For a little while he did not move, and the wind off the terrace laid its cold hand upon his face and upon Bella’s bared throat, and the sleet upon the stone balustrade shone pale under the moon as though winter itself had crept up to hear what had passed between them and what had been denied.

  August had halted so near her that he could still feel the ghost of her breath against his mouth, yet all that nearness was swept aside in one fell stroke; for beneath his boots there had come, not the steadfast murmur of burdened stone, nor the slow deep note that dwells in hewn things old as kingdoms, but a broken drawing of life, a great inward clutch and failing, as if the palace itself had lifted its head from black water for one breath and then been thrust down again.

  He set his hand against the rail lest he pitch forward, and the cold bit through the linen at once. The balcony did not stir. The leaded glass behind them did not rattle in its frame. Within the Duke’s hall the music yet went on, and the strings sang fair for those who had never heard a true cry from stone. That quiet faithlessness in the world about him made the thing fouler than any shaking of floor or wall would have done.

  Bella caught his shoulder before he could sink lower. “August.”

  He bent one knee to the sleeted flags and held there, broad-backed and grim, breathing as a man breathes who has taken a bar of iron through the skull and is minded not to show it before witnesses. The ache that had struck him was no longer keen, yet it had not passed; it sat behind his eyes like a driven wedge and made the dark sky swim.

  “Do not lay hold of the rail,” he said.

  Her hand stayed where it was, but the rest of her went still. “Why?”

  “Because I do not know what went through it.”

  “That is no answer.”

  He raised his head. She stood over him in the pale wash of moonlight and hall-glow, and the wind had troubled her hair so that one dark strand lay against her cheek. Her face was white with cold and with the thing that had almost come to pass between them, and whiter still with the fear she would not grant a voice.

  “The stone answered me ill,” he said. Then he shook his head, for even that was not the whole of it. “No. Ill is too small a word. It drew as though it were drowning.”

  Bella’s brow knit. “Stone does not drown.”

  “Yes,” he said, and his mouth twisted, though no mirth dwelt there. “That is the filth of it.”

  He rose slowly, trying the balcony with his weight as a mason tries doubtful scaffolding after a hard frost. It bore him, and that honest bearing was more evil to him than a visible rent would have been. He laid his bandaged hand upon the rail once more, and at once he drew it away. There was no sting in the flesh beyond the common sting of torn skin against cold iron and sleet. The wrongness lay deeper, in the great blank under the stone, in the vanishing of a thing that should not vanish.

  “Was it here?” Bella asked. “In the rail? In the wall? In the floor beneath us?”

  “In all of it, and in none of it plain enough for me to name.” He turned his gaze over the city. Blue ward-lights burned over the lower streets, wan and uncertain in the weather, and farther off the lamps along the walls marked out a false belt of warmth against the black breadth of winter. Beyond them lay only dark earth, white breath, and the old cold that belonged to the world before men set glass and brass between themselves and the season. “It came up once, and then it was gone. Like a bell struck in deep mire. Like—”

  He stopped.

  Bella’s hand tightened on his sleeve. “Like what?”

  “Like a man that breaks the water with his face and goes under ere he can cry out.”

  For a moment she said nothing. Then, in a voice level and cut clean, she said, “You are white as limewash.”

  “I have been called worse.”

  “This is no hour for yard-jests.”

  “I know it.”

  She searched him as she would have searched a fault-line in cast metal, with that clear and merciless regard she carried from the bench to the ballroom alike. “Can you stand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you dissemble?”

  He gave a rough breath that might once have been laughter. “Better than I could when first you met me.”

  “Then we shall go in. If one of the Duke’s bright-plumed folk comes out and finds you half-kneeling at my feet, the tale shall run through Antheia ere the candles are out.”

  That struck them both, and the word she had not spoken stood between them as some small bright blade set upright in the dark. August straightened the front of his Warden coat with his left hand, for the right was clumsy now, and his shoulder ached with the old buried hurt that woke in damp weather.

  “You should have your cloak,” he said.

  “And you should cease bleeding through your bandage.”

  He looked down, and saw that she was right. The linen over his palm had darkened again; for the blisters the dance had torn open and the strain of gripping the rail had together drawn fresh blood through the cloth in uneven blooms.

  Bella clicked her tongue softly. “A curse on this house and on all its dancing.”

  “Yes. After that I may break the scholar’s teeth.”

  “You have wrought enough harm for one night,” she said, and with a small lift of her chin she bade him toward the door. “Walk.”

  He opened it, and the heat of the hall smote them both as if a furnace had drawn breath upon their faces. At once the sounds of the revel came back, laughter under glass, the long lament of bowed strings, the bright ring of crystal meeting crystal, and whatever had opened between them in the cold dark was shut away behind masks and manners. Bella’s hand slipped from his arm as cleanly as though she had severed it with a knife.

  Two ladies near the threshold marked their return, and one bent to the other with a whisper quick as the dart of a minnow under reeds. August had no need of hearing to know what shape that whisper bore.

  Bella had taken but one pace within the hall before she halted.

  Silas stood not far off by a marble pilaster. The wine in his hand had gone untouched. His eyes passed first over Bella’s mouth, then over August’s blood-darkened hand, then over the sleet laid upon his shoulders.

  “Do not strike him,” Bella said, very low.

  “That was not yet in my mind.”

  “It is now.”

  Silas came toward them with measured steps, and his grace was rigid as winter branches glazed in ice. “Arabella.”

  She did not turn to face him fully. “Silas.”

  “You quitted the hall in haste.”

  “The hall was over-hot.”

  “A great many ladies endure heat without fleeing to a terrace in the company of their hired stone-bearer.”

  August felt his jaw set hard, but Bella spared him speech. She turned her head and gave Silas a look thin and bright as drawn steel.

  “And a great many gentlemen endure refusal without trailing after it,” she said. “Yet here you stand.”

  A small hush bent the talk nearest them. No voice wholly ceased, yet the sound of the room altered, as a field alters when a fox slips through tall grass and every living thing takes heed.

  Silas’s mouth moved in what a kinder face might have made a smile. “You have ever loved to make a spectacle.”

  “No,” Bella said. “I have only been ill-served by men who cannot bear quiet.”

  His gaze slid to August. “Has he spoken in your stead so often that now you cannot answer without him?”

  August took one step forward, but Bella laid two fingers upon his sleeve, and the touch held more command than plea.

  “I can answer for myself,” she said first to August and then to Silas. “You should go home. You look like old wax before a saint-image.”

  Silas’s jaw drew tight, and his upper lip flattened before he mastered it. He leaned nearer, and though his voice was lowered, strain roughened it. “Take care.”

  Then August moved. He did not lay hands on the man, though the wish was in him, old and hot. He only set himself between Silas and Bella, broad enough to blot one from the other.

  “You speak like rotten timber clad in leaf-gold,” he said. “Stand back.”

  Silas gave a poor little laugh. “There speaks the laborer.”

  Bella came round August’s shoulder and faced him from the shadow of that living wall. “There is the door,” she said. “Find it.”

  For one breath more Silas held her gaze, and then he lifted his glass in a mock salute and turned away. The ring of watchers, cheated of blood, loosened. The murmuring of the hall rose again.

  Bella let out her breath. “I am weary unto death of men.”

  “Some more than others.”

  “Yes.” She rubbed one gloved thumb along the heel of the other hand, and he knew that small motion now; it was the mark of a mind straining to hold all its pieces in due order. “You were right to come in. Another minute in that cold and you would have fallen.”

  He looked at her then, and the unfinished nearness between them returned with all its hurt. He longed to say her name as though it were something he had found in the dark and would keep. He longed to speak of what had risen in him upon the terrace before doom out of the stone had cut across it. He longed, most grimly, for the right to long at all.

  Instead he said, “I will see you to your carriage.”

  She gave one brief nod. “So be it.”

  They passed out by the servants’ way rather than cross the hall once more beneath the eyes of the noble hosts. Little was said between them until her carriage stood ready and the lantern at its side cast pale bars upon her face as she turned with one hand upon the step.

  “You are sure it was not only pain?” she asked.

  He knew her meaning well enough. She spoke not of the hand, nor of the old hurt in his shoulder, nor of the feverish heat of the ballroom and the lack of sleep that had worn him thin, but of that other thing, the broken drawing in the palace stone.

  “I am sure.”

  Her mouth set. “Then I will think on it.”

  “That is what I fear.”

  Something near a smile touched her and passed away. “Rest, if rest may be had.”

  “Okay.”

  She hesitated, and the coachman coughed into the crook of his arm while meltwater dripped from the wheel-rim onto the stones below. Bella’s eyes fell once, swift and unguarded, to his mouth, and then were gone.

  “Good night, August.”

  He stepped back lest folly take him in front of horse and driver and half the Duke’s house. “Good night.”

  That night gave him little. Sleep came in broken scraps, and each time he found it the memory of that deep failing under the palace rose again and wrenched him upward.

  Once he woke with his hand clenched so hard that the bandage had split anew, and the fingers would not loose their hold at once, but stayed locked and trembling as if they still gripped some failing ledge in the dark.

  Once he rose and went to the narrow window of his room in the Warden barracks and stood there while dawn paled the roofs of Antheia, with grit under his eyes and the taste of old iron in his mouth, listening to the walls as if they might confess some lesser answering grief. Yet nothing came from them.

  At first light a palace runner arrived, grey-clad and silver-trimmed, with the royal seal red upon a folded paper.

  Percival took one look at the wax, one look at August’s face, and swore beneath his breath. “What have you done now?”

  “Danced poorly.”

  “That is not all.”

  “It seldom is.”

  The Captain broke the seal, ran his eye over the lines, and thrust the summons at him. “You are called to court. Formal hearing, by tenth bell. You will wash, bind that hand anew, and answer when spoken to.”

  “Why?”

  Percival snorted. “Because some old king has heard a tale from Greyfang and would now see whether the beast we keep upon the rolls can make a stone sing for him. Why else?”

  August took the paper. The script was clean and stiff, and there in black ink stood his title like a blow to the nape: Sanctioned Warden Auxiliary August, attached by royal bidding to the Court of His Grace. A kept thing, scrubbed for noble eyes.

  Percival was still speaking. “You will not lose your temper. You will not threaten a scholar. You will not bring down floor, wall, stair, pillar, saint, fountain, or chamber pot because some silk-clad fool asks whether you can.”

  “I know how to stand in a room.”

  “Aye,” said Percival. “That is what gives me no peace.”

  By the time the palace carriage came, the sky had climbed from pearl-grey to that wan white which winter wears when cloud hangs low and the sun is only guessed at. Bella was already within. She had cast aside silk and stood now in sober wool of soot-blue, close-fitted and plain, with a high collar at the throat. Her hair was drawn hard back, and on her lap lay a leather satchel. She smelled of clean soap, lamp-oil, and the faint bitter tang of metal.

  Her eyes went first to his hand. “You bound it ill.”

  “It held well enough.”

  “It bled through before the knot.”

  He took the seat opposite, though his knees nearly met hers in the small carriage. “Good morrow to you also.”

  She opened the satchel, took out a fresh strip of linen, and leaned toward him. “Give me your hand.”

  “Bella—”

  “Do not make me ask twice in a box this narrow. I have no room to pace.”

  He surrendered the hand. Her fingers were cold from the outer air, and gentle too, though she would sooner have bitten her own tongue than name herself so. She unwound the old cloth and frowned at the torn flesh beneath.

  “You have opened half the healing skin.”

  “That ballroom should be condemned.”

  “It should be given to fire. Hold still.”

  The carriage lurched into motion. Her shoulder touched his knee. Neither drew away.

  “You did not sleep,” she said.

  “Nor did you.”

  “No.” She tied the fresh bandage with a sure, hard pull. “For three hours I sought a lawful cause whereby the Duke’s terrace might mimic a deep-fault under strain, and I found none.”

  He watched the city through the window glass as it passed in grey lengths. First the lower streets, wet with smoke and sleet. Then broader ways where brass lamp-posts stood in order and carved facades, blackened by long years of soot, watched from either side. At last the palace quarter, where every stone had been scrubbed by other hands until it shone with a false innocence.

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  “You believe me.”

  Bella did not lift her eyes from the knot she was setting. “I am in this carriage, am I not?”

  That should have given him ease, but it did not. Her faith made the matter heavier, not lighter.

  The palace received them with white stairs, iron gates, and guards bright in polished half-plate. Within, the heat was not laid evenly, but gathered in strange pockets as though the old wards in one wall burned too hard while those in the next were failing. The lamps had a thin, overdriven light, and beneath all the brightness August felt a muttering in the bones of the place, as though the great house had grown old and had begun to complain.

  Courtiers looked on them as folk look on odd beasts brought in for holiday display. August had borne fouler eyes in rougher quarters, and those had at least carried truth in them.

  They were led through a chamber of carved saints into a broad winter hall glazed on three sides, where the light lay pale as watered milk. Orange trees stood in tubs beneath the windows, and their leaves drooped as if the warmth did not reach their roots. In the midst of the hall, upon a low dais of veined granite, rested a block of white marble beneath a dark cloth.

  Beyond it the King sat in a chair whose arms were lion-heads, and age had gnawed him hard but not made him mild. His beard was white and close-trimmed, and his hands shook upon the carved wood. Yet the pale eyes in his seamed face were sharp still, and restless, and when they lit upon August they kindled like lamps touched to fresh oil.

  “That one,” he said at once. “Not the maiden. The great fellow.”

  An advisor bent toward him. “Your Grace, apprentice Elmsworth is the artificer whose work—”

  “I know well who she is. I asked for the mason from Greyfang. Come nearer, boy. Let me see what sort of thing the papers have made so much clamor over.”

  August obeyed.

  The old King looked him over from boot to brow. “Hah. Larger than I had thought. Good. Stone should have some fear of the hand that seeks to shape it.”

  At the King’s right hand stood Varrus in dark scholar’s robes shot through with silver, and his face was as smooth and cold as it had been in the Duke’s hall, only now the slight he had there received had sharpened him. Beside him another scholar clutched a ledger as though it might yet shield him from trouble.

  Varrus bowed his head. “Majesty, ere this display begins, I must renew my counsel. The Singing Marble has answered no licensed hand these five years past. Its virtue is spent. To hazard so rare a stone upon common theatrics would be folly.”

  “Common?” the King said, and his voice bit like a small hard axe. “I heard no word of common things in the reports from Greyfang. I heard of a cave-in held against its own doom by a laborer who made stone answer his need. Is that common?”

  “A broadsheet fattens all things, sire.”

  “Then let this hour grow lean enough to suit even you.” The King shifted in his seat and winced a little, though pride forbade him more than that. “My healing gardens are full of cracked saints and dead-faced lords. I am weary of seeing old ruin set up for comfort. I would have a new work before spring, and I would know whether this boy is a fraud, a wonder, or only better than the men to whom your guild has sold permission.”

  “It is not a question of craft,” said Varrus. “The stone sleeps.”

  The King’s mouth bent. “Then wake it.”

  A brief grim gladness touched Bella’s face, and August alone saw it.

  The King turned to her. “You. Apprentice.”

  Bella bowed low. “Arabella Elmsworth, Your Grace.”

  “You are she who held the foundry-blast in South Kettle from taking the whole ward.”

  “I stayed the spread, sire. The blast itself had already begun.”

  He gave a dry bark of approval. “A true worker marks the difference. Stand near your mason, then. If he fails, you may tell me whether the fault lies in his hand or in the old liars at my shoulder.”

  A dark flush climbed Varrus’s neck.

  Silas stood farther back among the knot of court fighters and well-born sons, white-clad and easy in pose, one hand upon the pommel of his short ceremonial blade. The same unhealthy cast lay upon him that August had seen the night before, yet now his mouth held leisure in it. He had come to watch.

  So, August thought, of course he had.

  The hall had grown very quiet. Even the servants seemed to draw breath more softly.

  Bella took her place at August’s side, not touching him, yet near enough that he could feel the cool of her sleeve.

  “Do not hasten because they crave a wonder,” she said beneath the level of the room’s hearing.

  “I had no mind to.”

  “Good. Let them hunger.”

  A footman drew away the cloth.

  The marble stood bare: white, though not the dead white of chalk, but white with blue and silver running hidden in the grain, like winter water under lake-ice. Fair enough that a man might lose his wits in the mere sight of it ere ever his tool kissed the face. August knew at once why kings loved such stone and masons mistrusted it. Beauty invited foolish longing.

  He went up onto the dais.

  At his first touch his breath all but left him.

  He had looked for silence, for dead heaviness, for the long dumb refusal of a stone gone wholly out. What came instead was worse by far. Through his palms there rose a broken drawing, thin and hard by turns, and then absent, and then returned askew. It was as if some deep note had been shivered into fragments and each fragment sought vainly to remember the whole.

  He shut his eyes and sought the grain, and found it. The block had been hewn well. The bedding was honest, the cut clean, the hidden veins no worse than any fine stone might bear. Yet in the deep part, where rock keeps the memory of the earth that bore it, something had gone amiss and kept going amiss, failing and returning bent.

  Bella saw the change in his face. “What do you find?”

  He did not open his eyes. “The same thing.”

  “The terrace?”

  “Yes.”

  “How may that be?”

  “I cannot yet say. It rises, it fails, and then it rises elsewhere. Like a cart-wheel in deep ruts.”

  “Is the wrong in the block, or in the hall?”

  “I cannot tell.”

  From behind them the King called, “Must the marble be wooed like a maiden?”

  August opened his eyes. “Stone answers ill to shouting, sire.”

  A stir went through the hall. Varrus looked as though he had bitten on gall. But the King only grunted.

  “Then set hand to it.”

  August laid both hands upon the marble.

  The old craft should have been simple, at least in the beginning. One does not master stone by force. One listens. One finds the line of burden, the held note under weight, the place where strain gathers and shape waits like a thing not yet born. Borin had beaten that into him years ago in quarry mud and winter sleet, with a lump of waste-stone thrown at his head and a curse to follow. Hear first, you ox, and command last.

  But now there was too much to hear.

  The broken song climbed into him in torn pieces, and one part was shrill and one hollow and one absent altogether. The pressure shifted with no right order in it. The ache ran through his teeth and up behind his eyes. He flinched before he could master it.

  The hall saw.

  “Come away from it,” Bella said, swift and low.

  “One breath more.”

  “No.”

  “If I step back now, Varrus will shape the tale before we leave the room.”

  “He will shape it in any case.”

  That was true, but pride was an old hook in him, and deeper than pride lay other things. The King had named Greyfang, and at once the dead and the spared had risen in his mind together: the long slab under his hands in the mine-dark, Bella’s voice striking through stone to tell him where the king-stone lay, the burden he had held because she had given him the one true line amid ruin. If he gave ground now, he would hear not only court laughter but every voice that had ever named him beast, carrier, tool, purchased brute.

  So he drew one deep breath and sought the line again.

  For a heartbeat the marble answered.

  All in the hall felt it. He knew by the small drawing-in of the watchers, by the tremor that passed through the lamps upon the far wall, by the faint lifting of dust from the seam of the dais. The stone yielded him the beginning of a shape: something narrow and rising, like the fold of a wing, or the fall of a cloak upon bowed shoulders. And then the broken pulse beneath it failed.

  Not softly, nor by degrees, but as a rope fails under too great a weight.

  The recoil smote his skull like a smith’s maul falling upon iron. A harsh sound was torn from him ere he could swallow it. His right hand flew back; and in the same instant the dead field surged once more, awry and fell, and the backlash ran through the torn skin of his palm like a white-hot lash.

  There came from the marble’s edge a sharp splitting cry, dry and cruel as ice parting on a winter trough, and a sliver sprang free from it, small as a finger-bone and keen as a new razor. It scored the flesh below his thumb. Blood welled out at once, bright and shocking upon the white face of the stone.

  Bella moved first. “August.”

  Varrus moved next. “Majesty, this has gone far enough. The hand is untrained. Mark how wild the pull has turned.”

  August scarcely heard him. Beneath his left palm the marble yet labored in that broken fashion, not as a living thing lives, but as some grievous remnant of life is forced to linger where it ought to have been granted ending.

  “It is failing,” he said.

  The King’s face had gone hard. “You were bidden to shape it, not to shed blood upon it.”

  “The block is dying, sire.”

  Varrus gave a thin scholar’s laugh. “A most convenient plea. It sleeps in one breath and dies in the next. Shall we have it speak prophecy as well?”

  August turned upon him, blood running warm now beneath the fresh cloth Bella was already drawing from her satchel. “Set your own hand on it, old fraud, and hear the truth.”

  A hiss passed through the noble ring. Court did not favor such words from coarse mouths to silk.

  Silas stepped forth from among the watchers, delight thinly veiled and yet not enough veiled. “There he is. Strip off the Warden coat and the mud shows itself soon enough.”

  Bella caught August’s wrist. “Do not.”

  His whole frame had gone rigid with the desire to break something, to dash Varrus’s smooth mouth against the dais, to seize Silas by that elegant throat, to end the marble’s lingering wrong by shattering it outright.

  Silas came a little nearer, slow and sure, knowing the room was his witness. “What ails you, mason? Has the stone remembered that you are only a brute with a fairground magic in your hands?”

  August would have gone for him then; he knew that later, and the knowing shamed him. Bella’s grip was the one thing that kept him through that last sliver of time.

  The King’s voice fell into the hall like a hammer on an anvil. “Stand down.”

  No one moved.

  Then Bella stumbled.

  It was done so cleanly that only one who knew the quick mind behind it could have marked the choosing. Her hem caught, or seemed to catch, and her ankle turned under her with the slight ugly awkwardness of any court lady’s misstep upon polished stone. Her shoulder struck the tray of a passing servant. A crystal goblet spun upward, caught the cold light of the hall, and burst against the edge of the dais in a shower of red wine and glittering shards.

  In that same breath the bracelet at her wrist gave forth a scatter of bright sparks, blue and gold, harmless in truth yet fair enough and sudden enough to drive the nearest courtiers back with cries and lifted skirts.

  “Do not touch it,” Bella said, and her voice rang clear through rank and silk alike. “Stand away from the stone.”

  The servant all but dropped the rest of his burden. Wine stained Varrus’s robe-hem. Noble sons dragged ladies behind them. Even Silas stepped back before pride could school his limbs, and then he clothed the movement in contempt.

  The bracelet gave one last faint spitting of light and went dark.

  Bella straightened, one hand braced on the edge of the dais. “There,” she said, breathing hard. “You have all seen it.”

  One of the advisers, soft-handed and pale-eyed, stared as though he had been shown an open grave. “What in God’s name was that?”

  Bella answered without pause. “An Aetheric mismeasure. Local, intermittent, and foul enough to throw both a tuned bracelet and a stone-pull out of their due course.”

  Varrus’s face mottled. “Nonsense.”

  “Is it?” She thrust out her wrist toward him. The bracelet was a neat silver coil upon leather, graven fine and set with a thumb-sized sunstone that had gone dull. “This was tuned at dawn. It does not cast off charge unbidden. He laid hand upon the marble. The field wrenched. My bracelet answered after it. Unless you mean to tell His Grace that this hall is founded upon air and pleasant fables.”

  “The girl improvises because her laborer has disgraced himself.”

  Bella’s eyes grew bright and keen. “Then touch the block, Scholar, and unmake my words.”

  He did not stir.

  She saw the room see that too, and she drove the blade home. “The old stones beneath this palace bear stored might. Every soul in this hall knows it, though half choose to call it blessing and not burden. If that buried might has begun to fail in its measure, the fault lies under our feet and not wholly in one mason’s hand.”

  The King leaned forward. “Fail in its measure?”

  “Yes, sire.”

  “And this trinket bears witness?”

  “It bears witness that something in this chamber leaped awry in the selfsame instant his hand was cut. Your Grace asked whether the fault lay in him or elsewhere. I speak only to what I saw.”

  August looked at her, and blood ran warm down his wrist. She had broken glass, marred her dress, and drawn scorn toward herself without a blink, all to turn the room’s doom from him by even so small a measure as might spare him open ruin.

  Silas said, “A neat pairing. One failure to cloak another.”

  Bella wheeled on him. “Do you know enough of charge-work to speak with weight, or have you come only to smile and stand fair in white?”

  Behind him one lady gave a small, shocked intake of breath.

  Silas’s smile faltered. “Take care, Arabella.”

  “I am taking care.” She raised the bracelet again. “Had that discharge been a true blow and not a scattered warning, your sleeve would now be ash.”

  The King laughed, and the laugh turned to coughing before it was done. An attendant hastened to him, but the old man thrust him off.

  “Enough,” he said, when he had mastered breath again. “Cover the marble. Send ward-men to sound the floor and the stones of the healing close. If there is sickness in the bones of my house, I will know it ere dusk.” Then his pale gaze settled on August. “And you, boy.”

  August stepped forward though Bella’s hand still held him.

  The King looked from the blood upon the marble to August’s face. “I called for the one from Greyfang because I have had enough of perfumed liars. See that you do not teach me to repent of choosing mud over silk.”

  August tasted metal in his mouth. “I have not lied to you, sire.”

  The old man held his gaze a long breath. “Do not begin today.”

  They were dismissed then with all the cold courtesy a great house can muster after its pageant has soured. Servants bent at once to cleanse wine and blood from the dais, as though diligent hands might scour away the shame of the hour. Guards opened doors for August and Bella with formal respect more cutting than mockery.

  In an outer passage where only a few lesser attendants moved, Bella stopped short, seized his wrist, and drew him into a narrow alcove between two saint-niches.

  “Sit.”

  “I am no child.”

  “No. You are worse. Sit.”

  He obeyed, for his knees had grown uncertain and she knew it. Bella brought out fresh linen, a small bottle of clear spirits, and a pair of workshop tongs fine and narrow as a bird’s beak; she carried half a bench with her wherever she went. She peered into the cut and swore softly.

  “There is still a fragment within.”

  “Leave it.”

  “I shall do no such thing.”

  “It is but a splinter.”

  “It is marble in living flesh.” She looked up at him. “Do you desire fever?”

  He set his head back against the cold wall. “No.”

  “Then keep still.”

  The spirits burned like clear fire. He bit the inside of his cheek and gave her the hand. When at last the tongs drew the fragment free, he saw it between their tips, bright with his own blood and no larger than a clipping from a thumb-nail.

  Bella bound the hand hard and sat back upon her heels.

  For a little while neither spoke.

  At length August said, “You should not have spent your standing for me.”

  She looked down at the blood upon her fingers as if some answer had been written there. “Do you think I did so for your standing?”

  “What else would move you in such a room?”

  She lifted her head. “Because you were right.”

  He gave a short bitter laugh. “The court has no love for right.”

  “No,” she said. “It has love only for certainty. I gave it a sharper certainty than Varrus had ready to hand.”

  “You lied before the King.”

  “I altered the shape of the chamber.”

  “That sounds worse.”

  “It was still the just choice.”

  He looked down the corridor where, through an arch at the far end, a strip of white winter sky could be seen beyond black tree-boughs in the outer court. Wet wind moved there, unseen and chill.

  “I could not hold it,” he said.

  Something in Bella’s face changed then. Not softness, for that word ill fitted her, but the hard edge of battle left it.

  “You set hand upon a dying block in a hall built over older force than half this city remembers,” she said. “That it answered you at all is witness enough.”

  “It cut me.”

  “That was the recoil.”

  “It failed in my hands.”

  She came and sat beside him, and the side of her skirt brushed his coat. “Hear me.”

  He did.

  “I watched your face before the cut came,” she said. “I know the difference between strain and bewilderment. This was neither. You were hearing wrongness in it. Of that I am sure.”

  He kept his eyes on the strip of sky. “And if the wrongness lies in me?”

  “Then why did my bracelet answer?”

  His mouth moved despite himself. “Because you are a liar of high courage.”

  At that she almost smiled, and this time the smile lived for a breath. “Yes. But I am not witless.”

  He shut his eyes. For one moment, and then another, her shoulder rested against his upper arm, and the narrow corridor grew more perilous to him than the Duke’s terrace had been.

  When she spoke again, her voice had gone lower. “Do not do this thing men do.”

  “What thing?”

  “The thing whereby pride puts on a coat and names itself duty.”

  He opened his eyes. “I do not follow.”

  “That is because you walk in it.”

  A footman turned into the passage at the far end. Bella was on her feet at once, all distance and decorum once more before he had taken his second step.

  He rose more slowly.

  They left the palace by a side-court where servants loaded trunks into wagons and stable-boys cursed over wet tack. There was no crowd there, no noble witness, only damp stone, old straw, horse-piss, and the honest smells of labor.

  The carriage waited, and Bella made one more attempt.

  “Come to the workshop,” she said. “Master Elmsworth will wish to hear all that passed, and so shall I.”

  “No.”

  “August.”

  “If I go there, you will spread drawings before me and bid me name the shape of a dying thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have no names left in me.”

  “You will have them by supper.”

  He shook his head.

  Her mouth went thin. “Then to the barracks.”

  “No.”

  “Where, then?”

  He did not answer.

  “Do not lie to me now,” she said.

  He looked at her fully, and let her see how little of him still stood upright and how much had begun to split within. “If a man cannot trust his own hands,” he said, “he had best keep them from fine work.”

  She understood him at once, and not only of marble and tools. He saw the understanding strike her.

  “Do not be cruel.”

  The hurt in those words wounded him more deeply than anger would have done. “I am striving not to be.”

  Above them the driver shifted on his box, and a thin cold rain began to fall.

  Bella stepped nearer. “Hear me plainly. I did not stand beside you in that hall because I pitied you. I stood because I believed you.”

  He did not answer.

  She swallowed once. “And because, when the room turned on you, I would gladly have broken something greater than a wine-glass.”

  A weak breath, near to laughter and not becoming it, stirred in him and died.

  “You should go home,” he said.

  “My home is a bench beneath Elmsworth’s south window and a heap of plans.”

  “Then go to it.”

  “And you?”

  He looked past her, beyond the carriage and the palace wall, to where the city sloped toward the river and the old broken works under its bank. The Sunken District. The aqueduct ruins. The first refuge he had found when the guild cast him out. Stone there asked nothing of him but silence.

  “Somewhere without eyes upon me,” he said.

  Her gaze sharpened at once. “The aqueduct.”

  He did not ask how she had guessed. She had studied him longer than either of them had been willing to name. “Yes.”

  “You are in no fit state to tramp so far in this weather.”

  “It is not so far.”

  “That is not the point.”

  He stepped back from the carriage. “I need the road.”

  “You need that hand looked at again within the hour.”

  “It will still be on my arm within the hour.”

  She came close enough that rain gathered on her lashes. “August.”

  His name in her mouth had grown perilous. No longer did it sound as a summons to work or an order flung across a bench. It had begun to sound like claim, and claim meant worth, and worth meant loss. He could bear none of those then.

  “If you follow me,” he said carefully, “I shall only stand there and speak ill-made words more ill. Let me go foul in private.”

  Bella’s jaw shifted once. “You do not rule me.”

  “No.”

  “Then do not speak as though you do.”

  Rain glazed the court-stones between them. Somewhere behind the stables a horse cried out and struck hard against a stall-board.

  August bowed his head once, not in courtly fashion, but because he no longer trusted his face. “Forgive me.”

  “Not yet.”

  He turned away before that could break him.

  The walk took all the remnant of the day.

  He went down from the palace quarter through broad ways where lamp-lads lit the evening one flame at a time with hooked poles, and past shop-fronts in whose glass fine wool, brass instruments, and little luxuries shone for the rich. Then lower, where the streets narrowed and the polish went out of the stone; where wet washing hung between leaning houses, and gutters were clogged with straw and ash, and children in patched coats darted round wagon wheels, and a woman on a stoop coaxed a coal-pan with mean pinches of dust because fuel had grown dearer again. Everywhere he heard the wan humming of the ward-lights, thin and overdrawn. They had not yet failed, but they were weary.

  August kept his cut hand beneath his coat. The bandage warmed and cooled with each beat of blood. In his skull the memory of the broken marble still lingered. Whenever his boots struck an older patch of paving, he listened inwardly for that same drowned drawing to rise through the soles.

  It did not.

  That made the court more dreadful still: one hall, one block, one place where the deep roots of the world had uttered their grief and then gone dumb.

  At dusk he passed out by the disused merchant gate. The rain had turned again to sleet, and the guards there scarcely marked him; for laborers and Wardens came and went too often to be worth a second glance. Beyond the wall the false autumn of the palace wards fell away at once. Out there the cold was true cold, river-cold and stone-cold, the elder cold that no lamp-grid could wholly bar.

  The road to the Sunken District ran by weed-choked embankments and old retaining walls half slumped into mire. The work of the First Dominion still showed in those ruins: blocks so great no sane man would have chosen to set them, fitted so close that even now the grass could not worm its way between. Then, out of the dim, the broken back of the aqueduct rose before him, black arches against a bruised sky, half sunken where the earth had given way under one side long ago.

  At the first fallen span he stopped.

  Below, the water moved black and heavy, taking the last of the day into itself. The coping stones were slick with a skin of old ice, and the wind came up from the river and laid hold of his coat as though with hands.

  Here at last there was no court, no king, no Bella with her fierce faith, no Silas smile, no Varrus mouth.

  Only old stone, whether dead or dying or merely broken, and he among it.

  August bent, took up from the sleet a fallen piece of stone, and cast it with all his strength into the black water.