Edmund was nine, and he had been in the gallery above the council chamber for both days of the argument, which nobody had noticed except Alaric, who did not count, and which he had arranged carefully.
He had been doing it for about a year. The gallery was for storage -- old tally-boxes, a broken settle, rolls of something nobody had unrolled in a decade -- and the stair to it ran up behind the scriptorium, and if you went up before the council assembled and lay flat behind the tally-boxes and stayed absolutely still, you could hear everything said below and be seen by nobody. He had worked this out himself. He had told no one, including -- especially -- Alys, who could not be trusted with anything, and who would have wanted to come, and who could not lie still for an hour if her life depended on it.
Old Alaric knew. Alaric had caught him on the stair in the spring and, instead of telling, had given him pages of the case to copy on Thursdays, and had said that it was useful to know where he was. Edmund had turned that over many times since. He had decided it meant that Alaric thought he was worth something. He had not told anyone that, either.
So he lay behind the tally-boxes with dust in his nose and listened, and on the first day he heard the old castellan say that the charter had holes in it, and that the town had been protected by its reputation and not its law. He did not understand most of it. He understood that the grown-ups were frightened, which he had never heard before in that room, not even when the lord with thirty men had come.
And then he heard the sentence.
They will ask, as commissioners always ask, about the founder. Where he came from. What his family was. Why there is no record of Master Thomas of Argenton anywhere in this Kingdom before he walked into this valley.
There was a silence after it, down in the chamber. Edmund lay in the dust and listened to the silence, and it was the silence that went into him, more than the words. It was the silence of a room full of people who all knew the same thing and were waiting for somebody else to say it.
Nobody said it.
On the second day he heard Cecily say that the town had been free-riding, and that it was wrong, and that they had all known it was wrong and said nothing. He heard his father agree with her. He heard Alaric say that the charter had held for twenty years by luck. He lay very still and thought that everything he had been told about this town by everyone in it was turning out to be slightly different from the inside, the way the wheel at the flume looked like one thing from the lane and another from the race underneath.
When the council rose he waited until the last footsteps had gone and the clerks had shut the scriptorium door. Then he came down the stair, very carefully, one step at a time, and let himself out by the back way, and went and sat on the stone lip above the flume where he was not allowed to sit, and stayed there for two hours.
He was a literal child and an observant one, and he was nine, which is not an age for the kind of inference that would have got him anywhere near the truth. He did not wonder whether his father was a sorcerer or a fugitive or a bastard prince. He did not have those thoughts yet. What he took from it was simpler and, in its way, worse.
His father had a secret. Everyone in that room knew about it. Nobody had ever told him.
He sat with that above the wheel until the light began to go, and the race went on under his feet the way it always did, and he took the Genoa coin out of his pocket and turned it over and over in his fingers and did not know why.
He asked a few days later, at supper, in the manner of a nine-year-old, which is to say with no preamble at all and at the worst available moment.
"Where were you born?"
The table went quiet. Alys, who had been mid-way through a complaint about the miller's girl, stopped with her mouth open. Margery put down her spoon. Hugh, three, did not notice anything and went on eating.
Thomas had been reaching for the bread. He did not stop reaching for the bread, which took a small effort he was aware of making.
"A long way from here."
"Where, though."
"Somewhere you've never heard of, and I couldn't show you on Elias's maps, because it isn't on them." Thomas passed the bread to Alys, who did not want it and took it anyway. "Why?"
"Because you've never said." Edmund's chin had the particular set it got when he had decided something in advance. "Alys knows where Mother was born. It's Ashfield. Diccon was born in the lower parish. Cecily was born in a village that's all dead now. Everyone knows where everyone's born. You've never once said."
"That's true."
"So where?"
Thomas was aware of Victoria beside him, not moving at all, not coming to his aid, and understood that she was leaving it to him because it was his to answer, and that she would have a great deal to say about how he answered it later.
He thought, very fast, about the things he could say. A town in the far north. A port across the sea. An abbey that had burned. He had used each of them once or twice, over the years, with men who had a right to ask, and each time it had held because nobody had cared enough to pull at it. He looked at his son's face and knew that this one would pull. Not now. In a year, or ten. Every lie he told tonight was a thread the boy would one day find the end of.
"Edmund," he said, "there are things about where I come from that I don't talk about, and I'm not going to talk about them tonight either. That isn't because you're a child. It's because I decided a long time ago that it's better for everyone that I don't, and I've held to that for twenty-five years, including with people who had a much better right to ask than you do."
"That's not an answer."
"No. It isn't." Thomas made himself hold the boy's eyes. "I'm sorry. It's the answer you're getting."
Edmund stared at him, and Thomas watched something happen in his son's face -- not anger, quite, but a kind of recalculation. A child shifting a piece of furniture he had always thought was nailed to the floor and finding that it moved.
"Fine," Edmund said.
He went back to his supper. Alys looked from her brother to her father and back again, and did not finish her complaint about the miller's girl. Margery picked her spoon up again and watched everyone over it. And Edmund did not mention it again, to his father, for nine years.
Thomas lay awake most of that night.
"You lied to him," Victoria said, in the dark, at some hour.
"I didn't lie. I refused."
"You refused in a way meant to close the subject for good, to a nine-year-old, at a table with his sisters watching." Her voice was not accusing. It was worse than accusing; it was careful. "I'm not saying you were wrong. I'd have done the same, and I'd have been worse at it. I'm saying don't tell yourself you refused, because in ten years he isn't going to remember it as a refusal."
Thomas stared at the ceiling.
"He was in the gallery," he said. "Wasn't he."
"Almost certainly. He's been on that stair for about a year. Alaric spotted him in the spring and asked me whether we wanted him removed, and I said no."
"You what?"
"I said no." Victoria turned over to face him. "He is going to run this town one day, or part of it, and he is nine, and there is no faster education anywhere than listening to Alaric and Cecily disagree about tenure law." She was quiet a moment. "I did not think he would hear that particular sentence. That was my error, and I'll carry it."
"It wasn't only--"
"I will carry it," she repeated, "because I chose it, and because I would choose it again, and because the other choice was raising a boy who thinks government is something that happens to other people." A pause. "But I want you to understand what has happened tonight. Our son now knows there is a thing about you that everyone in that chamber knows and he does not. He won't forget it. And every year he gets older, it will look less like a father protecting a child and more like a man keeping something from his heir."
He went up in the grey before dawn, when he had given up on sleep, and stood in the doorway of the room where Edmund and Hugh slept.
Hugh was flat on his back with his arms flung out, snoring a little. Edmund was turned to the wall. His breathing was too even. He was awake, and he knew his father was there, and he was not going to turn over.
Thomas stood there for some time. He thought of a dozen things he could say, and that none of them would be the true thing, and that anything less than the true thing would only be another thread for the boy to pull. He thought of his own mother standing in a doorway like this one, a very long way off, in a house that might not exist any longer in any form he would recognise. He thought that he had never once in his life lied to her about anything that mattered, and that he had just begun lying to his son, and would go on doing it for as long as either of them lived, and that it was the right thing to do, and that knowing it was right did not help at all.
"Goodnight," he said quietly, though it was nearly morning.
Edmund did not answer. Thomas went back down the stairs and sat at the kitchen table until the house woke, and when Victoria came down and found him there she put a cup in front of him without a word, and sat down across from him, and neither of them said anything until the children came.