Page 18 of Zenith Court

At full dark, Juno led all seven of us behind the blackthorn at the foot of the quarry. She and Rev lifted an iron grate from the weeds. Water moved ankle-deep beneath the road.

Rev went first with the lamp held low, testing each step. Cosima tucked her skirts above the water and followed with one hand against the wall. Juno touched my wrist once, just below the three completed lines.

“Get to the Court,” she said.

Then she followed them underground. At the first bend, Rev looked back once. The lamp turned with her and disappeared. I lowered the grate.

The five of us returned to the loft for the remaining hours of darkness. Before the next dawn, we left with bread in our coats and the chain’s next three entries lodged in Caspian’s memory.

South of the quarry road, the ledger thinned fast—entries farther apart, quantities smaller, farm country giving out toward the Court’s valley, where watching paid better than oats and the Council’s road money went further than Aldric’s.

Five of us now, one road, the wren against my breast and the watch ledger buttoned inside Delphine’s coat. Beyond the last of the barns, the Court waited in its valley.

We turned south.

10

Caspian

The inn stood half a day from the convoy road, the sixth stop marked in Aldric’s ledger. Its keeper was a miller’s widow who limped when she carried the stew to our table. She fed us without asking our names, warned Delphine about the loose third stair, and took her candle upstairs before full dark.

“I sleep soundly,” she said. “Be gone before I wake.”

Delphine took first watch on the stair. Kieran and Hale held the taproom over a map, still arguing about remounts when the candle burned low. Astra had gone to the pump to wash off three days of road. I took the corner room. It held a bed, a chair, a deep window seat under barred shutters, and a dressing glass spotted silver at the edges but clear in the middle.

My father’s trunk had come ahead by carrier, addressed to the widow in a clerk’s hand. Inside was Conclave black, cut from measurements remembered across years of absence. The coat fit exactly.

I had carried the smaller box myself. It had ridden in my saddle roll while the farm burned, chosen over spare boots before I could think better of it. Now I set it on the washstand and opened the latch.

The bands smelled of oil and the cedar box my father kept them in. He had first fastened them on me at fourteen.

The left cuff went on without ceremony. The hasp clicked shut, and the band settled against my wrist as if I had never stopped wearing it. I had never fastened the right one myself. I closed it with my teeth.

Then I built him in the glass, top down.

Chin first—my father corrected the chin before he corrected anything else, two fingers under a four-year-old’s jaw. Shoulders back and down. Weight even, hands still at the seams. I emptied my face last, then tried my voice at half volume against the shuttered room. “I was led astray by an Untethered girl. I have been corrected. I am grateful for the correction.” It found its old pitch on the second pass. By the third, it asked nothing of me.

That was the second offense: the ease. Fourteen years to build him, four minutes to put him back on after I’d removed him. My shoulders remembered where to sit; my hands went still without effort. Even my breathing shortened into the shallow, measured pattern my father preferred in public. The glass held the heir he had made, and I hated how little it hurt to become him again.

Astra’s steps sounded in the corridor. I had left the door unlatched for her.

“Does he pass?” I asked.

It came out in my father’s voice.

“You look the way you did the day we met.”

“Then he passes.”

She closed the door and crossed the room. “The day we met, I thought all of this was you.”

“And now?”

Her hand settled against my jaw. “Now I know better. I didn’t choose him. I chose you.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “I thought it would be harder.”

Her hand settled at my jaw and turned my face from the mirror, gently. “Because you know the part. We need you to play it long enough to get five people through those doors.” Her thumb moved once along my cheek. “I won’t mistake him for you. And afterward, I’ll be here to help you take him off.”