[INTERLUDE] WHAT ALDEN LOST

The first thing Alden Whitlock noticed, when he came home in a closed carriage with a sheet over his face, was that the house had gone quiet.

It was a large house. Whitlock Manor stood on a ridge above the harbor, forty rooms of cream stone behind a wall of lindens, and it had never in his memory been silent. There had always been servants. There had always been guests. There had always been his father's voice booming in the hall, or his mother's laugh from the conservatory, or the rattle of a hundred silver spoons. Now the corridors were dim. The footmen looked at the floor. A maid, passing him on the stair with a tray, stepped aside with her eyes lowered, as one does for an invalid.

He went up to his rooms and shut the door and did not come out for three days.

…

They had put him out of the Gauntlet on a technicality.

Alden had not understood it, at first. He remembered a Marshal helping him up from the mud. He remembered the Relay, enormous and bright, and the sound of the crowd, and a hand on his shoulder, and a voice saying, "I'm afraid, sir, you've been disqualified for loss of consciousness." He had said that he had not lost consciousness. The Marshal had said it was in the rules.

He had been taken from the arena by a service door. Nobody had cheered.

On the fourth morning his valet brought the papers on a silver tray, and Alden read them in bed with his knees drawn up. Each one had the same picture. A girl in a gray coat, standing over him, with her boot on his face. The headlines were varied. HEEL ON THE HEIR. FREE ENTRANT HUMBLES WHITLOCK. WHO IS TAMSIN REEVE? One broadsheet, in a flourish of unkindness, had printed the picture side by side with a portrait of his father's coat of arms, and underneath it a caption: A House Divided.

He tore them up. He did it quietly, one at a time, into very small pieces, and let the pieces fall on the counterpane.

Then he got up, and washed his face, and went to the training yard.

…

The yard was a long walled court of raked white gravel behind the east wing, where he had practiced since he was six. A rack of weapons stood against the wall. A dummy of oiled leather hung from a gibbet. He took his sword down, and walked to the center, and settled into the guard that his master had drilled into him ten thousand times.

He began the Lightning Lance.

He knew it as he knew his own name. He raised the blade. He drew on the Silver Sigil on his breastbone, and felt the power rise, hot, bright, the familiar pulse. He thrust.

The Lance flickered.

He tried again. It flickered, sputtered, and went out. He stood with the point of his sword wavering, and a cold unease began to creep up his back.

He tried a third time, and a fourth. He tried the Aegis. It did not hold. Its edges bled like water, and when he pushed, it dimmed and winked out. He tried the Hammer. The blade wavered. His wrist hurt. He swung, and swung again, and again, until his shirt was dark with sweat and his breath came in great gasps and the sun had climbed over the wall.

Nothing came right.

He stood panting in the center of the yard. The leather dummy swung gently on its chain. He looked at his hands. They were shaking.

It was the duel, he told himself. The shock. It will pass.

He told himself so for six days.

…

On the seventh, he went down to the family library, and for the first time in his life he opened the books himself.

He had always known where they were. A tall dim room on the ground floor, with a gallery and a rolling ladder, thirty feet of leather spines, the accumulated learning of eleven generations of Whitlocks. He had walked through it a thousand times. He had never read it. He had had no need. Whenever he required a thing, it had simply been there.

He pulled down the first volume at hand. A technical treatise on Lance-forms by his great-grandfather. He opened it at random.

It was incomprehensible.

He sat down heavily in a leather chair and tried again. He read a paragraph four times. He read the first appendix. He turned the page, and there, in the margin, in a small neat unfamiliar hand, a penciled note:

Root rune off-center by a quarter-inch. Correct with a lateral shim at the third join. Cf. Whitlock Manual, vol. 4, p. 211.

He stared at the note.

He had seen that hand before.

He rose slowly. He went to the shelf. He pulled out vol. 4, and turned to page 211, and found the diagram. It was marked with a tiny penciled arrow. Beside it, in the same neat script: This is the correction. A should be shifted left. He will find it if he reads. A.W. cannot find it if he is told.

A.W.

His own initials.

His hands began to shake.

…

He went through the library all that night. He took down every book that had to do with his Houses' arts, and he found them, everywhere: the pencil marks, the small tidy notations, the little arrows in the margins. They filled the manuals. They crept into the family ledgers. They were in the Aegis diagrams and the Hammer exercises and the long dull treatises on Silver-grade circulation. Whole pages of corrections. Whole chapters re-annotated, patient, careful, brilliant, in a hand that sloped slightly to the left.

Tamsin's hand.

He sat on the floor of the library with the books heaped around him and the lamp burning down, and slowly, as though a curtain were being drawn from a window, he understood.

She had tuned him.

For three years. Every Thursday in the garden she had stood beside him with a wooden sword, correcting his stance. Every evening in the library she had gone through the manuals, marking them. She had adjusted his exercises. She had changed the blend of his tonic in the mornings, he remembered now, the little cup she brought him, with a smile, saying it was good for his nerves. She had remade his drills. She had filed down every rough edge of his talent so smoothly that he had never felt the file. She had taken a mediocre swordsman with an ordinary Sigil and made of him a Silver prodigy, and she had done it so quietly, so lovingly, that he had taken the result for his own.

Gift, the masters had said. Remarkable natural gift.

He put his face in his hands.

It had not been a gift. It had been a girl in a white dress.

…

"You have been in here a day and a night," said a voice from the door.

He had not heard the door. He lifted his face from his hands and found his father standing in the doorway, a heavy silver-haired man in a black dressing-gown, leaning on a cane. The Patriarch of House Whitlock had grown thinner in the last week. There were pouches under his eyes. He did not come in.

"The servants are talking," his father said.

"Father." His voice came out hoarse. "Father, I think—I think I may have been wrong."

"About what?"

"About everything." He gestured helplessly at the books. "She did it. All of it. She did my work. Every manual, every—the Lance, the Aegis—" He swallowed. "It was her. It was never me."

His father looked at him for a long moment.

"Did you think," said the Patriarch, quite gently, "that we didn't know?"

Alden stared.

"A scholarship girl with a gift for patterns. The Council observed it in her second term. We thought it prudent to let the two of you grow close." The old man turned his cane in his hand. "You were a pleasant boy, Alden. But you were never going to carry this House on talent alone. She was a convenience. She was never meant to be anything else."

"You knew."

"Of course we knew." The Patriarch's eyes were weary. "What we did not know was that she would leave."

The library was very silent.

"Find her formulae," said his father, turning. "All of them. The tonics, the exercises. Whatever she did. I want it reproduced. Take it to the best minds we can hire, and have it done by the end of the month."

He went out.

…

They tried. God knew they tried.

The Whitlocks hired eleven scholars from the Academy in a week, and fourteen from the Eastern Colleges, and a retired Wardmaster from the Senate Library at an astronomical fee. They set them up in the east wing with blackboards and instruments. They gave them everything: the manuals, the annotations, the little pencil marks, the diagrams. They worked for ten days.

None of it fit.

It was a thing Alden would remember for the rest of his life: the sight of eleven distinguished men standing in the library at dusk, with chalk on their sleeves, staring at a blackboard on which Tamsin Reeve's equations stood in neat little rows. They tried to read them. They tried to follow them. They muttered, they argued, they filled whole pages with attempts, and at the end of the tenth day the eldest of them, a stooped white-haired professor with an enormous beard, put down his chalk and said, in a thin shaken voice:

"I cannot make it out, my lord. It is not a method. It is... a language. She is not working from the rules. She is working from something beneath the rules. Something we do not have."

"Then find it," said Alden.

"I do not think it can be found, sir," said the old man. "I think it was in her."

…

He went to see Cordelia on the last night of the month.

They had put her in the west wing, in the blue room that overlooked the lindens. A doctor sat by the window. A nurse was dozing in a chair. In the bed, propped on a heap of lace pillows, lay a small pale figure with her hair unbound, and both her arms, from the elbows to the fingertips, wrapped in plaster and linen.

She was awake. She had not slept, he thought, for days. Her eyes in the dim light were enormous and ringed with violet. She watched him cross the room.

"Alden," she said. Her voice was a thread.

"I'm here."

"They say I won't use them again. The healers. They say the bones were shattered, that the Sigil channels are cut." She looked down at her wrapped arms. "I won't be able to cast. Not ever. Not even Iron."

"They don't know that."

"They do." Tears welled and ran down, quite silent. "Alden, you have to do it. You have to get her. She did this to me. She did this, in front of the whole world, and she laughed."

"Cordelia—"

"You have to!" Her voice rose to a shriek. She flung herself forward against the pillows, her wrapped arms flailing, and the nurse woke and the doctor leapt up. "You have to kill her! Make her pay! Take it all! Take everything she has, and grind her into the ground! Alden! Alden!"

He sat on the edge of the bed and held her until she stopped. It took a long time. When she was quiet he rose, and kissed her forehead, and walked to the window.

The lindens moved in the dark. Beyond them, far down the ridge, the lights of Ravenport lay in a long glittering scatter along the harbor, and above it, white and enormous, the Colosseum glowed on its hill.

He looked at his hands in the lamplight. They were an aristocrat's hands. White, long-fingered, manicured. He had been told since birth that they were instruments of exceptional promise.

He lay them flat on the cold glass of the window and for the first time in his life he was afraid.

He did not know of what. Of her, perhaps. Of the girl in the gray coat. Of the heel on his face. Of the strange flat voice that had said, I've been thinking about you for several months. I have been trying to find the part of you that holds the rest.

He stood there for a long time, looking at the dark. Behind him, Cordelia whimpered in her sleep.

He thought: I do not know what I am without her.

And he thought, very quietly, so that the thought could not be heard: I never did.