Page 2 of Zenith Court

Couriers with bad news gallop. Council men trot, to be heard coming. This one walked his horse the last hundred feet, and that frightened me more than either.

He stopped at the edge of the lamp’s reach. Young, road-worn, no colors anywhere on him — coat, saddle, blanket roll, all of it the no-color of things chosen carefully to be forgettable.

“I’m told,” he said, “that this is the Verita holding.”

“You’re told wrong,” Caspian said. “Who’s telling?”

The rider reached slowly into his coat and came out with a strip of cloth, rolled small, tied with kitchen string. “I’m to hand this to the woman of the house and ride on. I was told she’d know the hand.”

Kieran took it from him at the porch rail — took it easy, turned it over easy, every line of him staging boredom while his eyes did fast, thorough work — and brought it to me. I unrolled it under the lamp.

Stitching. Not ink, stitching, black thread on unbleached cloth, the letters small and square and even. I knew the hand. I’d have known it on a shroud.

Ring One holds. The Dean stands where he stood. Third dawn.

Nobody spoke while I read it. The rider sat his horse, waiting, and somewhere off in the dark Jonah let him keep the illusion that the night was empty.

“There a reply?” the rider asked.

“Two words.” My voice came out steadier than the wrist under it. All three lines were humming now, as they had at the trough. Something was coming. Something had already started to arrive. “Gate’s open.”

He nodded once, turned his horse, and walked it back down into the dark at the same schooled, respectful pace, and the night took him as the Tower used to take sound.

Cosima examined the cloth and passed it to Caspian. Rev came up out of the cellar grinning before anyone said a word to her, because Rev could smell good news through a floor.

“Third dawn,” Caspian said. “Two days.”

Two days. I folded the cloth along its stitched lines and slid it into the inside pocket beside the wren: my mother’s brooch and the Dean’s summons, the oldest thing I carried and the newest.

The fence would be finished by then. I’d drive the nails in two strikes apiece.

2

Astra

Iwas at the gate before dawn, my breath white in the dark. Third dawn. Behind me, the house was dark: no lamp, no chimney smoke. But I heard the pump work, the door ease on its hinge, and Rev inform the stove in a low voice that today of all days it would not embarrass her.

Caspian stood at my left with the old fowling piece held slack. In work clothes and mud-dark boots, he looked prepared to shoot at crows, not men. Kieran leaned on the porch post with his hands in his pockets, doing his best to look idle. Delphine stood where the woodpile broke her outline. Jonah I could neither see nor hear, which meant he was somewhere in the orchard; the line at my wrist carried him anyway.

The rider came up out of the valley with the first gray light, one horse under him and a pack animal on a lead, both moving at a walk with their heads low from travel. He didn’t hail the house. He let himself be seen from a long way off and came on at farm pace, giving us the whole length of the track to decide about him.

I knew that seat. Fifty yards out, hood up, face in shadow, and my wrist warmed with recognition: a man who rode as he had taught footwork.

He drew rein at the gate and put his hood back, and there he was, grayer than I remembered, thinner, a healed line over one eyebrow that hadn’t existed when he stood in the great hall with his shoulders squared toward Quill and his career in its death throes. The Dean of the Combat Department looked at me for the length of one breath. Then he looked past me at the fence.

“Your spacing drops at the corner post,” he said.

“The corner post sits over the spring. It drops or it leans, and leaning looked worse.”

He grunted and let his eyes travel the rest of it: the orchard line, the trough, the chimney smoke Rev had finally permitted, the goat already trotting the fence toward him with the brisk self-importance of a mayor greeting a visiting dignitary. He took his time. He’d taught me that too: looking fast was the same as not looking.

“Congratulations on the farm, Verita.”

He said it in exactly the voice he’d used the first time — Congratulations on Ring One, Verita — flat as a plank, pitched over the sound of Marcus Venn relearning how breathing worked, while my hands shook and the whole salle pretended it hadn’t watched. It had been worth more to me than the ring. It landed now in the same spot, and my eyes stung about it, which I blamed on the cold.

“It needs a second well,” I said. “And the roof leaks.”

“Then it’s a farm like any other.” He dismounted like a man twenty years younger than his face and led both horses through the gate I held open.