He could not see the leaves falling.
He knew they were falling — he could hear them in the rose garden, the dry papery whisper of their landing, the particular quietness of a garden at the end of its year — but the crack in the boards gave him only the canes and the sky and the stone bench, none of the trees that bordered the estate's inner wall.
He listened to the leaves and took account.
Nine months in the east tower. Nine months since the courtyard, the gray robe, the empty room. He had survived winter, survived the thaw, survived the brutal heat of summer, and now he was arriving at autumn with something he had not expected to find in himself at the outset: not merely endurance but a specific, quiet competence at living inside very little.
He took account of what he knew.
He knew the household's full schedule from long observation — not the official schedule, the one posted in the housekeeper's ledger, but the real schedule, the human one, the one that included the midday guard's single daily deviation from his post to visit the kitchen yard for approximately seven minutes, the one that included Lady Elowen's second morning circuit, which she had begun three months ago, which took her past the east tower door — past it, not to it — before her usual visit to the garden.
He knew that Maret — he thought her name might actually be Maret, he had heard someone call something that sounded close to it from the corridor — had gone from contempt to a studied neutrality. She still did not speak. But she placed his tray straight now, and the water cup upright, and the extra bread had become so consistent that it had ceased to feel like a communication and had become simply a ration.
He knew that Deset had been quietly, unauthorized, becoming an irregular source of outside information. Not deliberately. The boy talked when he thought he was talking to himself. He was fourteen and the tower was boring and boring spaces made certain kinds of people verbose. In nine weeks of Deset's visits, Gerffron had learned: that the household's winter wool order had been delayed and Lady Elowen was displeased; that the cook had left service under circumstances Deset described as dramatic without specifying; that the estate's south gate had been repaired twice in the last month, the lock replaced both times; and that the north road had continued to see unusual traffic, which Deset had apparently made a small private hobby of cataloguing from the corridor window.
He knew that Lady Elowen had spoken twice more at the corridor bend.
The second time, five months in, he had caught only a single word. The third time, last month, he had caught something longer — a full phrase, low and fierce, directed at nothing: what did you think would happen.
He had no way of knowing who she was speaking to.
He suspected she was speaking to Gorgina.
He took account of Gorgina.
In nine months, Gorgina Wadee had not once come to the east tower. Not a visit, not a passage, not the sound of her boot heels on the stairs. The household moved around him with various degrees of cruelty and indifference and grudging neutral adjustment, and in the center of all of it was the absence of the woman who had wept and loved and hated and sentenced him, a silence so complete it felt architectural.
He thought about the silence of a person who has chosen not to look at something.
He thought about what that choice cost.
He thought about the Winter Ball, the blood-red rose, the promises she had whispered into his chest in the palace dungeon while her own guards stood outside the door. He thought about the woman inside the Duke. He had not forgotten her. He was not certain she had succeeded in forgetting him.
He thought about the south gate lock, replaced twice in one month.
He thought about the north road.
He set the pebbles on the floor in front of him in the autumn light and looked at them with great seriousness.
Nine months down.
The architecture in his mind was detailed now. Not a plan yet — he had almost no ability to act, confined as he was — but something very close to readiness. A prepared structure that would require only the right trigger, the right moment, the right word in the right corridor, to become something the east tower's builders had never imagined housing.
He listened to the leaves fall outside.
He was, he discovered, genuinely unafraid.