Page 4 of Zenith Court

“The circuit can run without me now. I spent the year making sure of it.” He paused. “What’s left is teaching and waiting, and I can do both here—if you’ll have me.”

“We have room,” Rev said. “The work pays in beans.”

Aldric looked down at his empty plate. “I can live with beans.”

He reclaimed the book from Cosima, turned it over, and slid two fingers into a slit in the paper lining of the back board. What came out was a single folded sheet, official and heavier than any paper a feed merchant ever touched, with a thick wax seal at its bottom edge.

“Not a copy,” he said. “A registry clerk at the third school is missing this and lying about it. Read it out.”

I unfolded it and read it once to myself, then aloud.

“By order of the Council in session: every witness-seat of lineage, of every hall and every holding, is summoned to Zenith Court before the season’s turn, there to convene as Conclave, to witness and to record the Council’s undertakings in the present emergency. Seats unfilled shall be entered in the record as such.”

“A Conclave,” Caspian said, and went very still.

“The first in living memory,” Aldric said.

“Why now?” I asked.

“The decree lets them hunt us. It doesn’t put the old families on record behind a war. The Conclave does.”

“What happens if a family refuses?”

“A filled seat counts as consent. An empty one counts as opposition.”

“So no one gets to abstain,” Cosima said.

“No.” Aldric looked at Caspian. “But they’ve summoned at least one seat they don’t control.”

“The Ashford seat has stood for eleven generations,” Caspian said. “It will be on that schedule. They’ll expect it filled.”

Nobody said his father’s name. The lamp hissed on its wick, and the goat gave up on the window. Under the table my wrist carried three low fires and the cold-marble line of one of them burning suddenly bright.

I read the summons again from the top, every clause locking the next like fence rails. For five weeks the Council had taught the whole country to bar its doors against us — riders in gray pairs, seals on saddlebags, three verbs where a conscience should be. And now, needing witnesses for its war, it had written out invitations to its own front hall and posted them to every name old enough to matter. A standing pass through the Court’s own walls, official, renewable, addressed to lineage — and a lineage sat drinking Rev’s coffee at my table with his wrists bare.

Gate’s open, I’d told the rider, and I had meant ours.

There were other gates in this war, and the Court had just published the visiting hours on its own.

3

Kieran

At two in the morning, I was kneading bread on Rev’s worktable.

The oven fire had burned down since supper, and the kitchen still held some warmth. I’d left the lamp cold; the coals gave me enough light to work by. I liked the kitchen in the near-dark, though I would have denied it if asked.

The other seven slept elsewhere in the house. Rev’s breathing came through the pantry wall. Aldric had taken the loft room and gone quiet within two minutes.

I was awake because for three years I’d fallen asleep counting down. Every night I repeated the count until I drifted off. I had expected it to kill me. I hadn’t expected to miss it.

I’d joked about the quiet to Astra weeks ago. The truth was, I didn’t know how to live without an ending in sight. I rehearsed everything, and I had rehearsed that.

When sleep wouldn’t come, I baked. It gave my hands something to do.

Aldric had arrived that afternoon with news of four hundred scattered survivors and a Council summons. Every lineage chair had to be filled at Zenith Court by the season’s turn or counted against us. I hadn’t stopped thinking about it.

The green-gold at my wrist warmed half a breath before the stair board creaked.