Page 103 of Zenith Court

“Aldric.”

“When you’re standing in that archive, ask it my question.”

“Money or blood,” I said. “I remember.”

“I’ll make the roads expensive for them. Use the time it buys you.” He looked at Cosima last. “The book goes west with me. The key goes north in your head. If the Council wants the whole of it, it can come after both.”

The girl clucked the team into motion. Aldric lifted one hand from the rail before the hedges hid the wagon.

Cosima watched the empty road, quietly repeating the entries he had taught her. Rev touched her elbow once. Then we turned north.

* * *

Two more barns north, the hills began to look familiar: a ridgeline like a knuckle, a river bend I remembered from the long drive to Zenith Hall. Rev had been navigating since noon without consulting anyone. This was her country, hers and the flour wagons’. At dusk she went down to the road alone and chalked the doorpost of the night barn.

The ledger identified the next barn as eleven bushels of seed oats. It belonged to a widow above the old quarry road.

Juno came up after full dark, walking beside a kitchen wagon with a tarp roped over its bed. I knew that walk before the lantern found her face. I hadn’t seen her since the night the Hall put four of us through a door with no handle.

She stopped when she saw me.

“Astra.”

I had spent months waiting for someone from the Hall to say my name as if I were still a person they knew. Now that it had happened, I couldn’t answer.

Juno crossed the yard and took my right hand by the heel of the palm—the old reading hold, firm enough to turn my wrist without touching the Mark. At the Tower, every reader had kept a desk between us or called for a steward. My hand opened for her before I thought to guard it.

Her nails were still bitten to the quick. Her eyes followed the three lines slowly.

“All three,” she said.

“All three.”

She examined them once more, as though the answer might change beneath her attention. It didn’t.

Her gaze lifted to mine.

“I saw you try to stop them,” I said.

“I didn’t stop them.”

“No.” My throat had tightened. “But I saw you try.”

Her fingers closed once around my palm. Then she released me and inspected the rest of me from head to heel.

“They’re feeding you,” she said. “That’s one worry gone.”

Juno clasped Rev’s hands, then turned to Cosima. “Can you write a clean inventory?”

“Yes.”

“Can you make it lie?”

Cosima’s expression barely changed. “Yes.”

“Good. The kitchen needs a scribe.”

We sat on the wagon’s tail while the others unloaded supplies into the widow’s cellar, all of it filed at the Hall as a discrepancy. “I’ve misplaced enough flour since spring to bury a man standing up,” Juno said. “Now listen. I get one night, and you get one question at the end of it, so save it.”