Master Osric's Offer

Kieran broke his promise at sunset.

He had waited all day. He had sat at the mouth of the cave on an upturned crate with his sword across his knees and Crane at his shoulder, and watched the light climb the ice and drain away again, and said nothing to anyone. The Ashborn brought him food and he did not touch it. Torvald came and stood beside him for an hour in grim, wordless company. When the sun touched the western rim of the glacier and the shadows of the pinnacles stretched out blue across the snow, the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom stood up, quite calmly, like a man who has made an arithmetic error and found it.

"Majesty," said Crane. "She said not to."

"She said not to come after her if she was not out by dark." He sheathed the sword. "It is dusk, Halvard. I have a quarrel with the arithmetic."

He went in alone.

He found her lying on the black glass floor of the great chamber, in front of a mountain of sleeping scale, curled on her side with one hand flung out as though she had fallen asleep reaching for something. She was breathing. Her cheeks were wet. Her face was perfectly peaceful, and in the dim violet glow that came from the dragon's closed eye, she looked about fourteen.

He knelt and gathered her up. She was very light.

For a long moment he stayed there, on his knees on the glass, with her head against his shoulder and his face in her hair, and the huge dark shape of the sleeper rising over them both like a cliff. He knew where he was. Even a man who had spent his whole life denying the existence of dragons would have known. He felt the weight of that great vigilance on his skin. He felt it turn, vast and slow, toward him.

He did not look up.

"I will not take her from you," he said, to the floor. His voice was hoarse. "I swear it. I do not know what you are, or what you want of me. But I will not take her."

Nothing answered. The heartbeat went on.

He rose with her in his arms, and walked out of the mountain, and did not look back.

…

She woke two days later, on Gron's back, at ten thousand feet.

It was a gray, soft, windy afternoon. The clouds were low and the ground below them was a quilt of white and brown, and she lay across the pommel of the saddle in a nest of furs with the Emperor's arm around her waist and his chin resting lightly on the top of her head. She knew where she was before she opened her eyes. His heartbeat was against her shoulder, slow and strong. Nothing else had that sound.

"You're awake," said Kieran.

"How did you know?"

"You stopped talking in your sleep."

"I talk in my sleep?"

"You have been conversing with someone since we left the glacier. In a language I do not know. You sounded extremely stern." A pause. "I thought it best not to interrupt."

She laughed, a little hoarsely, and turned in the saddle to look at him. He looked dreadful. There were gray hollows under his eyes. He had not shaved. His hair was matted with the wind, and his lips were chapped, and the eyes above them were the brightest she had ever seen them: wide, wary, as though he were looking at something that might vanish.

"Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"As if I'm made of glass."

"You were unconscious for forty-four hours. I carried you. I was told you were dead by two different Ashborn women, one of whom wept." His arm tightened. "I think I am permitted a little glass."

"I'm all right."

"Are you?"

She considered. Truthfully, she felt strange. She felt light and rinsed, as though something had been washed out of her. Her bones were humming faintly, and her hands, when she held them up, seemed to give off a barely perceptible warmth. But the fear that had lived in her chest for the past weeks, the cold small waiting fear, was gone.

"She said I'm to be brave," she said. "And that I'm to let the others lead me wrong."

"Charming."

"And that I shouldn't take a gift."

His arm went rigid. "From whom?"

"She didn't say. Someone with a silver face." She watched him. "It sounds like a mask."

For a long moment he did not answer. The wind rushed past. Far below, a river curved through the snow like a scrap of dropped ribbon.

"Then we shall refuse it," said Kieran, in a perfectly level voice. "Whatever it is."

She nodded. She said nothing about the way his pulse had jumped.

…

Berylla was waiting in the courtyard when they came down.

She had been waiting, by every account, for six days. She stood at the foot of the great stair in her best black gown, her hands folded and her face composed, with a servant behind her holding a heap of dry linen and a steaming kettle. When the Emperor came down the ramp with the Lady Solaia over his shoulder like a sack of flour, she took in the Lady's condition at a glance, and her face did something that it had not been permitted to do in thirty years.

"You are three days early," she said.

"We are three days late," said Kieran. "The ultimatum expires in a week."

"The Cathedral has been quiet."

"That is not a comfort."

"No, Majesty." Berylla dropped a curtsy that managed to be both perfect and withering. "There is also a visitor."

"I will see no one."

"I believe, Majesty, you will see this one." Her gaze flicked to Solaia. "He has been waiting in your study since Tuesday. He brought his own tea. The guards could not persuade him to leave, and after the first night they stopped trying."

Solaia's heart gave a strange little jump.

"An old man?" she said. "With a cracked lens in his spectacles?"

"My lady." Berylla's voice was very dry. "I can think of no one else who would be so rude."

…

He was sitting in the Emperor's own chair.

It was a high-backed, black-leather, iron-studded chair that had belonged to six generations of emperors, and in it Osric Wenn looked like a mouse that had crawled into a shoe. His feet did not reach the floor. A tray of tea things stood beside him on the great desk, among the maps and the sealed dispatches, with a mismatched cup balanced on a stack of imperial decrees. He had a blanket over his knees. He was knitting.

"Ah," he said, looking up. "There you are. I do beg your pardon about the chair. I did try the others and they were all too low."

"Master Osric," said Kieran.

"Your Majesty." The old man put down his needles and began, with creaking dignity, to climb out of the seat. "Forgive me. I should stand."

"Please do not."

"No, no. It is the proper thing." He reached the floor, adjusted his spectacles, and bowed, a long, slow, entirely unselfconscious bow. "I have been wishing to speak with you for nearly sixty years."

Kieran closed the door.

He did it quietly. He turned the key. Then he leaned back against it and folded his arms, and studied the old man with the narrow, appraising calm that he used in council when he was most dangerous.

"The archivist of the lower vaults," he said.

"Yes."

"My grandfather's appointment. A harmless eccentric with a donkey cart and a mania for folk songs."

"That is the official description."

"It is the one I have been given." Kieran's voice did not rise. "I have also been given a number of other facts, in the last week. I am told that you were present at the Measuring Hall. That you wept when the Stone glowed blue. That you have spent your afternoons teaching a girl with no past to sing lullabies in a language that has been dead for five thousand years." He paused. "I should like to know, before we proceed, whose servant you are."

"No one's," said Osric simply.

"That is not an answer."

"It is the truest one I have." The old man took off his spectacles and cleaned them on the edge of the blanket. "I am not the Church's. I am not yours. I am not, if you will forgive me, even the Lady Solaia's, though I should be honored. I belong to an order that no longer has a name. We were the Keepers of the Record. When the Sky fell, we took the books and ran." He sighed. "There were four hundred of us. There is me."

Solaia, who had been standing quietly by the hearth, drew a quick breath. "The Keepers. Kessa spoke of them."

"Did she? Good." Osric smiled at her. "She is a better woman than I deserve to know. The Ashborn kept the songs. We kept the paper. It is a poor sort of division of labor, but it has lasted."

"Why show yourself now?" said Kieran.

"Because you went north."

The silence stretched.

"I could not stop you," Osric went on. "I did not try. I did not know, until you were gone, whether you would come back as a man or as a monster. It is not a thing one can tell by looking." His faded brown eyes met the Emperor's, mild and level. "But you came back carrying her. I think that settles the question."

"Does it?"

"No. But it will do to begin."

He crossed to the desk, with a small shuffling step, and opened the satchel that lay under it. From the satchel he drew a flat bundle wrapped in oilcloth and tied with black cord. He laid it on the blotter, among the dispatches, and began, with great care, to undo the knot.

"I have a proposal, Your Majesty. A bargain, of a kind. I am an old man, and I will die soon, and I would like to see it done properly." The cord came away. The oilcloth parted. "I will show you everything I know. The books. The ledgers. The signatures. I will answer every question you have. I will hold nothing back."

"And in return?"

"In return, you must read all of it."

Kieran said nothing.

"All of it," said Osric gently. "To the last page. Without turning away. Without burning one leaf, or hiding one line from the girl. I will not have it said that I led you to the truth and you looked at the floor." He laid his hand on the bundle. "It will not be pleasant. I think it will hurt you more than anything that has ever happened to you. But there is no other way to the other side of it."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then I shall go back to my vault," said the old man, "and drink my tea, and wait for the next one."

For a long moment the Emperor stood with his back to the door. A muscle moved in his cheek. His eyes went to Solaia and held, and she gave him the smallest nod she could.

Then he crossed the room, and sat down in the chair that Osric had left, and put out his hand.

"Show me," said Kieran.

The oilcloth fell open.

It was a book. Not a large one. A thick ledger bound in dark stained leather, its corners worn to the board, its spine cracked and mended with a strip of cloth. A strip of vellum was stitched to the cover with a loop of thread, and on the vellum, in faded brown ink, in a clear, bold, soldierly hand, was written a single line.

The Account of the Marshal Aldren, kept in his own hand, and not to be opened by any who bear his name.

Beneath it, pressed deep into the leather, was the mark of a seal: a coiled dragon, with a sword across its throat.

Kieran's face went the color of paper.

"Where," he said, in a voice that Solaia did not recognize, "did you get this?"

"My predecessor's predecessor stole it from the Cathedral vault, in the year of the third Pontiff," said Osric. "It has been in the lower vaults ever since. Behind a wall." He took off his spectacles again. "Open it, Your Majesty. It begins on the first of the nine hundred pages. I have done a thing I cannot undo."