Chapter 22
The covered bridge between the glowing tower and the warm house on its terrace. On the bridge's snowy roof crouches a barefoot woman with crimson hair, a black panther beside her.
hanging from the house's eaves, glittering in the light of a window.
The icicle is on the bridge roof now. Rougeina is gone. Under the eaves, a silver-rose ghost of her fades. Already there.
A good fire in the fireplace. Shelves of books. A broad desk covered in neat stacks of decrees, and on it a glass jar holding a hundred identical silver pens.
It is covered floor to ceiling in birthday cards, hundreds of them, pinned in perfect rows by year, every one signed in the same neat silver hand.
Through an open door off the study, a child's bedroom: a small lamp shaped like a moon, a bed with a patchwork quilt. A little girl with a gap in her teeth sits up under the quilt, clutching a knitted toy wolf: EDDA, seven for one more night.
Beside the bed, in an armchair, sits a white-haired man in a woollen cardigan, reading glasses on his nose, a picture book open on his knee: BALDR.
Rougeina moves through the rafters, silent as dust, to the beam above the bedroom door. The panther follows along another beam.
Baldr reads aloud, doing the voices.
bouncing under the quilt.
He takes a card from his cardigan pocket and signs it, resting it on the picture book, with an ornate silver pen. The pen. "To little Edda, eight years old! — Grandpa." He blows on the ink.
He tucks both cards into his cardigan pocket and pats it.
From the beam above the door, Rougeina leans out over empty air, one blade drawn and angled down. The line from its point to the back of Baldr's neck is perfect: short and clean. The blade's mirror-bright face reflects the whole room below: an old man in a cardigan leaning down to kiss a little girl's forehead, the moon-lamp, the knitted wolf, the card on the quilt. Above it hangs Rougeina's face in shadow, her crimson hair falling, the panther's yellow eyes beside her. No sound at all.
Steady.
holding a fistful of her grandfather's cardigan sleeve. She is already half asleep.
Something in them closes.
She slides the blade back into its sheath. Below, Baldr stays in his chair by the bed, humming the wolf's tune, until the child's breathing slows.
A man in soft grey livery makes his rounds in the snow with a lantern. He stops. On the snow below the eaves, a faint silver-rose ghost of a crouching woman is still fading.
closing on a small glowing thread in his palm: a silent alarm. No bells. There are no bells in this house.
Rougeina drops from the rafters into the corridor beyond the study, and the corridor is full of people in soft grey livery: four household wardens, and an old man in white gloves holding a thin cane-sword and a padded mallet.
RANK PLATE ×4: HOUSEHOLD WARDEN · K-II MARKED · Scalelist #41,000–#58,000
HOUSE STEWARD · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #8,812
one finger to his lips.
The wardens drive anchor-stakes into the floorboards with padded mallets. No tang, only a soft tmp, tmp, tmp. The air in the corridor stiffens, and shimmering frost-lines spread across the walls.
flicking to a window as she tries to Swap. A silver-rose spark. It fizzles.
Rougeina fights with plain steel in a corridor where nothing can be traded: a dance on bare feet across a polished floor, a spin, a heel-turn, two blades. The panther pins a warden silently to the carpet. Nobody shouts. Every blow lands soft.
The Steward is good. Very good. His cane-sword is a thread of silver, precise and polite.
The cane-sword finds her: a line across her side, under the ribs. A tear in her tunic and a dark stain spreading, nothing more. She doesn't make a sound.
Teeth gritted, she drives a blade into the floor beside one stake and levers it out of the boards. Where it stood, the frozen air thaws for one hand's width. It's enough. She looks through the window at the snow on the roof outside.
Blink.
Where she stood, a scoop of roof snow drops onto the polished floor with a soft fwump. The Steward looks at it, then at the window. Outside, silver-rose ghosts are fading across the roof.
Baldr stands at the window in his cardigan, looking at the silver-rose ghosts on the roofs. He doesn't look angry. He looks tired.
glancing back at the half-open door where his granddaughter sleeps.
Rougeina runs across the snow clutching her side, Swapping from chimney to chimney, the panther leaping beside her. Behind her, across the whole city, a long line of silver-rose ghosts hangs in the air and fades slowly. Every Swap is a footprint.
white with pain, jaw set.
Rougeina drops through it onto a rack of blank glass tiles, which ring softly. Kompis is on watch, and he's beside her before she lands. Mingus sniffs at her side and whines.
Kompis cuts the tunic away from the wound with steady, trained hands and binds it. Everyone else sleeps. Vigolas mutters something about coins.
She tells him. Not Vigolas.
looking at her own hands.
looking at nothing: at a schoolroom years away.
Out across the snowy roofs, her silver-rose ghosts are still fading one after another: a dotted line drawn across the whole city, ending at this roof.