Glenn wondered what it would be like to push against the tension, to feel it as it flexed and bent and broke. How warm it would feel to be on the other side. To feel arms around her, Kevin’s chest underneath her head.
The noise from below subsided. All that was left were scattered voices and the clatter of tin as plates and tankards were gathered from tables and returned to the bar. Footsteps creaked up the stairs and down the hallway as people moved into their rooms for the night. Quiet settled throughout the inn.
Drawn by an island of warmth, Glenn’s hand moved beneath the covers to Kevin’s chest. She was only inches from him when he shifted and there was a faint metallic clatter beneath his shirt. His hand fell on whatever it was and stilled it.
“What did she make you promise?”
“Nothing,” Kevin said. “Just … that I’d be safe. That’s all.”
Glenn waited for more, but moments later his breathing became slow and regular. She turned and stared up at the ceiling, wondering why, for the first time in his life, Kevin Kapoor had just lied to her.
Late that night Kevin pulled the blankets aside and slipped out of bed. Glenn watched out of half-closed eyes as he dressed quietly in the dark and then disappeared into the hallway. His footsteps whispered along the hall and down the stairs.
The inn was quiet except for a low murmur that rose up through the floorboards beneath her. Soon Glenn could make out at least three separate voices — two that were deeper and older, and another …
Glenn lowered her head and focused. The third voice was higher and talked fast in a short, clipped cadence. Kevin.
The wood floor creaked as she put her weight on it. She froze, but there was no change in the voices below. Glenn eased out of bed and crept to the door.
There was a shaft of light coming up the stairway down the hall.
Glenn dropped to a crouch at the edge of the staircase. She kept her body hidden in the darkness, leaning forward just enough so she could look down into the inn.
Kevin sat with his back to her at a table by the fire. Across from him sat the bartender and the violin player.
“Is he here or not?” Kevin asked.
“We’re still not sure who we’re talking to,” the bartender said.
His clawlike hands were on the table, half curled into fists.
“A friend,” Kevin said.
“Prove it.”
Kevin’s hand dropped below the lip of the table and beneath his coat, where he had hidden whatever it was Opal had given him. He pulled it out and placed it flat on the table, but Glenn still couldn’t see what it was.
The bartender turned to the violin player, but the older man remained still, staring across the table at Kevin.
“Can’t imagine where you got that,” the violin player said.
“It was given to me.”
The bartender scoffed. “Might have killed the old bag for it.”
“What do you want?” the violin player asked.
“To talk to Merrin Farrick.”
“About what?”
Kevin said nothing. The bartender shifted in his chair, but the violin player didn’t move. He was an older man with slate gray hair and a heavily lined face covered in short steely whiskers. His eyes, narrow and sharp, were hard on Kevin. Glenn was sure Kevin would crumble under that glare, but he sat deadly still, staring back at them until, as if by some strange magic, the two older men grew smaller and Kevin
larger.
The violin player glanced at the bartender and then out toward the front of the bar. The red-headed man pushed his chair back and quickly walked away from the table. The front door opened and shut, leaving Kevin alone with the musician.
“I’m Merrin Farrick,” the man said. His voice was different now, deep and full. He sat straight in his chair and his eyes were clear as ice.
“How do I know that?”
The man smiled ever so slightly. “There aren’t many people
lining up to lay claim to the name,” Farrick said. “Not with Her Majesty’s spies about. So. The spider is still kicking. What does she want?”
“There’s something here that’s very important. Something that the Colloquium wants.”
“I have no interest in what the outsiders want.”
“This object could threaten the Magistra as well.”
Glenn looked down at the metal band on her wrist and a thick lump grew in her throat. Merrin Farrick sat back in his chair, silenced.
“Gather your people outside Bethany,” Kevin said. “I’m
responsible for obtaining the object before anyone else. Once I have it, your people will take it.”
“And then?”
The fire crackled. Glenn held her breath as Kevin leaned across the table, taking hold of the object that sat between them.
“And then,” Kevin said as he lifted a shining golden dagger over the table, “death to the Magistra.”
Glenn stepped onto the inn’s porch before dawn to find a town transformed by a new dusting of white. It lay thin over the street and the porches and roofs of the buildings, giving the place a motley look.
Glenn’s cheeks burned. She huddled in her coat to try and block the cold out, but its fingers always found a way in.
When Kevin came back to the room, Glenn pretended to sleep.
She lay there, rigid with fear, watching him out of her half-closed eyes as he sat at the edge of the bed, head in his hands. Finally he lay down to sleep. As soon as Glenn heard his breathing go soft and regular she crept out of bed, dressed, and went downstairs.
The innkeeper pointed her to a trader who said he could take her halfway to Bethany for a price. Glenn had eagerly accepted, and after paying him off, she used the last of the money she had to buy food and loaded it all into the backpack.
There was a low squeak of wheels and the jangle of the horse’s tack as the trader eased his old wagon alongside the inn’s porch. It was a small flatbed with uneven lengths of timber tacked on the sides, cracked and ill fitted.
Glenn turned back to face the inn. Already candles were being lit in the windows and fires stoked as people rose from their beds. Soon Kevin would turn over to find her gone. What choice did she have?
Coming to this place was no accident. Clearly, Opal had shown him the way. And Kevin had lied to her. Kevin Kapoor had lied.
“Let’s go if you’re going.”
Glenn stepped into the wagon. There was a crack of a whip, and then the horses pulled away, leaving dark ruts in the snow. Glenn watched the inn and the town fade into the gray of early morning.
There was something heavy lodged in her chest, like a breath she couldn’t exhale.
The land passed by, great expanses of fields — winter fallow -
set with isolated clusters of domed houses and lone stands of trees.
There were a few roadside temples just like the one Aamon had prayed at on their first day in the Magisterium, but they were broken too, shattered and burned. The emptiness of it all was striking. If she was in the Colloquium, all of it would have been filled with the marble white lines of train tracks, towering stacks, and the din of skiffs zipping through the sky.
Glenn had the sudden thought that what she was seeing all
around her wasn’t the Magisterium at all. Not really. The Magisterium had been where her mother had grown up, a place that survived until years later when she returned to find that Merrin Farrick had murdered her family.
My grandparents … Glenn thought distantly.
Glenn wondered what the Magisterium had been like then, when the temples stood in their marble and gold and the Miel Pan moved freely through the world. When Affinity crackled in the air. What would it have been like to grow up in a place like that instead of the Colloquium? What would she have dreamed of instead of 813? Who would she be? Glennora Amantine, maybe, the granddaughter of the Magister? A princess, Affinity swirling around her fingers? Would she have learned to pray? How would it have been to grow up surrounded in that bone-deep wonder? In magic?