ASHES OF THE OLD HOUSE

"Open the gate," I said.

Josie, behind me in the doorway, made a small strangled sound. "Tam—"

"Open it."

"You can't mean—"

"I mean they may cross." I did not turn my head. "They may cross the garden and the home paddock and the beech-wood to the sea road. They may not stop. They may not shelter. They may not bury anyone under my roof. At sunset they will be off my land, and after that they may go to the devil, or to the Houses' cannon, whichever comes first." I drew breath. "I am not their friend. But I will not have them shot in my road."

"Why?"

"Because it would be at my door."

It was a lie. It was not a complete lie. I had weighed the thing, in the instant of that choice, and what I'd found was not mercy and not pity but a cold, precise reluctance. I did not want to be the girl who watched. I had been the girl who was watched. I did not care for either role.

"You are splitting hairs," said Declan, drily.

"I know."

"I approve."

I went down to the gate.

…

The Aldrin commander was a sleek, tall man of fifty in a green-and-silver uniform, with the manner of a man who has never been refused a favor. He met me at the iron bars, on horseback, with a score of officers behind him. Five hundred soldiers had halted in the road, in ranks, and the twelve guns stood unlimbered on the verge. Up close the cannon were enormous. Their barrels, wrapped in copper coils, shimmered with heat.

"Miss Reeve," said the commander. He touched his hat. "I have the honor to be Colonel Aldrin of the Senate Guard. I am commissioned by the Honorable Houses to apprehend the persons of the late Matthias Whitlock and his associates. I understand that they are on your estate."

"They are passing through."

"I beg your pardon?"

"They will be gone by sunset."

"With respect, madam, I am not able to wait."

"Colonel." I folded my hands. "This is Ashgrove land. It has been in my family for seven generations. It is, as of the sixth of last month, registered in my name, by order of the Land Office, and you have no warrant for it. You will not cross that gate."

He smiled. It was an indulgent smile. "I think you will find that the Senate's authority—"

"The Senate," I said, "does not hold the deed."

I did not raise my voice. I merely let the Field open.

It spread from my feet in a quiet red ripple. It crossed the gravel, the lawn, the iron bars. It touched the colonel's horse, which snorted and shied. It touched the nearest guns, and the copper coils on their barrels went dark. It touched the Aldrin standard, a banner stitched with silver runes, and the runes went gray. It was a small thing, ten paces, a ring of heat no wider than a village green.

The colonel stared at his sword. The ley-light along its edge had winked out.

"The Cinder," he said.

"Indeed."

"That is... forbidden. It is against the Compact to wield a..."

"Colonel." I smiled. "You will find that I am not much troubled by the Compact."

A silence.

"The Whitlocks will be off my land by dusk," I said. "Not before. You may wait on the road. You may even pitch a tent. But if a single one of your men sets foot inside this gate without leave, I shall consider it an act of war, and I shall treat it as such. I have not, you will have noticed, any particular regard for the Senate Guard."

He looked past me. Up the long lawn, to the porch, where a tall dark figure stood with folded arms. The Warlord of the Iron March had come out of the house. He stood on the steps in his shirtsleeves, in the sunshine, with his hair loose about his shoulders and the great silver star glimmering through his open collar. He did not speak. He did not move. He merely looked down the lawn at the colonel, with an expression of perfect, mild, deathless boredom.

The colonel went white.

"Is that—"

"I couldn't say," I said. "I haven't introduced you."

…

They crossed that afternoon.

They did it in silence, in a long, shabby, shuffling column, down the terraced garden and across the paddock, with the retainers carrying bundles and the old men leaning on sticks. The cart with the small pale figure went last, driven by a stooped old servant, with a rug over the horse's flanks. Nobody looked at the house. They looked at their feet.

The Patriarch passed me where I stood on the lawn.

He paused. He looked up. His eyes were dull and enormous in his gray face, and I saw that the great gray head had begun to shake, very slightly, in a continuous tremor, like a leaf. He opened his mouth. He seemed to want to say something. I waited.

Nothing came.

He bowed his head, deeply, in a courtesy so old that it had gone out of use a hundred years ago. And then he walked on.

Torrance followed. He did not look at me at all.

Alden came last.

He walked alone, a few paces behind the cart, with his hands hanging. I braced myself. I think I expected a speech. A last apology. A word. But he went by me on the gravel without a glance, his eyes fixed on the middle distance, like a man in his sleep. He passed so close that I could have touched his sleeve. He smelled of woodsmoke and old sweat.

At the foot of the lawn he stopped. He turned his head. He looked back at the house, slowly, the honey-colored stone, the columns, the long gleaming windows. I think it was the first time he had really seen it.

"It's a beautiful place," he said.

I said nothing.

He walked on.

…

The Houses gave the Whitlocks until nightfall.

It was a courtesy, of a kind. The colonel withdrew his men to the crest of the hill, and made camp, and lit fires. I watched them from the balcony as the sun went down: five hundred men in green and silver, tending their pots, polishing their guns, laughing. They did not seem to expect a battle. They had the air of a party of tourists at a village fair.

I saw the Whitlock column pass through the beech-wood and out onto the sea road, a thin dark thread against the dying light. I saw it dwindle. I lost it in the trees.

And then, from the other side of the valley, I saw the fire.

It began as a spark. It was three miles off, across the broad dark bowl of the harbor-vale, on the far ridge, where the Whitlock Manor stood. I had not looked at it all day. The mob had burned it, a week ago, and the walls had stood black and open to the sky. But now it flared. Windows lit up, one by one, in rows. The roof blazed. A tower fell in. A column of smoke rose from it, black and enormous, and spread across the sunset in a flat red pall.

They are finishing the job, said Declan. The Brandts, I think. The Aldrin colonel sent them while we talked.

"I know."

They will leave nothing.

"I know."

I watched it burn. I watched the east wing go, and the conservatory, and the long dim library where I had spent three years of nights with a pencil. I watched the lindens catch. I watched the cellar, where forty-three had died, open to the air as the floor collapsed and a vast column of sparks went up to the stars.

It was an old, beautiful, hateful house, and it died in about an hour.

I thought of a girl in a white dress, and her first sight of it from a carriage window, long ago, on a bright autumn morning. I thought of the lindens in leaf, and the windows full of gold, and the sense, quite distinct, of arriving somewhere warm. I had been so afraid. I had been so happy. I had believed that I would be safe there forever.

I felt the hollow place in my chest, clean and still.

Nothing stirred in it. Nothing at all. It was as though the fire were burning in another country.

It is closed, I thought. The accounts are balanced.

It was not a feeling. It was a fact, like a column of figures that totals correctly. I did not rejoice. I did not grieve. I simply stood at the rail, with the wind at my back and the smoke in my eyes, and watched the old house of Whitlock turn to ash.

…

I learned the rest later, from Mabel's agents.

I learned that, at about eleven that night, a figure on foot had come running through the burning ruin of the Manor: a young man in a torn coat, with his hair on fire. He had gone back. He had left the column on the sea road, in the dark, and run three miles through the wood, and thrown himself into the flames.

He was looking for his mother.

The Lady Whitlock had not gone with the column. She was ill, and old, and had refused to be moved. She had hidden in the muniment room, in the cellar of the west wing, with a prayer-book and a flask of brandy, and said that she would die in her own house. Nobody had remembered. Nobody had counted. When Alden had looked for her among the carts and found her gone, he had stood perfectly still for a moment, and then turned and run.

He did not find her. The west wing was already down.

He was dragging at a fallen beam when the Brandt soldiers found him: six men in blue, with torches and clubs, who took him for a looter. They beat him in the yard, in the firelight, with his mother's body somewhere under the stones beside him. They did it methodically. They broke his arm, and three ribs, and his jaw. They left him in the ash.

He was found at dawn by a charcoal-burner, alive, unconscious, and brought to a hospice in the Falls. I did not hear of it for a week. When I did, I found I could not remember if I had been told or had merely guessed.

I learned too, in the same report, of the cart.

It had gone astray on the sea road. A wheel had broken, a mile from the coast, in a hollow of pines. The old servant who drove it had gone for help. He came back to find the horse standing in the traces and the cart empty.

There were wheel-tracks in the mud, other than his. A great many. Light ones, narrow, as of a long black carriage with a team of six. And at the edge of the road, in the pine-needles, a footprint: small, bare, a woman's.

Cordelia Fairchild was gone.

Nobody took credit. Nobody asked a ransom. In a month or two there would be rumors, whispers in the back-rooms of the Capital: a thin pale figure in a black cloak, seen at night, in the company of men in masks. A voice in the dark, singing. A name that people were beginning to say very quietly.

The Hollow Choir had taken her.

…

I did not sleep that night.

I sat on the balcony with a blanket round my shoulders, watching the red glow fade on the far ridge. The stars came out. A wind rose, off the sea, smelling of salt and ash. Down in the garden Nimbus was hunting something among the roses. I could hear the rustle of his wings, and the muffled chirp of a doomed small thing, and the sharp indignant clicking of a satisfied cat.

I heard the door open behind me.

He came and sat in the other chair. I felt him there. He did not speak. He had brought a bottle and two glasses, and he poured, and handed me one, and we sat in the dark and drank.

"So," said Declan, at last.

"So."

"The accounts are balanced."

I turned my head.

"You said it," he explained. "Aloud. Several hours ago. I was in the doorway."

"I didn't know."

"You were not meant to." His voice was gentle. "How do you feel?"

I thought about it.

"Light," I said. "And a little ill. As if I had been carrying a stone for so long that I'd forgotten it was there. And now it's gone, and the place where it was..." I stopped.

"Aches."

"Yes."

"That will pass." He turned the glass in his hands. "Or it will not, and you will learn to carry the ache instead. It is a lighter burden. In my experience."

We sat for a while.

The fire on the ridge had dwindled to a smoulder. A faint silvery line had begun to show along the eastern edge of the sea. In an hour it would be dawn. I felt very tired, and very clear, and oddly, absurdly young.

"Is there anything else you want?" said Declan.

I looked at him.

He was not smiling. His face in the gray light was calm and grave, the eyes steady. He asked it simply, as a man asks a friend whether he would like another cup. It was not a challenge. It was not a test. It was a genuine question, open and unguarded, and I knew that whatever answer I gave, he would take it exactly as it came.

I thought about the list. The long list, drawn up in a notebook on a train. Whitlock. Fairchild. Crane. Two names were struck out. One remained. I thought of a thin silver-haired man in a plain black coat. I thought of the Engine, and the Tithe, and a hundred thousand silent sufferers.

I thought, too, of something else: a hunger, a restlessness, a wish for more. It had been growing for months. It had a name, and the name was not revenge.

"Yes," I said. "I want Archmage."

He didn't blink.

"I want to be strong enough that it doesn't matter what he draws on. I want to stand in front of the Engine and not be afraid." I drank. "I want to be the thing they are afraid of."

"You are already that."

"Not enough."

A long pause. Then, slowly, he nodded, as a man nods who has been waiting for a particular word.

"I know a place," said Declan.