Page 35 of Rhapsody of Ruin
“We can,” he said, and then gave me the look that meant he’d keep me honest about what we meant by can and should. “We will need the steward’s lust for neat margins. We will need to be boring.”
I grunted. “I hate that strategy.”
Elowyn looked out through the slit to where the land rung like a bowl with no hand to strike it. “I hate this place,” she said softly. “Because it listens. Because it tells me when I don’t know enough to deserve any answers.”
There are a dozen ways a man can understand a sentence like that and fewer ways to keep himself from reaching out the wrong way. I did not touch her. I let my shoulder line up with where the wind ran the narrowest and took enough of it that it had to fold around me before it folded around her. You learn, if you have led long enough, when to stop speaking and start remembering.
We stood there until the cold taught breath to behave. We stood there until the feeling beneath my ribs slid from heat toward steadiness. We stood there until the part of me that had wanted to smash a singing floor with my heel learned the shape of the song it refused to sing and realized it was as honest as any field I had loved. Then Elowyn breathed out once, clean as a blade eased from a sheath, and stepped back.
“There is a second shelf,” she said. “Not as far. A store for ledgers no one cares about, grain routes, hire rolls, fines. If Master Cor will humor me, we can bring three of the old account books up from the year my father started logging the northern anomalies and look for subtraction that has another name in an unimportant column.”
“You believe the missing pages moved as barley to market,” Torian said, thinking where her mind had run and enjoying the way it did.
“I believe the man who loves not being seen best learned to be the kind of ledger you don’t notice signing itself,” she said. “And I think he practiced by practicing on us.”
“Your brother,” I said, so she would not have to say the name and make it true too early.
She did not nod. Not with her head. The floor felt it anyway.
We descended from the slit by another stair. Master Cor met us at the base with two thin volumes already wrapped in brown paper and sealed only with string, as if he had anticipated her request not by reading her mind but by having known this house long enough to understand how questions find their way to the places records sleep. He said nothing as he handed her the string; she said nothing as she took it.
In the small ledger room beyond the archive, the air warmed two degrees. The lamps burned a fraction brighter; the glass in the window was thicker here, warped into faint waves that made the cliff beyond look like water under stone. Elowyn set the ledgers on the table and slit the string with a thumbnail. The paper yielded with the sigh paper makes when it has put its life’s work under your hand and knows you’ll either read it or pretend you did.
We read it.
We didn’t skim. Torian has never skimmed anything in his life that carried numbers in a column. I can skim a field and a man’s eyes and a line of hungry soldiers and know when to feed them from my stores or his pride. I do not skim books and call it war. We took the time the ledgers demanded.
Four entries from the month before the “missing” binding was logged as received had a cartilage in common anybody else would have called boredom. The tally of barley sold to a mill the Varcoran kitchens did not source. A fine paid by a cousin for bringing three rams over the pass after the first thaw. A note that the team that delivered the rams had taken a pair of empty crates up the back stair to a clerk who never signed for anything heavier than ink and then returned with those crates carrying less than a mouthful of air. And a flour account closed with a sum that did not match the number of zeros recorded in the petty theft column three days earlier.
“You will stop enjoying this look,” Elowyn said to Torian without heat when his mouth did that thing that made men tell him they had loved numbers since they were boys. “If you don’t, I will have to borrow it and my face will crack.”
“You were right,” he said, and ran his thumb along the crooked line in the margin. “He practiced by practicing. He made the absence small where people are trained to see absence only when it drags a feast off a table.”
“He wore the glove our mother cut and then hid his fingers under it,” she said.
“And used Varcoran house habit to teach the floor not to complain,” I said.
Master Cor stood in the door while we mapped my chalk circle onto three more lines he pretended his house hadn’t noticed. He said nothing. When we were done, and when the ledgers lay open in their shame with the neatness of a wound stitched badlyby a man who loves his own hands too much, he bowed not to me and not to Elowyn and not to the work but to the room.
“Highness,” he said softly, “if the Hold listens, it is because the mountain taught it the names of the dead. It has learned one new one today.”
Elowyn’s jaw went hard and then broke and then held again. “Master Cor,” she said, and the steadiness earned him as much respect as any man has earned in my presence with only three words.
We left the ledgers where he could rebury them and carried nothing but breath. The old steward lit the corridor ahead with a lantern he did not need to walk these halls; he did it because he had learned to honor the feet of the living when they went looking for the dead.
Outside, the Hold’s courtyard caught echo and light and gave it back with the indifference of a cliff. The outriders watched a stable-boy teach a horse to hate him less; the horse was winning. The sky refused to act like day or night, the way it always did in Wonder. The northwind had pulled its teeth in an inch while we worked; it still bit. I didn’t mind. I have always preferred a wind that tells you what it means to do.
Elowyn stopped at the lip where the yard fell back into the road. She did not lift her hand to her throat the way she had in Shadowspire when she was deciding whether to let a woman on a balcony call her mercy weakness. She let both hands hang open a fraction from her sides, as if she were telling the Hold she would not beg it to hold her up should it decide not to.
“Thank you,” she said to me then. The words were ordinary. They carried weight like a pack you do not put on someone’s shoulders unless you have learned where it belongs. “There is a way to look at a wall that teaches it the shape of your stubborn. Ido not know if I have appreciated stubborn in a man who burned it before.”
“I do not know if I have appreciated hearing a ledger breathe,” I said. “It’s an ugly music.”
“It is,” she said. Her mouth almost made a smile and didn’t. “But if you listen long enough to ugly music, sometimes it shows you the door you need and then leaves you alone while you walk through it.”
Torian coughed. He does this when he wants to give privacy to the doe and the wolf and still stay close enough to keep the longer peace. “We will need the steward’s good pen and the Whitewood’s bad grace,” he said. “We will need to keep the council from swallowing the ledger whole before it knows it has teeth in its throat.”
“We will need to get there first,” I said.
