Chapter 4: For Merit Alone

He left by the side door, because it was shorter, and because the short way did not pass the duke’s pool.

His carriage waited at the gate with the lamps lit at the corners and the driver already up on the box — hat down, reins in one fist, patient in the particular way paid men are patient, which is to say on the clock. Somewhere down the long body of Thornhallow the lamp boy was still making his round, and the house was going dark a window at a time, like something being swallowed.

Ambrose crossed the yard. He was putting the night in order as he went, because that was how he kept himself upright at the end of a day: the facts in one column, what to do about them in another, and let the second column wait until morning. One body. No women in the house. A captain who had not lied to him yet. A menu, and a word he was not going to think about again.

He put his boot on the step.

The step held. The yard was what moved.

He stood with one hand flat on the carriage frame and let the ground come back, and while he stood there his coat shifted against his side, and his dinner came home to him, the way it had been promising since he sat down at the table, and he breathed through his nose and waited out the first edge of it.

Then, out of the dark at the gate: “Chancellor.”

He turned.

Two lamps burned on the gateposts and didn’t reach far. Past them, where the lane ran between Thornhallow and the house across from it, a third light moved — a lantern, held up by a servant — and beside the servant stood an old man.

Ambrose knew him without needing the light. Eight days in this city had taught him the shapes of the men who mattered, and this was one of them. Lord Alaric Moray. Provost of the Royal College, keeper of its staff of office. Uncle to the Duke of the North Marches.

The old man carried his weight on a stick, the bad leg turned out to the side, the way a man stands when the standing itself is the hard part. He wasn’t coming nearer. He wasn’t going back. His coat was buttoned wrong at the collar — the top button through the second hole — and he hadn’t fixed it, which told Ambrose how long he had been standing there and how little he cared who knew it.

“Lord Moray.”

“Chancellor.” A shallow nod. “Forgive the hour.”

“I’ll forgive it if you tell me it caught you on your way past.”

“Nothing catches me on my way past anymore.” Moray set the stick and reset his grip. “I came out to wait for you. Your carriage has stood at that gate since before dark.”

Ambrose let go of the carriage and straightened, and if that cost him anything he kept it off his face. He looked past the old man at the house across the lane. Every window in it was lit. Every one, at an hour when that house should have been dark from the second floor up.

“You could have waited indoors,” he said. “I’d have come to the door.”

“You might have.” Moray said it without complaint in it. “But I’ve spent the afternoon having men tell me things in my own front room, and I’ve had enough of that for one day. I’d rather be the one standing.”

“Then say it standing,” Ambrose said, “and then we’ll both be out of this cold.”

Moray didn’t say it yet. He looked down the lane a moment, at the two houses and the strip of wet stone between them, as though what he had come to say were something he’d set down there earlier and would now have to go and pick up.

“The High Court’s people were at my nephew’s gate tonight,” he said at last. “And so were you. So you know about the woman in the duke’s water.”

“I know about the woman in the duke’s water.”

“Then you should know about mine.” He brought his eyes back. “I had the cistern in my court drawn down this afternoon, first time since spring. There were three women in it. Young. All three.”

Somewhere further down the lane a door shut, and a man laughed at something, and the laugh went along the wall and didn’t reach either of them.

Ambrose had both hands on the carriage door. He took them off it and put them in his coat, because his hands had their own ideas tonight and he preferred to keep them where he could watch them.

“You’ve sent to the Warden,” he said. It was not a question.

“First thing. And to the High Court, and to my own people, and to every other office a man is supposed to send to before he takes to standing in lanes.” Moray’s stick scraped half an inch over the stone and stopped. “I’m not out here at midnight because I don’t know who to write to, Chancellor.”

“No,” Ambrose said. “You’re out here at midnight because writing to them didn’t feel like enough.”

Moray didn’t answer that. Ambrose came down off the step, so that the two of them were on the same stones, and stayed there in the cold, which was the smallest decent thing available to him, and did it anyway.

“I’m sorry about your house,” he said. “And sorry about the women. And sorry it’s you standing out here and not one of your men.”

“One of my men is holding the lantern,” Moray said, “and wishing he wasn’t. A house with three bodies in it is not a house a man wants to be in alone.” He looked at the lit windows, and then back. “Though that’s not why I’m out here either. God forgive me for saying so, and He will have to, because it’s true: I’m not out here for the women.”

“Then what for.”

“For the other thing.” Moray shifted his weight off the bad leg and onto the stick. “It’s been at me for five days, and it’ll be at me all night whether or not I ask you, so I may as well ask you and lose the sleep over your answer instead of over the question.”

“Ask.”

Moray looked at him a long moment. Then he said, “Why did you recommend me?”

Ambrose said nothing.

“Five days ago, in the Great Hall, before the whole realm, you stood up and put my name to the Provost’s seat of the College. I read it in the minutes the same as everyone else. You never sent me a word before, and you haven’t sent me one since, and I’ve had the question in my throat since the day I read it.”

“Five days,” Ambrose said, because it was the only part of the sentence he could check.

“Five. You know what that seat is. The College turns out the men this kingdom runs on — the clerks, the justices, the secretaries who’ll be sitting at the table of the boy on the throne before he’s old enough to shave. He’s ten years old. And as of five days ago, the seat and the staff under it are both in the hand of a Moray.”

He laid it out on the stones between them.

“And I am not the Moray who matters.” Moray said it the way a man reads out a sum he has checked twice already. “The one who matters holds the whole of the north and the army that comes with it, and a claim on that boy’s chair that no lawyer in the realm would have to argue twice.”

He let that stand.

“So I’ll ask the whole of it while I’m out here and cold. Am I a piece that somebody’s moving?”

Ambrose ran the arithmetic, because he could not help running it, and it came out the way it had come out five days ago, in the light and the noise of the morning. The College. The boy on the throne. The duke in the north with the army at his back, and a name that would carry him into the boy’s chair if the boy should ever fall. And here stood the duke’s own uncle in the dark, asking the only question that mattered, which meant the old man had been over the same ground himself and come out at the same place.

He had thought all of it before he said a word in the hall — in the same order Moray was thinking it now, and past that. He had never said it out loud, and he was not going to say it in a lane.

“Why did you recommend me,” Moray said again, quieter.

“For merit alone,” Ambrose said.

He said it the way he would have told a man the time, and then said nothing else at all.

The servant’s arm had begun to tire under the lantern and the light dipped and came back. Moray didn’t turn to look at it, because Moray was looking at him.

“That’s the whole of it,” Moray said.

“That’s the whole of it.”

“A man with a reason gives it in three sentences.” Moray’s voice was low and not unkind. “A man who wants me to stop asking gives it in one. And a man who doesn’t care what I think gives it exactly the way you just did, and then stands out here in the cold, and doesn’t have the decency to look pleased with himself.”

“I’m not pleased with myself,” Ambrose said. “It’s nearly midnight and I’ve been on my feet since six.”

Moray looked at him. Then he laughed — a real one, surprised up out of him and loud at the gateposts. He had to put his free hand on the stick to hold himself up, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

Ambrose stood with both hands in his coat and watched him do it, and did not know what he had said.

“You’ll not get a better answer out of me by laughing,” he said.

“I know it.” Moray was still grinning. “That’s the part that’s funny.”

He got himself back, and turned the stick toward home, and started away with the servant bringing the light along at his shoulder. Two steps on he stopped and said something to the servant — three words, maybe four, low and quick — and Ambrose caught none of it, and the two of them went on toward the Moray house, and the door took the lantern in, and the lit windows stayed lit.

Ambrose got into the carriage.

“Home,” he said, and the driver, who had heard enough of the end of it to know better than to talk, put the horses into the lane.

The leather was cold. The carriage turned out of the gate and past the Moray house, where not one window had gone out, and then up the long hill.

Ambrose sat in the dark and did the arithmetic over. Two houses on one lane. Four young women out of the water in a single day — three of them on no better word than an old man’s, and one he had seen for himself, under a wet sheet, with a bruise laid across her throat. And five days ahead of all of it, his own voice in the hall, putting the College into the hands of the duke’s family and asking nothing for himself on the face of it.

He turned the terms over all the way. It was not a coincidence. That was as far as he could get, and past it there was no name, no reason, not the first scrap of proof, and no night left to go looking for any of it.

His stomach came due on the meat somewhere on the far slope, exactly on schedule, and for the rest of the drive he sat with one hand braced flat against the seat and paid it.