Julian Morland looked at the diagram, then raised his eyes to Silas Vancroft. Grendt continued to stare into nothing with the expression of a man who has long known any possible outcome.
A minute passed. Perhaps a little more.
Then Valeria Sallow, the Intelligence Intendant, finally decided to speak.
"She made the decision too quickly."
Alistair looked up at her, but said nothing.
"I am not saying it is wrong" — Valeria emphasized.
"I am saying we need to understand what we are dealing with before announcing a tournament as if nothing has happened. Twenty-three people. Twenty-three. And not one explanation we could give their families."
"There is an explanation" — said Morland.
"The Sacred Hunt is dangerous. Every person who enters it knows that."
"The hunt is dangerous by the tusk of a boar or the claw of a cortex" — Elena Rowley, Intendant of Provisions, suddenly answered.
"Not by something that breaks runed steel."
"Then in this case the danger turned out to be different" — answered Vancroft.
"And yet we do not know exactly what happened. We only know the consequence" — Intendant Holloway put in carefully.
"We know the tracks" — said Morland.
"Tracks of an unknown creature from the depths of the forest?"
The voices began to layer over one another, not interrupting but thickening, while one of the knights at the wall shifted his foot slightly, restoring his balance.
Ulrich Thorne was silent. He stood at his end of the table, listened, and at some point simply raised his hand, not sharply, without a commanding gesture, but it was enough.
The voices settled.
"The queen did not rush. She made a decision that holds the city in balance while the investigation continues. The tournament only buys time to answer it properly, not in haste. That is the difference between governance and reaction" — he swept his gaze over each member of the council.
"Now — a different conversation."
A pause.
"About whose tracks Sir Bram found."
Julian closed his mouth. Holloway looked away. Grendt, for the first time all evening, shifted his posture slightly.
Ulrich turned to Aurey, who stood at the western window, his back to the hall again, looking at the night city as though nothing that had been said concerned him.
"Aurey, you heard Sir Bram. You saw the diagrams" — Thorne spoke evenly, without pressure, as if simply listing facts for the record.
"What do you think?"
Aurey did not turn immediately. A few more seconds he looked out the window, where the night city of Ockhaven lay beneath the moon, calm and entirely unaware of what was happening in this hall.
Turning slowly, his grey-blue eyes moved across the faces at the table. Across Julian, who was waiting for an explanation. Across Holloway, who was waiting for the same. Across Grendt, who was waiting for nothing but was listening. Across Alistair, who sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the tabletop with the expression of a man who has long known the answer.
Aurey shifted his gaze to the Hand.
"That is precisely why he knows the answer, he said what he said. Not directly."
"What are you talking about?" — Julian asked again.
No one answered him.
Alistair raised his head from the tabletop and looked at Julian Morland with a long, heavy gaze.
"Ursus" — answered the head of the Green Order, as if one word were sufficient.
Morland raised his brows, looked around the hall with the smile of a man waiting for someone to share his skepticism, and was met with nothing but silence.
"Are we really going to talk about ancient myths?" — he spread his hands, resting his elbows on the armrests of his chair.
"A giant six-legged bear-guardian that no one has ever seen alive? Those are tales for children and hunters around a campfire, to keep anyone from wandering into the forest without need."
"Precisely" — said Sterling.
"No one wandered in. It worked."
Morland opened his mouth — and closed it.
"Six points in the track" — Holloway said quietly.
"A coincidence. An anomaly. An unknown species that no one has encountered before" — Morland shrugged, but the intonation had already lost its earlier ease.
"An explanation no worse than the one you are proposing."
"And no better" — Valeria replied, without changing her posture.
"And the tracks lead past the inner boundary. To where, under any explanation, something lives that wants no neighbors."
Morland looked at her, then at Sterling, then back at the Hand — searching for an ally or at least a neutral arbiter.
Ulrich was silent, and his silence was itself an answer.
"Very well" — Morland leaned back slightly, changing his approach.
"Let us say. Let us say it is him. What does that change? He went back past the inner boundary. The tracks end there, Aurey said so himself. Which means the threat is contained."
"The threat is contained" — Sterling repeated slowly, the way one repeats a phrase in which something is fundamentally wrong.
"Until someone disturbs what should not be disturbed again. As has already happened."
Morland was silent for a moment.
"The League's people" — he said at last, and it came out no longer as an objection but as a conclusion.
"The League's people." — Sterling confirmed.
A heavy silence settled over the hall. Morland looked at the tabletop, and the smile was no longer on his face.
The Hand swept his gaze around the table.
"The question now is not whether we believe in Ursus or not" — he said.
"The question is that there are tracks, there are bodies, and something that came out past the inner boundary for the first time in an unknown number of years has gone back. For now."
Aurey was still standing at the window. He had been listening to the entire conversation, not turning, looking at the night city below, and at some point said quietly, not addressing the words to anyone in particular.
"Vellard said one more thing."
Everyone looked at him, while he himself finally turned back to the council.
"He said that in all his years of service he cannot recall a single instance of Ursus coming out past the inner boundary. Not one documented track, not one story from senior watchmen" — he paused.
Silence.
Morland slowly rubbed his face with his palm.
Sterling looked at Aurey with an expression that on another man might have been called grim satisfaction at words finally finding their proper form.
Thorne nodded.
"Then we will have our answer to the first question when the survivor regains consciousness" — he folded his hands on the table.
"Until that moment — no versions outside this hall. No hints, no rumors. The council has heard me."
---
Meanwhile, Queen Edith was making her way to her chambers, through a narrow and well-lit corridor, torches every ten paces.
Two guards at the tall doors of dark oak straightened as soon as Edith appeared at the end of the gallery, and lowered their halberds in a synchronized salute.
She entered without stopping.
The front room of the chambers was quiet and warm, threaded through with the scent of dried herbs that the maids hung in the corners every week. At a small table by the window stood a servant, a young woman with neatly pinned hair and her hands folded before her, who gave a quick bow at the sight of the queen.
"My queen. Your bath is ready."
"Thank you" — answered Edith, stopping in the middle of the room.
"Tell the others they are free for tonight. I will take the bath alone."
The servant raised her eyes quickly and almost imperceptibly, and something in her face showed for a fraction of a second before becoming neutral again.
"As you command, my queen."
She bowed and left, pulling the door firmly shut behind her.
For a few seconds Edith simply stood in the silence, listening to the footsteps fade in the corridor, after which she moved to the bathchamber.
The bath was stone, wide, set into the floor and filled to the brim. Steam rose in slow columns, settling on the ceiling in fine droplets. One of the maids had managed to add lavender oil to the water, from which a dense, faintly astringent scent spread through the entire space, overcoming the smell of stone and wax. Several candles burned on a stone shelf at the wall.
Edith unhurriedly unfastened her dress, while the fabric fell smoothly along her baring hips, her movements so habitual that her hands worked separately from her head. She removed her jewelry, freed her hair from the pins, letting the heavy strands fall to her shoulders, and lowered herself into the water.
For the first few seconds she simply sat, feeling the warmth press through her shoulders and lower back, softening what had hardened over the last hours. Then she took a rough linen mitt, dampened it, and began slowly working it over her forearms, washing away the invisible fatigue that always felt physical, though it left no marks.
The conversation in the cell would not release her.
She understood that Kyle might have been telling the truth, and that was the most unpleasant part of all. A man who had broken her laws might have been right in his fears, and that did not make the law any less a law, nor his people any less dead, but between those two facts a space had formed in which it was difficult to stand upright. Twenty-three people. Six not found. Two from the League somewhere unknown. And Aris, who knows everything and is silent for now against her will.
Edith worked the skin on her wrists in circular motions, looking at the water.
Ursus.
She did not know him as well as any child raised in Waldruhm knows him, for she had heard of him only through the stories of her late husband, King Edmund Borne, who had fallen in love with a wandering warrior during the great battle at the Cursed Forest, and then taken her as his wife, gifting her the not particularly desired status of queen.
King Edmund believed in the legend of the Great Ursus, the legendary guardian of the Forest, keeper of the Great Tree. The one who does not come out past the inner boundary, because there is no reason to come out. Because people had long since stopped giving him that reason.
She lowered the mitt into the water and tipped her head back against the stone edge of the bath, looking at the ceiling. The candles behind her cast ragged shadows on the stone above her, and in those shadows there was nothing but stone.
Thirteen years ago she had stood on the edge of another, cursed forest, sword in hand and blood on her boots, and then too it had seemed that the most terrible thing was happening right now, that one decision would not be enough. The Cursed Forest had taught her a different lesson. The most terrible thing is always somewhere other than where you are looking for it.
Steam settled on her face in fine droplets. The warmth of the water pulled downward, toward heaviness, toward stillness.
Edith slowly closed her eyes.
Behind the closed doors of the castle it breathed evenly and as it always had, knowing nothing of its mistress lying in hot water, thinking about a living myth whose tracks lead past the boundary where no one goes by choices.