Blind Tower

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 24

This is the latest installment of The Falcon’s Children, a fantasy novel being published serially on this Substack. For an explanation of the project, click here. For the table of contents, click here. For an archive of world building, click here.

And a note of apology to subscribers; for reasons related to my new day job obligations I am quite behind on the audio versions of these chapters, but I’m going to continue to post on the intended schedule and hopefully catch up on the recordings as I go.

All the next day, the city gates were closed, the Falconguard as well as the watch patrolled the streets, and Rendale's rising panic stayed in check. But barely, only barely: Though legionnaires had barred the road south, Winter’s Town mostly emptied, the mountain men not so much fleeing as evaporating, and inside the walls most people expected Varelis bar Veruna to ride down the northward pike at any moment.

So it was through mostly-empty streets, with armed men at the corners and small crowds stirring around the Temple and the shrines, that Gavian took his final walk to the House of Birds.

The answer to his knock on the red door was slow, the guards’ blades a little more obvious than usual, and the common room was empty save for Reffio, who sat at a table near the fireplace drawing a file — scrape, scrape, scrape — across his nails.

“The answer, captain,” he said before Gavian had said anything, “is we can hide anyone, sure enough — make them disappear. But this time the price gets paid upfront, and paid in gold.”

He thinks I want my princess hidden.

“Good guess, friend, and close, but not quite there. What I’m here for is a good bit stranger. I need to see your mistress.”

Ruffio gave him a bland look. “The mistress is busy thinking on how much she’ll overcharge the Old Hound’s officers. What you’re needing to ask, you can ask me.”

“I’ll ask you, but in front of your mistress. What I’m offering, what I need, concerns her too.”

“Can’t do it,” the bald man said. “Not this day. Not when we don’t know how things will settle in a tenday. If it’s wartime I’m the general here. You should understand.”

Has the old bird already fled the city? Gavian thought, but what he said was cold and stern: “Do you mean that she’s suspending our arrangements because she thinks there might soon be a different arse on the Falcon Throne? She’s not such a fool: Nobody in the House of Verna gives a damn who runs this city’s underworld or what entanglements they had the day before yesterday, but if she won’t help me in an hour of need I can assure you by all the angels that Alsbet Montair will remember.”

“Now look you, captain,” said Reffio, entirely unruffled, “why would you be jumping to the conclusion that we won’t help, when you haven’t even sat yourself down here, let me find you a drink, and told me what it is you want? I told you straight out: If you just need someone spirited out of the city, we’ll do it if the price is right. And for something else, something a bit more complicated, I could turn your little speech right back on your fine self: After all we’ve been through together, half measures and full, why would you assume that your odds of a yes are lower if it goes through me? Hells, maybe you’re better asking me first” — a smile, an eyebrow lifting toward the hairless dome — “seeing as how you always seem to think that I’m easily swayed by the promise of some criminality.”

“All right,” Gavian said, still standing, keeping himself soldier-stiff, “all right. I do need some criminality.”

“That’s more like it. Against whom, then?

“Against what, is more the question. I need some arson, and I need it in the darkest hours of the night. A diversionary fire.”

“Fire in the dark, you say? Now that does interest me. But more than that, it interests me in why you need it. So let’s say that I’m open to the possibility, but I need a little clearer sense of what it means … politically.”

“It’s not the kind of thing where you need to know the why of it to do it well. And we can pay in real coin. You asked for gold upfront, I have it.”

“Oh, no, but now you’ve interested me too much. The House of Verna doesn’t care who runs the underworld, sure enough, but if we’re doing something besides hiding people for a price, if we’re doing something more violent-like that all the world can see, well, all kinds of strange roads run away from that kind of decision. And I’d like to be able to see a few of them, just a few, from where we sit right now.”

Do you trust them? Alsbet had asked when he had given her the outline of what he planned to ask, and why he felt like he could ask it. None of the questions he didn’t care to answer, no mention of the dead priest — just do you trust them?

And of course the answer was only so far as their self-interest. But as to whether they would make a bargain, the question that mattered was what he had to offer, and she had given him the permission that he needed.

So he sat down at Reffio’s table to make the necessary deal.

Night fell, and the Old Hound did not come. The only new arrival was a bank of clouds pushing east from Ysan, whose billows seemed pause as darkness fell, just westward of the city, leaving a jaundiced moon to light up half the sky while the rest was black as pitch.

It was in first hour of darkness that Padrec, meeting again with his council, sent again for Benfred, to join him to their plans.

It would be morning — a morning of chaos and tumult — before the servants sent looking for Benfred felt confident enough in their failure to find him to bring word to the emperor that the Duke of Meringholt had vanished from the Castle and, it seemed, from the city as well.

In the between-time, just after the bells of midnight, Fidelity ceased pacing in her cell and dressed herself, robe and hood and veil and heavy cloak, and slipped out into the long dormitory hallway.

She paused for a moment near Temperance’s door, wondering for the last time if she should have confided in someone before it all went this far. But everything she liked about her friend — the giggles, the gossip, the relaxed frivolity — made it impossible. And there was no one else, not with all the threads she imagined running up from the Reverend Mother to the Castle, to Lord Arellwen but also angels-knew-who-else, running up and joining a web that she could never hope to comprehend.

No, there was no one. It didn’t matter where she went: she could be her father’s daughter, the Ladyhawk’s whore, Arellwen’s holy sister, and in each place she ended up utterly alone.

And to think that for a moment she had felt relief, running away down the steps from the princess’s apartments, the weight of her secret lifted and given away! As if it could have all ended with the captain’s interrogation, the princess’s blessing, and then sweet escape. As if she what she told them didn’t make her a witness, essential to any move they might decide to make. As if they could do something about her information without also doing something with her.

She had thought all this through by the time she had spent an hour back in the sisterhouse, and so it was with resignation, not surprise, that she accepted a written message from the princess late that morning — a message given to her in person, after a summons to the sisterhouse door, where a thin legionnaire with sandy hair and bright green eyes bowed and told her that he was to await her reply.

It was fortunate she could read well enough now, because angels knew what she would have done otherwise, standing there with the sister-doorkeeper and a note that bade her come to this door tonight, by imperial command, and Fereth will bring you to my company. Tell no one, as you have kept other secrets so well.

Of course she told Fereth that she understood and would obey, and he asked her to return the note and bade her farewell in a way that seemed so conspicuously demanding, even menacing, that she was sure the sister-doorkeeper would say something, but thankfully it was daffy Merciful who didn’t notice anything at all.

There was suspicion elsewhere, she was sure she caught some of it from Sister Diligence in the refectory that evening, probably it had filtered up to the Reverend Mother — why is the princess so interested in the girl Lord Arellwen imposed on us? But all the rhythms of the evening were normal, she behaved normally, sang normally, ate normally, prayed normally, and closed her door at ten bells for the normal six hours of sleep before the morning orison. Then she sat awake until it was time to meet whatever doom was to be inflicted on her next.

Now she went down the stairs, hand clutching the bannister in the dark, too cautious to even light a candle. The downstairs was a black pool where a single taper floated, half burned out, beside the doorway to the cell where the sister-doorkeeper slept. The door itself was a hulking outline, barred and bolted but not, she knew, locked against escape; this was not the kind of sisterhouse that worried particularly about runaways. She pulled the cloak tighter, feeling the cold strengthen as she reached the door, and then heaved the bar upward as carefully and slowly as she could. It clattered but not too loudly, she hoped, as she drew one bolt — snick-snack — and then another, letting the door swing inward, dark within meeting smoldering torchlight just outside, where the soldier stood, cloaked and waiting.

For a moment they just stood looking at one another. She didn’t say anything: What was there to say?

Finally Fereth spoke: “Best come, sister — every minute we’re asking for attention we don’t want.”

So she went through the door, the chill embracing her, and turned to pull it closed — and in that instant saw a figure behind her, backlit by the ebbing candlelight, close enough for the legionnaire’s torch to reveal the unveiled, bleary face of Merciful.