Page 15 of Zenith Court

“Walkin signs what the Council gives them,” Cosima said. “Someone else chose that wording.”

“Old debts mean money or blood,” Aldric said from the sacks. “Ask the archive when you’re standing in it.”

That was as far as we could take it. Somewhere inside the Court, someone had pulled an old file and found me in it.

We ate what the saddlebags held while the fire settled to coals. Then I said what I had decided on the road.

“Magnus holds the Ashford seat, and every lineage chair is summoned to the Conclave. Caspian wears the cuffs and returns as his father’s heir. The rest of us enter as the Ashford retinue. Once we’re inside, we find the archive and whatever they’ve decided I owe.” The current warmed beneath my three lines. “I’m done being located. If the Court wants me delivered, I’ll walk in on my own feet. I choose in.”

Caspian set the last stick across the coals.

“I’ll wear them,” he said.

“I’m in.” Kieran spun a chip of millstone across his knuckles. “I’ve wanted to see the Court ever since—” The chip stopped in his fist. “Ever since I stopped dying. I want to stand in the room where they wrote my count and make them watch it stay wrong. In.”

“I’m in,” Jonah said. “All the way. I wanted everyone to hear me say it.”

“Before anyone offers to leave me somewhere safe,” Delphine said, “don’t.” She came around the fire, wiping her hands on a strip cut from Aldric’s sleeve. “They wrote me dead. I’m still here, and I’m not staying behind.” She looked at Cosima. “I choose in. Write it down.”

Cosima opened the watch ledger to the first clean page and wrote five names in her small, even hand.

“Then I’ll handle the outside,” Aldric said. He shifted higher on the sacks, face gray. “You’ll need enough trouble beyond those walls to keep their attention off you. I have riders, millers, ferrymen, and kitchen workers on every road between here and the Court. I can run them from here.”

“Cosima and I will take the Hall road,” Rev said. “Juno is already moving food and people through the east kitchen. She’ll know which doors are still open.”

Cosima closed the ledger. “And where the records are.”

That settled it. Rev banked the coals. Aldric stayed on the grain sacks rather than attempt the stairs; Rev and Cosima laid their blankets nearby. The rest of us climbed to the loft above the millstones, where the floorboards were dry and sound, and opened four blanket rolls side by side over empty grain sacks.

“I don’t sleep the first night in a strange building,” Delphine said from the head of the stairs. She sat with her back to the post and Aldric’s second knife across her knees. “Old habit. The watch is mine. Argue, and I’ll take tomorrow’s too.”

Nobody argued.

Caspian lay behind me with his arm over the side of my coat where the wren rested. Kieran folded himself in front of me, already half asleep, one foot hooked over Jonah’s ankle. Jonah lay outermost, facing the stairs. Their breathing gradually slowed. Beneath the smoke and wet wool, the three lines at my wrist stayed warm—marble and burnt sugar, apple and warm stone, leather and clean skin. No current rose. No alarm followed.

At dawn, the mill would empty by three roads. Rev and Cosima would go north toward the Hall. Aldric would go west to call the people in his ledger. The five of us would take the long road toward the Court and the archive holding its oldest debt under my name.

I put my hand over the wren.

I slept until morning.

9

Astra

The three roads out of the mill shared their first four days. Around the fire we had spoken as if we would split at dawn. In practice, there was one safe line north through the hills, marked in Aldric’s ledger. All eight of us traveled it together: a borrowed farm wagon, four walkers alongside, and Aldric in the wagon bed directing the pace.

The ledger called the stops storage barns. On the page, that was the whole truth: oats in, oats out, a family name, a distance to the next. The key turned the page into a country. “Four hundred entries,” Aldric said on the second night. The lamp was low, and Cosima sat across the straw from him with her hands folded because she was not permitted to write. “Feed quantities are households. Repairs are riders. A barn that buys new hinges twice in one season can hide six people for three days. Learn it wrong and you’ll knock at a door that reports you before you lower your hand.”

Cosima recited entries back to him in her small, even voice while the rest of us pretended to sleep. By the fourth barn, he had stopped correcting her and begun testing her.

By the third stop I knew the signs. A chalk tally on the doorpost, dated within the week, meant swept and safe. Feed already forked down meant we were expected. Bread came at dusk with a woman or half-grown boy who did not look at our faces. No one offered names. The ledger held those.

Delphine rode in the wagon the first day and refused it the second. Every rut jarred her bruised ribs worse than walking did. Kieran walked beside the wheel and kept trying to read the ledger upside down until Aldric told him the next attempt would end with his hands bound for his own health.

The route forked on the fifth morning at a crossroads marked by a shrine worn past recognition. A horse doctor waited on the west road with Council-stamped traveling papers and a girl too young for papers of her own, who handled his team as if she had been born on the box. They were two more entries from the ledger, there to collect Aldric.

Aldric accepted help onto their wagon without thanks, then looked us over from the bench. “Ashford. Marsh. Hale.” A nod apiece. “Moreau—if it hurts to breathe, you ride. Verita.”