far kinder to you about it than I would have been.”

She let Rainthorn tow her toward a dye-shop neither had any intention of entering, Tsuki flowing after them along the rooftops. Then it was only the two of us in the narrow street, the morning continuing around us.

We walked.

He fell into step beside me without a word, shortening his long, loose-limbed stride to match mine. For a little while we said nothing. The quiet was easy in a way it had not been at Selene’s table, a difference I noticed without dwelling on its weight.

“What happened after I left you?” I asked. “Did you find out who signed it?”

“I found out very little and understood less.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “The emperor came himself, Liora. Down to the barracks, to me, which captains do not warrant. I went expecting a clerk with a writ, and instead I got the man with the crown standing in front of me.”

Of course, I already knew it, having heard it an hour ago from a squirrel on a wall. I will set down honestly what I did with his words, for it is not a thing I am proud of, but an instinct born of betrayal. I listened to him, laying each sentence against what I knew to be true, half braced for the place where the two would not meet. The last man who had looked at me with a warm, open face had lied beneath every soft word, and I had not yet unlearned the flinch.

Yet the discrepancy never came. Every detail sat true against what Tsuki had witnessed, and with each matching piece, the tension in my chest loosened a degree further.

“He was not angry,” Auden said. “That is the part I cannot make sense of. An emperor signs an order to confine one of his own vanguard, breaking a three-hundred-year custom to do it, then comes down in person and stands before me looking like a man at a graveside. He asked how I did. He asked after the lower wards, the shrine, the people there, as though it mattered to him, and I think it did, which only makes it stranger.” He frowned at the cobbles. “Then he asked me something I still cannot place. He leaned in close and asked quietly, almost as if the question shamed him, whether I had met anyone of late. A woman, he said. Any woman new to the temple, new to the lower city. Anyone out of the common run.”

Auden shook his head. “I told him no. I did not understand why he wanted to know, and I liked even less how badly he wanted it, an emperor with a province supposedly in revolt, asking a Veilborn after women. So I told him no. It was barely even a lie, for what was I going to say? That the one woman out of the common run I have ever met danced the dead lamps of Tateharas alight the night before, and that I would not hand her name to my own emperor without her leave?”

He said the last of it lightly, yet the truth of it remained. He had been asked by the most powerful man alive to name a remarkable woman, and he had refused, shielding a woman who was not there to know he had done so.

There it was, the proof I had braced against all morning without daring to hope for it. Not a trap I had sprung, nor a test he had passed, but this: I had come to him doubting, half waiting to be lied to again, and he had been true. True when no one was watching, true when telling the truth gained him nothing, and kind to a stranger at the cost of his emperor’s favour. He had chosen honesty when he had no idea I would ever learn of it.

The relief rose through me so fast and warm that I had to turn my face toward a shopfront until I regained my composure. Beneath the relief sat a quieter feeling I kept trying not to name, the simple, unadorned gladness of walking beside him in the sun.

“And the others?” I asked when my voice returned. “Your brothers. The captains who came.”

“Two of them came in behind me, within minutes of the emperor arriving.” Something unreadable flickered across his face. “There are five of us in the order. Three of us in the capital just now, the other two posted away. Word travels fast, faster than any writ. If one of the most senior captains of the vanguard is suddenly kept close at the barracks for his own good, the whole order hears of it by nightfall. It did not sit right with them. If there were truly unrest in the south worth confining a captain over, why was it only me ordered to stay, and not them as well? So they came to see for themselves, to ask the questions I could not.”

His mouth tightened, half grim, half admiring. “The emperor could not answer them without making his lie about the south bigger than he could manage. One confined captain he could explain away, but three captains standing in his hall asking him plainly where the unrest was and since when, that he could not. So he let it drop. I walked out a free man over a war that does not exist.” He looked sidelong at me. “Which is its own kind of answer. Nobody breaks a three-hundred-year custom to cage a man over a fiction about the south. Someone wanted me off these streets and out of the lower city badly enough to dress it up as soldiering. I mean to find out who, and why me.”