Chapter 368 - 368: Site Extra

Mesterica left with the letters before the courier could ask a castle question by accident.

Calden was put on a stool in the hall with a fresh quill and orders to break it if the point started writing numbers he had not been asked for.

Cynthia took her father a closed flask and did not stay to watch him drink.

Pell was gagged again.

That left the side room, the cool packet, the letter with the bird grown on its back, and Erna, who should have gone back to her crew and had not.

She shut the door with her foot because her hands were full of the tool bag she no longer trusted.

"You can say thank you like a person, you used my site, my hole, my name, my pony, and now you are using my standing here as if I am another panel in your west wall."

Rigel set the folded letter down.

"You followed me into a passage and onto a road, I did not draft you."

"You looked at me like you had, that is the same thing with worse manners."

She was still dusty to the collar.

The film on her sleeve had dried into a pale map that cracked when she bent her elbow.

She kept talking because talking had kept her herself at the crack, and the room was too quiet without masons and mallets.

Rigel crossed the space and took the bag out of her hands.

She let him, then hated that she had let him, and reached for it again.

He put it on the chair instead.

"If you stay in this room you keep your mouth on work, if you start answering walls I will notice, that is the whole arrangement."

"That is not an arrangement, that is you deciding I am convenient because I already know what your hands do when a person cannot turn around."

He did laugh at that, short.

"You want it written on the estimate, extra labor, after hours, unpleasant."

Erna's face went hot in a way that had nothing to do with shame she would admit.

"Don't you put a price on that, don't you dare make it sound like I am bidding, I am telling you I can still feel the stone on my hips and I have been carrying it around this castle like a second spine, and if you are going to stand there with your quiet iron and your father's letter you can at least look at me when I say I am not your crew."

He looked at her.

Then he backed her into the table hard enough that the packet jumped once, cool, uninterested, which somehow made it worse.

Erna's breath caught, and the next words came out longer, tangled, because she could not find the short angry ones fast enough.

"If someone knocks I will kill you, if that boy next door starts tapping third bell I will kill you, if you think this makes me softer on the crack you are even stupider than the wall."

"It doesn't," Rigel said, and his hand was already under the work shirt, palm on bare waist where the stone had scraped her, "it makes you quiet for a minute, which I need, and you came in here wanting a fight you could lose without an audience."

She swore at him and kissed him like an accident she refused to take back.

Teeth.

Dust.

The sour leftover of fear.

He turned her, shoved her belt down just far enough, and she braced on the table with both arms so she would not have to hold him.

"Not from behind because you feel like a hole, do you hear me, I am standing, I am looking at the door, I am not crawling into anything for you again."

"Then keep looking."

He pushed in before she could find another condition.

Erna made a sound she tried to turn into anger and failed halfway, forehead dropping toward the wood, then lifting again because she had promised the door her eyes.

It was fast on purpose.

Not the long cruelty of the corridor.

A stolen use in a house that had too many ears.

"You are still tight, you were tight at noon, you can pretend the wall did that if it helps you add the line later."

"Shut up, just, ah, just move, if you talk like the crack I will bite."

He gripped her hip where the tool bag strap had cut in earlier and used that mark like a handle.

Erna's elbow slid on the table, papers whispering, Balzac's letter an inch from her wrist.

She laughed once, wrecked.

"If I smear flour-script on your father's handwriting I am not copying it out again."

"Then don't fall on it."

Her body took him anyway, traitor-slick from a day of being held and chased and named by things that should not have known her.

When she came it was ugly and small, bitten into her own wrist, and she stayed looking at the latch through it, furious that the room had not ended.

Rigel followed with a breath through his teeth and pulled out at the last instant, finishing on the inside of her thigh because a craftsman walking the north corridor leaking him was a map he did not need on the floor.

Erna stayed bent a second longer than pride allowed, then yanked her belt up with hands that wanted a hammer.

"That was not danger pay."

"No."

"I will still bill you for the shirt."

"Do it."

Someone knocked.

Calden's voice, careful, human.

"Lord Rigel, the post horse is gone with Lady Mesterica, and Count Blade asked for you in a sentence that had only one cadence, I counted, I would like you to hear it before the second cadence thinks about arriving."

Erna wiped her thigh with a rag from her own bag, shoved the rag deep like evidence, and opened her mouth on a longer line than a yes.

"I am going back to my crew, and if any of them are still polite I am sending them home even if the west corridor falls in, you can explain the rubble to your Count, I am done being the person who holds holes shut with skin."

Rigel picked up the letter, packet, and the smell of stone dust together.

"Stay out of servant passages, stay off wells, if a child says your name you do not answer it, not even to tell him to get lost."

Erna paused with her hand on the latch, looked at him over her shoulder, and the heat in her face was still anger first.

"You do not get to give me safety instructions with my belt freshly done, that is grotesque even for you, write it on paper if you want it followed."

She went out.

Calden very pointedly did not look at her collar.

Rigel followed toward the conference room, and Blade was sitting upright, eyes clear in a way that hurt to trust, and he said, all one tired human stretch of words,

"The merchant on yesterday's outgoing list did not take the west highway toward Gousel, he took the old quarry track that dies in the hills and then, according to a sentry who only remembered it when Cynthia shouted at him, he came back after dark without the cart, smiling, and asked whether the young lord's private rooms had been aired."