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Chapter 126: Yellow Paper
Aethros told Roran everything as soon as the room was shut, in a low voice, with the window latched and Nyx on the bedpost. Roran listened sitting on the edge of his cot in his shirtsleeves, turning his bandaged hand over in his lap. When Aethros reached the part about the supper, he stopped turning it."The night after my match," Roran said. "They want everyone at a table while they move Dorric.""That's what I heard. A cart, an old landing on the river, five men. The envoy in rust is the buyers' own man, and he wants a look at Fenn. At you, if he can't have Fenn.""And they think Hobb isn't real.""Wen thinks so. He said it to my face today. There are four carters from the Silverreed mills, and he knows all of them." Aethros sat down on his own bed. "If he's checked, the story falls. Halvard has already sent Garo down the east road, and Garo found no Hobb either. I think you need a second layer."Roran rubbed his jaw and thought about it for a long time. "Hobb is new," he said final
Chapter 125: The Notebook
Wen Shaoling had carried the broken staff to the council house after the morning bouts, and he had been received by a secretary who took the two halves, noted them in a register, and promised that the matter would be considered. It had taken eleven minutes. He had walked back to the instructors' hall with his hands empty and the taste of the council's tea still in his mouth, and he had been writing ever since. The cup at his elbow had gone cold and grown a skin.His study was a narrow room above the instructors' hall, with a window that looked out at the practice yards and a desk so old that its legs had been shimmed with folded paper. On the desk lay three notebooks. One he had filled before the tournament. One he was filling now. The third was blank, and he did not like how often he looked at it.He read down the page he had just finished. Chen Wu's staff, the cut, the wax and the sawdust, the time of the bout, the signature of an instructor. Beneath it, in smaller writing: A boy in
Chapter 124: Ironwood
Aethros had got out of the flue before dawn. The guards had argued over the noise for a long time, one swearing it was a rat in the chimney, the other refusing to climb up and check, and in the end the lantern had swung away and the dice had started again. He had lain in the soot until his legs went numb, and then he had crawled out through the kitchen door with ash in his hair and his hands shaking. There had been no time to wash. He had barely managed to change his robe before the first bell.After Lyanna’s match, he had taken her to see the physician and had left soon after with Roran to see Chen Wu fight.Now he stood at the rail above the competitors' entrance with Roran at his elbow, and he made himself look at the arena instead of the registry building at the far end of the grounds. It did not work. The long gray block with its row of narrow windows kept pulling his eyes, and he kept counting from the east. One, two, three. The third window was shuttered, and no lamp showed beh
Chapter 123: Cold Ground
The competitors' tunnel was cold and smelled of damp stone. Lyanna walked its length with her hands loose and her breath slow. At the far end, daylight flooded the platform, and the sound of the crowd was a solid thing, pressing against her ears.Ling Hao was waiting at his mark. He was a big, slow-moving young man from a southern marsh sect, with a broad, good-humored face and thick forearms, and a long iron hook on a chain coiled over one shoulder. His boots were caked to the ankle with something dark and wet. Lyanna noticed it with a tiny pinch of unease. In every bout she had watched, the ground around him had looked slightly damp."Frostwind," Ling Hao said cheerfully. "My sect's elders told me to be polite and not to lose too fast. I'm sorry, but I don't think I can do both.""You can try one."He laughed, a big easy laugh that made the front rows smile, and the gong sounded. The first thing he did was stamp. It was a casual, almost lazy movement, a single heavy step, and the wh
Chapter 122: Ledger Night
Aethros had spent most of the day going through the places where Dorric Vane might be kept, and crossing them off. The discipline cellar was out. Roran had been in it, and it held one cell with one lamp. The infirmary's isolation ward was a long room with six cots and a physician who slept in the next chamber, and he had walked through it that afternoon with a basket of fruit for a cousin who did not exist. Nothing. The annex cellar was where Halvard and the clerk had met, but it was a cold storeroom with a grate in the ceiling and no door that locked from the outside. The records passage under the library had three keys and one night keeper, and Doran had never heard a sound from it.That left the north halls, and the bead on his palm that leaned toward them, and Fenn's memory of a covered lantern moving past the drainage ditch. It was not proof. It was a direction.He also had a night. He had been counting for a week, because the men he was watching were methodical, and methodical m
Chapter 121: Silk
Yin Sulan walked out onto platform one in a pale silk robe, and the arena went quiet the way a room does when a good singer stands up. Lyanna sat on the stone bench beside Roran with Zara's cloak-warm shoulder against hers and tried to feel nothing about it. She did not manage it.Yin did not look at the crowd. She never did. She carried a thin curved sword in a lacquered sheath and wore her hair pinned tight, with a single jade pin that caught the sun. Across from her stood the twelfth line, a young woman named Shen Yue, tall, wiry and calm, with a long spear in her hands and the lean, sun-browned look of someone who had grown up carrying water up a mountain. A fine thread of water ran along the shaft of her spear as she settled her grip, bright as a silver wire, and it clung there without dripping. Water element. Lyanna had seen her use it in the first round to bend a thrust around a shield, as if the spear had a mind to curl."She's good," Roran said under his breath. "Shen Yue. Sh
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