Chapter 48: My Excommunicated Wife Knocked on the Hero’s Door

"Three daughters."

Calista said it from the doorway of Roderic’s room without stepping in, the pension list in her hand.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed. Dressed. Boots on. Eleven weeks of sleeping in his boots.

"Go away."

"The widow who draws pension eighty four has three daughters and no son." She shut the door behind her. "Twenty years of payments for a boy who isn’t on the roll."

"It’s a clerk’s error."

"Zelina said the same thing." Calista set the list on the table. "Zelina didn’t take your pulse on Tuesday."

Roderic didn’t move.

"Five years in a hospice. A hundred and forty sick." She pulled the chair out and sat in it, which meant she wasn’t leaving. "I opened your collar in front of three hundred nobles and I knew before I counted the first beat."

"Then why didn’t you say it there?"

"Because it wasn’t mine to say."

That got his head up.

"I don’t inform on people."

"On who?"

"On the women who told me things." Calista folded her hands. "Eleven years of hearing what people don’t tell anyone. I’ve never repeated one of them."

"So go on not repeating."

"I came to ask you one thing and then I’ll go."

He waited.

"Do they know you’re alive?"

That was what broke him, and it wasn’t the pulse or the list or the boots.

He looked at the window for a while.

"My mother put me in my cousin’s clothes when I was ten," he said. "A year later a man in a grey cloak came asking for the boy of the house."

"And there was one."

"There was one." He dragged a hand down his face. "If I’d been a girl in that barn, that man rides out and looks somewhere else, and my house loses the pension and everything after it."

"And now the pension is the chain?"

"Now the pension is what they eat." He looked up. "Eighty four payments, my lady. If tomorrow the empire finds out its hero is that kind of fraud, the payments stop and they hang my mother for twenty years of theft from the crown."

Calista turned the list face down on the table.

"What’s your name?"

"Roderic."

"The other one."

"I don’t remember," he said. "And that one the System did take."

She sat with that longer than she needed to.

"Does he know?" she asked. "The emperor."

"No."

"Do you want him to?"

"I want a lot of things." Roderic pressed the heels of both hands against his knees. "I wanted to be somebody’s son for one afternoon in Vareth. The smith asked where I was from and I had nothing to hand him."

"You had something. You chose not to hand it over."

"That’s the same thing after seven years."

"It isn’t." Calista leaned forward. "I renounced my vows in a basilica in front of my whole diocese and they called it apostasy. You’ve kept yours in a room with the door shut and they call it heroism. Neither of those has anything to do with what we actually are."

"You had a choice."

"I had a choice at twenty six not at ten." She let that sit. "Nobody makes a choice at ten. They make one for you and you carry it."

Roderic laughed.

"You’re the first person in seven years who’s said it out loud."

"I’m the first person in seven years who took your pulse."

"Zelina takes everyone’s pulse."

"Zelina counts the beats." Calista pointed two fingers at her own wrist. "I count what’s under them. That’s the difference between a poisoner and a healer, and don’t ever tell her I said it."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth for the first time since the throne room.

"What do you want, my lady?"

"Three things, and you can refuse all three."

"Say them."

"First. Stop sleeping in your boots. There’s a bolt on that door and I checked it myself before I knocked." She held up a second finger. "Second. Eat with us. Not in this room but at the table with the five of us, where I can watch you do it."

"And third?"

"Third is the one you’ll refuse."

"Say it anyway."

"Let me write to your mother."

Roderic stood up.

"No."

"Not with your name nor with mine." Calista stayed in the chair, which is the only way to keep a man standing in front of you. "As a sister of the Vado, on diocesan paper, asking after three daughters and a widow’s household. That letter crosses no border it shouldn’t and names nobody."

"And what does it say?"

"That she’s well. That her house still stands." Calista held his eyes. "And that whatever she paid twenty years ago, somebody in this capital knows she paid it."

"Somebody knows already." Roderic looked at the door. "There’s a man out there with twelve carts and my file."

"There’s a man out there with everybody’s file. He hasn’t used yours."

"He will."

"Then he’ll use it against a stranger who has nobody, or against a woman with four people who know and won’t say." She stood up. "Those aren’t the same odds. I’ve bet on worse."

Roderic Alden stood in the middle of a room with no belongings and no marks on the walls, and for once he didn’t have anything ready.

"Why are you doing this?"

"Because they took a title off me nine days ago and gave it to you, and I’ve spent nine days deciding whether to hate you for it." Calista picked up the pension list. "I’ve decided. It’s a lot of work and I’m too tired."

"That isn’t an answer."

"No." She got to the door and stopped with her hand on it. "The answer is that I spent eleven years telling women that God knew what they’d hidden, so I’m not going to hand you a God who knows."

"Then what?"

"Me," she said. "I know. That’s all you get, and it’s more than you had this morning."

She opened the door.

"Eat at the table tomorrow. I’ll be counting."

When it closed, Roderic Alden sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled off one boot, then the other, and set them side by side on the floor where anyone walking in could see them.

Two floors up, in a study with an open case and a grey notebook, the blue window lit in my palm on its own.

[Carrier load: 74% ▼ 72%]

[HERO, I didn’t do that.]

[Neither did you.]