Page 22 of Last Flame
He breathes out, drags a hand down his face. “Bad sleep. Strange dreams.”
It’s the most he’s given me and it’s still nothing. I can usually read every man on this staircase before he opens his mouth. Tonight Rayner gives me a lie about sleep and there’s nothing underneath it I can reach.
I’ve never once had to wonder about this man.
I can’t afford to start right now.
The doors to the Embers stand open.
I don’t like that.
Four hundred years, and I’ve stood at these doors eight times. Eight. I keep the count the way I keep all my counts, because the number is information and information is the only thing that’s ever kept these men alive. Eight times, and the doors have never once been open before we reached them. You wait. They decide. The waiting is the message.
There’s no waiting tonight. That’s a message too.
We walk in.
It’s never been all of them. In eight visits I’ve seen three, four, once five of the Vestry seated, never the full circle. Tonight the circle isclosed. Every seat filled. And in the place at the center that I’d half-decided was a story they tell to frighten the young — Ezra. Her gray hair lifting in a wind that isn’t moving anywhere else in the room.
I didn’t believe she was real.
Four hundred years, and I still don’t have a name for what sits in this room. The Legion knows dragons. The Orders know how the world is put together. Nobody knows the Vestry. I’ve never needed a category badly enough to invent one, and I don’t reach for it now. They’re the Vestry. That’s the whole of what anyone can say.
Her eyes find mine the second we clear the threshold and they do not let go. Every instinct I’ve spent four centuries sharpening stands up at once and says the same word.
Bad.
No one offers us anything. No seats, no names, no softening. They don’t explain themselves to men like us and we’ve never been fools enough to expect it. For a long moment nobody speaks. They take us in the way I take in a room before I commit men to it — measuring, sorting, deciding what we are and what we’ll cost — and it is a deeply strange thing to stand on the receiving end of. I read people for a living. In this room I’m the one being read, opened up and turned over, and I cannot read a single face back. That’s never happened to me. I’d prefer it never happen again.
Ezra stands. Her eyes don’t leave mine.
“We have located Erik.”
My pulse kicks once, hard. My face doesn’t move. My face is the only part of me that takes orders without arguing, and I need it now more than I’ve ever needed it.
Beside me Brock goes rigid.
“Alive.” She says it before the question can fill the room, before any of us has to be the one to ask it and risk the answer. “He is alive.”
Gunnar’s shoulders come down. The breath I didn’t know I was holding goes out of me slow. Alive. Three years, and the word still does something to a man’s knees.
And still I can’t settle, because the Embers do not wake a unit in the dark and open their doors and seat their eldest to tell four men their friend is breathing. Good news comes by messenger. You’re only brought into this room for the part that comes after the good news, and I already don’t want it.
“Where?” Quiet. You don’t raise your voice in here.
“Beyond the crossing.” Ezra’s voice is unhurried, like she has all the time the rest of us are running out of. “He has been beyond the crossing since the night we lost him.”
Three years. One crossing away. Close enough to walk to, in the scheme of things, and it took the oldest powers in Teth this long to find him. I don’t like that. If he was that close, either no one looked, or something kept him from being found. Neither answer is one I want to carry out of this room.
“Then we bring him home,” I say.
“That,” Ezra says, “is the difficulty.”
She doesn’t continue right away. She’s watching me, looking for something. She has outlasted more of us than I will ever meet, and she is choosing her next words with care. That, more than anything tonight, is what cools the room.
“There is a disturbance around him.” Her eyes stay on mine, only mine, and I feel the rest of the circle watching her watch me. “We cannot name it. We have looked, and the looking comes back empty.We know only that it surrounds him, and it is unlike anything we have read in an age of this world.”
The corner of her mouth lifts. Not a smile. Something older and stranger than a smile, aimed at me like she can see a road I’m standing at the foot of and haven’t noticed yet.
