‘That’s just what he said, is all.’
I held his gaze a while. The watchman became uncomfortable and went back to watching the lamplighter.
I thought about killing him. Hatred boiled over in me. Not toward this man, who I’d never seen before and never would again—not even toward him, him, the one who had used me. The betrayal was mine. I had built a fiction around myself, a fiction in which I mattered, in which I had been at the beating heart of some grand conspiracy. And what a conspiracy it was! Were they just nonsense codes, just parcels full of stones? Did they come from anyone, did they go anywhere, or was it chaos with no beginning and no end, just hints and empty secrets swirling and elaborating and corrupting like rumours whispered in a circle?
I wanted to scream. No, I did not hate the man beside me, but still I imagined stepping back, I imagined miscounting the lights and him squinting to check, and I imagined my boot in his back and him barely even calling out with the suddenness of it. And by the time I had imagined all of this, I found that I had done it.
The lamplighter didn’t even seem to hear the crunch the false watchman made as he slammed into the street at the base of the wall. It began to rain. I ran.
Weeks slipped by. I ignored the usual signs, I slept in different places each night. People began to mutter. I listened, usually when I was hunched over a mug in a tavern. The Margravine, they said, had died. Assassinated, one said. Riots, another. Took her own life, a serving girl told me as she refilled my drink. I wondered if I had relayed a message that had led to her death. I wondered if anybody had.
It had not rained since that night, and that was why nearly a month later I was not expecting to hear his voice.
‘Follow me, Canica,’ he said.
It froze me over. The coin slipped from between my knuckles and murmured across the wooden floor. I wanted to say no, just to see what he would do. I was too frightened.
As I strode behind him I bent my gaze skyward. The clouds were light and held no promise of rain. Had it just been a coincidence? Had I seen storm clouds chasing him like that ranger had seen stars behind his eyes?
If he’d made the slightest hostile motion I’d have torn my blade from its scabbard and hoped for the best, but he led me from the city like nothing had changed.
We rode. The city retreated behind us and the plains swept out, dry and yellowing and smelling of dust. I wanted to ask him where we were going, but I thought I knew.
My eyes scarcely left him. I feared the silence but he never broke it. Even when we reached Hember’s Mantle he just dismounted, checked his pack, glanced at me, and left. Perhaps he didn’t know. But he must have: I’d murdered a man, I’d ignored the signs for weeks. How could his arrival be a coincidence?
Grass swished beneath his boots. The light of the new moon barely touched him. Despite myself I tried to imagine him as I’d seen him years ago, a black shape eclipsing stars, rain-slick hair snaking down around a wide wolf’s grin. I couldn’t summon it. I watched until I could no longer separate him from the night, and for the first time I wondered if he was just a man.
Hember’s Mantle turned in its sleep. Lamplights glimmered in the dark. I rested against my pack. The town had grown into a city, but it seemed so much smaller now.
The archivist’s words echoed in my skull, so similar to my own. Her spies . . .
Had I stumbled on truth, or had the rumour I’d started snaked its way back to me? Had I made it true by speaking it? Or perhaps I was mad, and had imagined it all. I lay awake for hours. Sleep never came.
