Scene One: The Hours I Had
Perspective: Ren
By the time the sky above the window turned black, I had built six versions of my afternoon.
None of them put me in the gardens.
The shortest gap began when I left the Clock Tower and ended when the steward found me at the service entrance. That version required Luna to finish dressing my arm in less than a minute, the Academy to move several streets closer, and me to have arrived without stopping twice to keep from being sick.
It was not my best work.
"Stop moving your fingers."
The healer sat beside the basin with a lamp pulled close. I had been touching my thumb to each fingertip beneath the edge of the sheet.
"I'm checking them."
"You're irritating the wound."
"I'm checking whether irritation is still possible."
The sheet came back.
The healer pressed something cold against my thumb. Then my first finger. The second.
The third took longer.
My little finger felt nothing.
"Again," I said.
"No."
The healer settled my arm between the rolls of cloth and inspected the copper cuff. Its line of light remained closed above the elbow.
"Did you feel the fourth touch?"
"Yes."
"When?"
I considered improving the answer.
The healer waited.
"After you moved it."
A clean strip of linen was pulled over my wrist. The lamp moved back to the washstand.
The room became less bright. I lowered my head until my hair fell across my left eye.
"How long have I been here?"
"Several hours."
"That sounds imprecise for a healer."
"You need rest, not a clock."
That was fair.
Beyond the open doorway, one guard leaned against the opposite wall. The other sat on a stool with his helmet between his knees. They changed positions when they noticed me watching.
I looked at the healer instead.
"What happens to things said in this room?"
"They are heard."
"I had gathered that part."
The healer folded the blood stained linen inward before placing it in a metal bowl.
"I write what I treat."
"And what the princess asks?"
"If the princess asks whether your hand is attached, I will tell her."
"That seems reasonable."
"If she asks whether you killed Saint Dorothy, I will tell her to ask you."
I stopped touching my fingers.
The healer carried the bowl to the door. Neither guard tried to look inside it.
Not an ally, then. Just someone who understood the limits of a job.
At the moment, that was better.
A slow set of footsteps approached from the far end of the passage. One step landed properly. The next dragged.
The seated guard stood.
Sir Tobin appeared between them in a plain shirt and loose trousers. His ruined armor was gone. A bandage wrapped his left leg from knee to ankle, and someone had given him a wooden crutch that was too short.
He stopped at my door.
"No visitors," the standing guard said.
"I'm walking." Tobin shifted his weight on the crutch. "Very slowly."
"Keep walking."
The healer returned from the passage and adjusted the crutch beneath Tobin's arm by one notch.
"He rests here," the healer said.
The guard opened his mouth, thought better of it, and stepped aside without letting Tobin cross the threshold.
Tobin leaned against the doorframe.
There was more grey above his ears than I remembered. It had been there in the orchard. I had been trying not to see it.
"I asked about hazard pay," he said.
"And?"
"They said the expedition was part of my duty."
"Unfortunate. You almost died for free."
"Not free. I get to keep the crutch."
The joke left him looking younger than the grey did.
He turned it once against the floor.
"Pell says eight years. Maybe ten."
I watched the tip of the crutch move between two tiles.
"Can you feel it?" I asked.
"My leg hurts."
"The years."
"No." His fingers tightened around the handle. "That's the strange part."
The healer stood close enough to catch him if the leg failed. Tobin pretended not to notice.
"They showed me a mirror," he said. "I thought the grey would be worse."
"It looks distinguished."
"It looks like dust."
I had nothing useful for that.
He glanced at the guards before lowering his voice.
"Halden said you went onto the stones after me."
"He went farther."
"That wasn't what I asked."
I was beginning to dislike that sentence.
"Yes."
"Did you know what it would take?"
"From you?"
He nodded.
"No."
"From yourself?"
My right hand lay under clean linen. Four fingers rested in a line. The fifth had been arranged to resemble one.
"Yes."
Tobin absorbed that without thanking me. I was grateful.
"Would you do it again?" he asked.
The sensible answer was that I would not stand on a road full of moving years a second time. The honest one came first.
"Yes."
His mouth moved as if he had expected something longer.
"All right."
"What does that mean?"
"I hadn't decided whether to thank you or be afraid of you."
"And now?"
"Both."
The healer touched his shoulder.
Tobin pushed himself upright. Before turning away, he looked once at the hand beneath the linen.
"I won't tell them I saw anything under the stones," he said.
I had not asked him to lie.
That seemed to be happening without my help.
* * *
Scene Two: A Gardener at Work
Perspective: Captain Halden
The Academy steward answered questions beside the ovens because Princess Seraphina had ordered that nobody be dragged to the palace.
Halden approved of the order.
The steward did not. He kept glancing toward the kitchen doors as if expecting them to open on a cell.
"I sent them together," he said. "Some to the kitchens, some to stores. Ren went where the clerk wanted him."
"And before the palace request?"
The steward wiped flour from the duty ledger with his sleeve. It left a pale streak across the leather.
"In the lower rose beds. Before noon."
"You saw him?"
"From the upper path."
Halden opened the ledger.
The page held names, tasks, and short marks in dark ink. Beside Ren's name, the steward had written lower roses and drawn a line through it.
"Who marked this complete?"
"I did."
"After speaking to him?"
"I called down. He raised a hand."
"Which one?"
The steward's eyes shifted toward Halden's empty sword belt.
"I don't know."
"Think."
"The left."
Halden turned the ledger toward the oven light. The ink in Ren's entry had dried like the lines above and below it. It had not been added after the expedition.
"You inspected the work?"
"Of course." The answer came too quickly, then steadied. "The beds were watered. Loose heads cut back. The path swept."
"Could another gardener have done it?"
"Anyone could pour water. Ren clears the soil from the stone with the side of his boot. Never a broom. Says the bristles throw it back into the roses."
"And that had been done?"
"Yes."
The steward sounded offended now. Fear had found something smaller to stand behind.
Halden closed the ledger.
At the palace, the receiving clerk produced a second list. The Academy staff had been entered together. Ren's name was near the bottom, written in the same hurried hand as the others.
Duke Valerius received Halden in the Gate Room.
The receiving platform had been scrubbed. Grey stains remained between the stones where the root fragment had broken apart. Two warding mages worked behind the barred doors and did not speak.
"The porter was available," Valerius said. "The swords required carrying. I joined one problem to the other."
"Why him?"
"He was nearest the supplies."
The clerk cleared his throat.
Valerius did not turn.
Halden did.
"The sword bag was moved after His Grace selected him," the clerk said.
Valerius adjusted one cuff.
"Then he was nearest the place I intended the supplies to be."
"You looked along the servants and stopped at him."
"I admire your memory, Captain. I hope it proves as useful when recovering the property your unit abandoned."
The sword bag. The potions. The princess's blade. The reserve core burning in a station beyond a gate no one could safely open.
Halden left before the duke could add anything to the list.
He carried both records back to the Academy.
One said Ren had been gardening while Saint Dorothy died.
The other said Duke Valerius had lied about a bag of swords.
Halden trusted the second one more.
* * *
Scene Three: The Account
Perspective: Ren
Tobin had made it six steps down the passage when Roxxy came around the corner.
He tried to stand straighter. The crutch slipped.
She caught his elbow before the healer had to.
"You were told to rest."
"I was told to walk."
"By whom?"
Tobin indicated the healer.
Roxxy looked over his head.
"To the end of the passage," the healer said. "Not into the room."
"I did not enter."
One of the guards became interested in the floor.
Roxxy handed Tobin back to the healer and came inside. Halden followed with two ledgers tucked beneath one arm.
He still had no sword.
That bothered me more now that I had seen what the world did to unarmed men.
Roxxy pulled the stool to the bed. She had put her gauntlets back on, but the right one was not fastened at the wrist.
"Captain."
Halden opened the Academy ledger.
"The steward's record places Ren in the lower rose beds until shortly before the palace requested staff. He inspected the work himself."
Roxxy kept her attention on me.
I arranged my face around mild confusion.
It was not difficult. Most of the confusion was genuine.
"The steward saw him?" she asked.
"From a distance. Called down to him. The person he saw raised his left hand."
Luna's fingers closed around my cuff in the Clock Tower.
Use the other one.
I kept my left hand flat on the sheet.
"The entry was made before Halden came asking?" Roxxy said.
"Yes."
"And the work?"
"Done in the manner the steward associates with Ren."
Roxxy leaned back slightly.
I could have corrected the record.
I could have told them the lower roses had been tended by someone else while I was turning Dorothy to ash. That would have been honest. It would also have required a second sentence.
I said nothing.
Roxxy waited long enough to make the silence mine.
"Valerius?" she asked.
Halden produced the palace list.
"He says Ren was chosen because he stood nearest the supplies."
"I was sitting," I said.
Roxxy's eyes narrowed.
"That is the part you object to?"
"The sword bag was dragged over after he chose me."
"The receiving clerk confirms it," Halden said.
Roxxy turned the loose strap of her gauntlet between two fingers.
"He lied about something that did not need a lie."
"He may have remembered efficiently," I said.
Neither of them found that helpful.
Halden set the palace list on top of the Academy ledger.
"There is more. The supplies left beyond the gate have been entered as unrecovered crown property. The reserve core is still feeding the station. The potion bag and sword bag remain near the road. Your sword is in the orchard, Highness."
Her hand stopped at the strap.
"I know where I dropped it."
"Valerius knows too."
"He can send me the invoice."
It was the closest I had heard her come to a joke. Her face did not change enough to prove it had been one.
She dismissed Halden to the doorway but did not send him down the passage this time.
Then she placed the Academy ledger on her knees.
"On paper," she said, "you were working when Dorothy died."
The healer returned and adjusted one of the cloth rolls beside my wrist.
I watched the black cover of the ledger.
"That is convenient," I said.
"For you."
"No."
The word came out before I could flatten it.
Roxxy heard the edge in it.
"You didn't arrange this."
It was not a question. I gave it the answer I had given the other one.
Nothing.
She opened the ledger again.
"Either someone was lucky, or they knew which hand you could still use," she said. "They knew how you worked. And they put you in those gardens before anyone outside the expedition had reason to connect you to what happened beyond the Barrier."
Luna knew the hand.
She knew the Academy existed. She knew I had to return somewhere ordinary.
I had never shown her the lower rose beds.
"The record gives you an alibi," Roxxy said. "It does not explain you."
"Very little does."
"I am not clearing you."
"I didn't ask you to."
"No. Someone else did it for you."
The lamp flame shifted as the door opened wider behind Halden. Both guards remained in the passage.
Roxxy stood with the ledger under one arm.
"I will give my father the record," she said. "And I will tell him what I saw."
There it was. Not protection. Not betrayal. Both placed neatly on the same page.
"What happens to me?"
"You stay here."
"I was afraid of that."
"If the Barrier fails tonight, staying in that bed may be the safest order anyone gives you."
"And if it holds?"
She fastened the loose strap at her wrist.
"Then I ask better questions."
Roxxy left with Halden and both ledgers.
The healer lowered the lamp. One guard returned to his stool; the other stood where the light from the passage stretched his shadow beneath the door.
I thought of three people who might have given me those missing hours.
Luna, who should not have known enough.
Valerius, who had already lied once.
And whoever had stood on the palace balcony without moving while I threatened the crown.
The shadow beneath the door narrowed.
Neither guard moved.
A thin edge of darkness bent toward my bed, held there for a moment, then slipped back into the passage.
I kept my mouth shut.
Apparently, I was getting very good at being protected.