Chapter 64: Curiosity
Three days later, in the backyard.
“Sister Anna.”
“Mm.” Anna was watching Lightning, who was currently demonstrating her maximum altitude, a small figure against the grey sky.
“Don’t you think Sister Nightingale has been acting a little—” Nana paused, apparently selecting her word — “different lately?”
“Different how?” Anna said, still watching Lightning.
“The way she talks to His Highness. And the way she looks at him when he’s not looking at her.” Nana’s voice had the very-serious tone of someone conveying intelligence they consider important. “It’s different from before.”
“She always stands near him.”
“It’s different from that different.” Nana made a small sound of frustration. “Sister Anna, I’m trying to tell you something.”
Anna looked at her. Nana was twelve years old and had the expression she used when she had determined something that no one else had bothered to determine, which she deployed with the air of a person delivering findings. Anna waited.
“She’s wearing different clothes,” Nana said, apparently shifting tactics.
Anna looked at Nightingale, who was standing near the shed with a cup of tea, watching Roland mark something on the test sheet he was holding. She was wearing the style of clothes Roland had introduced — the jacket, the trousers, the practical flat-soled boots. She had been wearing them since the morning after the oath. She looked — Anna searched for the word — present. As though she had taken up residence in her own outline.
“His Highness wears them,” Anna said. “They’re practical.”
“That’s not the—” Nana stopped again. She looked at Anna with the expression of someone who has decided that their audience requires a different approach. “Sister Anna. Later, when it’s too late, please don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”
“Warn me about what?”
“I don’t know yet. But something.” Nana appeared to consider this satisfactory, and turned back to watch Lightning.
Anna also turned back to watch Lightning, and did not think about what Nana had said, because it hadn’t been clear enough to think about.
“Fastest you can go,” Roland called up. “I want a number.”
Lightning, at altitude, gave him a thumbs-up, positioned herself, and flew.
She made a complete circuit of the castle in what Roland estimated was between sixty and eighty kilometers per hour based on his internal reference for that speed, which was apparently how fast he’d driven something in a previous life. Anna found the unit incomprehensible but the assessment plausible — it was approximately the speed of a fast horse at full gallop, perhaps slightly faster, sustained.
He wrote something on his test sheet and then said, “Maximum weight.”
This part was less impressive.
With Anna standing on the scale he’d built from a barrel and a marked board — Fifty-two kilograms, he noted, which she will not thank me for noting — Lightning’s altitude dropped from the hundred meters she’d been playing in down to approximately ten. She held it, clearly working, and maintained forward motion.
He added another fifty kilograms of iron ballast.
Lightning dropped to two meters and lost speed substantially. She was not visibly alarmed by this — she had the attitude, in the air, of someone who considered any altitude a manageable one — but the math was not favorable.
Roland looked at his sheet for a while, and then wrote something else, and then looked up at Lightning and said, “Come down.”
She descended, landed with the same slight precision she always landed with, and looked at him expectantly.
“Scout work,” he said. “Reconnaissance. Vertical height gives you range of vision — you can see things from two hundred meters that we can’t see from the wall.” He was already drawing something in the margin of his sheet. “In an open field before an engagement, you could give me a complete picture of enemy positions in twenty minutes.”
Lightning considered this with the seriousness she reserved for things that involved actual movement. “I could carry a notebook,” she said. “My father’s exploration methodology includes recording what you actually see, not what you expect to see.”
“Yes,” Roland said. “That is exactly what I would need.”
Lightning’s face did what it did when she was genuinely pleased — a specific kind of brightening that was distinct from the general enthusiasm she moved through the world with, something more focused. “When can we practice?”
“Soon,” he said.
She seemed to find this satisfactory, turned to Anna, and asked whether Anna thought the steam engine’s exhaust volume would increase if the fuel were different, which was a question Roland had apparently not considered yet, because he looked up from his sheet with an expression of someone who has been presented with an interesting problem.
Anna, who had been thinking about the exhaust question herself for a week, sat down with Lightning on the nearest crate and began explaining what she’d observed.
Wendy stood at the edge of the shed roof’s shadow and watched Roland work.
She had been watching him for three days, in the careful way she had learned to watch people — not with the anxious attention of someone looking for threat, but with the patient method of someone checking a proposition against its evidence. She had decided to believe Nightingale, and believing Nightingale meant believing that this man was what he appeared to be, and believing that meant she needed to confirm it rather than simply deciding she believed it and stopping.
She had been wrong about men before. She had been wrong about people before. She had found, over fifteen years, a reliable method for this particular error: she had assumed that kindness was a performance, until she had evidence that it was otherwise. The evidence usually arrived in the form of the moment when the kindness failed — when she said the wrong thing, or when someone important applied pressure, or when it became inconvenient.
The moment hadn’t come yet.
She watched Roland thank Carter for something and mean it. She watched him ask Nana how she was sleeping and listen to the answer. She watched him hand Anna a section of specifications with a note written in the margin that she could hear him saying was his own error — the tolerance I gave you was wrong, here’s the corrected figure — without any apparent difficulty. He did not expect credit for the correction. He just corrected it.
She thought about the contract.
In fifteen years of witchcraft and the Witch Cooperation Association, she had understood, in a general way, that any arrangement with a non-witch was one in which she had fewer rights than were stated and more obligations than were listed. She had signed things before. She had learned to read the gap between the language and the intention.
This contract had no gap. Or if it did, she hadn’t found it. She’d read it three times, and the third time she’d been looking specifically for where the language became vague enough to do something bad with, and it hadn’t been there.
Article 2.1. Paid leave. She could still not fully process Article 2.1.
She looked at Nightingale.
Nightingale was at Roland’s left shoulder, her usual position, and she was saying something quiet to him while he looked at Lightning’s demonstration notes, and he said something back, and the thing that moved across Nightingale’s face was — Wendy stopped herself and looked again. She was not imagining it. There was a quality of ease in Nightingale’s expression when she was talking to him that Wendy had never seen before in the five years she had known her. Not the careful ease of someone who has decided to trust and is managing the decision. Just — ease. The person in front of her was a person she trusted, and this had become unremarkable, and her face didn’t know to hide it.
Wendy thought about what it had cost Nightingale to trust anyone, after Mr. Gilen and after Hyde. She thought about the two years of theft and iron bars and threats. She thought about the girl she had found in a street in Silver City with the particular look of someone who had been running on willpower alone for long enough that they couldn’t feel it anymore.
Two months, she thought. Two months to produce that ease.
I hope you know what you’ve done, Roland Wimbledon, she thought. I hope you understand the weight of it.
She found that she meant it as a warning rather than a threat — not I hope you are careful but I hope you understand what you’re holding. She had watched Cara’s certainty destroy people who had needed her to simply be reliable, and she had decided that the single most important quality in a person who held others’ trust was knowing that they held it.
The horn sounded from the west.
A single long note, and then two shorter ones — the standard signal for demonic beasts detected approaching the wall. Everyone in the backyard registered it and changed posture simultaneously, the way groups do when they have rehearsed a response.
Roland was already looking west. He set down his notes.
“Back to the castle,” he said to Wendy. “Both of you.” He looked at Lightning, who had the expression of someone gearing up to argue. “No,” he said, before she could.
Lightning argued anyway. She lost. Wendy put a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward the castle door, and Lightning went, protesting, with the specific energy of someone who has agreed that they lost this argument but wants the record to show how wrong she thinks the decision is.
Wendy looked back once.
Roland was already walking toward the wall with Nightingale at his shoulder, and Nightingale’s hand was at his arm, and then they were both gone — not moving, just gone — and Wendy stood in the empty backyard and thought about what it meant to be someone whose ability was to walk through walls.
She went inside.