Chapter 362 - 362: Two Throats

Rigel did not put the packet on the table.

Cynthia filled the far doorway, cloak film-stained, blade low.

The map between them was no longer a roll.

It had peeled itself open to the old capital and the north road, and the ink was creeping, wet, toward Riverbend as if the paper remembered feet.

"Father," Cynthia said.

"Your eyes. Look at me."

Count Blade looked at her.

That much was his.

The lining under his voice looked too.

"Ask," he told Rigel, still calm.

"You were going to."

Rigel kept the wrapped metal against his ribs.

The tick in it matched the Count's stopped fingers, almost.

"How many boxes of stomach potion did you tell Calden to write."

A small question.

Ugly only to the man who had been drinking the stuff since dawn.

Count Blade's mouth tightened.

The iron in him liked that.

The lining in him did not.

"Four," he said, too fast.

Then, slower, with hate in it:

"I said three. He wrote four. I let him. I was going to drink the fourth box before the week ended."

Mesterica watched his throat.

"Again. Something that costs you."

Cynthia took a step closer.

"Father. The engagement. The one you evaded with Marquis Gousel. Say what you actually think of it."

That one landed.

Count Blade's hand closed on the table edge hard enough to blanch the nails.

"I think my daughter decided a war was a wedding," he said.

"I think if I formalize it, Lady Mesterica burns this castle down with both of us in it. I think if I refuse, Cynthia will draw on an ally in front of the men. I have been buying time with medicine and silence. I am tired of both."

The lining tried to ride out on the last sentence and make it generous.

He bit it off.

Sweat stood on his temple.

Calden, by the door, whispered, "That sounded like him."

"It sounded like him answering," Rigel said.

"Not like him asking me for a private inventory."

On the table the ink reached the mark for Riverbend and blossomed into three small stains.

East hamlet.

Relay post.

A fourth stain began, faint, under the castle itself.

Cynthia saw it and made a sound in her teeth.

"Don't look at the new one," Rigel said.

"That's the invitation."

Count Blade shut his eyes.

Opened them on his daughter, not the paper.

"I can feel it offering me the easy version," he said.

"The version where I ask you pretty questions and we all sit down. If I look at that stain I will ask them. Rigel. Take the map off my table or cut the table in half. I no longer trust my hands with either."

Mesterica did not wait for a vote.

She hooked the map with her blade tip and flung it toward the dead hearth.

Paper hit grate.

Ink hissed as if it had nerves.

The fourth stain kept spreading for a breath after the paper left the wood.

Then it died in mid-creep, frustrated.

The thing in Blade's lining recoiled with him.

His knees hit the chair.

For three seconds his face was only a father who had almost signed his hall over for the price of a question.

"Cynthia," he got out.

"If I ask you how you sleep, you do not answer. Not even to comfort me."

"I won't."

Her voice broke and came back armed.

"Stay seated. If you stand, I will assume the legs are not yours."

Calden had both hands up.

Ink on the left.

Nothing on the right.

"My lord. I keep wanting to write the north wing sentry count in the margin. I have not. I would like credit for that."

"You'll get a bottle," Blade muttered.

"After."

From the north corridor came the scrape of many boots turning at once.

Rigel was already moving.

"That's the crew."

They hit the junction at a run.

The masons were no longer in a line.

They were walking toward the conference wing in pairs, tools down, faces polite.

Not rushing.

Errands.

Erna was still at the crack.

Both hands on the stone now.

Forehead against it.

A smear of pale film climbed her left sleeve like frost.

She was not humming third bell.

She was swearing, which was better.

"Back up," she snarled into the hole.

"I said ten and I meant the discount, you deaf pile of gravel. You don't get a name. You don't get the crew. You can have the crack and choke on it."

The masons did not look at her.

They looked at Rigel's coat.

Mesterica put herself in the corridor mouth.

"First one who asks a question loses the tongue."

The front mason smiled the healer's smile.

"We don't need to ask. The boy is already in the walls. He left the knots for you to admire."

Cynthia's blade came level.

"Pell."

"Pell was a door," the mason said.

"Doors don't stay in bed."

Rigel stopped beside Erna close enough to smell stone dust and the sour edge of fear she would deny later.

The packet in his coat was hammering now.

Not a tick.

A pulse.

It wanted the crack the way a key wants a lock it almost fits.

"If I feed it this, what do you lose," he asked her.

Erna's laugh came out cracked.

"If you feed it that, I think I stop being the one holding the hole and start being the hole."

Her left hand slipped a finger-width.

The crack brightened, pleased.

She slammed the hand back so hard her wrist popped.

"Danger pay. Write it. Then drag my crew off their feet before they reach your Count."

Rigel grabbed the nearest mason by the belt and threw him into the next two.

Bodies went down in a clatter of unused tools.

They got up too neatly.

No curses.

No surprise.

Mesterica's first cut took a mallet hand off at the wrist.

The man looked at the stump, then at her, and asked, mild,

"Does the inner storeroom still connect to the servant passage?"

She kicked him through a side door and did not answer.

Cynthia took the legs out from under a woman with a coil of rope.

The woman kept smiling while she fell.

"Rigel," Cynthia said.

"We can drop them. We cannot keep them down. They're sharing a spine."

Erna's right knee buckled.

The film had reached her collar.

"Hey," she said, to Rigel, not the wall.

The prickle was still hers.

Thinner.

"If I say Master, you hit me. That's not my word."

"Understood."

The crack spoke with Pell's cheer and Blade's iron stacked together.

"Put the scrap in, maker. We will give you the boy back in one piece. We will even give you the watchman's name while it still fits him. A fair trade. You like those."

Rigel looked at the pulse in his palm, then at Erna's white fingers, then at the polite dead-eyed crew climbing over their own fallen.

He did not put the scrap in.

He set his free hand over Erna's on the stone, added his mana the way he had added it to a collar in a dark room two weeks ago, and shoved the opposite direction.

The crack screamed like heated iron dropped in water.

Every mason in the hall seized at once, heads tipping the same degree, and from somewhere deep in the north tower a second bell tried to ring, bent, and broke off.

Erna sucked air through her teeth.

"What did you just do."

"Rewrote the stitch," Rigel said.

His nose was bleeding.

He ignored it.

"Temporarily. It remembers being worn. So I reminded it who wore it last."

On the floor, the pale film shrank from his bootprint as if burned.

In the conference room, Count Blade made a raw sound.

Calden dropped his quill.

And from inside the walls, very close to Erna's cheek, Pell's voice said, no longer cheerful:

"That was ours. You don't get to keep both the formula and the people it learned. Choose which throat you want to save before the seam in your craftsman finishes closing."