The Cost of a Rescue

Kaelen had been shot, stabbed, burned, and once, memorably, bitten by a bishop's wolfhound, and he could not remember a wound that stung worse than a lieutenant's cheerful commentary.

"Hold still, Captain." Lieutenant Dain Corrigan pressed a pad of linen soaked in Holy Oil against the gash on his forearm, and Kaelen hissed through his teeth. "You've gone and got your own blood on a Archmage's carpet. Very bad form. I'm told the carpet is Zeran silk."

"Then send the Church the bill."

"I intend to. Two hundred gold crowns. Per drop."

"Dain."

"Captain?"

"Shut up and wrap it."

Dain grinned, sandy-haired and freckled and entirely unrepentant, and wound the bandage tight. He had served under Kaelen for six years and had never once been intimidated by him, which was both the man's chief virtue and his chief defect. Behind him the long gilded reception hall of the Water Spire swarmed with servants, healers, and Cathedral clerks. Fountains murmured in alcoves. Someone had hung a banner of white lilies across the far window in a vain attempt at festivity, and below it, wrapped in three blankets and a dressing gown embroidered with seahorses, Lord Perrin Halloway sat in an enormous chair with a goblet in each hand.

"Brandy," he said, to nobody in particular. "More brandy. I have been dead, you understand. Dead for nearly a minute. It gives one a thirst."

"You were not dead, my lord," Kaelen said.

"I was dying. It is the same in all but the paperwork." Halloway took a long pull from the left goblet and shuddered. "Do you know what it feels like? No, of course you don't. It feels like being unpicked. As if one were a hem, and some cruel little seamstress had taken a pair of scissors to every thread. I could feel the sea in my bones going quiet." His voice cracked. "I have held the rivers of Aethel in my hands for twenty-six years, Captain, and I could not so much as raise a ripple."

Kaelen said nothing. He had learned long ago that the best answer to fear in another man was silence.

"It was not always so difficult, you know," Halloway murmured, to the bottom of the goblet. "When I was a young man, a Water Archmage could turn the tide in the harbor with a gesture. Now I can scarcely fill a bath. We are fading, Captain. All four of us. Torrin's forge barely holds heat any longer. Ottoline complains that the roots will not answer. Seraphine says the wind has grown hoarse." A wet, unsteady laugh. "I am told it is a natural cycle. The Church is very firm on this. Such matters are not to be discussed in public."

Across the hall, by the long window where the light fell cool and white on a marble table, Lyra lifted her head.

Kaelen had been aware of her all along, the way one is aware of a stone in one's boot. She had hardly moved in a quarter of an hour. She sat with her back to the room, bent over the little slip of parchment from the hourglass, her quartz lens clamped to her eye and her hair coming loose from its pins in long dark strands. Ink stained her fingers to the second knuckle. She had a smudge of dust on her cheekbone. She looked tired, and small, and not at all like the woman who had stood on a ledge a hundred and forty feet above the plaza and told him which chain to cut.

I trust the work, he had said.

He wished he had said something better.

…

"Saints above."

Dain had followed his gaze. "She's quite something, isn't she?"

"She's a heretic."

"She's a heretic who knew the order of four magic chains by looking at them." Dain tied off the bandage with a flourish. "I'd say that makes her a very useful one. The lads on the tower stairs are already calling her 'Saint Quill.'"

"They will stop."

"I'm fairly sure they won't."

"Lieutenant."

"Captain." Dain stood, brushing at his knees. His voice lowered. "She asked me for ink, you know. Before you came down. Black, not red. Quite insistent about it. Said she'd run out." A shrug. "I thought it strange. Scribes always carry both."

Kaelen watched Lyra bend closer to the parchment.

Black, not red.

He filed it away, with the half-dozen other small odd things the day had handed him: the way she had gone pale on the ledge, the pause before she said A riddle. A cold feeling had settled in his gut and would not shift. He told himself it was only fatigue. A man who has not slept since the night before does not read a woman's silences well.

"Scholar," he said, crossing the room. "Have you got it?"

She did not turn at once. When she did, her expression was composed to the point of blankness, and he realized with a dull shock that he had seen that look before. On men about to lie under interrogation.

"I have a translation," she said.

"I did not ask for a translation. I asked if you had it."

"Air. Eleven. Where winds are caged." She read it off the parchment without inflection. "The archaic word for 'caged' is vheran, which can also mean 'kept,' 'held,' or 'sheltered.' There is a deliberate ambiguity. I think the author wants us to dwell on the verb."

"An aviary," said Dain, helpfully.

"A weather-vane workshop," said Halloway, from his chair.

"A bellows-house," said a clerk.

"Or a prison," said Lyra, "for winds."

"The Observatory," said Kaelen.

They all looked at him.

"The Cathedral Observatory on the Cloud Hill," he said. "It has the tallest vane in the city. Seraphine Valcourt holds court there on market days; the Air Archmage's seat is built into the weather-dome. Everyone knows it. They keep a hundred wind-chimes in the rafters to track the pressure." He heard how it sounded. "Caged in glass and bronze. It is the obvious place."

"Obvious," Lyra repeated.

"What is wrong with obvious?"

"It is what a clever person leaves for a stupid person to find." She said it very evenly, but a flush had crept into her cheeks. "Captain, I would like to propose..."

"Yes?"

She hesitated.

He saw it. The tiny wrench of her mouth, as though she had bitten down on something. And then, with an effort so visible that it was almost painful to watch, she closed the lens case in her hand and looked away from him.

"No," she said. "It is likely correct. The Observatory. Forgive me. I am tired."

"Lyra."

"We have forty minutes."

It was a reasonable answer, and the clock on the wall agreed with her. Kaelen let it go.

He would think about that later, with a particular bitterness. He would think: she knew. She had not known where. But she had known something, and she had put it away behind her teeth, and it had cost them four minutes in a cart crossing the Bridge of Sighs.

…

"Children."

The voice was low and warm, tinged with a faint amusement, and it stopped the room as a hand stops a spinning top.

"I did not wish to interrupt." Cardinal Malakor stood in the open door with his staff of carved cedar in one hand and his rosary wound about the other. He was a tall, spare man, stooped now with the weight of the morning, with white hair that stuck up at the back like a child's and a long, gentle, scholar's face. His red robes were creased. There was a smear of ash across one sleeve, from the altar, Kaelen supposed, and his eyes were red-rimmed.

Dain straightened. Halloway tried to rise and failed. Every clerk in the room dropped to one knee.

"Father," said Kaelen, and went to him.

"My boy." Malakor's hand came to rest on the side of his face, thin and cool and dry as paper. "You are hurt."

"A scratch."

"A scratch that a Water Archmage paid for with a bandage." The old eyes crinkled. "I heard what you did. It was brilliantly done. Brilliantly. I will not say I am not proud, because it would be a lie." His thumb moved, once, over the scar at Kaelen's temple, the way it had when Kaelen was ten and could not sleep. "But you will promise me one thing."

"Anything."

"That you will let her go first, on the stairs. She is not made for it."

Kaelen drew a breath. "She is quite capable of looking after herself, Father."

"I am sure she is." Malakor smiled, and let him go, and turned. "Scholar Lyra."

She had risen. She stood stiffly beside the table with the parchment crushed in her fist, and for an instant Kaelen thought he saw something flicker across her face. It was not fear. It was something more complicated, more raw. It looked almost like longing.

"Your Eminence," she said.

"I am told you saved a life this morning."

"Captain Kaelen saved it. I only read the chains."

"Only." The Cardinal's mouth twitched. "Thirty Symbol-Breakers served me for twenty years and none of them could have done what you did on that doorstep. I do not say it idly. I have been telling the Council for six years that you are the finest mind in the Archives."

"And the Council has been telling Your Eminence for six years that I am a danger to the Faith."

"Yes." He sighed. "They are not entirely wrong, you know."

She blinked.

"A mind like yours is a lamp, child. In the right hands it lights a city. In the wrong ones, it sets the house on fire." He raised a hand, and she braced; but all he did was brush a lock of hair from her forehead with one finger, as a grandfather might. "I do not want you to be less. I want you to be careful. Keep doubting. Doubt is the first prayer. A faith that cannot be questioned is only a habit."

Kaelen saw Lyra's throat move.

It was strange. He had heard his mentor say those words a hundred times, to novices and kings alike. They had never seemed to carry such a charge. But Lyra stood before the old man with her chin lifted and her eyes suspiciously bright, and he realized, with a lurch that he did not entirely like, that she loved him. As Kaelen did. As a child loves the one hand that was ever kind.

"Thank you, Your Eminence," she said. Her voice shook.

"Go. Find Seraphine." The Cardinal turned toward the hall. "And Kaelen. The Observatory has always kept the winds on a leash. I would start there."

…

They had got as far as the foyer when the laundry chute opened.

It was a wooden hatch in the wall beside the stairwell, designed for the quick delivery of sheets. It had not been designed for the delivery of a young man in a page's tabard, who tumbled out in a shower of lavender linen and landed on his back on the marble with a sound like a dropped sack of flour.

Dain had a knife out before Kaelen could blink.

"Don't kill me!" The young man scrambled to his feet, hands raised, hair standing up in all directions. He was perhaps eighteen. He was lanky, sharp-featured and freckled, with a brilliant, nervous grin and a livery two sizes too large. "I'm unarmed! I'm on your side! Which is to say I'm on a side! I haven't had time to decide!"

"Who in the hell—"

"Tobias."

Silence.

"Tobias Everard." The young man bowed, extravagantly, the tabard flapping about his knees. "Crown Prince of Aethel, heir to the Sunlit Throne, and, as of this morning, a very unhappy puppet. I have been trying to find you for an hour. I'm told you're the woman who reads the old words."

Lyra stared at him.

"My lord," said Kaelen, on one knee before he knew he had moved, "this is not safe. The Cardinals have ordered the Prince confined to the royal apartments until—"

"Until Sunday, yes, I know. Where I may be properly dressed." Tobias waved a hand. "I escaped. It was not difficult. The guards play dice at the second bell. Captain, I have a request."

"Your Highness—"

"I would like you to know," said the Prince, ignoring this, "that I am not entirely stupid. I know what the Church wants with me. I know what a Coronation is for." He glanced at Lyra, with a sidelong, boyish, curiously clear look. "And I would very much like to be alive for the next four hours, and preferably the next forty years. If there is anything I can do, tell me."

Lyra opened her mouth. She seemed, for once, entirely lost for words.

"There is not," said another voice, silky and amused, from the doorway.

Kaelen's hand went to his sword.

The man leaning against the frame was perhaps twenty-nine. He wore a dark blue doublet slashed with silver, a coat of Zeran velvet, and an expression of easy and unbothered charm. His hair was the color of burnt honey. His eyes were gray-green, half-lidded, and amused, and they passed over Kaelen as one passes over furniture before settling on Lyra with an interest that could not have been more obvious had he sent a card.

"Highness," he said, "your escape was delightful, but your guards are looking for you, and I would hate for them to find the Holy Captain first. It would look so poor."

"Cassian," said Tobias, with a wince. "How did you—"

"I was in the next chute."

"There wasn't a—"

"There is always a next chute." The man straightened. He bowed to the Prince, then, with a fraction more ceremony, to Lyra. "Duke Cassian Lorne, Lord Warden of the Royal Guard, at your service, Scholar. And I believe I've been looking for you as well."

"Have you?" said Lyra, coolly.

"I have a proposition." He smiled. "For the Archives. For you. And for a Church that has, I believe, a great deal to answer for."

"Not today, my lord," said Kaelen.

The Duke turned his head slowly.

"Captain." The smile did not move. "I was not aware the lady was in your keeping."

"She is under emergency decree of the Council of Cardinals."

"Ah. So she is a prisoner."

"She is a colleague."

"Then she is free to speak to whom she pleases." Cassian's gaze returned to Lyra, warm and appreciative. "I will leave my card, Scholar. Burn it if you must. But if you ever tire of being a lamp in a locked room, you know where I am."

Kaelen did not draw his sword.

He wished, for a moment, with a violence that startled him, that he could.

…

The Cathedral Observatory stood on the crown of Cloud Hill, a dome of green glass and bronze ribs, and when they reached it, at twenty-four minutes to eleven, it was empty.

Not abandoned. Empty. The doors stood unlocked. A hundred wind-chimes hung from the rafters in glittering rows, stirring and tinkling in the hill breeze. The great telescope leaned toward the sky. Seraphine's chair sat at the center of the floor, with a half-drunk cup of tea on the arm, still faintly steaming.

There was no one in it.

There was a note on the cup. Kaelen picked it up and held it so that Lyra, at his shoulder, could read.

Too obvious, it said, in a neat clerk's hand. Try the Cloud Market. Bring a lantern. It is dark down there.

He felt Lyra go rigid beside him. Heard her whisper something under her breath, and did not catch the word. But he saw her face in the green light, white as bone.

"What?" he said. "What is it?"

"Twenty-four minutes," said Lyra, and her voice was a thread.