Chapter 15: Rules of the House

Ansgar read Calista's drawing three times under the guest tower lamp.

Hedda sat on the window seat with the blue-ribboned bundle on her knee, sorting my life into piles.

"Before you ask," he said, without lifting his eyes, "there's a thing I haven't told you."

My heart did something unwise.

"Go on."

"Since we crossed the White Crown's gate, the brand has been warm."

He turned his left hand over on the table, palm up.

The seam across it lay pale and shut, but a faint heat moved in it.

"Your grandmother pulled the Oath out of me. She didn't pull out the mark."

"And the mark answers the Crown."

"I think it can be called. I felt nothing for eleven years, and now I feel the Provost in the stones."

He closed his fingers.

"I wanted you to hear it from me tonight, before it's a surprise on a worse night."

I looked at his closed hand for a while.

He had put that on the table before I asked, exactly as he'd promised.

He didn't look as though he expected a prize.

"Thank you for saying it first," I said.

"That's all?"

"That's all for tonight."

Hedda coughed into the bundle.

"I'll hold the lamp in the window," she said. "If the Wardens count heads, they'll count three silhouettes."

At the third bell the Archive was a black building with one lamp lit at its gate.

The night porter was walking away from it.

The carved line over the door read NOTHING LEAVES. NOTHING IS UNSWORN.

"The rules of the house," Ansgar said under his breath. "Apparently I'm about to break both."

He put his branded palm flat to the outer ward.

The runes in the lintel read the mark as an Oath-sworn graduate's.

Their light dipped politely and let him through.

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