Chapter 13 What Bettany Knew

Two nights before the Lumenfast, Bettany came to Ophira's room with a bottle he had not paid for and the face of a man who had stopped deciding how the conversation would go. His face had been coming apart all day, and she had watched it and let it. "Sit down," she said. "I'd rather stand." "Then stand." He stood in the doorway with the bottle hanging from one hand and looked at the floor for long enough that the lamp on the sill began to gutter. "I didn't tell them about the hall," he said. "I know you didn't." "How do you know?" "Because you could have told them two weeks ago and been paid and gone, and instead you've been standing in doorways counting wardens for a woman you owe nothing to." Ophira leaned back against the wall. "What did you come to say?" Bettany set the bottle on the table without pouring it. Then he said the thing he had been carrying, and he said it badly, in a rush, as if he had practiced the shape of it and not the sound. "Three years ago the man who hired me to count wardens was not a thief," he said. "I thought he was. I thought he was running his own job on the fourth tier and I was the outside eye. He paid me in Cognate silver. New-minted. I didn't ask why a job-runner would have new Cognate silver, because I was nineteen and it was more money than I'd seen." Ophira said nothing. "He wanted to know when the wardens changed their posts, and which corridor they left empty, and how long the gap lasted. I gave him all of it. And then he told me one more thing, which was that if I ever spoke about the count to anyone, he would have me picked up for conspiracy, and he gave me a name to remember so I'd know he could do it. The name was yours." "Whose silver?" Ophira said. "I didn't know then." "Whose silver, Bettany." "Kalfax's." He said it fast, like pulling a splinter. "You don't hire a boy off a harvest fair with new Cognate silver by accident. He hired me, and he used me, and he knew that whoever came up that corridor after the count would be walking into a room arranged for them. I was the arrangement. I've known it for three years and I've told myself a hundred times that I didn't know it then, and I don't know anymore whether that matters." Ophira stood up. She crossed the room. She stood in front of him, close enough that he could have hit her and she could have hit him, and she looked at him for a long, level moment. "Yes," she said. "He used you. And you took his money, and you were nineteen, and hard as that is, it's the truth. Harlo is dead because Kalfax wanted a thief who could reach the fourth tier to be made an example of, and because I chose to stand two tiers above him when he fell." "You told me you couldn't get back down." "I couldn't. That's not the same as it not being my fault." Bettany's eyes were wet and he did not wipe them, and his voice, when it came, was almost steady. "So what happens now?" "Now you take the bottle, and you go and get four hours of sleep, because tomorrow we steal a Key out of a mage's hand, and I need you sharp." Ophira picked up the bottle and pressed it back into his chest. "And when this is over, if we live, you're going to help me find every other person Kalfax used the way he used you, and we're going to put their names somewhere he can't burn." "That's not forgiveness." "No," Ophira said. "But it's a use." For a while after he said it, neither of them spoke. Out on the terrace someone was still selling festival tokens, and the vendor's voice came down through the shutters, thin and cheerful, counting brass in a city that was already spending its decade's money. "There's something I owe you," Bettany said at last. "You've paid." "No. Because you haven't asked me the question yet, and the fact that you haven't asked it is worse than if you had." He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, an angry gesture, aimed at himself. "Ask me who the man was." "Who was the man, Bettany?" "Kalfax." He said it the second time without flinching, and Ophira understood that the first time had been practice and this was the confession. "Not a runner. Not a middleman. The Archmage himself, in a good coat, on Lantern Row, three weeks before the Sealing, buying a boy off a harvest fair a story about a job he was running on the fourth tier. He told me it was a count. He told me he was one of us. He told me that if I did it well he'd use me again, and for a nineteen-year-old on Lantern Row that's the only sentence in the world that matters." "What did he look like? When you saw him that night." "Old. Grey. Very calm." Bettany looked up. "And he asked me one question about the wardens that nobody who was running a job would have asked. He asked me whether the wardens changed posts when the lamps went out, and whether the corridor went dark first or the men moved first. I told him the corridor went dark first. He said thank you, very politely, and paid me, and I have never in three years been able to work out why a thief would want to know that." Ophira knew why. She had known since the archive on the second tier. Because Kalfax had not been running a job. Kalfax had been arranging a lesson. He had wanted a thief to reach the fourth tier of his own spire, on a night when the corridor went dark before the wardens moved, so that the Cognate could catch and kill that thief in the most instructive place in the city. Harlo had been that thief. Ophira had been the one who was supposed to be standing beside him. "You were the arrangement," she said. "Harlo was the example. I was the message to whoever came next." "Yes." "And you've spent three years waiting on Lantern Row for me to come up it." "I've spent three years waiting for somebody to come up it," Bettany said. "I didn't know it would be you. I hoped it would be you. I was going to tell you everything on the first night and then you gave me the speech about being the clumsiest tool in Vessant and I decided you were right and that I'd rather be a tool than a stranger." He left. She sat down on the edge of the bed with the lamp guttering and her hands flat on her knees, and for a while she did not think about the job at all. She thought about the fact that she had just told the crew's weakest link the truth and that it had not cost her the plan, and she understood, with a clarity that came too late to be comfortable, that the reason it had not cost her was that she had already decided which of them she was willing to spend. She sat with that until the lamp went out. The worst of it was not that it was true. The worst of it was that it was rehearsed, that she had made the decision weeks ago, in the Green Cistern, before she had ever met Cadoc or Skellick or any of the rest of them, and had spent every day since collecting reasons that it was the right decision. She had told Bettany, on Lantern Row, that a person who cannot say a thing out loud is a person who will sell you. She had been describing herself for two weeks and calling it a plan. ---