Chapter the Eleventh

The chevalier was still shrieking in the courtyard. Shiv drew the thick velvet curtains to muffle the sound. It helped – hjet, which meant a little – but only a little, only hjet – but the woman in the yard (the woman in the yard had dripped swampwater all her way inside) she would, eventually, quieten or be quietened.

Either way. No matter for the chevalier of the Ninth House. If that was what Shiv was.

(It was. Of course – of course. Yeri.)

She had not seen her protectorate for some long minutes – those minutes had become hours – and the hours had slipped away – not even his shadow splayed up on the far wall – taller and broader than he could ever hope to be in life (such as his life had been, a-tethered and a-cossetted and hidden from the sky as he had been) – and her pacing here and him off in the castle somewhere – hiding, as was his wont, no doubt hiding.

She whispered to herself, "Aoife," and then – realising the confusion – his petty lord father had known no shame, that much was clear (her grandmother would have called it blasphemy – she would have rued it) – she muttered – it was almost begrudging, the way her tongue had to rip each sound from her mouth, thorns deeply embedded between her teeth – she muttered instead, "Preserver guide all."

The words suspended in the air – a khopesh prepared to swing. Shiv realised, belatedly, that they would not make her feel better. A chevalier she might have been – aye, a chev she was – but she could only lay a claim to so much and so many of the Ninth's traditions – no matter how she tried – (and wasn't this a good and honest try?)

Her effort wrapped its fingers around her throat and choked her. It had always been the same – it had always been thus – boxaja eş huvmae pakrkva e wirienjarefe.

She banished the thought by opening another cupboard – in another airless room – behind another mahoghany door – in another long grey hallway – and what was she searching for? Fifteen days they had resided here – sleeping in the dining hall, and there had been something in home about the simple ritual of laying out a bedroll – though she had, of course, been obliged to sleep little – and he had slept just as little as her – and she had not asked, for she knew that he must have had his reasons – and what would she ask for? And so it was fifteen nights that they had crept about the corridors, shadows abhorring the sky. Sometimes they went together – mostly they went apart. More ground, the lordling had said, more ground more time more effort effort effort eş eş eş.

She had mapped out much of the Keep by now – or reckoned she might have – it, after all, was all long stone corridors – white busts on white plinths – ivory fans and wall hangings – plush carpets over aged wood and woven rugs over slate floors – the paper doors and windows for which the city was named – a glimpse, from afar, of the fabled paper floors – and there was, on occasion, a door unlocked that had been barred the day before – or a door locked that she had found open only an hour ago – and so (quite without meaning to be cynical) she had the unerring sense that they were being turned about, this way and that – exactly as a hound turns the prey back into the path of a hunt – so she knew only the paths they allowed her – only the avenues that had been opened to them.

Someone would be watching – if not the scion then his chevalier – if not his chevalier then his sister – if not his sister then one of the myriad dead men that hung about these hallways – hallways like gallows – or one of the others, baron or bahram.

It was still something (it was an advantage) (ik davri). Shiv had not even heard of the Selection when she – she and he – ramar – when they had been despatched across the world to pledge their swords – her sword – to this strange contest. He had explained what he could – all that he knew – and she had been four years old and motherless all over again. She had been a scholar anew of another strange new world and another strange new world etiquette as they rode east and north and east again.

(He had been more patient with her. She could say that much.)

They were strangers to one another – in a strange land, at least – and she wondered how many pairs would be thus – or if they would arrive as partners, honed and happy and hunting.

She had been – quite secretly – delighted to learn that they were the first to arrive – that they had arrived just as soon as the Selection had opened – that they had set off on their journey before the king had even made up his mind to summon them. If the lordling from Fifth – he was of Ninth, but he was from Fifth – if he had understood how this had come to be, he had let nothing slip – and Shiv had not been eager to be made a fool of – so Shiv had said nothing either, and let them wonder.

This cupboard (it transpired) was full of uisge. She pulled out a bottle, and examined it. It was of the mainland – the continent – an Domhan Mór – which could sometimes be glimpsed from the westernmost point of the homeshore, which they called Oren's Finger – huv oreine. It had always been wreathed in mist, except for the very warmest of summer days – when the fog would burn off and the grass would gleam golden across the channel. There were other tribes that rode there, Aisling had told her – Mkhedari with lions and jaguars for mounts – who wore lion-skin and jaguar-skin in the place of horse-leather – who whistled instead of speaking – and sang when they should have sobbed – who chewed emeralds instead of tobac – and let their children drink molten silver before bed.

Molten silver, she thought, and uisge.

She unstoppered it and inhaled hesitantly – he had been confident about his wanderings – "we are not in danger until the Selection begins, Chevalier Íomharach" – could he really be so naive? – but it was uisge, rather than poison, and strong stuff at that – brewed in an orange barrel – so the whole dark room smelled (vaguely, very vaguely) like citrus now, sweet and sharp. It reminded her of a dead woman, that scent.

There was a monumental crash in the hallway outside – she turned – a quick turn – martial – hand on the hilt of her weapon – and watched the man in gold stumble through the doorway – crunching ceramic underfoot – so she suspected that the white bust of the ancient king was no longer. His gaze fell first – not on Shiv – but on the bottle in her hand – a crooked smile – true, and crooked teeth too – whiter than white – almost as white as his hair – (ah, but he didn't seem an old man, despite the grey) – and he smiled – and he smiled – and he smiled and said, "so you found the stash."

Shiv said, "not hard to find." Nje dokhiikh.

He leaned, and kept leaning, until the doorframe seemed the only thing holding him up. Vahakn the Third said, "an' take your share – I'm not a stingy fellow."

His coat was new – the gold buttons were fake. His teeth were crooked – but very white. His eyes had the unfocused look of the drunkard – his hair, which came to his collar, was dripping damp.

Shiv said, "is that so?" Yeri?

"Dead men shouldn't be denied a final drink."

"You've imbibed a few of those by now."

"Oh, a few."

"The Selection hasn't even started."

"Then why are you wearing your war paint?"

She wasn't.

He smiled – true, he had a bottle in his hand, not a blade – she removed her hand from the hilt of her club – rested her forearm there instead – wondered where her counterpart had got to – wonderd whether he had thought at all of her – and as Vahakhn the Third stepped forward, she put her hand back on the pommel, firm.

He skirted her – went to the window – hauled back the curtains to catch a glimpse of the sky. The dawn – which she had always called grisz – the dawn was creeping in: over the walls of the Keep, there was a great glow growing – a fire stoked beneath the sky. The screaming had stopped – the chevalier of the Fifth House had been quietened.

He sounded a little melancholy when he said it – "an' who can blame her?"

Shiv said nothing. He had found her searching. Would he remember to wonder why?

"Chev," said the baron. "Shiv. Chev shiv chev."

She imagined he could amuse himself awhile with that one. Did his chevalier know that he had got loose? She waited for him to sit, and sit he did – slid down the wall beside the window – rested his arms on his knees – eyes unfocused – and took a drink, seeming to have forgotten (entirely) that she was there.

In the window above him – in the dawn beyond them – somewhere within or without the Keep (somewhere the Selection could not touch) – Shiv could see that the fire of the rising grisz had turned blue and white around its edges.

The library had been locked the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that he had not even been able to find the door to tell if it was locked or opened.

Today it was not locked, and Aoife could not quite believe his luck. He needn't have wasted time smiling, however, for the books were all locked away in dense wooden cases and no matter how he toyed with the locks, he could not manage to prise them open. Case after case: thousands of them, on low shelves and low tables, stretching back and back and back in a room larger than his father's own estate. The Paper City indeed, and nothing to show for it! A real shame: he had dreamed of a space like this one when he was a child, of inhabiting a place so beautiful, of conducting his esoteric studies someplace warm and safe and well-lit. He thrilled to it: surely the bones of this space were original, altered, perhaps, but superficially rather than surgically. He wondered what these books said of the Floating House; he wondered what, contained within their pages, was known of their traditions and their Ways. It would surely be noted if he broke open these books; it would cause alarm if he struck open the boxes and rifled through them, as he itched to do.

There were hundreds of these boxes lining each shelf, and the room all lined with these shelves. There was room for little else but for a few places here and there where a writing desk or armchair had been strategically placed near to a lantern or window.

His gaze was snared by the window. There was his own face: pale and worried and somehow less-than, spectral in the gloom, its sharp edges ossified by the darkness as though this hungry visage and its bleed-red trellis had never looked otherwise.

In the window, there was a face overlaid on his own: a girl, wide-eyed, storm-drenched, manacled.

She wanted to be let in.

Aoife froze. There was, for a long moment, only that: his heartbeat, and the screaming outside, and the girl imploring him from the depths of the storm. She had a blackened eye. She looked pale, and she looked frightened.

This was the Selection. This was the first task. This was the first test.

And where was Siobhán Íomharach?

The girl had seen him: she raised a hand, as though to strike the window, and then did not. They remained bound thus for a heartbeat that took forever. The bolt on the window had been designed to withstand sieges: it was made of tarnished silver, and had worn a thick groove into the pale yewwood of the frame.

Aoife tilted on his decision, honour-locked: it could not have been less than twenty seconds before the image of the girl retreated from the window pane. For a brief moment, he considered the prospect that it might have been naught but ill-imaginings brought on by the way the castle creaked and shrieked at night.

The moment was, indeed, brief, for in the one that followed a large grey rock came crashing through the window, sending tiny shards of glass flying this way and that.

There was a tiny gasp out in the storm – "oh" – and then the very same girl had appeared at the window again as though propelled, all hands and elbows as she clawed her way into the Keep. The broken edges of the window caught at her garments and at her skin: it drew long red lines across the surface of her lovely brown face and braceleted her thin arms. It was not a graceful procedure, but the shock and sound had rather stirred Aoife from his indecision: he hastened to the smashed window so that he could help her through, graceless though he was: though he had no great strength to speak of, between the two of them, they managed to haul her into the library.

When she fell to the carpet, her manacles sang and strained, flexed and fretted: she was tethered to something that was still outside!

There arose no opportunity to question what, for in the next moment that self-same window was becoming quite thoroughly trafficked: first, a girl in charcoal scholar robes, singed along the sleeves, swung her legs in and leapt through; then, a man wearing a grey hood that obscured his every feature, red scarf wrapped around his throat like a noose, climbed after her; and, at last, a Mkhedari thrall, war paint streaked into an impressionistic mess across eyes and lips alike, swung through, tiny shards of glass glittering in her braids like a set of fallen stars.

The thrall had tied the chain to the girl's manacle, which matched her own. She unbound it now, silently, and the girl fell back against the carpet and began to rip at the cuff around her wrist, prying it away. It left white welts where it had bitten into her; they rose over scars which looked similarly.

The thrall crouched, and began to wrap up the chain, her movements sharp and somehow reckless: the chain whipped its way across the plush red carpets, leaving long trails of brown rust where it ran. When she smiled, as she did now, quite mirthlessly, her blue warpaint ran down onto her teeth and stained her incisors navy. Siobhán had not worn her paint to greet Aoife: he suspected she would consider it too hostile for the outset of their partnership.

The Burned Scholar leaned on the edge of the writing desk, legs crossed at the ankles. Her flint ring gleamed black from her finger: long grey lines criss-crossed its surface, showing where she had recently struck upon it. He could not tell whether she was chev or scion. The flint suggested the former, but her confidence suggested the latter. She was not veiled, so she bore scant resemblance to the etchings of Scholars that Aoife had seen in his books: she was younger than someone in the Selection ought to be, with long auburn hair and thickets of freckles crowding a broad nose and bracketing full lips. Her eyes were small and dark, which gave the impression that she was utterly unreadable even as she smiled and said, in a low voice, "good morning to you."

Aoife said, "it is."

He knelt and offered a hand to the girl. She accepted it, and rose. It was a much more elegant movement than those that had preceded it. She was wearing a dress that was much too pretty for all that was about to ensue: long lengths of plum-pink fabric, draped about her like the petals of a cherry blossom. "Thank you," she said, rather breathlessly. Her hair clung damply to her cheeks and neck; rain still clung to the ends of her eyelashes. "I – apologies, but I didn't realise we were going to..."

"Chevaliers tend to cut the knot," said the Burned Scholar, amusedly.

The girl rouged about the cheeks. She said, defensively, "I imagined elegance."

The Mkhedari thrall paid them no heed: she had gone back to the broken window, and was using the knotted iron chain to knock out the remaining shards of glass that clung to the frame. She made it look like punching in teeth. The hooded chevalier rested an arm on his sword, and ran a thumb along his flint cuff. Aoife said, "you are of Two and of Seven." He had misspoken. He hastened to cover. "Eight," he said, which he supposed really only drew attention to the error. ""Two and Eight."

The Burned Scholar seemed aware that she could not accuse him of presumption here: it was too obvious to even count as an informed guess. She nodded, curtly. "Nimue vch Tudwr." She indicated her hooded chevalier. He wore a sword at his hip; the other chev bore an axe on her back. "Maddoc ap Alcluith."

"Aoife the Ninth."

The girl's eyes widened; the corner of her mouth twitched. "Ninth," she repeated, disbelievingly, delightedly.

Nimue the Second's gaze was boring into him. Aoife should have been able to meet her gaze – she was no older than him, certainly, and perhaps a little younger – but found that he could not. The scion of the Second House said, after a moment, "curious," and then no more.

The reaction was always the same. He suspected Siobhán Íomharach rather relished in it: myth made man. For his part, Aoife always found it terrifically awkward: people expected Ninth to hold secrets, and clutch at them they did. With that in mind, he stayed silent.

In the silence that followed, the girl hastened to sweeten it. "Lilitu," she said, quickly. "Lilitu Bhargava." She paused, and then pressed on, quite earnestly. They might as well have been standing together at a matinee: her demeanour betrayed no hint of self-consciousness or self-preservation. "How many preceded us?"

"You are fourth and fifth to arrive," said Aoife. "So far as I know."

"So the Selection is yet to start," said Nimue the Second. He could not read her tone: disappointed or relieved? Once within the Keep, they were barred from moving against one another until the Selection had begun. All of Aoife's hopes and plans rather hinged on sanctuary and the prospect that the others might cleave to it. It was ancient tradition; it was obligation.

One wouldn't be able to tell, with the way the pair from the Second Land eyed the others so hungrily.

The dawn had not yet penetrated the darkest glooms of the corridor; Nimue the Second set a thumbnail to her cuff, and struck true. A blue glow roiled along her fingers, licking tenderly at her nails and cuticules – she held her hand aloft, and gave a meaningful look to her chev, and they went off together in the direction of the banqueting hall, standing tall and walking quickly. They were strangers to one another, though they desperately wished that Aoife would not notice. They stood ten inches apart, and held their arms rigidly beside one another, for fear of touching accidentally.

Once they were gone, Lilitu the Eighth said, "I didn't… I am sorry if I was uncouth. I only…" She paused, and took a breath, as though to settle herself. "The Floating House is something of a fairytale in our parts, you understand."

Aoife pointedly did not mention that Siobhán Íomharach would doubtlessly contest this characterisation. She had, after all, grown up in their parts. He only said, "it's no matter for apologies." He glanced over her shoulder. "Does she wish to…?"

The thrall had nearly finished destroying the window entirely. Aoife suspected she would move onto another in the next few moments, if she was not stopped – and then his suspicion manifested, as the little thrall stepped around a desk burdened with book-boxes, and cracked the surviving window with a wild swing of her chain.

Lilitu the Eighth said, despairingly, "Tawi doesn't speak the common tongue."

That sounded a lonely existence, particularly in this place of all places.

Aoife said, "my ch – my companion's father was a rider of the Mkhedrebi. She may be able to interpret for you." He could not imagine that Siobhán Íomharach would apprciate his hiring her out thus, but hoped that it would be some comfort to her, too, to speak her mother tongue here. Some semblance of friendship, before one split open the other's skull.

Lilitu the Eighth cast him a searching, suspicious look. "Is that so?"

"Unless her tattoos are for show," he said, "then I am quite."

She smiled. It was an exceptionally pleasant smile: it should have been offered over dinner or in the marketplace or over a fieldful of wheat. Instead, she was wearing the marks of one who has travelled a long distance and come to die on her feet, and he knew that he would know – before the week was out – precisely what colour her blood was.

"A geas." Siobhán Íomharach had not approached the Eighth's chevalier purposefully, but had thrown some Mkhedari phrase in her direction when the two had found themselves standing beside the same dead attendant, collecting the same dishes of soft stewed rabbit. The thrall had eyed her silently – shaken her head – and turned back to her mistress, kneeling beside Lilitu the Eighth and placing the dish before the scion as she spread out her skirts near to the fire and encouraged them to dry. Siobhán Íomharach said, "The bitch has placed her under geas of some kind."

He and she were sitting together in their corner of the banqueting hall. It had become their corner in the sixth day that they had spent there: Siobhán Íomharach had dragged a chair over from which she could sit and wage watch while Aoife sat on the floor, and put his back to the wall, and watched the other scions through half-lidded eyes. They would not be assigned their quarters until the rest of the Selection arrived, and he knew that Siobhán Íomharach would resent him before long for the duration of their sejourn on the cold flagstones of the hall. The others had tolerated and would tolerate only a few days of sleeping in armchairs and on floors and under tables. Siobhán Íomharach had lasted fifteen nights thus.

Better than the alternative. More time to search.

"A geas?"

"A compulsion," said Siobhán Íomharach.

"Not to speak?"

"Just so."

"You are certain?"

She shrugged and set her chin back onto the pommel of her club; its rounded end spun lazily against the flagstones as she did so. "Not remotely."

He rolled this thought around in his head, prodded at it. It was like tonguing at a loose tooth. It irked. "How does it work? The geas?"

She gritted her teeth. "It is a deal. A trade."

He nodded.

She rolled her eyes, and lifted her head, catching her club in one hand as it tilted groundwards. "Thing for thing."

Her gaze had not left the thrall for all this time. Aoife eyed her. "Have you ever been under geas, Siobhán Íomharach?"

"Never," said Siobhán Íomharach. "Never been foolish enough to agree to one."

He mused. The heat of the fire did not reach them here; the new arrivals had drawn all warmth from the world. The storm had whined down to its pitiful end, as though tiring of wreck. The day had dawned, brittle and bright, the sixteenth of its kind.

Aoife said, "This sounds like no school of magic I have studied."

"Not magic, but tradition."

"Tradition?"

"These are private things," she said. "Tribal things."

"Siobhán."

"I won't speak any more on it."

"I understand."

"Don't ask me any more."

"Very well."

She took a long drink then, to prove her commitment to silence in tribute to her fellow chevalier. He permitted her to do so, casting his gaze back across the assembled Selection, silently cataloguing.

There was Second, standing beside the door that led to the rest of the tangled Keep. Nimue the Second had thrown back her scholarly robes, and held them closed over her chest so that they bared her freckled shoulders and the flint decorations she wore along the line of her clavicle.

There was Third, or at least the chevalier, sitting at the banqueting table and sharpening his sword. He had smiled to see Aoife, as he had smiled every time he had seen Aoife. He had greeted Siobhán Íomharach with a polite nod. Did he know Vahakn the Third was passed out someplace within the depths of the building? Did he care?

There was Fourth, who had become a kind of shadow for Third and followed about as though Mikula the Fourth thought that the enemy chevalier might protect him too if he only asked nicely enough. His chevalier maintained a polite distance, always standing, hands folded in front of her skirts or behind her back. She might as well have been one of the dead attendants watching from the doors.

There was Eighth, perched on the edge of the armchair nearest the fire. Lilitu the Eighth still looked a little paler than she ought; she still looked a little frightened. She had set her hands onto the arms of the char, and curled her nails in tight, pulling up threads and bits of fabric. Her thrall was sitting on the floor next to her with her, axe laid across her knees, warpaint drying in dirty patches on her neck and cheek. A geas, then, if Siobhán Íomharach was correct, and Aoife doubted she was. There were myriad reasons more mundane: perhaps Lilitu the Eighth had simply taken her chevalier's tongue, as they had done in Selections of old, or perhaps, like the rest, she wasn't inclined to make small talk with those who would kill her if the word was spoken.

Or maybe it was a geas, or maybe it was something else entirely, or maybe he was badly out of his depth, treading tides and breathing in water even now.

"Any luck?"

"None."

"Any trouble?"

"No," she said. "No trouble."

"Good."

"Three came looking for his uisge."

"And?"

"When the time comes," Siobhán Íomharach said, "he will go quietly."

Aoife stared at Third's chevalier; the breadth of the man's shoulders seemed to belie this point. "You believe so?"

"Of course," she said. "As quietly as the rest."

She patted him on the shoulder, hard enough to shake him, and smiled mirthlessly, as though this had been compliment.

"Yes," Aoife said. He ran his fingers across one another. He had raised red patches on his pale fingers where he had scrubbed at the skin too hard. He imagined black crescents beneath his nails; he imagined stains. "Well, I'll certainly do my best not to make a fuss."

She was curt. "See to it."

The doors swung open, to admit further competitors and new arrivals, but Aoife did not remain to see who they were. He rose from his place beside Siobhán Íomharach, and crossed the hall, and went back into the corridor through which he had escorted Lilitu the Eighth only a few minutes ago.

His Keep was becoming crowded.