Chapter 123: A Finger's Width (Patreon)

The curtains were drawn across both windows, and the bedchamber held the light of late morning, filtered to a dull pewter through the weave. Gaearien stood at the foot of the bed with her staff in her hand. She had not set it down since she came in.

Someone had watched the painting room from the canopy for the whole of the sitting, and a demon had been the one to say so.

Lilith had offered to remove the problem. She had made the offer lightly, and Gaearien had heard it as a debt with the terms left blank. A watcher was a cheap thing to place, if whoever placed it meant to be thanked for taking it away. The woman had sat for a portrait and spoken of nations joining her willingly.

She looked at the curtains. They had been a mistake. A queen who shut out the daylight at this hour told anyone with a bow and patience exactly what she knew. Every door she sealed and every guard she doubled would reach that ledge as news, and whoever lay on it would be gone into the fog before noon.

She breathed out through her nose and crossed to the door. She had been in here too long already.

Ithilwen Faelor waited in the antechamber, placed so that the bedchamber door, the corridor door and the servants' passage all fell within her sight. To the palace she was a lieutenant of the Royal Guard who kept the rosters and decided who stood where. To Gaearien she commanded the Lunar Veil, the handful within the Guard who took orders from the Queen alone. Her silver eyes lifted when the door opened and dropped again at once.

Gaearien shut the door behind her. "Well?"

"We have him." Ithilwen kept her voice under the murmur of the branch traffic outside. "A ledge on the eastern limb. He keeps a second one higher up, for dusk."

"You've gone close?"

"Close enough to count his arrows. No closer." A pause. "Did you want closer?"

"Not yet." Gaearien turned the staff a quarter-turn on the floor. "What is he?"

"Dark Elf."

Gaearien's grip shifted on the crystal. The Dark Elves and Duergar were the only people on the continent who still traded openly with the Wastelands.

"Has he strung the bow?"

"Not yet. Does a watcher need to?"

"Then he may have a line to Nocturne."

"May." Ithilwen's eyes stayed on the corridor door. "Can a corpse tell us? Or a man who's fled into the fog?"

"Neither."

"Then we take him alive. Before that, I can't say."

"Good." Gaearien set the staff's foot down and heard the crystal ring once against the wood. "Do it quietly. Use your own and no one else. Keep the rest of the Guard out of it."

Ithilwen's head came up. "The Council?"

"I was absent for a long time. I don't yet know who grew comfortable in that absence." Gaearien held her gaze until the lieutenant lowered it. "If one of the elders put him on that ledge, a single patrol changing its route will tell them we've seen him."

"Understood." Ithilwen touched two fingers to the crest on her breastplate. "Tonight, or the next dusk he keeps."

She left by the servants' passage. The panel slid shut behind her without a sound.

Gaearien stood alone in the antechamber. Then she lowered herself into the chair by the cold hearth and laid the staff across her knees. Her hands stayed on it.

*

The eastern limb ran broad as a road here, its bark furred with moss that took a boot without sound. Ithilwen kept to the underside of the climb, where the lip of the ledge cut the watcher's sightline. That was the blind spot they had marked that morning. The two Veil agents at her back moved when she moved and stopped when she stopped.

Twenty paces below, the second pair crouched in the crook of a fork. She lifted two fingers, turned her palm down and drew it toward her chest. Both heads dipped once. They started up.

She breathed the hush-word into her collar, and the scrape of plate at her shoulder went dead. Behind her, lips moved, and the creak of a leather bracer stopped mid-sound. The spell held only for slow bodies. A jerked limb or a shaken branch would set the leaves above talking, and the man on the ledge would hear the leaves.

She set her weight on a side shoot and waited for it to stop trembling before she took the next.

The fog had thickened since noon. Somewhere below, the bells of the lower hall rang the fourth hour. Gaearien sat with the ambassadors this evening. Ithilwen meant to have him bound before then.

*

"I confess I'm surprised you called us together today, Your Majesty." Lilith settled into the chair the elves had grown for her and folded her hands on the table. "Given everybody's circumstances."

Gaearien's fingers moved along the lunar crystal of her staff, top to bottom, and stopped at the grip. Elder Tolben, two seats down, nodded and turned a page of his notes.

Cassius sat across from her. His silks were pressed, the solar emblems aligned at each cuff, the goatee trimmed to a clean edge. Above it his eyes kept moving: to her, to the window, to the ceiling, to the jug of water at his elbow, which he had not touched. A muscle under his left eye jumped twice while she watched.

"Circumstances." He drew the word out. "Yes. Some of us have had circumstances, haven't we, Lady Lune? I'd wager you know the details better than I do."

Helena stood behind his shoulder. Her hand rested on the back of his chair, and when his voice climbed, her knuckles whitened against the wood. She bent and said something too low for the elves to catch. Lilith caught it anyway: Ambassador. The Queen. Cassius shut his mouth and smoothed his sleeve.

"I only meant the strain on everyone," Lilith said. "Long negotiations wear on the mind. I'd hate for any participant's health to suffer." She let her gaze rest on Cassius for one breath, and his hand found the water jug and missed the cup.

Her real worry sat at the head of the table. The man on the eastern limb had been watching that balcony since the morning, and Gaearien had turned down her offer to deal with him. An arrow through the window during a summit would end the truce, the trade talks and possibly the Queen. It would also put a demon delegation in the room when it happened.

"There is no need to be concerned, Lady Lune." Gaearien's voice came out level, though her eyes went to the window sooner than they needed to. "I've been assured it won't be an issue."

Lilith nodded. She reached outward, past the walls and into the fog. The watcher was still out there, one heartbeat, steady. Five more had gathered near him now: three close beneath the ledge, two further down, all climbing slowly to stay quiet. None of them had drawn a weapon yet.

Tolben cleared his throat and squared his notes against the table. Cassius filled his cup on the second try. Helena's hand stayed on his chair.

"Well then," Gaearien said, and laid the staff across her lap. "Shall we begin?"

*

The bark under Ithilwen's palms had gone slick with fog. She kept the hush-word stretched over her armour as thin as it would go and reached for the next hold. Three more and the ledge would be level with her eyes. Behind her the two agents climbed in her own handholds, a body's length apart.

Above, the Dark Elf moved.

He had sat an hour with his knees drawn up and the bow cased across them. Now he rose to a crouch, slid the bow free and set his weight on his back foot. The summit chamber's window threw amber light through the fog onto the limb, and he had turned to face it.

Now, then. There would be no dusk tomorrow.

The hush-word would not hold a climb at speed. She lifted her left hand where the agents could see it and closed it into a fist. The one nearest the second pair passed the signal down.

They went up.

Plates knocked. A buckle scraped the bark. A strip of it tore loose under her boot and dropped into the fog. Ithilwen took the last reach with both arms and came over the lip of the ledge on her knees.

He had an arrow on the string. He was drawing.

Twelve paces. She had crossed them in her head a dozen times since the fourth hour, and now her body crossed them slower. His elbow came back past his ear. His shoulders settled. Four Veil agents were scrambling across the ledge behind him in their armour, boots striking wood, and he kept his eyes on the window.

He turned his head only when her hand closed on his drawing arm. Someone else had his collar. A third threw herself across his legs.

The string had already left his fingers.

She watched the arrow go. It cleared the ledge and crossed the fog, and the shaft turned once in the amber light. Through the window the long table was visible. Cassius was half-risen. The scribe stood at his shoulder. The Nocturne envoy sat with her face toward the glass. Gaearien sat at the head with a cup in her hand, turned toward Tolben in the middle of a sentence.

The arrow was flying at the Queen.

Ithilwen's grip was still locked on the archer's forearm. The arm had jerked at the release. The bow's lower limb had struck her wrist. Had that been enough? A finger's width at the ledge could be a hand's width at the window. It could be nothing.

Under the agent's weight the Dark Elf stopped fighting and lifted his head to watch.

*

"It is a reasonable proposal." Gaearien set her cup down and left it. "Should the Empire rescind the restrictions it places on my people, I will lend archers to instruct your troops. Mentors. Nothing more."

"You can't be serious." His rings clicked against the table edge as he spread his fingers flat. "Forgive me, Your Majesty. What I meant to say is that I hold no authority over imperial law in that regard. I can, however, offer payment. Grain, or gold, in whatever measure the Conclave finds fitting."

Gaearien looked him over. Beside her, Elder Tolben did the same, slower, from the goatee down to the solar emblems stitched along the silk cuffs.

Tolben coughed into his fist. "Gold does sound like a reasonable offer." He glanced at the Queen.

Gaearien gave him the smallest nod.

"But the wellbeing of our people matters as well." Tolben opened his arms wide, palms up. "So long as you can promise that every elf within your Empire may move freely, instead of being penned into forests and reserves, I would consider the matter settled."

Helena leaned forward behind Cassius's chair and spoke into his ear. Cassius's shoulders came down.

"While it is true that elves reside in certain zones," he said, "they are not barred from travelling through the Empire. The law stipulates only that they may not settle inside human cities. It was passed to protect populations already in decline. Scattering them further would serve no one."

"Then the guarantee costs you nothing." Tolben's arms stayed open. "If our people already hold such rights, you need only write them down."

Gaearien lifted her cup and turned to hear him out. Cassius's palms pressed flat to the table, and he began to rise.

Out on the eastern limb, beyond the fogged window, the five presences closed on the sixth. Lilith had tracked them since she sat down. A body jerked, two more landed on it, and a bowstring released.

The arrow cleared the ledge.

The damp air had pushed the arrow's line a hand's width, and someone's grip had dragged the shot further left. It would strike the window frame, or the wall a pace behind Gaearien's chair.

A silent ward outside the window would stop it. Nobody at the table would know there had been an arrow at all, and the meeting would go on.

Or she could catch it beside the Queen's throat.

Lilith shaped the gesture under the table and clipped the incantation to a single syllable. Gold washed over the back of her hand. She stood, and the chair skidded behind her.

The guards at the door saw a foreign envoy rise and lunge at their Queen. One shouted. Two drew. Across the table, Cassius's mouth spread into a grin, his rings catching the glow of her Haste as she passed him.

She reached Gaearien a heartbeat ahead of the arrow and closed her hand, turning her wrist as she caught it so the shaft seemed to have stopped a finger's width from the Queen's neck. Its fletching brushed silver hair, and the window cracked in a star around the hole it had left.

Gaearien threw herself sideways out of the chair. The guards kept coming, blades out, and the Haste guttered from Lilith's hand.

"There!" Cassius was on his feet, his chair knocked over, his arm thrust at her. "You see it now! The demon shows her true intention!"

Lilith held still, the arrow upright in her fist, and let the first guard's sword arrive at her collarbone. Three more fanned behind him. Their boots scraped on the living wood.

"Stand down."

Gaearien had a hand on the table edge. She was looking at the arrow.

The guard's blade stayed where it was. Nobody sheathed anything.