Ash and Silver (34 page)

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.”

“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.

“. . . A
nd 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 given 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 . . .”

“. . . and how persuasive is the righteous anger of a portrait artist
easily seduced to murder
?” I said.

Fix nodded slowly, eyes never leaving me. “Aye. There's that. So I just feel . . .”

“. . . there must be more.” We spoke the inevitable conclusion in unison.

If Damon didn't want something more from me, I would be a martyred memory, not nurtured in the bosom of the Order with my memories of the past dust.

“I've got to keep going, Fix,” I said. “I've got to learn what is Damon's idea of Registry purity and the rebirth of Navronne. Does he plan to make a puppet of whichever prince wins the day? And if not one of Eodward's sons, then who does he intend to sit Caedmon's throne? Does the Marshal
bring the Order to enforce their will? The second band on the bracelet suggests it.”

Fix threw his bent spoon into the empty pie dish. “Boldest would be to sit his own king. Wait for one of the three to eliminate the other two and then trump the winner with his own man. But I've no idea who.”

We had to leave the question there, as Fix had duties to attend. “I'll look in on your hungry friend from time to time through the night. Are you for the seaward wall? That could be a good time to consider magic that can knit the world back into one piece or set free a people trapped in trees. Gods' bones, I'll need to give those things some heartfelt contemplation myself!”

“Our seaward flank will go unguarded this night and several more,” I said, dragging myself from the floor beside Fix's brazier. “Inek's pointed teaching tells me I am unfit to buckle my boot at present. And falling off the wall will do no one any good. But there is a matter of boats. . . .”

“
Boats
, as in more than one? I told you old Dorye—”

“I believe I can bring the Cicerons from Xancheira to anywhere in the fortress, if I focus my magic right. Two hundred people or so.”

Fix closed the door he'd half opened and rested his back on it. “And when are you planning to perform this feat?”

“It needs to be soon. Tonight I sleep. Tomorrow night I'll take old Dorye to the estuary. By now Morgan should have Bastien waiting for me, assuming he was willing to come away, rather than waiting around to be murdered. I'm hoping the two of them will agree to get the Cicerons back to Palinur or wherever they want to go. As soon as we've a plan, I'll return to Xancheira through the crypt door and retrieve them. Hopefully I can bring more than one at a time.”

“There's no place for your sister here. The Order doesn't believe you should even know she exists. Are you sure—?”

“I won't allow her to stay in Xancheira and starve. She's made friends with the Cicerons. . . .” I couldn't believe I was even considering sending my sister off with a troop of thieves and vagabonds, no matter their place in history. But where would a gently raised pureblood maiden of fifteen be safe? Evidently a place of legend I'd never seen, beyond a mystical boundary I myself couldn't cross, had seemed the best choice two years ago.

Fix folded his arms across his chest. “You won't need boats alone, but rowers; never heard of a Ciceron who knew an oar from a chicken leg. And you'll need a distraction, as we wouldn't want the Order, for the Mother's sake, to see
two hundred
people hauled out from their own confusticated
docks!” As his voice rose, I'd swear the air rippled. “But certainly, paratus, Fix the boatmaster can provide whatever you need. Just give him a day's warning to create a bit of distracting spellwork and eight or ten rowers who can make a rough crossing twice in a night and whose minds can be safely mucked out at the end.”

“I can do that. And this is your warning.”

He jerked his body away from the door and reached for the latch again, then paused and looked over his shoulder, the moment's manic agitation profoundly stilled. “I felt what your magic wrought as you opened that door in the crypt, and again this morning when you returned. This Morgan and her kin, who seem devoted to preserving the natural order of things, are right to be concerned about you. Use such power wisely, Greenshank. I don't like thinking of a power-mad Damon having your kind of magic at his beck as he sets out to transform this kingdom. You
cannot
allow him to control it. I can't allow it, either. I won't.”

His sobriety shot steel needles up my spine. “I understand, sir knight.”

“And you'd best figure out what your friendly Danae do to mad ones of their own kind and to those humans who've befriended them. Two hundred ragtag Cicerons are one thing. But what happens when twenty thousand sorcerers, savaged by the Registry, are set free? Are these new wars in the making? Will your involvement bring them to my fortress? I won't allow that either.”

His warnings jangled every nerve, but I refused to let fear take hold. “We can't turn our backs on them, Fix. We have to find a way to make it right.”

A grin flashed through his mask. “Thought you'd say that. But
do
let me know what I must prepare for. If Damon thinks to use the Order to bring down the Registry and win Navronne's crown, and you think to bring in a legion of starvelings and mad Danae, I'm thinking I might have a very busy year.”

His humor should have been reassuring . . . but Fix was a very serious man. I watched him stride down the quay, brushed by spotty lamplight . . . and felt the swift pulse of power that transformed the tall, brisk, sinewy knight into a round-shouldered, slow-moving elder. Had I not been waiting for it, the keen blade of enchantment would have been lost in the myriad threads that entangled Fortress Evanide.

“Dost thou count that extraordinary person as friend?”

The voice from the depths of the cottage spun me around so sharply I
near broke my skull on the low lintel. “I thought you were sleeping, Lord Siever.”

“Perhaps his potent spells cannot redeem this cadaverous frame any more than Kyr's new-bled meat does. Though, truly, I've not
felt
so well in months.” Siever hefted his lank body to sitting. “This man Fix . . . danger drips from his tongue alongside jest as bee stings companion honey.”

His wry observation raised a chuckle, but my answer came sober. “Fix is not my friend. His duties preclude friends, I think. He's let me know him, which implies a trust I believe extremely rare.
Never
would I presume on it. In return, I believe him eminently trustworthy. He'll not betray either of us.”

“To this man Damon—who seems set to upend the world my people yearn to rejoin? Or to thy Danae friends?” Perhaps the fate of his people weighed especially heavy on Siever at that moment—or perhaps it was the cost of illness or Fix's spellwork—but his warmth had shifted into cool and weary resignation. “Thou didst not mention having friends among the long-lived.”

“I didn't think—” Why hadn't I told them of Morgan and her kin? “I'd no intent to deceive. But it's a difficult situation, and I've no idea how to resolve it. Indeed, I could use some good counsel. . . .”

So I sat back down and told him of the blue Danae and their concerns about my magic and their silver-marked kin, of Morgan and the youthful liaison I could not remember, and of the terrible risk she'd taken to help me. “. . . so she agreed to bring this coroner back here. And I hope she can tell me what's necessary to set your people free of their prisoning.”

Siever spoke carefully, as if paring away words he might otherwise have said. “I would accompany thee to meet this gentle lady. 'Tis inevitable that she have questions, and across a boiling sea is a very long way to shout an answer.”

“I'd welcome you—and so would she.”

The lamplight carved creases into his high forehead. “I doubt that. Truly 'twould be best not to speak truth of my origins, even to one who has so captured thy regard. Once the long-lived understand that the terms of thy oath are in play, thy choices will be limited.”

His clarity shook me. I had sworn to take Tuari to the silver Danae as soon as I learned how. And Morgan's fate rested solely on my adherence to those terms. I was already in violation.

But Morgan had accepted my excuse that I had to understand what I
learned before telling her father. “I trust Morgan, if not her kin. But I'll leave you to decide what she should know of you.”

“But—” Again, he bit off words. “Well, we shall see.”

Of course his dreadful experience would color his feelings about Danae. “Will you be strong enough to venture the sea tomorrow night?”

“A bit of sleep, another meal or two—this cider is extraordinary—and I shall likely be able to row.”

•   •   •

I
slept that night like the Sky Lord's hounds, who chase the Bull and Stag across the winter sky and sleep away the summer. After an early visit to the chart room and a hard run across the mudflats, Dunlin, Heron, and I sat our session with the Archivist. We had already studied the premises of memory magic—language, symbols, patterns, and the structure of human recollections—as well as the physical and ethical considerations underlying memory implantation and removal. To implant a new memory with a fullness of experience, understanding, and emotion was so complex and bore so many ethical burdens that it was taught only to vested knights who had substantial need for it. Memory preservation was quite delicate. Thus we began with the study of simple destruction.

We began by constructing the simplest kind of memory pattern—a word and its definition, a food and a preference, an action and result—and learning to wrap it in magic, so we could strip it from a person's mind.

The more one knew of the person, the more specific the memory you could construct—and the more complete the removal. The spells on our memory-wipe tokens used for strangers were extremely specific—this man's face, that particular location, this exact circumstance—else we risked intruding on memories we had no right to touch. Removing the memory of a knight's mission was dependent on the thoroughness and exactitude of his report.

Removing the past of a tyro was work that had been developed over decades, a sprawling net spell that touched those parts of every person's experience—family, teachers, lovers, residences. . . . It was brutal because of its extent, yet necessarily incomplete, so that the memories could be returned. Fragments always remained—perhaps like the greeting
Envisia seru
when one met a being of legend, and certainly those roots of familiarity, like the scent of ink, my hand's recognition of my signature, the understanding of my own artworks, the familiarity of Bastien's necropolis.