Chapter 23: The Sleepwalker

Chapter 23

The Sleepwalker

Harwick’s carriage left Millhaven at dawn.

Hilde brought the news at seven, breathless, coat half-buttoned, moving through the Compass door with the urgency of a woman who had run across the market square because the information could not wait for walking pace.

“He’s gone. Packed before sunrise. Didn’t speak to anyone.” She set her basket on the bar with more force than the bar required. “The grey-coat collected the papers from the Hesslers and the Branns on the way out.”

She looked at Sera. Looked at Roen. Waited.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Sera said. She was at the bar with her tea, ledger closed, watching Roen with an expression he couldn’t quite read. “I have no idea why he left.”

She was lying; Hilde was sharp enough to know it, and Sera was not bothering to hide it, which meant Hilde was the only person in the room who would not be told the truth before nightfall. Roen could feel it. The not-knowing sat between him and Sera like a third person at the bar, taking up space, drinking tea it had not earned.

Hilde made a sound through her nose that communicated, in a single exhalation, her complete opinion of people who kept secrets from their town’s primary information network. She sat down. She ordered tea. She began mentally cataloguing everyone she needed to speak to before lunch.

The filing held. The families held. Harwick’s charm offensive had evaporated overnight, his renegotiation letters undelivered, his careful three-day campaign abandoned between dusk and dawn for reasons nobody could explain.

Sera did not look like someone who had won. She looked like someone who was owed an explanation and was deciding how long to wait before collecting.

• • •

Bess started breakfast, not Roen. She did not comment on this. She did, however, look at him in a way that meant she had noticed and would have a comment ready if asked.

He did not ask.

Milo did not come down from the spare room until nearly nine. When he did, he came down slowly, one hand on the rail, his hair in the chaotic state of a child who had slept fitfully and not bothered to fix anything before showing his face. He went straight to the bar without speaking, sat on his usual stool, and put his forehead on the wood.

Sera looked at him for a long second. Then she got up, walked over, and put a hand on the back of his neck, the kind of touch that asked nothing and offered nothing except contact. Milo did not move. He did not acknowledge it. But the small line of tension in his shoulders eased a fraction, and Sera left her hand there until he sat up on his own.

“Is there breakfast?” he asked. His voice was small.

“Bess is making it.”

“Can I have it here? At the bar? I don’t want to sit anywhere I can see the south window.”

Sera did not look at Roen. She did not have to. “You can sit anywhere you want.”

She made him toast. Three slices, with butter and the strawberry preserves Hilde had brought last week. She poured him milk in a mug that was usually meant for ale because she knew it would make him laugh, and it did, a small dry laugh, but a laugh.

Roen watched all of this from behind the bar. He did not move into it. He did not need to. Sera was being a particular kind of careful with the boy this morning, and the carefulness told Roen everything about what she had heard through the walls, and what she had concluded, and what she was holding back from asking until later.

When Milo had finished the toast, he asked if he could go up to the spare room and read for a while. Sera said yes. He went. The stairs creaked under his weight in a way they did not normally creak, because he was walking slowly, like a much older person.

The kitchen door opened. Bess came out drying her hands on her apron.

“That boy needs a hot bath and to be told three lies about how everything is fine,” she said. “Are we going to give him that?”

“Yes,” Sera said.

“Good.” Bess looked at Roen. Then at Sera. Then at the bar between them. “I’m going to take a long walk to the market and pick out vegetables. By myself. For about an hour.”

She left.

The common room was empty. The kitchen door was open. The morning was still and warm and full of the small ordinary sounds of a town that did not know what had nearly happened in a baron’s guesthouse the night before.

Sera came around the bar. Sat across from Roen on a stool. Closed her ledger, deliberately, in case there had been any ambiguity about what she was here to do.

“Tell me,” she said.

He looked at her hands. They were flat on the bar. Steady. The hands she used when she was trying not to do something with them.

“I went to his lodgings. I made it clear that using what he knows about you would be inadvisable.”

“How?”

“I let him see the smallest piece of what I am. A breath. A shape. Enough to make the asking unnecessary.”

“Roen.”

It was his name, but the way she used it was the same as two nights ago, in the same kitchen, with the same low pressure underneath it. It meant do not insult me by pretending this is enough.

He closed his eyes for a second. Opened them.

“I went through his window. I had a — a way of being seen that he wouldn’t be able to remember properly. I told him to leave Millhaven. I meant to show him a breath of what’s underneath. Just a breath. And then —”

He stopped. He had not meant to say this part out loud. But Sera was waiting, and days, not weeks had been her line, and the truth he owed her was the only kind worth telling.

“Something under the south road answered first,” he said. “Before I’d even fully opened the gap. It pulled against me, my power. And the…thing I was about to release, it overflowed, and the gap I’d opened tore wider than I meant. I lost control of it for long enough that the candles went out, the plaster cracked, and Harwick is leaving Millhaven not because of what I said but because of what he felt in that room.”

The kitchen was very quiet.

“Something under the south road,” Sera repeated.

“Yes.”

“That noticed when you used your power.”

“It’s been there for months. Maybe longer. I killed a piece of it in the field, but that was just the beginning, its eyes, its mouth. The thing the mouth belonged to is bigger and it has been — sleeping. Listening only at the surface. Last night it woke up enough to look at me, and it pulled at what I was holding, and I —” He breathed out. “I was not in full control.”

Her eyes did not leave his face.

“And Milo,” she said. Slowly. Putting it together as she spoke. “I heard him cry. I lay in my bed and decided you were doing whatever you needed to do and you would tell me about it in the morning.”

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“He felt it. Yes.”

“Felt the thing. Not you.”

“Felt the thing turn. Felt himself turn with it. Like he was part of it. Which, ” Roen looked at the bar, at her hands, at anywhere except her eyes. “Which I think he might be. A small piece of him. I don’t know yet.”

He had not meant to say that part either. But Sera’s days, not weeks was sitting in the bar between them and she was watching him with the kind of attention that asked for everything a person had and did not look away from any of it. He had been carrying the truth alone for months, and the carrying had run out somewhere around dawn.

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the steady hands had finally moved, one of them was on the bridge of her nose, rubbed the space slowly and moved up above her eyebrows, pressed there hard, the way she pressed when a headache was older than the morning.

“The Milo who stole apples, and can eat 5 honey cakes?”

A heavy nod.

“And he is — what? Connected to a thing under the south road, under his small farm, that you fought all those months ago.”

“Something like that. I fought an envoy of it, a sign of the corruption it represents.”

She did not raise her voice. She did not shake. She did exactly what she always did when something she could not solve landed in her ledger, she sat with it, weighed it, ran the numbers in a private place behind her eyes, and looked for the first move.

“You said you would tell me everything in days, not weeks.”

“I know.”

“I am not collecting on that promise yet. But I am very aware of when I will be. And I want it on the record that what you just told me does not count as everything. It counts as the part you couldn’t keep behind your teeth this morning. There is more.”

“There is more.”

“Days, Roen.”

“Days.”

She breathed out. The long breath of a woman who had spent a night not sleeping and a morning not asking the question she had been holding behind her teeth and had now asked it and gotten an answer that explained almost nothing while being more than she had expected.

“You stayed with him,” she said. Quieter. “Until morning.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

That was the part that caught him. Not the anger he had been bracing for. Not the cold collection of facts. Thank you. For not leaving the boy alone with what he had seen.

“Sera —”