Chapter 699: An Unappeasable Mood
The others were already around the table when No. 76 came through the door.
“Good morning!” Amy gestured with her fork. “Come sit. Fried eggs this time. And milk. I haven’t eaten this well since—”
“Don’t complain,” Broken Sword said. “At least you ate fried eggs within the last decade. I haven’t in almost ten years.”
“There’s someone who hasn’t eaten them at all,” Annie said, with the mildness of someone reporting weather.
Three heads turned. “Who?”
She pointed at herself. “Me. When I was small, our neighbor kept old hens. I used to dream about those eggs. Finally worked up the courage to crawl into the henhouse and steal one to taste.” She paused. “My father discovered me before I made it out. Nearly beat me to death with a rolling pin.”
“He must be an honest man,” Hero said, with genuine respect.
“Honest.” Annie’s tone was thoughtful. “He was frightened the neighbor would discover it and ask for damages. The egg, as it turned out, he ate himself. Along with my brother.”
The room went very quiet.
“Let’s eat,” Hero said, a little desperately.
Amy burst first — a single helpless snort that became laughter she couldn’t stop. The others followed in sequence, unable to resist it, and for a moment the Foreign Affairs Building held something it probably hadn’t seen in some time.
No. 76 smiled with them. The smile cost her nothing; after so long, the performance of small pleasures had become as automatic as breathing. What lay underneath it — the absence of taste, the food going down like particulate matter, sustaining the body it occupied with the same enthusiasm as fuel sustaining a furnace — she had learned not to examine. Hundreds of years of eating without sensation had taught her what the body required and what the mind could be redirected toward instead.
She watched the younger generation laugh and felt something that wasn’t quite what she would have called emotion, but wasn’t nothing either.
She had seen Taquila in its strength. She had served through the slow failing of that strength. She had spent four centuries in the dark of the maze ruins, watching the Union contract toward nothing, and had told herself that survival was purpose enough.
Looking at this table — the eggs, the milk, the laughter over something as small and human as a stolen egg and a father too frightened to do the right thing for the right reason — she found herself revising that.
This is what the Holy City looked like. Not the walls or the structures. This.
And Neverwinter would be more than an echo of it. Because the Chosen One had appeared.
“You look tired.” Amy leaned across the table and touched the corner of No. 76’s eye gently. “Dark circles. Didn’t you sleep?”
“Perhaps not enough,” No. 76 said, lowering her head. “I was too excited.”
Technically: she needed two hours. Technically: the soul, when overexerted, reflected its strain in the body it occupied, and that was a damage more permanent and less remedial than anything that could happen to flesh. She knew all this. She had practiced for centuries the discipline of regular rest.
She had not been able to sleep.
The possibility that the light in the ring had been a mistake — that exhaustion or the snowstorm or some failure of the stone itself had produced what she thought she saw — was one she could not make herself take seriously. But the alternative was that the Chosen One was real and close, and she had been afraid to sleep in case the morning proved her wrong.
That was not discipline. That was four hundred years of waiting finally arriving at something it could not stay calm about.
She needed to reach whoever had produced that light. According to Wendy, the witches lived in the Castle District. She was not a witch and had no path into the castle through the Union. Sneaking in was an option she’d reviewed and discarded — not because it was impossible, but because the green-haired witch’s detection ability made anything covert into a variable she couldn’t control, and she did not yet know whether the Chosen One could be extracted before pursuit caught them. She also did not know whether the king would permit such a thing, or what he would do if he understood what he had in Neverwinter.
She had been told that Roland Wimbledon had defeated the God’s Punishment Army. She had seen what he’d built for witches to live in. She had read his city the way she’d been trained to read cities — its layout, its population, the ease with which people moved through it.
Unless he moves against the Chosen One himself, Taquila does not move against Graycastle. That was Pasha’s position. Her own. The Union had no capacity to produce new members without human help; that arithmetic had been settled for centuries. The demons were coming regardless, and the four kingdoms were the only resource between that future and oblivion. Burning that resource now would mean defeating the king and winning nothing.
She would find another way in. She would find the one with the orange light, and make certain first, and then decide.
“Can’t you nap later?” Amy said, still smiling, hiding it poorly. “The servant said lunch and dinner come on a schedule. No need to go searching for your own food.”
“Miss Nana cured me completely,” No. 76 said, pressing her hand to her chest to indicate solid health. “I feel fine.” She let a hesitation show. “Lady Wendy is taking you around the city today? I… I don’t want to stay alone.”
“Come with us,” Amy said immediately.
“It would be no trouble,” Hero added.
“I don’t like staying alone either,” Broken Sword agreed.
Annie said, without flourish, “I’ll ask Lady Wendy.”
“Thank you.” No. 76 bowed. She meant it, in whatever way she still had access to meaning things. These four had known each other through years that had not been kind to any of them. They had extended her the small, unconsidered inclusion that people extend to each other when they don’t yet have a reason not to. She found she wanted to deserve it.
Wendy arrived with a chair.
Not a carrying chair or a padded seat — a device with large wheels at the sides, precisely sized, with a footrest for legs that were not currently present. She demonstrated the function: push the wheels to move, rotate differentially to turn. Her voice was warm and matter-of-fact in equal measure.
“Anna and Soraya worked through the night to make it. With this, Hero can go anywhere on flat ground.”
Anna. No. 76 caught the name before her expression could react to it. The High Awakened that Nana had described — and now apparently someone who spent their night making a wheelchair for a witch she’d never met. She filed this, carefully, next to everything else she was filing.
Hero accepted the chair with the face of someone who had been practicing not crying. She didn’t quite succeed.
“This is your home,” Wendy said simply. “All the witches here are your sisters.”
While Hero tested the wheels, Annie put the question about No. 76 to Wendy directly. No. 76 watched Wendy’s response from across the room — the way Wendy paused, the way she turned to look before answering, the specific quality of the look.
“Of course,” Wendy said finally. “One more person is no trouble.”
The pause had not been long. It had been long enough.
No. 76 kept her expression pleasant and grateful.
The inspection isn’t finished, she thought. I haven’t passed yet.
Which meant she was still being watched. Which meant the one she’d felt in her room last night — the witch with the orange light, the one who had extinguished the candle — was not a stranger who had passed through, but someone assigned to this purpose. Someone who had looked at her and found reason to keep looking.
She would need to be more careful than she had thought.