Seventy Three: News

Grace's breath was warm against her neck. Her sleep was one of deep exhaustion; she had spent the past three days helping with the crisis at the Kelian temple, out from before dawn and returning with Nika as night fell. Nova envied her oblivion as she stared at the ceiling for the fourth night in a row, sleep evading her despite her best efforts. She would have given a lot to go with her during the day, to be of some use and perhaps get tired enough to fall asleep for once. But Grace could blend with a crowd; Nova couldn't.

And so here she was.

When she had first been brought to the inn, she had felt her first sparks of excitement in a very long time. She soon found out that one place was much like another, one room as tiring as any, when one was stuck in it all the time. Her enslavement followed her even when she was out from under Harkenn's eye; she was doomed to be trapped in whatever enclosed space she found herself in.

Grace shifted and mumbled in her sleep, letting up a waft of warm air that smelled of her. Nova calmed a little. No, it wasn't charitable to say it was exactly the same.

She looked down at Grace's sleeping face, then sighed and reluctantly extracted herself. The boards were cold under her bare feet, the gaps beneath the floor exuding cold air from outside. She shivered, wishing she was still under the warmth of the blanket, but her bladder didn't care about how cold it was. She padded to the door and out into the hall, passing other occupied rooms in silence. Her presence here meant that the innkeeper had not allowed overnight guests for the past few nights, but the man didn't seem to mind. He offered her welcome food and less-welcome conversation in the hours she was stuck in the inn alone, and his daughter was always bright and helpful. Nova could see why Haverford liked her, but could also see that the arrangement was not as serious as it could have been. She'd even gathered enough curiosity to ask Laurel about it, on one particularly boring afternoon.

"He's Unspoken," the woman had replied, shrugging as she folded laundry. "I haven't expected anything more from him for a long time. Yes, I took a shine to him when he first arrived." She had smiled softly. "He was so sweet, and actually very good-looking, though he didn't seem the slightest bit aware of it. But I don't think he has space in his life for a relationship. I've made my peace with it."

"You don't just want to look for someone more committed?" Nova had asked in return. It had felt somewhat uncharitable to Jordan, considering what he was dealing with, but her curiosity ran ahead of her.

"Not currently," Laurel had said. "But I don't think I have a future with Thorne, if that's what you mean. Not in that sense, anyway. He's...changed. He's harder now than he was, and...haunted, I think, by something. Some Unspoken turn out like that, struggle to adjust and change in the process of doing so out of necessity. Nika said that to me not too long ago, when I asked him about it. He also said it was incredibly rare for Unspoken to settle with anyone, and when they do it's normally with another of the Gifted. It makes sense, I suppose." She'd sighed and smiled. "But we'll always be friends. And I'm still fond of him. So while this arrangement gives him comfort and I still enjoy myself, I see no reason to end it on principle."

Nova wasn't certain she'd have felt the same way in the same situation, but her experience of romance had been very different. One had ended in betrayal and failure, the other... Her cheeks warmed even now to think of it. She had never thought she'd find anyone like Grace. Her royal status had kept most others her age at an unbreachable distance, and a political marriage was the best she could have hoped for anyway. She hadn't expected to find love at all, and though her people did not worry about the sex of any person one mated with, it wasn't very typical for nobility to settle within a same-sex relationship – if only to have children that carried the bloodline. Nova had seen all sorts of ways used to get around that issue, from consorts to polyamorous marriages, but she'd never engaged with it. Full commitment to another woman had not featured in her childhood imaginings of her future. Now she could not picture a future she wanted that didn't have Grace in it, could not imagine ever being prepared to share that with anyone else.

Ever since Jordan had manifested after letting wights into the inn, Laurel had also told her, they'd kept a chamber pot inside. It was a simple plank of wood with a hole in it, set over the top of a bucket inside an old store cupboard. Nova had no desire to freeze outside – the days were warming a little, but the nights remained bitter and prone to frosts – so she relieved herself inside the cupboard. As she left, the courtyard door opened and let in a bitter wind anyway.

She frowned at Thorne as he stumbled inside. "You've let all the cold in."

"Sorry." He barely seemed to notice her. He shuffled towards the bar and sat down on a stool, fumbling with something in his hands. Nova wrinkled her nose as a plume of blackweed smoke rolled into the air from the cigarette. She associated the smell of blackweed with the lord's parties, of which none had ever been a pleasant experience.

She debated whether to leave him to it and return to the warmth of Grace's company, but then imagined Grace's face in the morning if she realised that Nova hadn't stayed long enough to establish whether her brother was alright. She hopped up onto a stool beside him. He had removed his gloves and his hands were shaking. On one arm was a healing gash, and on the other palm a thick pink scar.

"Bad night?" she asked. She had some vague notion that something important was supposed to have happened, but no one had given her details.

"I got mind-slammed by that cocky Angel prick." The mutter came muffled through the smoke cloud. "I feel like I've been drop-kicked. And then kicked in the head, hard, about two dozen times."

Nova finally examined his aura. Emotions flitted across it like rampant shadelings. And there, right there, a note of Cael's now-familiar signature. It skittered across the surface but couldn't seemed to find a way in – not like with Harkenn's, with its leached colour and holes.

"And why were you in a position to get, ah, mind-slammed?" she asked. Carefully she drew up her walls as she did for Harkenn and Grace, and pushed them outward to include Jordan within them. His shoulders slumped, and he finally looked at her.

"Are you doing that?"

"Is it helping?"

"Mm. Thanks." He paused. "Can you do that? Attack someone's mind like that?"

She shook her head, twisting her lips. She didn't like the implication in that question, that how he viewed her might change according to her answer. "What I can do now is too exhausting to sustain for long, let alone gain that much force. If I were to be free to regain strength, if I practised..." She shrugged. "Maybe one day. But I also think that Cael is exceptionally talented, and I would never say for certain that I'd reach his skill level even with those things." She looked at him. Jordan nodded absently, flicking ash into a small glass bowl on the bar, and then took another drag. "You didn't answer my question."

"Hm? Oh." The man seemed to wrench his thoughts back from elsewhere. "Broke into his room. Looking for anything useful."

Nova kept her tone carefully neutral. She remembered now; Jordan had asked her for the guest wing layouts, and she'd not thought twice about giving them to him. She had figured it was for something like this, and didn't have any particular compulsion to keep it secret for Harkenn's benefit. "Did you find anything?"

"Don't know yet. Picked up some vials of stuff, but they might be nothing. I'll know by the end of the week."

"Your criminal friends were involved in this, then."

He glanced sharply at her. "So was Yddris."

That didn't surprise her, either. Shame flittered across his aura, and it amused her to think he believed that it bothered her the slightest bit the company he kept. She could hardly throw stones. She'd killed ten men, and she could tell without asking that despite Jordan's frequent companions, he hadn't killed anyone before. It tinged an aura, subtly, sometimes not so subtly. On that front, Jordan's record was cleaner than his sister's.

"Next time I'm summoned to the castle," Nova said. "We'll see what your key leads to. Harkenn is in no position to stop us, and I think I can persuade the captain of the guard to turn a blind eye."

She got off her stool before he could respond to that, and was halfway up the stairs when she met Grace coming down. She looked rumpled with sleep. "Did I hear Jordan's voice?"

"Yes," Nova said. "Just got in."

Grace wrinkled her nose. "Is Yddris back too? I can smell his horrible smoke."

Nova hesitated, hoping Jordan was together enough to hear it and get rid of his cigarette. She thought she heard a muttered curse in the other room and stifled a smirk. "I can barely get a dozen words out of him, he's that tired. Come back to bed and talk to him in the morning."

Grace paused in rubbing her eyes, frowning at her. That adorable little worry line appeared between her brows. Nova crushed a sudden urge to kiss it away. A few days away from the castle and she'd already got sappier.

"Is he okay?" Before Nova had a chance to answer, she followed it with, "Are you not telling me something?"

"I'm just tired, Grace." Jordan appeared at the bottom of the stairs. "I'm going to scavenge something to eat and then I'm going to sleep. I'll talk to you in the morning, yeah?"

Grace didn't look at all convinced, and advertised her scepticism by retreating without saying anything. Jordan met Nova's eye and sighed, a heartfelt wave of exhaustion blossoming around him.

-

Haverford proved no more talkative the next morning. He sat at breakfast like a dark cloud, wedged between Nika and Laurel. Nova scanned his aura curiously, and found only exhaustion and worry in it. She supposed that getting attacked in that way for the first time was rattling, but he hadn't told Grace or Nika about the incident and they were both punctuating their spoonfuls of porridge with suspicious glances at him. She wasn't sure what he thought he had to lose by telling them, unless he was simply embarrassed by the vulnerability. He was no more vulnerable than anyone else; less so, actually. She supposed that if Cael hadn't been expecting to encounter an Unspoken aura and its accompanying defences, he wouldn't have prepared for it. Unspoken weren't invulnerable to attacks like that, but it would be harder to catch them unawares, and if Cael was still trying to keep his claws hooked in Harkenn at the same time...

Nova frowned into her mug of tea. He was stronger than she thought, then, to be able to do all that and not be bedridden with a pounding head. She had been forced to retreat to her blankets for far less than that.

As usual, she finished her food long before anyone else did. Laurel smiled at her across the table and pushed the serving bowl across so she could scrape it clean. After years of dry bread and the lord's scraps, a whole meal of her own was a novelty. Her guts seemed to be trying to make up for years of not quite enough food; she woke up hungry, she went to bed hungry. The only time she wasn't was immediately after a meal. She wasn't sure how she was supposed to return to close captivity without breaking down in despair.

Grace's hand touched hers under the table. The girl had a knack for drawing her attention just as she began to spiral into the familiar quandary; this was the closest to normal life she had had in a decade, and it was wonderful in its simplicity. She complained about the close quarters, but in truth it was leagues better than any one day under Harkenn's eye. And despite all that, she was working to save him. It was enough to mess with anyone's head.

"Are you up to a patrol today, Thorne?" Nika asked, breaking the quiet that had until then only contained the scraping of cutlery. "You seem very off colour."

"I'm fine," Thorne said, but the regret immediately bloomed across his aura.

Nika made a motion as if to settle in for an argument, but at that moment the inn door opened, sending tendrils of cool air across the taproom to attack Nova's bare legs. She shivered. She was tired of being so dark-damned cold. The one thing she could say in the castle's favour was that the fires in the kitchen were always stoked, and that even if she hadn't managed to find or pilfer a blanket on a given night, she would still be warm.

Nika and Jordan both sat up straighter.

"Koen!" Jordan exclaimed, a brightness finally suffusing his troubled emotions. She studied the Unspoken who had entered, not recalling this particular individual. It didn't gain her much, visually speaking, but his aura was telling. Even as Grace's brother shunted along the bench and bounced to his feet to greet the new arrival, she sensed the heavy news the Unspoken bore with him.

"Oh no," she murmured.

"What?" Grace whispered. She was the only one close enough to hear.

"Something bad has happened."

They turned to watch. Jordan stepped back from a brisk embrace with Koen as Nika joined the two of them. They conferred quietly for a moment or two, and then Jordan took two more, unsteady, steps back. Nika froze in place.

"I have to tell Yddris," the Unspoken said. "Oh, but I was supposed to..."

"Don't worry about me," Jordan said hoarsely. "I'll stay in today."

"Right. Right..." Another stuttering pause, and then Nika turned on his heel and strode towards the stairs. Koen and Jordan drifted back to the table together, but neither sat down.

"What's happened?" Laurel asked. Her father emerged from the kitchens, wiping a pan down with a rag.

"Is something wrong? I thought I heard someone storm upstairs."

"I just came from the Guildtown," Koen said, speaking up for the first time. "There have been two more deaths. Outskirts homes, from sabotaged rune nets. The men taken were very old, but... the Guildmaster is absolutely furious. All our nets, all our patrols, and they got in anyway. They're just playing with us. That's all it is, they're playing with us."

"Where's Hap?" Jordan asked suddenly, a terror in his voice. "Why isn't Hap with you?"

"He's fine," Koen said quickly. "Night take me, Thorne, you don't think I wouldn't have told you right away if it had been Hap? No, he couldn't make the trip. He insisted on helping with patrols and did for his leg falling over a tree root." He shrugged and let out a shaky chuckle. "I say fine, but I'd bet any money he's making Nadiya's life a misery. I think he's more upset it was a tree root that finally immobilised him more than anything else."

"You don't think he'll walk again?"

"It's not looking good. It was bad before the dark season, it was even worse after it. This could be it. Even if he does, I don't think he'll ever be up to another Barrens crossing. He sent me back here to have Nika mentor me for my first 'official' year instead. I'll ask him when...when all this mess is dealt with."

Jordan rubbed the Unspoken on the shoulder. "I'll get you a drink. Sit down, you must be knackered."

Koen more collapsed on the bench than sat. He hooked his bag over his head, rubbed his face and sighed. Nova suppressed a chuckle as she watched the realisation of who sat opposite slowly dawn on him.

"You...but you're..." The Unspoken stuttered to a halt. He sat back against the bench. "You know what. I'm not even sure I want to ask."

"Best not," Grace said, less successful at stifling a giggle. "At least not until after a good night's sleep."

"Oh, goodie."

Jordan returned to the table with a tray, on which sat a whisky bottle and several glasses. Nika hurried past behind him, not saying another word to anyone before the inn door closed. An uncomfortable pause ensued. Nova had never been good at this sort of thing, and she hadn't finished clearing out the porridge bowl, so she returned to that while she thought through what might happen next. She was at a loss, though. So much of it depended on whether or not Harkenn recovered.

"So there haven't been any more incidents in the city?" Koen asked Jordan. Killian emerged from the kitchen and set another portion of porridge in front of the new arrival, to a muttered but heartfelt thanks.

"Not that I've heard," Jordan replied. He pushed his spoon around the last dregs of his own meal, and Nova sensed him hiding something.

"Do you think they've all just moved on to the Guildtown?"

A hesitation, and then Jordan shook his head. "No. No incidents, but they've been seen."

This was news to Nova. She frowned at Jordan, piecing together his evasion with Yddris's strange behaviour; at the meeting with the Caelumese, Yddris had been just as evasive about something that had happened. She had never got around to asking him about it afterwards.

"It's all so strange," Koen murmured. "Like someone's coordinating them. There must be a pattern that we're missing."

"It's not sounding like it to me," Grace finally said. Her grip on Nova's hand under the table was convulsive, and she knew that this topic had been Grace's worst fear for a long time. "Though...if it is the Caelumese behind it, and if they don't really want to wipe out the Guild but bring you into line like Nova thought, it might make sense to them to send out a firm warning first, and spend the rest of the time picking at the edges. You know...scaring working Unspoken, and targeting only the ones who have retired."

"Or they could use that strategy as a decoy to have us looking the wrong way while they strike at something important," Koen pointed out.

"Yes," Grace said, "something important. Like your Guildmaster, or the city guard. Or like Harkenn."

A profound silence ensued.

"Ah, shit." Jordan poured out the first glass of whisky and threw it back in one swallow, ignoring his sister's disapproving eye and Laurel's consternation. "I'll see you all later."

"What? Where are you going?"

"To catch up with Nika."

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Regards,

Elinor (S E Harrison)