Dawning Night

On the longest day of the year, the heir of House Meridian was late to his own Dawning, and it was a horse’s fault.

Nobody was going to put a crown on Sorin tonight. But when the greatest House in the Concord stood its heir before the uncut sunstone, all of Highnoon behaved as though somebody might, and Sorin had been taught since he was six to behave the same way. Be early. Be gracious. Be seen.

At that moment he was being seen by two grooms and a very tired mare in the east stable yard, in his rite clothes, with straw on his knee.

By midnight he would be dead. Nobody in the stable yard knew that, least of all him.

“She was mine to foal,” said the elder groom. Gilbert was broad and red-faced and had put Sorin on his first pony, and had picked him up off the cobbles afterwards. “I sat up with her three nights.”

“You sat up with a bottle three nights,” said the younger one, whose name was Will and whose shirt was ruined. “I’m the one who had his arm in her to the shoulder at four this morning, and you bloody know it.”

“Language,” Gilbert said, scandalised. “In front of his lordship.”

“His lordship’s seen an arm in a horse.”

His lordship had, and was trying hard not to smile. A foal dropped on Dawning Day was lucky, by Meridian custom older than the stables, and the groom who brought it into the world took home the noon purse: a silver sun on a ribbon and a year’s wages in a bag. Enough to marry on. Enough to drink on, in Gilbert’s case, which Sorin suspected was the difficulty.

“Will,” Sorin said. “Show me your arm.”

Will blinked and rolled his sleeve up. Bruised to the elbow, and scrubbed raw where he’d tried to clean it. There was no faking that. Sorin nodded and turned to Gilbert, who had already started to look hurt in advance.

“You sat up three nights,” Sorin said.

“I did, my lord.”

“Awake?”

Gilbert was an honest man in all the ways that mattered, and it cost him something to say, “Mostly.”

“Then here’s what I think.” Sorin pulled a stalk of straw off his knee and turned it in his fingers, the way his father turned a pen when he was about to be fair to someone who wouldn’t like it. “The purse goes to Will. He delivered her. But she’d have had nobody at all if you hadn’t been sitting there, mostly awake, for three nights, and that counts. You name her, Gilbert. Nobody else.”

Will opened his mouth, and shut it again when he realised he’d won. Gilbert looked at the foal. Then something in his big red face eased.

“Late,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Her name, my lord. Late. On account of she came after the bell, and on account of…” He looked pointedly at Sorin’s rite clothes, then up at the sun, which was well past where it ought to be. “Begging your pardon.”

Will laughed out loud. Sorin found, to his own surprise, that he was laughing too.

“Late it is,” he said. “And Gilbert? If I hear you’ve drunk the naming toast before she’s weaned, I’ll send you to the Vantor remounts and you can sit up with their mares. They kick.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“My lord,” said a third voice from the yard gate, dry as old paper, “is wanted.”

Ser Aldric Vane stood in the arch with the sun behind him and his arms folded: a lean man of fifty in a plain coat with the Meridian sun on it and nothing else that shone. He was grey at the temples, with a soldier’s weathered face that a sword had opened once from brow to cheekbone and left a white seam through the eyebrow. He’d been Sorin’s sworn shield since Sorin was six, and his fencing master for just as long, and in all that time Sorin had not seen him hurry. He didn’t now. He took in the straw, the foal, the grooms and the heir, in that order, and his scarred eyebrow climbed a quarter of an inch, which for Aldric was a speech.

“Your father’s compliments,” he said, “and if you aren’t in the rite hall by the ninth bell past noon he will name your sister heir and save himself the trouble.”

“Elodie would be better at it.”

“She would. Don’t tell her I said so.” Aldric stepped aside from the arch. “Walk with me, and brush your knee.”

They took the terrace way, because it was quicker. Highnoon fell away below them in tiers of white and gold to the river Sallow, wide and slow and brown. On Dawning Day the sun never quite set: it sank to the rim of the world at midnight, sat there a few hours like a coin on a table edge, and climbed again before anyone had properly gone to bed.

Along the terrace the sunbirds were singing in their gilt cages, small gold-throated things Meridian had bred for three hundred years to sing while the sun was up and stop when it went. Today they never quite stopped. His Sunmark itched on the inside of his wrist, the small bright brand every soul in the Daylands wore, and he rubbed it without looking.

Below them on the great bridge the Order’s men were trimming the ward lamps, as they did at the dusk bell every evening of the year, even on a night with no dark in it. Last night’s Midsummer Eve fires had left black rings along the bluffs. The lamps guttered when anything of the Night came near; every child knew that.

Across the river, the light stopped.

It always did. It was the first thing visitors noticed and the last thing anyone born in Highnoon thought about. The gold ran right up to the far bank of the Sallow, and then, as cleanly as if someone had drawn a line with a rule, it gave way to dusk. A grey-violet country of low hills and dead trees and a sun that never climbed. The Gloaming. And on the first hill past the water, black against that bruised sky, the Castle.

Nobody in Highnoon called it anything but the Black Castle, because nobody knew what it had been called before. People rode out to the south bank on summer afternoons to picnic and look at it. Nobody crossed. It had been the Queen of the Sallow’s, whose herds on the far bank had not been cattle; every child had that from a nursery maid before it had its letters. Sorin had never quite stopped wondering what she had been, and how she’d taken it when the sun came.

From the terrace it was a shape more than a building: a long black wall on the crown of the hill inside a lower one, with towers set all along both, a gatehouse square in the middle of the near face, and rising out of the middle of it all, just behind the gatehouse, one round tower twice the height of the rest, thin as a chimney. No window in it had been lit since the Dawning. At this hour the bats came up out of the tall tower in a long smoke and went out over the dead woods, and that was the only thing about the place anyone had ever seen move.

Away to the left, on a low ridge beyond the dead woods, stood the gibbet: a black upright, an arm, and on the arm something that was not a bird. The Order said it was a knight of the Dawning, hanged there in the first winter. Sorin had once stared at it for a count of twenty, on a dare, and been sick in a flowerbed. The Order had sent knights up the ridge for him three times, and none had come back, and the Rule forbade it now; but the watch-house at the bridge’s south end kept a lamp lit towards the ridge every night of the year, till he came home.

He noticed, though it meant nothing to him then, that Aldric didn’t look across the river at all.

“Nervous?” Aldric asked.

“No.”

“Liar.”

“A little.” Sorin shrugged. “Everyone knows what the stone’s going to give me. Noon’s given every Meridian heir a Noonblade for nine generations. I’ll stand there, it’ll say what it always says, everyone will clap, and then I have to dance with Seraphine Ambrel for an hour while she works out what I’m worth to the ounce.”

“She’s already worked that out.”

“Then what are the dances for?”

“To see if you know she has.” Aldric’s mouth twitched. It was the closest he came to laughing, most days. Then he put a hand on Sorin’s shoulder, briefly, as they came to the top of the great stair, and Sorin felt it the way he’d felt it after every bout he’d ever fought: good. Again.

“You’ll be fine,” Aldric said. “You always are.”

The rite bell began to ring below them, slow and deep, and the two of them went down to meet it.

☀︎

The rite hall of House Meridian had been built to make people feel small, and it was very good at it.

It was round, and white, and taller than it was wide, and the roof was a single dome of glass so that the noon could fall straight down through it onto the floor. Tonight, with the sun low and red on the rim of the world, the light came in sideways instead, long and gold across the benches, and every lord and lady of the Concord sat in it with their House colours on and their faces arranged. Eight Houses, of the nine that had stood at the Dawning. Seven of them here to watch. One of them here to be watched.

It was quiet in the way of rooms that are never allowed to be anything else. The air smelled of beeswax and, under it, of the Houses’ scents all together. Nobody coughed. Nobody ever had.

And in the middle of it all, on a plinth of black stone so old that its edges had worn soft, sat the uncut sunstone.

It was the size of a man’s chest and the colour of the inside of a flame. Every other House in the Concord kept a cut stone: a shard, a facet, a polished slice set into a lamp. Only Meridian’s had never been cut, and only Meridian’s beat. Not literally. Not anything you could put your ear to. But stand close enough on a quiet day and you’d swear the light in it swelled and eased, slow as sleep, and the old priests said that was why the House of Noon stood first among nine. Given, the priests said at every Dawning, to the Nine at noon, and the hall said it back; and the stone is alive, they said, and it chose us.

Sorin had never liked that word. Chose. It made it sound as if the stone might change its mind.

He came in at the back with Aldric a step behind him, and the hall turned to look, the way a field of wheat turns in a wind. He let it. That was the trick his father had taught him when he was small: don’t hurry, don’t look down, let them have a good look, because they’re going to anyway. They always had. The boy had the Meridian look, the Concord had been telling his father in his hearing since he was twelve: the gold hair off the portraits, worn long enough to curl at the collar, and the very blue eyes. The dowagers of three Houses had a word for that face, and used it where he could hear. He had been looked at for so long that he’d stopped feeling it, the way he had stopped hearing the sunbirds. He walked the long aisle at the pace of a man who’d meant to arrive exactly now.

“Straw,” murmured a voice to his left as he passed a pillar. “On your heel. The rest will do.”

Elodie. She didn’t look at him as she said it. She never did in public. She stood where the House’s illegitimate children always stood at a rite, among the pillars at the edge of the light, in a plain grey gown with gloves pulled up to hide the stains that her stillroom left on her fingers. She was twenty-two, dark where the Meridians ran fair: black hair put up by feel and coming down by evening, a narrow watchful face that was their father’s about the brows and her own about the mouth, and ink on the one finger the gloves never quite covered. She was the cleverest person in any room she’d ever been in, which was why the room kept her at the edge of it.

He scraped his heel on the step, never breaking stride, and heard her breathe out through her nose, which meant good.

At the front, on the first bench, Lord Halric Meridian rose to meet him.

Sorin’s father was a big man, broad as a door, with silver-gold hair and a laugh you could hear across a parade ground. People who’d only read about the Lord of Noon expected someone cold, and were always caught off guard by how warm he was. He’d held Highnoon through two bad winters and a Vantor war with that warmth, and with the fact that underneath it there was iron all the way down. He clasped Sorin’s arms in both hands now and looked him over, and his eyes were bright. Then he set straight the sword at Sorin’s hip, the Meridian dress sword he had buckled on him himself that morning, and named it under his breath, as every Lord of Noon named it to his heir on Dawning Day: “Birthright.” At his own hip hung Solstice, Aurion’s sword, that the Lord of Noon had worn to every Dawning since the first.

“Late,” he said.

“There was a foal.”

“Of course there was.” Halric laughed, quietly for him, and the front benches laughed with him because they’d been waiting to. “Go on, then. Let’s see what it gives you.”

It’ll give me a Noonblade, Sorin didn’t say. It always does. He went up the three white steps to the plinth.

The herald read the words. Sorin didn’t hear them. Up close, the stone was warmer than he remembered from his Naming at twelve, and brighter, and the slow swell of its light seemed to be keeping time with something. His own pulse, maybe. He put out his right hand, the hand with the Sunmark on the wrist, and laid it flat on the stone.

The light went white.

Not gold. Not the warm, kind gold of every rite he’d ever watched from the benches. White, the white of noon on a blade, so bright that the hall disappeared and the dome disappeared and there was nothing in the world but the stone under his palm and the window opening in front of his eyes.

He’d known it would say that. He’d been told it would say that since before he could read. It still stole his breath, the way a view does even when you’ve climbed to it a hundred times. Epic. Nine generations of Meridian heirs had stood here and seen that word, and now it was his.

Yes, he thought, and the stone took it.

The card folded itself away. And underneath it, where there should have been nothing, there was one more line.

▓▓▓▓

No header. No colour he could name. Just four dark blocks, like a word that had been scratched out by someone pressing hard.

Sorin frowned at it. He tried to read it, squinting, as you can sometimes make out the shape of a sealed line. Nothing came. It sat there, patient and blank, and then the white light drained out of the world and he was back in the rite hall with his hand on a warm stone and every soul in the hall on its feet.

They were applauding. Of course they were. His Sunmark was blazing on his wrist like a coal blown on, and the herald was calling the class to the dome, Noonblade, Epic, of the Sunstone, and the sound came down off the glass in waves. Somebody in the Ambrel benches was whistling, which wasn’t done. Somewhere a child was crying because it was loud.

Sorin turned, smiling, because the heir smiled, and looked for his father.

Halric was standing at the front bench with everyone else. He was clapping with everyone else. And his face had gone blank.

It lasted a heartbeat, two at most. A man who didn’t know him wouldn’t have seen it. But Sorin had been watching that face across tables and council floors and fencing yards for eighteen years, and he knew every weather it had. He’d seen it laughing, furious, drunk, grieving. He had never seen it look like that: wiped clean, as if something had reached in and taken everything off it at once.

Then it was gone, and Halric was laughing and coming up the steps to embrace him, and the whole hall roared.

“Epic,” his father said in his ear, holding him hard. “Epic. I knew it.”

“Did the stone show you anything?” Sorin asked. “Under the card?”

The arms around him didn’t tighten. They didn’t loosen either. That was what Sorin would remember later: that his father, who couldn’t hold still to save his life, held perfectly still for the space of a breath before he answered.

“The stone shows the heir,” Halric said, “and nobody else. You know that.” He stood back, both hands on Sorin’s shoulders, beaming for the benches. “Now go and dance with the Ambrel girl before her mother has me arrested.”

Sorin filed it away. He didn’t know yet that he’d filed it. But somewhere at the back of his mind, a part of him that had been trained in rooms like this since he was small took the stillness, and the breath, and the answer that wasn’t one, and set them carefully on a shelf for later.

☀︎

The Dawning ball was held in the Sun Gallery, which ran the whole west face of the palace and had windows from floor to ceiling, so that the low midnight sun could pour in and turn the dancers gold. Four hundred guests. Two orchestras, so that the music never stopped. A fountain of Halcyon wine at one end and a pyramid of candied Ambrel pears at the other, taller than a man and slowly losing a battle with the heat.

Sorin danced with the Vantor envoy’s daughter, who asked him about swords, and with three ladies whose names he’d learned for the purpose, and accepted forty congratulations and two marriage proposals, one of them on behalf of a dog. He was good at all of it. He had stopped noticing how tiring it was some time ago.

Then the orchestras changed key, and the room parted the way it parted for weather, and Lady Seraphine Ambrel was standing in front of him with her hand out.

“My lord heir,” she said. “I believe this is ours.”

She was nineteen, and gold all over: gold hair, gold silk, gold eyes, the Ambrel colouring so strong in her that she looked like something cast rather than born. Gold on gold, the court called the two of them, and had since they were children, and said it the way it said the sun would rise. Their families had been discussing the match since they were both in the nursery. Neither of them had been consulted, and both of them had decided, separately and never saying so, to be very good about it.

They danced. She was better at it than he was, which she let him know by never letting him notice.

“Epic,” she said, as they turned under the great chandelier. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“Was it a surprise?”

“About as surprising as sunrise.”

“Sunrise is extremely surprising to some people.” She smiled. It was a lovely smile and gave away absolutely nothing. “Ask the Gloaming.”

He laughed, because it was funny, and because she’d meant him to. Across the floor, the Vantor envoy was holding forth to a ring of nodding men about the river lamps on the Sallow border, which by his account had been burning dimmer every summer for ten years while the Council sat on its hands. Halric was nodding along with him and looking entirely unbothered. Halric was very good at looking unbothered.

The music slowed for the long turn. Seraphine’s hand was light on his shoulder, and her voice, when it came again, was lighter still.

“Did the stone show you anything else?”

Sorin missed a step. Not by much. She covered it so smoothly that nobody watching would have known, and he caught the rhythm again and looked down at her. Her face was pleasant and interested and nothing more.

He’d learned a trick, years ago, from long nights of watching people at his father’s table: listen for what the question already knows. It wasn’t magic. It was just attention, and it came to him easily, so easily that sometimes the Noble gate he’d carried since twelve would mark it with a little flicker at the corner of his eye. It flickered now.

She wasn’t asking whether the stone had shown him something. She was asking whether it had shown him something she already knew about.

“Only the card,” he said. “Why?”

“Curiosity.” Her gold eyes didn’t move off his. “They say the uncut stone talks. I wondered if it had anything to say to you.”

“It said Epic. I felt that was plenty.”

“I’m sure you did,” said Lady Seraphine Ambrel, and the music ended, and she curtsied, and left him in the middle of the floor with the distinct impression that he’d failed a test he hadn’t known he was sitting.

☀︎

He found Elodie where he’d known he would, on the narrow balcony at the north end of the gallery where the servants went to smoke. She was leaning on the balustrade with her gloves off, looking out over the city towards the river and the long violet line of the dusk beyond it.

“You’re not supposed to be out here,” she said, without turning round.

“Neither are you.”

“I’m not supposed to be anywhere. It’s very freeing.” She held out a hand behind her, palm up, without looking. In it was a small stoppered vial of something green. “Drink that.”

“What is it?”

“Something for tomorrow morning. Before you start, not after. After is for amateurs.”

He took it and drank it, because he’d been drinking Elodie’s remedies since he was small and she had first discovered that the stillroom was the only room in the palace nobody would follow her into. It tasted of mint and something bitter underneath. He leaned on the stone beside her.

For a little while they just leaned there. Below them, Highnoon glowed: a whole city lit by a sun that wouldn’t set, every window warm, every street gold. Across the river the dusk lay quiet, and on its first hill, the Black Castle.

“Father looked as if he’d been handed a bill,” Elodie said.

Sorin glanced at her.

“In the rite hall,” she said. “When the light went white. Just for a moment. I was at the pillar, I had the side view.” She turned the empty glove over in her fingers. “It’s never white. I’ve watched every Dawning in this House since I was small, and it’s always gold.”

“It was white,” he agreed.

“Was there anything else? On the window?”

That was twice in an hour. He thought about the four dark blocks, and his father’s stillness, and the arms that hadn’t tightened.

“A line,” he said. “Sealed. I couldn’t read it.”

Elodie was quiet a moment. Then she said, carefully, in the voice she kept for things she’d want to take back later if they turned out to be wrong: “Sealed lines usually mean something’s coming that you can’t have yet. A skill, a road.” She paused. “Or a cost.”

“Thank you, that’s very comforting.”

“I’m a physician, not a nursemaid.” But she bumped her shoulder against his, briefly, which from Elodie was practically an embrace. “Congratulations, little brother. Epic. They’ll be insufferable about it for a year.”

“They will?”

“You’ve always been insufferable. It’s part of your charm.”

He read her without meaning to, as he had read her since the day he was given his Gate. It told him what it always told him.

Elodie:	Gate · Almoner · Tincturer (Uncommon) · Leechcraft (Common) · a surgeon’s hand

Someone cleared his throat behind them.

Aldric stood in the balcony door with the gallery’s gold light at his back, so that his face was in shadow. He’d taken off his dress sword and wore his working blade instead, the plain one with the leather grip worn pale by twenty years of his hand. He noticed that; he noticed everything about Aldric’s swords.

“My lord,” Aldric said. “It’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“The heir’s rite.” A small, tired smile. “Did nobody tell you? There’s one more, after the ball. Down in the family crypt. Only the heirs know of it. Your father went down on his Dawning Night, and his father before him.”

“In the crypt? At midnight?”

“It’s very old,” Aldric said, “and somewhat theatrical. Come on. You can complain to your ancestors in person.”

Sorin laughed and pushed off the balustrade. Behind him, Elodie had gone still.

“There isn’t one,” she said.

He looked back at her.

“An heir’s rite. In the crypt.” She was frowning, not at him, at the air between them, as if it were a page with a word wrong on it. “I’ve read every rite book in the library. Twice. There’s no rite after the ball.”

“Then you’ll have something to write up,” Sorin said, and kissed the top of her head, which she hated, and followed Aldric in out of the light.

☀︎

The way down was the old servants’ stair behind the chapel, which Sorin hadn’t used since he was a boy hiding from a tutor. It wound down through the cellars, past the wine and the ice room and a door to the cistern, and with every turn it got colder and quieter, until the music of the ball was a rumour and then nothing at all.

Aldric carried a lamp. He walked a step ahead, as he always did on stairs, so that anything coming up would meet him first.

“How long does it take?” Sorin asked.

“Not long.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Kneel. Listen.” They turned on the landing. “It’s mostly listening.”

The crypt of House Meridian ran under the whole east wing, vault after vault, and every Lord of Noon since the Dawning lay in it in white stone, with a carved sun on his breast and his sword at his side. Sorin had been down here for funerals and for his Naming, always with torches and priests and a hundred people murmuring. Empty, by one lamp, it was different. The effigies’ faces caught the light and lost it as they passed. Their stone eyes were all open.

They went deeper than he’d ever been. Past his grandfather. Past his grandfather’s grandfather, whose effigy had a cracked nose that no mason had ever been allowed to mend. Past tombs with names he knew from schoolroom histories and tombs with names worn away. The ceiling came down lower, and the stone changed: older, darker, the joints closer and the blocks larger, as if a different and much more patient people had built this part.

At the very end was a small round chamber with a single tomb in it, and an arch in the far wall that had been bricked up.

Sorin knew the tomb. Everyone did. It was in every painting of the Dawning. Aurion the First, who raised the sun. The man who’d led nine families against the Night Court on the longest day of the year and won. His effigy lay with a sword in his right hand, as they all did, but Sorin knew this one by its long plain guard: Solstice, carved to the last notch, the sword his father had worn in the rite hall tonight. In his left, where the others held nothing, he held a cup.

Sorin had never noticed the cup in the paintings. He found that he didn’t like it.

The bricked arch behind the tomb was older than the bricks. You could see where the stone around it had been carved with something once, a pattern of vines or veins, and then chiselled flat. The mortar was grey and old and, along the bottom, there was a little drift of fresh dust, as if somebody had been at it recently with a pick.

“Here,” Aldric said, and set the lamp down on the tomb’s foot. “Kneel, my lord. Facing him.”

Sorin knelt on the cold floor in front of Aurion the First, in his rite clothes, with his dress sword awkward at his hip and his knees complaining. The lamp threw the effigy’s shadow up the wall huge and soft. Behind him he heard Aldric take one step back, and stop.

It was very quiet.

“Sorin,” Aldric said. Not my lord. He hadn’t called him by his name alone since Sorin was about nine. “What’s the first thing I ever taught you?”

Sorin smiled at the stone face in front of him. He knew the answer as well as he knew his own hand.

“Never kneel with a drawn blade behind you.”

“Yes.”

The smile stayed on his face for one more heartbeat, because the rest of him hadn’t caught up, and he heard, behind him, the soft sound of a blade leaving leather. Then it did.

He moved, because twelve years of Aldric’s training moved him: a twist to the left off his knees and a hand to his hilt, the dress sword coming out of its scabbard faster than it had ever come out in the yard. And something new happened, something he’d only been given an hour ago. He asked, not in words but the way you’d clench a fist, and the blade went white.

Noon Edge. Light ran down the steel from guard to point, hot and clean, so bright that it threw the whole chamber into hard black shadow. For one breath, kneeling half-turned on the crypt floor with a burning sword in his hand, Sorin felt like the hero in every painting.

Aldric had already taken the blade.

It was the bind he’d taught Sorin at fourteen, the one Sorin had never managed to beat: a turn of the wrist and a press with the flat that trapped the other sword against your own and carried it wide. Aldric did it with his left hand and his working blade, in no hurry at all, and the white edge hissed along his steel and went harmlessly past his hip into the dark.

His right hand was holding a knife. It was narrow and plain, and it went in under Sorin’s ribs on the left side, upward, exactly where Aldric had once drawn a chalk mark on a sparring jacket and said here, and you won’t need a second.

The white went out of the sword.

Sorin heard it hit the floor. He was on the floor too, he realised, somehow, on his side, and Aldric was kneeling over him with one arm under his shoulders as if he’d fallen in the yard. The lamp was very bright. The cold of the stone was coming up through his rite clothes and the cold in his chest was coming out to meet it.

Aldric was crying. Sorin hadn’t known he could. Tears were running down the scarred face and dripping off his jaw, and his voice, when it came, was the voice from the fencing yard when Sorin had broken his wrist at twelve: low and steady and furious with grief.

“I’m sorry,” Aldric said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Why?” It came out as a breath. There wasn’t much else to make it from.

“It’s the order.”

“Whose?”

Aldric closed his eyes. He didn’t answer. He held Sorin tighter and pressed his forehead to the top of Sorin’s head, as he’d done after Sorin won his first bout, and said into his hair, “It isn’t mine to tell. Forgive me. Please. It isn’t mine.”

The numbers moved.

HP:	9 / 160 ▼︎

Sorin tried to look at the window and found it was hard to look at anything. Over Aldric’s shoulder, the effigy of Aurion the First lay with his sword and his cup and his open stone eyes, and beyond him the bricked arch stood in the lamplight with its little drift of fresh dust. Aldric was looking at it too. Sorin saw him look, and saw him look away.

He thought of his father’s face going still in the rite hall. He thought of Seraphine’s question, and Elodie on the balcony: There isn’t one. He thought, with a calm that surprised him, I should have listened to her.

Then the cold reached the middle of him, and the window gave him one last line.

HP:	0 / 160
Status:	▓▓▓▓

And for the first time in his life, Sorin of House Meridian had nothing to say.