Chapter 2: I Ask, You Write

I Ask, You Write

The file on the Chancellor ran to two pages, and Cassian had read it three times.

He sat behind the desk with his back straight and his shoulders set, the house’s thin incense threading one slow line past his shoulder, and read the whole of it the way he read a scout’s report on ground he had not walked himself. Two pages, for a week of Voss’s time and a purse of silver. Voss had spent that week in the coffeehouses and the barbershops and the Chancellery’s own front room, and had come back with a clean picture of a man whose office had sent a calling card up to Thornhallow every morning for seven days and gotten every one of them back unopened.

Cassian had spoken to him once in his life, the afternoon before, in a charity clinic. Everything else was two men standing on opposite sides of the same room at morning court, and that did not count.

Ambrose Calloway. Chancellor of the Realm.

Three generations of the family in the Crown’s service, and not one of them a surprise: first a ministry, then a council seat, then the top of it — a hundred years of the same career, run clean. Not a stain on any of them. Each had married once and fathered once; no branches, no bastards, no cousins worth counting. By the time the seals came down to Ambrose there was nobody left but him, and he had turned out to be worth all of it. At sixteen he had sat the College examinations and come out at the head of the field. After that his life had run straight, office after office, to the top — until the old king, Aldous, dying, had put his son’s hand into the Chancellor’s and named him Protector.

Aldous had not been sentimental about it. He had looked down the length of his own peerage and picked out the one house with a hundred years of clean paper behind it, and put his heir into its hands.

Cassian did not know this city. He had made sure of that years ago, which had been the point, and now the bill was arriving. Ten years on the Marches had kept him out of the capital except for two short visits, and every name in that file was a wall he could not read from the outside.

A thoroughly loyal servant of the Crown.

He said it out loud, twice. It came out smooth and easy, and he did not like the sound of it at all.

He looked out through the open door at the tree in the courtyard. It had come into leaf a fortnight back, and it moved now in the smallest wind there was, all of it shifting at once, and he watched it without seeing it, and turned the page.

There was a line at the foot of it, in a hand that was not Voss’s — smaller, pressed tight to the paper as if it had been paid for by the word.

No wife. And no woman’s company either, if the clerks have it right.

He read that one twice as well.

He was not a man who cared much where other men slept. He had come home from the north with a thousand things he did care about, and that was not on the list. And still he sat a while with the line, the way a man sits looking at a loose board in a floor he had planned to cross in the dark. He could not have said what it was costing him. He didn’t care to.

He reached for his brush and got as far as putting it in the ink.

The steps came down the corridor fast and heavy and gave up any pretense of quiet at the door, and Voss came in without knocking, because he never knocked.

“Your Grace. Something’s happened. Across the street.”

Cassian was up and moving before the sentence finished. He put the file in the desk drawer as he went past it and did not slow down.

The Morays kept their town house directly opposite Thornhallow: two gates facing each other across the width of a street, which was more contact than the two families had chosen in ten years. Cassian knew the outside of that house as well as he knew his own. The inside of it was not his business, and he had never once made it his business, which he had been quietly congratulating himself on for years.

By the time he crossed, the street had filled. A bailiff’s cart stood at the Moray gate with two men putting a rope over the back of it, and four or five others moved around doing nothing with enormous authority. The door of the house stood open. Somebody had set a lamp in the hall, though the sun was still well up.

Cassian stood at the edge of it and did what he always did first, which was look at hands and at where people stood, and read the room off that before he read a single face.

The bailiff held a writing board and a stick of chalk and wrote down nothing at all. Two of the Moray servants stood to one side of the gate with their hands clasped behind their backs, and neither of them was looking at the door. That told him more than the bailiff had. Men who studied the ground in front of a house that had just been opened up were men who already knew what was inside it.

Then the High Court’s carriage came up the street with the horses still breathing hard, and stopped at the second gate.

The first man down off the step was the Chancellor.

Calloway got out with a waxed paper packet in one hand, and even when he stopped and took in the cart and the men and the open door, he did not put the packet down or tuck it away. He stood holding it. He looked like a man who had been pulled out of his own evening and cleaned himself up in the carriage on the way: coat brushed, hair pinned, every trace of wherever he had been wiped off the surface of him — except his cuffs. The left one carried a wet dark smear along its edge, and Cassian looked at that before he looked at the man’s face.

Calloway turned back to the carriage and said something quick to whoever was still inside it, before he said anything to anyone on the street.

Perry Winslow came down after him, in no hurry at all, and stood looking around at the crowd as though he had been the one to call it here. Young, twenty-five maybe, and dressed by people who were not counting. A justice of the High Court, if Cassian had the coats right.

The Chancellor crossed toward the Moray gate. Winslow walked a step behind him and to the side, and as they passed the bailiff, Cassian heard him say, low and cheerful:

“Two Houses. Mind you get that written down right. Two Houses of the Crown’s own kin, on one street.”

The bailiff nodded. He had been minding it for an hour.

Cassian walked out of the crowd.

He took the Chancellor by the wrist before the man had reached the gate.

The street watched him do it. The High Court’s own man watched him do it. He did it anyway.

There was a small, particular stillness after that. The servants at the gate went still. The bailiff stopped writing nothing. Winslow turned his head with his mouth already open and did not get a word out before Cassian had the Chancellor turned and walking back the way he had come.

The Chancellor was half a head shorter and a good deal lighter, and he had one of those faces that make a room want to hear him talk. He also had a wrist, and Cassian had that.

“Your Grace—“ Calloway said.

“Don’t.” Cassian did not look back. “Not out here. Save it for inside.”

He gave the wrist one small warning squeeze. Behind him, the man did not talk. Behind both of them, the street began, quietly and all at once, to enjoy itself.

Thornhallow’s study sat at the back of the house, off a corridor with nothing else on it, which was the reason Cassian used it. He brought the Chancellor through the door, stopped him in the middle of the room, and shut the door behind them.

“Sit,” he said, and pushed him toward the chair at the desk.

The Chancellor did not sit. He stood at the edge of the desk with the packet still in his hand, looking around the room — the shelves, the gray light coming in over the top of the window — and then at Cassian, with the level, working patience of a man who believed he still knew where he was standing.

Cassian pulled the chair out himself, put a hand on the man’s shoulder, and pressed down. This time the man sat. Cassian reached past him for paper and a brush and set both on the desk in front of him.

“You don’t speak,” Cassian said. “Not one word of it. I ask. You write.”

The Chancellor looked at the brush. Then at him. Then picked it up and wrote, in a small clerk’s hand that sat lightly on the page, Why not.

Every stroke of it landed where the man had meant it to. Cassian noted that, and put it away with the rest of what he had on him.

“Because your voice is hard on the ear,” Cassian said, “and if I have to listen to it, I won’t sleep tonight.”

He had picked the words on the way down the hall. He had picked them because they were contemptuous, and contempt shuts a question off.

The brush stopped over the page. One beat, no more — and then it moved again, and the first word of it went crooked, and the man wrote straight on as though it had not.

I’ll try to keep it brief.

Cassian read it upside down and did not answer it. He put his hand flat on the middle of the desk instead, and left it there.

“Your office. The courts. Have you been taking in missing-persons petitions? Common people, gone. No body, no note, no reason. Lately.”

The brush came up. It did not touch the paper for a while.

How do you come by that question.

“I’m the one asking tonight. Answer it.”

The petitions are held under seal.

“I didn’t ask whether they were sealed. I asked whether they were coming in.”

The brush hovered. Then: Yes.

“How many.”

More than we announce.

“Only men.”

Yes.

“Young. Strong. The kind who could carry a spear, work a field, keep a wife.”

Calloway looked up. He got as far as drawing breath before he remembered the rule, and the breath went out of him, and he wrote Yes.

And then, fast, before Cassian could ask again: Why does it matter to you.

Cassian took the list out of his coat and put it on the desk and turned it around.

“Because two of my men are on it,” he said. “Off the Marches. Both of them soldiers. Gone six weeks, and nobody has brought me back a body or a reason, and those men were not the kind to wander off.”

The brush stayed where it was. The Chancellor reached for the list instead, and drew it closer, and read.

Cassian watched him read it. The mouth moved at one line and stopped at it.

Soldiers, he wrote at last.

“Yes.”

How many of the rest aren’t.

“More than will fit in a courthouse.”

The Chancellor sat back. Somewhere in the last few minutes he had put the packet down on the desk, close to his own hand, and it had not moved from there. Cassian looked at it a moment. Then away.

“But that isn’t why you’re here,” Cassian said.

The brush stopped.

“It’s the reason you’re in this house. It isn’t the reason you’re in that chair.” He took the list back, folded it, and put it inside his coat. “So you can stop working on it.”

The house had gone quiet around them. Nobody had come down the corridor since he shut the door.

Ten years, it had been. In the same spring, one boy had ridden north to the Marches at seventeen, and one boy had stood at the top of the College examinations at sixteen and heard the whole court clap for him, and until this week neither of them had ever had a reason to say one word to the other. Cassian had spent his ten years learning what the Marches smelled like in every season. He did not know what this man had spent his on, and he had never once wanted to know that about anybody.

Then why am I here, Calloway wrote, and looked up.

Cassian did not answer that.

There was something on the air near him. Clean and faint, like oil kept in a cold room. It was not the incense; he had stopped noticing the incense an hour ago. It came off the man. He leaned down, meaning to find the edge of it, and his knee came up against the arm of the chair.

The Chancellor went still. He did not turn his head. He put one hand on the arm of the chair and pushed back with it — the chair, himself, whatever would give — and nothing gave. The desk was at his knees, and behind him there was no room, only Cassian.

The door behind them came open.

Cassian straightened.

Voss stood in the doorway with his mouth already open. He got out half of a word — “Your—“ — and then his eyes went from Cassian’s face to the Chancellor’s face, to how close the two of them were, and then to the paper on the desk, and the other half of the word stayed where it was. He took one step back into the hall. His hand stayed on the door, which put him in the doorway and out of it at the same time.

“What,” Cassian said.

“Your Grace.” Voss swallowed. His eyes went to the Chancellor and away again. “They’ve brought a body up. Out of the water, in the courtyard.”

The Chancellor came off the chair as if he had been let out of it. He took the packet up off the desk, took half a step toward the door, and stopped himself, and turned to Cassian with the question already on his face — and remembered the rule. He closed his mouth. Then, deliberately, he looked at Cassian, and waited.

Cassian held the look a moment longer than he needed to.

“Come with me,” he said, and went.