The List of Seven

Year 0, dawn into late morning. Valdris.

Kaelith woke before dawn and did not get up.

He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling, which was made of dark wood crossbeams that had been there since his great-grandfather's time, and he held the morning before the morning began. He had been holding it for ten minutes when he realized he had been holding it for ten minutes, and that the holding was already something different than it had been at the second bell, when he had set the packet down on the table beside the bed.

The packet was still there.

The list of seven names was inside the packet.

The list included Lord Malrien. The list included the steward who had attributed the second Sunward attack to opportunistic banditry. The steward's name was Garran. He was sixty-two years old. He had served the Sunward house for thirty-one years.

The list included five names Kaelith did not recognize.

He sat up.

The packet was where he had left it. He had not, in the end, slept with it under his pillow, although he had considered doing so. The pillow had felt like a child's hiding-place, and he had been twenty-three for eight months now, and he had decided that a man of twenty-three did not put state intelligence under his pillow even when no one was watching. He had set it on the table.

He looked at it.

He did not open it again.

He got up and dressed slowly. He chose the dark blue again, although this was the second day of wearing it, which was bordering on a thing his mother would have remarked on. He chose it anyway. The morning would not be the morning for a fresh tunic and a careful cravat. The morning would be the morning for the same blue and the unworn silver chain still on the desk.

He left the chain.

Captain Moren met him in the second courtyard at the third bell, which was when Kaelith had asked to be met. The captain was already there. The captain had been there since the second bell, because Captain Moren did not understand the concept of being met when he had been instructed to be met, and instead understood the concept of waiting with a punctuality that he had been correcting Kaelith's father about for fifteen years before Kaelith's father had died.

"My lord."

"Captain."

"My lord, the household steward has not appeared at the second bell. Nor at the third. The household has noticed. I have been informed. Should I send a man to his rooms."

Kaelith stopped.

He stood in the courtyard and felt, briefly, something cold pass through him. The cold was the same cold he had felt at the chamber window two nights before. It came and went.

"Yes," he said. "Send a man."

"My lord."

"And captain."

"Yes, my lord."

"When the man returns, whatever he reports, do not take action without speaking with me. Even if the report appears to require immediate action. Find me, in person, before any further step."

Captain Moren had been a soldier for forty years. He had stood at Kaelith's father's right hand at the wedding-procession in Maradel when Kaelith's mother had been new to the court. He had carried Kaelith on his shoulders once during a Yule fair, when Kaelith had been four and Captain Moren had been twenty-eight and the world had been simpler than this. He looked at Kaelith for a long moment and then nodded once.

"Yes, my lord."

He went.

Kaelith stood in the second courtyard and watched the captain disappear into the corridor.

Lord Malrien came to him at the fourth bell, in the second courtyard, where Kaelith had been waiting on a stone bench beside the small fountain that had stopped working in late autumn and had not yet been repaired. The fountain had a low ring of frost on the basin's inner edge that the morning sun was not yet warm enough to clear. Kaelith had been looking at the frost.

"My lord Sunward."

Kaelith looked up.

Malrien stood at three paces. He was not wearing his council robes. He was wearing a plain dark coat of the kind a Lower Sward weaver might have made for a senior merchant. He had not shaved this morning. His hands were at his sides. The right hand, Kaelith noted, was no longer making the small thumb-against-forefinger motion. The hand was completely still.

"Lord Malrien."

"May I sit."

"Please."

Malrien sat at the other end of the bench. He left the proper distance, which was the council distance, two arm-lengths between two senior lords. The distance was protocol. The protocol, this morning, felt like a costume that they were both wearing and that they were both about to take off.

The frost on the fountain did not move.

"I would like to tell you a story, Lord Sunward, if you will permit me. The story is short. I will not tell it well. I am out of practice at telling stories. I will tell it anyway."

"Yes."

Malrien took a breath that was longer than it needed to be. He did not look at Kaelith. He looked at the frost.

"Twenty-one years ago," Malrien said, "the Ashwood was a normal forest. It had not yet been the Ashwood. It had been called the Greenwood for nine hundred years. There were ash-trees in it, but there were also oaks, and birches, and a small grove of rowan that the locals used at midwinter for the small fires. The forest was a forest. It had not yet been a wound.

"My wife was Elena. My daughter was Lyanna. We had been married for eight years. Lyanna was six. Six and a half. She had been born in the late autumn and we had counted her age in years and half-years because she had been, at every age, distinctly herself in halves as well as wholes. She had a small wooden bird, carved by her grandfather, that she carried in a pocket she had asked her mother to sew into the inside of her cloak. The pocket was not a real pocket. The cloak's seam was thinner there. The bird was always there.

"They were going through the Greenwood on the third week of summer. They were traveling to my sister's estate near the Sunspear foothills. The road through the Greenwood was the long way. The long way was safer in those days because the short way had bandits. We always took the long way. They were three days out from Valdris. They were a day from my sister's. They had stopped at an inn at the Greenwood's edge. They had eaten a meal. They had been laughing about something. The innkeeper would tell me, later, that Lyanna had been laughing.

"The next morning, they did not arrive at my sister's. The morning after, they did not arrive. On the third morning, riders found Elena's carriage in the Greenwood, eight miles from the inn. The carriage had been overturned. The horses were gone. Elena was, in the carriage, dead. Lyanna was not in the carriage. Lyanna was forty paces from the carriage, behind a fallen tree, where she had been hiding. She was, when the riders found her, also dead. She had been alive when she had hidden. The riders found her body without the cloak. The cloak with the small wooden bird in the inner seam was never found.

"The official report was that bandits had attacked the carriage and had taken the horses and the cloak and that Lyanna had crawled to the fallen tree and had died of exposure. The official report was filed. The official report was wrong. The official report was wrong in the small way that something is wrong when the truth has been known and the wrong has been chosen instead. The riders had seen the tracks. The tracks were not bandit-tracks. The tracks were, the riders said, they were ash-wolf tracks. The Greenwood had been a normal forest until that morning. After that morning, the Greenwood was the Ashwood.

"I was not on the road with them. I was in Valdris, at the council, where I had been called for an emergency consultation that had not, in retrospect, required a Malrien-house presence. The consultation had been a pretext. The man who had called the council, who had requested the Malrien presence specifically, was a junior secretary at the Maradel House. His name was Edrin. Edrin would die three years later of a riding accident that was also not what it was reported to be. I have known, since Edrin's death, that the consultation that took me to Valdris had been arranged. I had known, by the time of Edrin's death, who had arranged it. I have known the man's name for nineteen years.

"The man's name is on the list I left in your records, Lord Sunward. He is the third name. The first name is the man who corrupted the Greenwood. The second name is the man who, at the second-tier of the Cult, instructed the corruption. The third name is the man who arranged the consultation that kept me from the road. The fourth, fifth, and sixth names are the men who, in the years after, came to me with offers of purpose and order and the small mercies of removing pain, and who I, in my grief, accepted. The seventh name is mine.

"I was not, until this year, willing to write my own name on the list. I have, until this year, been a member in good standing of the Cult of the Broken Chain. I have had blood on my hands for nineteen years. I have done things I will not name in this courtyard. I will name them in a written confession that I will leave in the Master of Records' care, sealed under my own house seal, after this morning. The confession will be available to the council. It will be available to you. It will not be available to anyone before the second bell of tomorrow morning, because I have asked the Master of Records to wait, and the Master of Records has agreed."

Malrien stopped.

He still had not looked at Kaelith.

The frost on the fountain had begun, in the last few minutes, to thin at one edge. The morning sun had come around the corner of the second courtyard.

Kaelith said nothing.

"I have," Malrien said, after a long silence, "come to you this morning because I learned at the third bell that Garran has died in the night. The men I have served, for nineteen years, will have understood by now that I have stopped serving them. They will have ordered Garran's death because Garran was the channel through which their instructions reached my house. Garran has been the channel for eleven years. He killed himself, I believe, because he could not bear what they were going to ask him to do next, which was, very likely, to be the channel that would carry instructions for my death by the end of this week.

"I have come to you, Lord Sunward, because if I am dead by the end of this week, the seven names will be in the Master of Records' care, and they will be available to the council, and you will know what to do with them. I have come to you also because if I am not dead by the end of this week, I would like to have, before whatever comes next, given the names to a man who I have been watching for eleven years, who has held a wooden horse on his bedside that I carved when he was twelve, who has the room in him to hold what I am giving him.

"I have wanted to say that to you for a long time. I have not been ready. I have been preparing. I am, now, ready.

"I am sorry."

He stopped.

The frost on the fountain was thinning. Kaelith could see, where the morning sun had reached, a small drop of water beginning to form.

He held the morning. He held the packet that was upstairs on the table beside the bed. He held the seventy seconds of his mother's face through the carriage window. He held his own father's voice, eleven years dead, saying wear what your house wears, my boy. He held Captain Moren's nod, twenty minutes earlier, in this same courtyard. He held the small cold he had felt at the third bell.

He held the small wooden horse on his bedside, which he had not, in nineteen years, understood was Lord Malrien's penance offered to him by hand.

"Lord Malrien," he said, finally.

"My lord."

"Look at me."

Malrien turned his head.

His eyes were tired in a way that exceeded the word tired. They were the eyes of a man who had not been seen in nineteen years and was being seen now and did not know what to do with the seeing. They were the eyes of a man who had brought a small wooden bird in an inner pocket of a cloak to his daughter, who had been six and a half, who had laughed at the inn the night before her last morning.

Kaelith met them.

He did not, this morning, drop his gaze.

"You will not die this week," Kaelith said.

"My lord."

"You will give me the seven names. You will give me, today, what you know that is not on the list. You will, with my captain of the guard, walk back to your rooms, and from this moment onward you will not be alone. I do not yet know what I am going to do with what you have given me. I will know by tomorrow morning. I will know with you in the room. I am not telling you, this morning, that you are forgiven. I am telling you, this morning, that the Cult of the Broken Chain will not have the eighth name they intend to add to the list. They will not have you. I will hold what you have given me. I will hold what you cannot, this morning, hold by yourself."

Malrien did not answer.

His eyes did not look away.

A small drop of water, where the frost had been, fell from the basin's inner edge to the basin's bottom.

It made a small clear sound that, in the second courtyard, was the only sound.

Nyra Brightblade had been in the corridor at the courtyard's eastern end for the last nine minutes. She had been there because Kaelith had asked her, at the second bell, to be there. She had been there because the seven names, when she had read them at the second bell over Kaelith's shoulder in the small breakfast room, had included a paladin she had called uncle until she was nineteen and who had stopped writing to her at twenty.

The paladin was the fourth name on the list.

Nyra had not yet decided what she was going to do.

She had decided that she would not move from the corridor's end until Kaelith had finished with Lord Malrien. She had decided that she would, when Kaelith finished, walk into the courtyard and tell Kaelith what she had not yet told anyone, which was that her uncle-in-the-Order had visited her chapter house twice in the last three months, and that her chapter house's senior paladins had received him with the warmth they reserved for senior alliance figures, and that she had not, until this morning, understood what the warmth meant.

She would tell him today.

She would help with whatever came next.

She heard the small clear sound of a drop of water falling in the courtyard, and she stayed at the corridor's end, and she waited for Kaelith to finish.

Kaelith stood in the second courtyard.

Lord Malrien sat on the bench.

The frost was almost gone.

In a forest very far away, against a woman's sternum, a small piece of polished silver hummed a note it had not yet hummed.

Kaelith Sunward's chest, very quietly, grew warm.

He did not yet know what had happened to him.

He held what he had been given.

He stood up.

"Lord Malrien," he said. "Walk with me."

They walked.

End Chapter 5.