Fragile Concord

The gulls came first, which is how I knew to look up from the herb garden.

They were white against a sky the color of old pewter, three of them wheeling over the eastern tower where the watchmen kept their fires. In seventeen years at the Aurelian court, I had learned the birds never flew this far inland unless a storm pushed them, or a ship had come. The sea was forty miles east. Gulls don't wander for pleasure.

I set down my trowel and stood, brushing dirt from my knees. My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs to make them stop.

"Branwen." Sister Elin's voice came from the cloister walk behind me, carrying that particular tone she used when she wanted to pretend she hadn't been watching. "The rosemary won't plant itself."

"I know." I didn't turn around. The gulls had banked west now, toward the harbor road. "I only need a moment."

"A moment for what?"

For hope, I almost said. But you don't say things like that here, not out loud, not where the walls had ears and the ears had loyalties. So I said, "For air," and she let it pass.

The truth was simpler and more dangerous. My father's ship had been sighted off the coast three days ago, or so the kitchen girls whispered, and if that was true, if the rumors held, then he was coming. Finally. After seventeen years of letters that arrived twice a year and gifts that always fit a child two years younger than I was, he was coming to take me home.

I had stopped believing it would happen. That was the trick of this place. You stopped believing, and then the not-believing became a kind of armor, and after a while you forgot you were wearing it.

But the gulls.

I walked the long way back to my quarters, past the fountain with its four bronze dolphins, past the library where Master Draeco was probably already at his desk, past the practice yard where the young officers drilled in the pale morning light. I knew every stone of this place. I could walk it blind. Seventeen years of memorizing the cracks in the flagstones, the places where the mortar had crumbled, the exact angle of shadow the west wall threw at noon. A ward learns a place the way a prisoner learns a cell. Thoroughly. Lovingly, almost. Because it's all you have.

My room was small and clean and cold in the winter. I had made it mine anyway, with dried flowers from the garden and a blanket from home, the only thing I owned that had crossed the sea with me when I was four years old. It was too small for me now. I kept it folded at the foot of my bed and never used it. Some things you keep not for use but for proof.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my hands. Gardener's hands. Callused and stained. Not the hands of a noblewoman's daughter. Not the hands of a girl who was supposed to go home.

The knock came at midday, when the bells rang for the meal.

"Enter," I said, and Cadoc stepped in.

He was new. Everyone knew that. The young nobleman from the eastern provinces, sent to replace me as ward when I left. He was fifteen, maybe sixteen, with the soft face of a boy who hadn't yet learned to hide what he felt. He bowed too low. He always did.

"Lady Branwen. Forgive me. I was told to find you."

"You found me." I stood and smoothed my dress. "You don't have to bow. I'm not a lady here. I'm a ward, same as you."

His face did something complicated. Relief, maybe. Or shame.

"I don't understand this place," he said. "I've been here three days and I don't understand anything."

"Good," I said. "That means you're paying attention."

He looked at me like I'd spoken in a foreign tongue. And maybe I had, because the truth was, I didn't understand this place either, not really, not after seventeen years. I had just learned to move through it without asking questions.

"Sit," I said, and gestured to the chair by the window. "You're hungry. I can hear your stomach from here."

He sat. I handed him bread and cheese from the tray a servant had left, and he ate like a boy who hadn't eaten in days. Which he probably hadn't. New wards were always too nervous to eat.

"Why are you being kind to me?" he asked, mouth full. "I'm replacing you. You should hate me."

"I don't hate you." I sat across from him on the bed, the too-small blanket between us. "You didn't choose this. Neither did I."

He stopped chewing. Looked at me with those soft, unguarded eyes. "They said you were cold. The servants. They said you don't talk to anyone."

"I talk to the rosemary," I said. "It's better company."

He laughed, and it surprised us both. A real laugh, short and bright, the kind that doesn't know it's not supposed to happen. I hadn't heard a laugh like that in years. Everyone here laughed carefully. Politely. Like laughter was a currency and they were afraid of overspending.

"You're not what I expected," he said.

"Neither are you."

We sat in silence for a while, and it wasn't uncomfortable. Outside, the gulls had come closer. I could hear them crying over the courtyard, that thin, hungry sound that meant the sea was near, that meant somewhere beyond these walls there was a world I had almost forgotten.

"When do you leave?" Cadoc asked.

"Soon," I said. "When my father comes."

"And when is that?"

I didn't answer. Because the truth was, I didn't know. The ship had been sighted three days ago. It should have docked by now. It should have been here. But the harbor road was empty, and the watchmen on the eastern tower had stopped lighting their fires, and no one had told me anything, which was how I knew something was wrong.

That night, I went to the chapel.

It was empty, the way it always was at this hour, the candles guttering in their red glass cups. I knelt at the altar and folded my hands and tried to pray, but the words wouldn't come. They never did. Instead I thought about the ceremony.

The Concord renewal was in three days. Every five years, the Aurelian Empire and the northern kingdoms renewed their peace with a ritual that took place in this very chapel, in front of this very altar. I had watched it twice before, when I was seven and twelve, and both times I had felt something shift in the air, something I couldn't name.

This year, something was different.

The preparations had started early. The priests were nervous. I'd seen them whispering in the corridors, their hands fluttering like trapped birds. And Master Draeco, who had overseen the ceremony for as long as anyone could remember, had been in the chapel every night this week, alone, doing something at the altar that no one was allowed to see.

I didn't know what it meant. But I knew it meant something.

The door creaked open behind me. I didn't turn around.

"You should be asleep," Master Draeco said. His voice was gentle. It was always gentle. That was the trick of him.

"So should you."

He came and knelt beside me, his old knees cracking on the stone. He smelled of incense and old paper and something else, something sharp and cold that I couldn't place.

"The Order will keep its oath," he said. "You don't need to worry."

"I'm not worried."

"You're kneeling in a dark chapel at midnight, child. You're worried."

I turned to look at him. His face was kind. It was always kind. And that was the problem, because I had learned, in seventeen years, that kind faces were the ones that lied the best.

"When is my father coming?" I asked.

He didn't answer right away. He looked at the altar, at the candles, at the cross on the wall. And then he said, "The sea is unpredictable this time of year."

It wasn't an answer. It was a door closing.

I stood up. My knees ached. The chapel was cold, and I was tired, and I wanted to go home, and I didn't know if home was still a place that existed.

"Goodnight, Master Draeco," I said.

"Goodnight, Branwen."

I walked back to my room through the dark corridors, past the fountain, past the library, past the practice yard where the young officers had drilled and gone to bed. The gulls had stopped crying. The sky was black and empty.

And somewhere beyond the walls, beyond the harbor road, beyond the forty miles of sea, my father's ship was either coming or it wasn't. I didn't know which. And for the first time in seventeen years, I wasn't sure I wanted to find out.