Transcribed by Murk Lake, Seeker to the Old King

Stitchem River, Southern bank of the Drop Ditch, Age 3.9 U.C.

I’ve been walking the beach at night. It’s the only remedy I’ve found for the tightening coil of longing-sickness infecting the roots of my stomach. When my boots are edged close enough for the river’s exhale to fog the leather, the individual cords of the squirming black mass beneath the wide surface of the Drop Ditch become apparent. They’ve settled the water smooth as tar and in red and green waves of reflected light, the bottom half of my lungs ease open and I’m able to breath deep without vomiting.

Dragging myself up the beach each purple morning, away from the island and beyond the dark eclipse of water surrounding it, drives the illness to a pointed peak. I’ll lean over the backs of moss-covered boulders dotting the otherwise flat landscape and retch until I’m light enough to continue. Back in my tent, sleep comes after I’ve dried my mouth on bread and satcha, and before the sun finishes dispelling the roll of mist marching in from the coast.

The soldiers in camp have seen me, I know. Plenty are eager for the night’s watch. Crusty eyes are preferable to what the lights might slip into their dreams. I imagine they’ve told Major Montess about my walks. The first day he rode in, eyes focused on the needlepoint trees piercing the heart of the Drop Ditch, the major swung down from his horse and ordered no one set foot on the buffer of stony sand between us and the water. Most everyone’s had an easy enough time following the major’s first rule. The only tracks in the sand aside from my own are huddled around a wet gash below the boat, which has widened each day its hull is slid down and back from the water.

But Montess has said nothing to me. He likely hopes I’ll get too close and be pulled under, like those first six soldiers who were sent across to the grove. That was back when we were still learning the rules here and whatever sent them fleeing from the trees was more terrifying than a swim through black water. Like those soldiers, one wrong step and I’d be drowned from the inside out. The blood in my veins would harden into the muscle fibers of some other organism before they burst out of me. I’ve skipped stones out over the river, trying to get one to land on the island, but each has caught and held still at a single touch to the surface, then slipped under without so much as a ripple. There would be no splash or fighting for the surface; the Drop Ditch would suck me under in a single swallow. Unfortunately for the major, I’m sharpest when balanced on a razor’s edge. And should Montess get tired of learning that lesson and join me on the beach one night, I keep a knife made of bone tucked in my sleeve. I hear a nick makes a monster, and a twist in the gut makes a corpse. It’s dispatched a man with magic in his eyes, it would carve Montess like fish flesh.

The distance between us has improved our relationship. When the nausea grew too constant to write, I told Montess I was moving my tent upstream beyond the Saviors’ camp, and his faced opened so wide his tongue threatened to loll from his mouth. It’s not uncommon for a moonlighter to find himself on the outskirts—or in my case, the outdungeons—but I’ve never known a samwhin to shed so many scales over the more palatable Talents.

The Speaker’s Guild sauntered in and erected a black and white striped monstrosity in the center of the major’s bootcamp the day after my last letter to you. Montess can be observed each morning stalking around it, pretending to be counting his men while he rips through a side of stale bread like a balding seal. If his posturing didn’t draw so much attention, he could get away with letting the sparks he flicks from the end of his pipe land more strategically.

I’ve had daydreams about it all going up in smoke; the Guild’s quarters are the brightest match in the tinderbox, but the largest are the Reliquaries’ encampments to either side of us. Blue long-tents of the Savior Sect were killing a field of grass along the shore upriver before Montess had finished setting the crease on his bedroll. Reliquaries, for all their nosing around when the fun starts, prefer to rest their heads next to clear water. Montess preferred it too. But when the white flag bearing the cloaked figure for the Sect of the Lost Solider appeared one clear morning a day’s walk downstream, it was an awe if Montess could walk from the mess tent and back without a blue robed Savior getting under his feet.

I recall writing to you about all the hand waving and jangling of silver rings and pendants that was supposedly evidence of the Saviors’ right to ‘support the King’s cosmic mission’. Rumors of the white Reliquary spread from the blue to the soldiers. Now, everyone’s convinced the white tents downstream are hiding a cult of self-mutilating, fairytale-obsessed madmen, lying in wait to snatch whatever’s in the grove for themselves.

Irony is often lost of those who think they see so much. Even more is lost on the Saviors, from whom I have amassed a sizable collection of silver pendants under my bedrolls, parted from their chains so easily, I sometimes wonder if my knife remembers them.

“Mightn’t a moonlighter be useful in the grove?” A blue cloaked grey-beard muttered next to me the other day. His eyes flicked too often to where I sat perched on a boulder for his sidle to be happenstance. I shrugged and we watched the six drawn faces packed in the boat slide out over the black water—soldiers made sacrifice at that point, being fed to whatever hides behind the island’s sledgetrees.

Don’t feel bad; it does them no harm to admit it. The smart ones flee in the night. And the truly foolish ones we find in the morning, twisted up in sopping bedrolls, peeled open by the knives of capel assassins.

If Montess is worth a hair off his beard, Capelle makes similar discoveries come morning. But my hope is waning; each week, a coffin-laden wagon departs south for Samwhin, but I’ve not seen a single bandaged stiff sent north.

I don’t count the ones who die on the island—and they are dying, no matter how Montess dances around the word.

“Useful?” I asked the Savior and brushed the feathered end of my quill under my nose—a trick I learned to stave off sea sickness. “Maybe, but not to be trusted. Whatever relic you’re hoping to steal for yourselves, you’ll want it caught by better hands than mine.”

The man was so lost in huffing off, he didn’t notice the opalescent glint of my knife when I snipped free the eye-pendant he had dangling from the end of his beard. You’d think Reliquaries would be less offended by thieves stealing from them when they make it so easy.

It was a relief when Capelle arrived the morning after the last full moon, towing its own rank and file of fodder and an outbreak of what could only be the Red Hunters in tow behind them. It’s all Sect drama; nothing sours a Savior quite like a Hunter, even if they’re standing in two different kingdoms. The presence of all three Reliquaries at last quieted the fussing around camp in a way Montess’ orders couldn’t. Now, we only cross paths when the sun is at its highest, and we stand around holding our breaths, waiting to see if the screaming will start.

It always does.

Calma knows what the white think of the noises. Since the day one poked his way into camp, his eyes hidden behind a bandage wrapped around his head, and declared his Sect was ‘here only to observe’, I’ve not seen one. Their camp could be abandoned for all I can make out. I’ve considered wandering over, if for no other reason than to see their sunken eyelids. I heard from a man I met on the road that if you look underneath one, their eyes are still in there, but different. They’re smaller and sharper, and they look back at you from deep inside the squishy pink part of the brain.

It saddens me I’ve become so desperate for something new to ignite my interest. I long for a break in the pattern. Though nights are when the sickness threatens to crush me flat and the crackle of desperation is the most suppressing from the bodies in the camps, it’s the only time I feel I can think.

This grove…the head of a needle plunged from the deepest crevasse beading the Stitchem, it’s all there is to focus on when the lights come out and the distant dunes and hills, which in the day circle us like a pack of misty wolves, feel poised to descend.

It makes me hot and shivery, but maybe that’s the pressure of focused desire that’s been building, since no one else seems to feel it. Something is going to happen here. It has to. I hope it does. The value of whatever’s in the grove is growing by the day. It’s making me act unlike myself. I’m becoming dangerously disappointed when noon arrives and the soldiers die. If a capel soldier were to emerge holding a bundle in his arms tomorrow and walk on water straight into the Hunters’ tent, I’m concerned I’d be driven to commit treason, if only it meant I could touch it.

When I was too young to be making promises, I swore to myself I’d never to help anyone in the military. But that was before, when I was directionless. Now, I’ve felt this, and I know what I want—I might not know what it is, but I know it’s that same thing you want. That puts us on the same side, don’t you think?

To get what I want, I need to know what’s been killing all these soldiers. It’s one thing to see monsters in your dreams, but I wanted to see them awake, so last night, I took my spyglass. Or Sabe’s eyeglass, I should say.

It clicked in my belt against my knife as I walked under the hooded gaze of the bloodshot moon. It was the very same knife that had killed the monster inside Sabe and removed a clean sliver from his cornea before I buried him between two steep dunes outside Capelle. This thought comforted me as I watched the shadows between the sledgetrees shift and yawn, pitiless black against the green and red sky. Though Prisoner 94’s story has made me careful not to let the opalescent shard pierce my own flesh, I’ve taken to sleeping with it under my pillow.

I’ve learned to ignore the watchmen along the river, as they have learned to ignore me. They were too concerned with the lights in the sky and the camp across the river, who might be watching them back, to bother when I stood with my boots teasing the water’s edge and held the spyglass to my eye.

My spyglass no longer widens my view—the lenses Sabe’s cornea is encased between are ordinary glass—but I didn’t need to see closer to see more.

You asked me to write to you of any movement at the grove, and after two months of Montess’ daily failure, movement is exactly what I saw.

The wind singing in over the northern desert quieted and as the camps on either side of the river lay awake in the silence, my skin tightened under the prickle of an invisible stormfront. A glut of fruitless longing clogged the sky above the grove in weeping billows, too dark and heavy to possibly stay aloft. It’s no wonder my stomach’s been near torn in half since coming here.

If I hadn’t been paying it only half a mind, the corner of my eye might not have caught the movement on the island. I looked away from the anvil coalescing above us and moved the glass over the trees. In the cavernous pockets of shadow between them, the grove moved again—it was a small shadow, small in the way a wasp feels small squeezing inside your ear, moving steadily across the island. It turned no stone and brushed no branch.

The muscles in my legs bunched and burned, then as though it were already happening, I saw myself plunging into the Drop Ditch. The river parted oily and deliberate around my fingers and I couldn’t get a strong enough hold on it to keep from sinking. Water passed over my eyes and the lights in the sky began to fade as I held my breath. Something was pressing into my ear, something else up my nostril. Still, I fought to get to the island, and with every inch I got closer, sweetness of longing fulfilled washed along my bones. Blunt-headed creatures wormed under my skin, threaded themselves through my arteries, and congealed. Veins popped lose, and slippery tubers squeezed free.

I felt no pain, so I was able to convince myself it was not real.

At once, I was whole again but fleeing east, over the foothills to the ocean on the other side of the continent. I thought about how, when I got there, I would dive into warm, clean water and swim. I would swim out until I was too tired to paddle another stroke and something with teeth pulled me under. I ended up clawing for air either way, and I wanted to get away, as far as I could from the yawning agony clawing from inside the grove.

The next blink, and it was morning—the spyglass had rolled from my stiffened fingers, and for a moment I panicked because the wet moss on the boulder I was leaning against had soaked my back; I thought it was ocean water. I grasped at the place between my heart and my belly and pressed my hands over unbroken skin.

But still, even as the rest of the camp rose around me, lining up, already mourning the six of their number who will go in the boat today, I struggled to believe there wasn’t a hole through me. It isn’t real, but it’s like a well’s been drilled through my center, and at the bottom is… something that isn’t mine.

In the scrap of intentional sleep I managed before the sun rose, the lights striped the insides of my eyes. They had mouths. They whispered something in my ear and I shuddered awake to scrabble for a pen, but I couldn’t remember what they’d told me.

That all feels like very long ago. The sun is bright today, and warm, and Montess is reading the six names of who will fill the boat.

I haven’t told the major about the shadow in the grove; his soldiers are already shaky enough. They watch the boat sitting moored on dry land like it might turn into a viper. What would I tell them that could help, when so much of what I saw may have been a dream?

It’s beginning to show that Montess is doing his best to make this appear like role call at the palace—just another training exercise, just another missive into the kingdom. I think they’d be under less stress if he organized for them to be stolen in the night and tossed in the boat blindfolded. If they aren’t paling at the boat, they’re glaring across the water at the Capellen side, and from the looks on their faces as they watch those purple cloaks ready their own ship to sail across, you’d think they’d rather we were going to war.

Montess called the fifth name and paused. He glanced to the old Speaker standing in line next to him and hardened his jaw. On-loan Representative of the Guild, Sarina Mayloft has used her shield of gold and silver hair to ward off Montess’ pointed glares the past several mornings, and today was almost no different. Before the major could grind his teeth on his pipe in defeat, his captain made the least-tactical whisper I’ve ever witnessed.

“The sixth spot should be for a Speaker,” the captain hissed to Montess, loud enough even I heard from where I was half hidden behind a tent.

Montess crunched his teeth in an agonizing grind but said nothing to contradict him. The camp stood silent, watching Sarina as she blinked slowly and turned to Montess.

The major bought himself time by sucking an angry drag from his pipe and narrowing bloodshot eyes at the captain. I wonder if he’ll be demoted for this; Montess’ been playing a persistent middlegame with the Speaker’s Guild for weeks now.

“The time’s come to try something new,” Montess said, and now that he’d finally found his way onto the hook, he had no choice but to speak with driving force. The soldiers lined before him exhaled at once. Even the ones already chosen for the boat lifted their eyes hopefully from the Drop Ditch.

The hair along my arms prickled, as though lighting had struck nearby. Despite the warm sun on my cheeks, I lifted the spyglass from my belt and surveyed the grove. A towline was stretched across the river on Capelle’s side—they’d cast off quickly, not that it will matter—but otherwise the shadows were still. Whatever magic roiled above the treetops last night was gone. I ran my tongue over my teeth to convince them there was no need for chattering.

“The Guild’s contract was made with the King of Samwhin, major, not you. If you’d like to renegotiate its conditions, you may take it up with him.” I set the spyglass aside in favor of my pen to keep pace with Sarina’s recitation of the Guild’s mantra.

“Do you suggest he stop by with a pen and his seal?” Montess demanded.

If possible, Sarina’s expression smoothed even further, and Montess’ beard bunched. It went unspoken, but both were surely thinking about how the notion was doubly ridiculous because you haven’t been seen leaving your chambers for weeks now. Maybe your afflicted with a longing sickness of your own.

“That contract was written assuming there’d be something for your people to report on this side of the river,” Montess spoke over the sudden silence. “But the only place we need eyes is over there.” Montess threw his arm towards the grove.

Whispers passed amongst the soldiers and Sarina’s mouth tightened.

“The wording of the contract was conjured, negotiated, and approved under the power of the King’s own council,” she said with her face forward, eyes focused over the heads of the soldiers and on the Speaker’s tent. “It’s through no fault of the Guild the specifications of the agreement weren’t chosen more carefully.”

“You’re weighing words on a page over the lives of men and women.” Montess said lowly.

There he goes, showing his hand again, admitting his company’s lives are on the line. It won’t matter that their deaths have been obvious since the first boat of soldiers ran screaming from the center of the island and into the clutches of the water—there will be more deserters tonight.

“Not over the lives of my men and women,” Sarina corrected. “It is my responsibility, above all, to protect the rights of those in my charge. Just as it is your responsibility, sir, to reach the grove and whatever rests inside it. If you wanted firepower, you should have sent for Elementals. Speakers are not soldiers.”

Montess didn’t show any sting on his face, but you and I know it must have been there, because he has sent for Elementals.

I’ve been intercepting his birds with a stone and sling for weeks now. Of course, I tie the letters to fresh birds and set them on their way to you once I’ve had my look. The monotony has rooted so deep, I might bother intercepting yours too, if you sent him any in return. I haven’t received any letters from you myself, lately. Are you still there, King, holding tight to the leash?

The Speakers have wondered out of the Guild tent having heard the argument outside, and Sarina looks over her doe-eyed flock like a ram with a crook. Montess is chewing his pipe so hard I swear a splinter’s broken free and disappeared between his teeth.

When he pulls the pipe away, he shouts a final name—Abaline, from his own company—and the last soldier trudges to the boat, her eyes hard and unseeing.

If the deserters weren’t decided before, they are now. Montess’ leadership inspires it in people. There might even be a mutiny. More than one set of eyes is dogging the billow of the captain’s cape as he storms away from Sarina and Montess, not waiting for the gene

-:::-

Murk Lake’s letter was found floating on a gust of wind above the ashes of the camp several days after it was written. I discovered it three weeks ago after the Old King’s body was taken from his chambers for casting, amidst crumpled notes shoved beneath his bedding. The notes were scribbled on thin sheets of parchment, their creases softened, and the lines smeared. I doubt a Seeker would have sent such a poor report.

It is with these scribbles, and Murk Lake’s singed draft recovered from the wreck around the Grove—which I pulled from beneath the mattress folded in a crisp square—I’ve made conclusions about that day twenty-four years ago.

It was not soldiers Murk Lake saw Capelle sending to the island that morning.

Elementals training for assignment with the Select practice for years to cover half the range needed to ring the Drop Ditch in flame.

In one sketch of the aftermath, charcoal presses heavy over squares outlining the soldier’s encampments on either side of the river, ringing the outline of the fire’s burn.

It feels like a long time ago, but you remember when we fed a marrow wick you stole from the palace kitchen into a bladder filled with lamp oil, trying to create what we imagined fueled Capelle’s sparkboxes. You’ll recall the bald pink faces we sported for weeks after. We were so sore the Old King took pity and didn’t bother with more than a lecture. It seems Capelle’s had better luck perfecting the power they package.

The day Capelle lit the Drop Ditch on fire, I was on a self-imposed lockdown in the library with old Speaker Sivil, trying to make sense of the Guild’s contract with Skyclipse Dive while you were off somewhere outside, likely sticking rabbits in the woods. I remember with perfect clarity how the crack of his porcelain teacup hitting the tile rattled my teeth.

Speakers lie flat on the periods of their watch, and Sivil was not scheduled for dictation at that hour. He collapsed as though his supporting lines had been gathered and severed at once and I was not quick enough to catch him—you’ll remember the weeks he spent grumping around the palace with a broken wrist, entirely overdone with patience, and quick to swipe with the pointed end of his cane whenever he caught us sneaking behind him in the hallways—but when his slack mouth animated and began moving against the tile, I flipped him onto his back and readied my quill.

I could not have known the significance of the message coming through, and it would not be for twenty four years that I’d be going through these letters and see the name Murk Lake again. I knew only that whether the message be unlawful or legitimate, it needed to be dictated.

Enunciate; teacher still tells me that when she catches me visiting the Guild, as though I’m still the stray sneaking around her feet to send her friend secret codes, not a woman rushing to fulfill the duties of a Listener. I won’t apologize for the eyerolls I’ve sent her, but there’s a reason she used to make us write out our letters clearly before bothering with a Speaker. The message was quick and unplanned, and I may have missed a word or two of Murk Lake’s final words to your father. I admitted this fact to him bitterly later, convinced missing such a detail would have him setting me back in my training. That did not happen.

I remember your father from when I was first taken into the palace—he used to be a big man, with a barking laugh that made half his council jump when he unleashed it in the throne room. It gave me a fright each time I heard it, but the hunched figure he withered into those last few years was even more terrifying. That day, though, after I slammed open the doors of his study and could barely keep myself seated long enough to tell him what had happened, his laugh hit me so hard around my head I dropped the goblet of wine I’d been fiddling with. It left that purple stain on the ivory you keep covered with a rug.

He snatched the message from my hands and disappeared it somewhere behind him before pulling me up and holding me in front of him by my shoulders. He was still a big man then, and his grip was so sure I almost didn’t notice that he was standing barefoot in the spilled wine.

He told me things like this happened to the Guild all the time. He thought I’d understand how tempting the Guild must be to pranksters, with all their fuss and rules. You and I had certainly given in and tormented Sivil on more than one occasion. I left the Old King’s chambers feeling very silly, but giddy for having been in his presence like I had not been since I was child in awe of Samwhin’s Interior.

Three weeks ago, I was thinking about that conversation when I saw a puddle of ruby wine spreading out from under the doors of the Old King’s chambers. It had been years since he’d left his chambers, but against all odds I was bracing myself for his crack of laughter when I undid the latch and his body fell at my feet, and a knife—I still argue he’d only been holding it to defend himself—was gripped in his bloodless fingers.

It was after you’d been swept away to prepare for coronation that I was sorting through the Old King’s affairs, trying to prepare what I could for you before heading to the Dive, that I noticed my own handwriting sitting atop a pile of yellowing letters in his bedside drawer, and pieces started coming together.

-:::-

“—talking, unless you’d rather I—ugh.”

Sivil’s mouth opened and closed. He grunted as though under strain, but the evenness of his breath did not match the tone of the voice he was channeling.

“Whoever’s got the other end of this, write, if you know what’s good for you. I’m Murk Lake, and I don’t have the hands for it right now.”

He chuckled, and it came through the old Speaker dry and distant, the racks shaking his body and making the loose skin pooled against his throat wobble.

“They coat these little boats in tar out on the Reef, but the fire didn’t stick to this one. I don’t think it’s leaking. I’m not getting in it if it’s leaking. Swimming’s not… no, don’t swim.”

Sivil made a strangled noise as Murk Lake exerted himself.

“I thought I’d picked one of the smaller ones, but Speakers don’t make anything easy, do they?” He chuckled again but cut off which a hacking cough. I moved to wipe spittle from Sivil’s lips, but had to scramble to dip my quill in ink when he shouted:

“I thought you wanted the treasure for yourselves! You’re welcome to hop in, hah!”

Sivil’s mouth floundered and twisted, trying to convey noise caught in the background. Sweat beaded his brow, and I checked his pulse, but it was not so elevated I worried about the strain. The voices behind Murk Lake faded and he fell into a rhythmic beat of breath, Sivil’s pulse evened again.

“You know, there wasn’t any need for all this trouble with your black dogs. It’s not like I haven’t caught them slipping in and out of my shadow since leaving the prison. I felt them over the water that first night you had me plopped me in a boat for Inlay. It’s been amusing, pretending not to see them sniffing at my heals, but everyone wants something—it’s impossible for a moonlighter to ignore the stink. I’d have thought even you knew that. Was I not supposed to notice them?

“They make poor guards now that they’re out here on the Sledge. They didn’t stop me stealing Reliquary property on Inlay, or from using that property to bleed a man dry in Capelle. Now they won’t even get their feet wet to keep after their charge?”

Murk Lake shouted the last line, and his mania came through almost gleeful. Sivil gurgled as Murk Lake hocked something from deep in his chest and spit.

“You did promise it would be a fruitful partnership, and it has been. Better on my end than yours, though. Why not one last story, for all the good times? You get a story; I get the treasure. Maybe I’ll let you buy it back from me.” Murk Lake grunted, as though having been struck in the stomach. “No, no, maybe not.”

There was silence for a long while and I checked Sivil’s breathing again to assure myself that he was not slipping away. His Talent was still clouding his eyes, the veins in them swelling bloodshot. If we’d been at a Guild house, an attendant would have stood by with a dropper to wet his eyes. As it was, I could only try to close them, but they sprang open again. At last, Murk Lake swallowed thickly.

“It can’t be right, but the smoke’s cleared just over the island’s lip. The trees, they aren’t touched. It’s like… but I swear, that fireball came from the heart of the island. I was… I felt it when I...

“Skulls, what am I doing?”

Murk Lake pants.

“No, no, no. Bloody—move! Why can’t I…?” More heavy breathing followed by forced calm. “Boat’s stuck. The water’s got a hold of it.”

When Murk Lake next made noise, Sivil grit his teeth and hissed. I believe this is the point at which the boat came to rest on the Grove’s shore. I imagine his first step onto the island was a hesitant one.

“A black robe, a white robe, six pockets, and a copy of your frightful contract, but nothing sharper than a toothpick. Wake up. Snap out of it!” He breathed. “Calma.”

Sivil opened his mouth wide and made an awful rocking gasp, his chest rising as though trying to push something out. Murk Lake groaned long and low.

“Float, damn you!” He retched again. “Take me back. Not at night, it’s not supposed to be night yet…

It took Murk Lake minutes to get himself back under control. “Fine! Fucking fright; you’re coming with me.” He must have lifted the kidnapped Speaker onto his shoulder and walked on, over the stony shore of the unblemished island towards the stand of sledgetrees and the pathways snaking into them. “You won’t have me,” he mumbled between breaths. “See this here? I’ll kill you if you get close. I’ve gotten out of worse with this scrap of bone. Haven’t you heard; magic favors the moonlighter?”

Nothing answered him. Later, he laughed again, high and thin.

“Alright, I see you, now go away. It’s not night; you’re not allowed out yet. You want to get inside my head? I already tried listening to the dreams! The others were too scared, but whatever you want, I’ll… just show me what you want. Yes, I’m good at finding things.”

He must have been walking slowly, or in circles. The Grove, for all its mysteries, is no wider than the shortest sledgetree on its shore.

Suddenly, Murk Lake’s breath stilled. “Stop—come out.” A pause. “I can see you!”

When Murk Lake next spoke, his voice was far away. He must have set down the Speaker he was carrying. “That’s a nice trick, but you can copy me all you want, I’m still the one with the knife.” Murk Lake chuckles, but it’s quick, scared. “What stone? I said, come out from there.”

Murk Lake curses. “Don’t think I came here blind!” His voice grows more and more faint as he walks away from where he laid the Speaker. “I can feel you want something. Give me what I want, I’ll get you what you want. Let me go back to shore and I’ll find it for you.” No one answers him. “Yes, I’ll look. Just show me.” Quiet breaths. “What mirror?”

I sat with my pen ready, waiting for what felt like minutes to record the rest. Sivil’s lips parted dryly, and he screamed.

I dropped the quill to cover my ears. As quickly as it had come, the cry stopped, and Sivil bolted upright coughing. I ran then for the palace guards and sent for the Healer. I shook the message to dry the ink as I ran next for your father’s study.

-:::-

I’m sorry for not telling you all this before I left, but these letters your father collected, they are incomplete.

I wanted to tell you at the coronation, but it was too soon. Your father kept so much to himself these past few years, and I know you’ve felt the distance harder than most, regardless of what you’ve said. I thought, let the Old King be cast in stone before I start reshaping your image of him.

The only way to Skyclipse Dive form Samwhin these days is over the Barrel, or around the Island Belt. The ice sheet should be solid enough this time of year for a ship to land at its edge. And I will be taking a ship, but before beginning my duties, I’ve taken my company to the Grove.

It is a small island with black, stony shores, not even so wide as the palace greenhouses. The forces which Murk Lake described years ago as ‘bootcamps’ have swollen into armies, though no one has begun using the word ‘war’. They linger inland, away from the river and the black iris of the Drop Ditch. A few scraps of charred wood still litter the shore. A captain showed them to me through his spyglass and explained it’s what remains of the Guild’s tent. Now, the stripes and colors of Reliquaries and Speakers sit nearly a mile from the rest of the garrison. They’ve erected stables so people can ride in as needed and leave again before nightfall.

I asked the captain if he’s had strange dreams.

“Aye, but come nightfall, they’re no stranger than what you’ll see with your eyes open,” he pointed to a patch of sky above the Grove, the snow-laden clouds were beginning to blush with stripes of red light.

I did not stay to have dreams of my own. Before you tease me for being suspicious, I am on a timeline to begin my duties as your Inaugural Listener. But the Grove was not all that I wanted to see. I directed my company to continue downstream from the Drop Ditch. A ship is waiting for us where the river meets the ocean.

I found myself riding close to the riverbank once the black water was behind us. The Stitchem flows turbulent and clear outside the range of the Grove, carrying cool mountain water down from the Steps and filling midnight-deep pools with still water. Otherwise, the land on the south bank is flat and green, the soil dark and perfect for tilling. But there is not a homestead in sight at this part of the border. On the trunk of every other tree, a mark has been carved: an S with a line bisecting it, like a worm cut down the center, a mark for the King of Graves. It may tarnish the memory of your father, but the nickname Mouse Writ spoke about is real, and we will have to work carefully to make sure it remains his alone.

It is the night before I set sail for the Dive. I am cold already, but I can’t bring myself to drift away under the warmth of my tent yet. I sit bundled under a wolf’s pelt, stoking the last embers of our fire and I can’t help but survey the sky behind us. But there are no strange lights, only clouds and drifting snow. Still, I wonder what I would see if I had Murk Lake’s spyglass. Would there be something moving in the shadows, having followed us from the Grove? Would I see a stone? A mirror?

I will have more time to think on these questions later—a lifetime of time unless the Reliquaries are right about Calamity. Though I am writing this letter to you from the border—your Inaugural Listener in title if not in location—I have one final stop to make before I take my post and send these letters to you. The Old King’s Seekers are gone, but the road to Badgerpool is open, and I intend to visit.

Signed,

Mercurial Lascar, Ward of the Old King, Inaugural Listener to Skyclipse Dive

Age 1.5 Until Calamity