جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 20

They packed the shoulder wound with grey salt, and it did not close, so they packed it again and it did not close, and the healer, a square woman named Ilma with forearms like a smith's, finally said what everybody in the room already knew."Moon-silver doesn't heal. It waits." She tied the last of it off. "It'll stop being cold in about nine days and it'll ache when the weather turns for the rest of your life. Don't use the arm.""Fine.""You are going to use the arm.""Almost certainly."They had Dunstan in the lower hall under four spears, and he had not stopped shaking, and Aldren would not have him in a cell. That is worth recording. Half the Court wanted the man hanged before breakfast and the King put him on a bench by a fire with a cup in his hands and stood over him like something guarding a door.I came down the stair at first light with my arm strapped across my chest."You should be on your back," Aldren said, without turning."I want to look at him properly.""You looked

We fought about it for two days and I lost, and then I won, and the winning cost more than the losing would have.His position was not unreasonable, which is what made it unbearable. Blackthorn held eleven leashed people that I could see and no way of knowing how many more that I could not. The Court had drawn a writ once and would draw it again. Hesper had gone home to Frostvein in a state I did not like. And under all of it, the plain arithmetic: the King of the Seven Territories could not order a wash-house girl through a sealed royal door without giving her a standing in law that she did not have.“Then give me one,” I said.“There is exactly one instrument that would do it,” Osbert said, “and I would prefer neither of you asked me what it is.”Aldren said, “Say it anyway.”Osbert put down his pen with the air of a man watching a cart go over a cliff at a distance too great to shout.“A blood oath,” he said. “The pre-Crown form. It is older than the throne, which is precisely why

The stair down is not on any plan of the fortress, which is the first thing that ought to have told somebody something four hundred years ago.It starts behind the cold store on the lowest tier, behind a wall that Aldren had four men take down with hammers at eight in the morning because he had decided he was finished asking permission from architecture. Behind the wall was a landing, and beyond the landing the steps went down, and they were not Blackthorn work. Blackthorn is black stone cut square. These were pale, worn hollow in the centre by feet, and they turned the wrong way, which no defensive stair does.We took lamps. Aldren, Wulstan, Osbert under protest, and me.Balthor stayed up. He stood on the landing with his spectacles in his hand and said, “I have spent sixty years reading about what is at the bottom of stairs like this one and I have formed no ambition whatsoever to see it,” which I thought at the time was cowardice and have since decided was the most sensible remark

Evander rode into Blackthorn four days later, alone, on a horse he had very nearly finished, with no escort and no letter and no permission.They took his weapons at the gate and he let them. They put him in the lower hall and he stood in the middle of it without sitting down for two hours, and by the time somebody thought to come and tell me he had been there long enough for the whole household to have an opinion.He looked terrible.“Four days,” I said.“Three and a half.” His voice had gone to gravel. “I’ve not slept since the feast. Not properly. Not once.”“Sit down before you fall down.”“Ellie.”“Sit down.”He sat. Up close he was worse. He had lost weight he had no business losing and his hands would not stay still, and there was a tremor going through him at intervals of about nine seconds that I recognised, because I had felt the same thing at the bottom of a stair with my hand on a white stone.“Rosamund sent me,” he said.“What?”“Not sent. Told me to go.” He laughed, and

I stood in the doorway with the forgery in my hand and I did not go in, and I did not go away.I looked.It took perhaps three seconds. Between the two of them there was the thin worn thread of six years and the bright plain line of pity, exactly as there had been the day before, and one new thing which I read in the same glance and which flattened the green thing under my breastbone entirely.Grief. Hers, enormous and fresh.“They’ve arrested him,” Rosamund said, without turning round. She had heard me. She did not care. “My father. Four days after I left. He’d worked out the box was gone and he did not run, he sat down in his own hall and waited for the King’s men, and the message says he asked whether his daughter was safe before he asked what the charge was.”I put the letter in my pocket.“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it, and hated that I meant it, and understood in that moment that I was going to be able to like Rosamund of Thornwake eventually and that it was going to be extre