Nyssara spent the seven winters after Maethril in a drying-loft north of Auberdine, working for nobody.
The loft belonged to a kelp-cutter who took his rent in dried fish and had no curiosity to speak of. Under the third floorboard from the wall lay an oilcloth bundle the size of an oven door. Inside were Maethril's ledgers. There were eleven, in a hand so small it looked like stitching: which priestess owed money to which trader, which Sentinel captain had a brother among the smugglers at Rut'theran, which druid had been seen where, with whom, carrying what. Any three pages would have bought her a house in Darnassus. Any ten would have emptied one.
She oiled the cloth each autumn and used none of it. A fire nobody lights is still a stack of dry wood.
Twice a month she walked the shore road down to Auberdine to sell rope-weed to a net-mender named Corwen Tidegrass, who had never learned her name and did not know the dock clerk in the hooded woman with salt-cracked hands. He had grown stooped. His daughter had grown tall. Lirelle ran the mooring lines now, and crossed the old pier at a walk so quiet that the gulls did not lift for her. Nyssara watched that walk from under her hood and corrected nothing.
The news came up the coast on a fishing smack in the last warm month, wrong in its details and right in the bone. The Archdruid had been taken. He was in chains under Moonglade, or dead; he had poisoned the morrowgrain, or been poisoned by it; something had been grafted into the root of the tree that should never have been there, and the Circle had known, or half of it had, or none. On the pier a priestess sat down on a bollard as if her knees had been cut.
Nyssara bought a heel of bread, walked back to the loft, lifted the third board, and sat with the bundle in her lap until the light went.
It was all there, in a dead woman's stitching: the casks, the seal from inside the Enclave, a bark-scroll changing hands beside a moonwell while a girl of fourteen watched from a tree. Maethril had known. Maethril had judged that Darnassus could not yet afford to know, and had burned the pages, and had been called an assassin for her trouble by the people she was watching. Then she had sat down in a guarded room and drunk the one thing she ever made that she could not unmake.
She had been right about the Archdruid. She had been right about what a single loose page would do.
Nyssara had supposed, on the bad nights, that being proved right would feel like a door opening. It felt like the bread, which she had forgotten to eat and which had gone hard in her pocket. Somewhere names would be cleared in a quiet room, without the inconvenience of an announcement. Nobody would walk north to tell an apprentice who had failed years ago at a moonwell.
She put the bundle back and set the board over it.
The ground had been uneasy since the leaves turned: small shudders, a cup walking across a table. On the night it stopped being small Nyssara was already awake. She had counted four owls from the loft window at dusk. By midnight there were none, and no frogs.
She was on the shore road with her boots half laced when the earth moved under her like a rug being pulled. When she got up, the sea was leaving. It went out past the kelp beds and past the bar with a sound like a sheet dragged over gravel, and left boats lying on their sides in the mud with their lamps still lit. She ran toward the town, because the town was where the people were.
She did not go back for the ledgers. She noticed that about a mile on, and kept running.
In Auberdine the cracked moonwell was pouring itself, glowing, down the steps toward the harbor, and people were wading through the light to reach the boats, which was the wrong way. Nyssara shouted them toward the ridge road in a voice she had spent her life training herself out of. Some of them turned.
The water came back as a hill. The harbor stood up and walked into the town. It took the fish sheds and the lower street and the seaward half of the long pier in the time it took her to drag a cooper's wife onto the fallen inn roof by the hair.
After that the night was a count. She kept it because counting was what her head did when her hands were busy. A boy off a floating door: one. Two sisters roped to each other and to a dead goat: three. A Sentinel in full armor, sinking, who had to be cut out of her breastplate under the water and came up swearing: four. A man she towed sixty yards and found, on the roof, to be dead. She left him out of the count, and later put him back.
Some time after moonset the harbor bell began to ring.
It hung in its frame at the root of the long pier, on the last stretch of planking the sea had left, and she knew the stoop of the man on the rope. Corwen Tidegrass had been safe on the ridge. He had come back down through the wrack and climbed the pier, an old net-mender who could not swim, because there were boats in the bay with no mark to steer for, and the bell was the harbormaster's charge, and he was the harbormaster's nephew. He had spent most of his life frightened and doing the frightened thing. Apparently he had finished with that.
Two fishing boats came in on the sound, low with people, and found the ridge shallows. Something else came too. Swimmers who had been making for the ridge turned and struck out for the bell instead, for the lamp and the planks, the one thing in that harbor that sounded like help. The pilings under it were moving.
She screamed at the swimmers until her voice tore. Some heard. She went in after two who had not, and got one.
She had counted thirteen strokes when a second surge came through, lower than the first and much faster. The frame went over with the lamp still burning, and the bell rang once more going down, a flat sound, like a pot struck with a spoon.
Lirelle was on the pier.
She was forty feet from shore, on her knees where the bell frame had stood. Between her and the land the planking was coming apart: boards hanging by one nail, boards afloat, a stringer twisting. Nyssara set a foot on the landward end and felt the whole length shudder. One more body would bring it down.
"Lirelle." She did not shout. Shouting was for people who were not listening. "Look at me. You know how to do this. The edges, where the nails are. Never the middle. Weight on the back foot until the front one has asked. You did it when you were small enough to carry. Do it now."
It took a very long time. Lirelle stood. She put her foot on the edge of a board that should not have held a cat, and it held her. She came on across the wreck of the pier, over black water with things turning in it, and not one board spoke. She stepped onto the stones and Nyssara caught her by both arms, and the last forty feet of Auberdine's pier lay down in the sea behind her as quietly as a tired animal.
"He told me to stay on the ridge," Lirelle said. "He said he'd only be a moment."
The druids came on the third day, down the ridge on foot and out of the sky as storm crows, with sacks of meal and a great many opinions about where the sea would go next. By then the living had walked north to a shelf of high ground where a stream came down, and had begun calling it Lor'danel, the way people name a place to make it stay put.
Nyssara had walked back along the shore the day before. The road ended in a new cliff. There was no loft, and nothing of eleven ledgers but a strip of oilcloth snagged on the rocks. She stood over it for a while and found she was not sorry.
Now she was splitting driftwood for the cook-fires, with Lirelle silent at the other end of the pile. Her count from the night stood at nineteen, of whom sixteen were alive.
Nyssara knew his walk before she saw his face. No quantity of robes and rank had changed how Faelen Starbough put his left foot down. He wore brown wool, not the Archdruid's colors, wet to the knee, and he was thin, and the charm had gone out of his face like dye out of cheap cloth.
He saw her and stopped. She watched him decide whether he was permitted to stop.
Then he set down the sack of meal he was carrying, went to where the bank was slumping toward the tents, knelt, and put both hands in the mud. Roots came up between his fingers, pale and wet, and knitted themselves across the face of the bank as tight as a creel. Nobody had asked him. It took him until dusk. She split wood and watched, and disliked how good the work was.
He came to the fire after dark for water, because there was only the one barrel.
"Nyssara."
"Faelen."
He drank. His hands shook on the dipper; the mud had dried white across the knuckles. "I've had what I would say to you ready since they took him," he said. "Longer. I think I knew before I let myself know." He hung the dipper on its nail. "I'm not going to say it. You would have to stand there and listen, and I have cost you enough evenings."
"Yes," she said.
"I thought I was keeping you out of it. I know what that's worth."
"She named six." Nyssara's voice was level. She had not known it would be. "She sat with a clerk and gave them six names, so that nobody would go looking for a seventh. Then she drank something. I was in the roof. And they raised you for it."
He took it like a man taking a weight he had asked to be handed. He did not say he was sorry, which she could not have borne, and he did not look away.
She had a dagger at the small of her back and, from long evenings in the loft, an exact knowledge of where on Faelen it would go. A blade is an answer. She had asked the question properly, and it came back the same each time: he would be dead, and Maethril would be dead, and Nyssara would be a thing that killed elves to keep its own peace. Anyone who cannot undo a thing has no business doing it. Maethril had broken that rule exactly once, in a cup, on herself.
Forgiving him could not have been taken back either. She looked for it anyway, honestly, the way she would have checked a pocket. It was not there.
"The bank will hold," she said. "It's good work."
"It's roots," said Faelen. "It's the only part that was ever true." He went back toward the dark where the druids slept, around the firelight and not through it.
Captain Shaleth Moonspear found her at the stream the next morning. The inn's roof-beam had come down across the captain's left arm on the first night. It was strapped to her chest in a sling of sailcloth, and the hand at the end of it was the wrong color and was going to stay that way.
"Duskwhisper," she said.
So she had always had the name. Nyssara went on filling the skin.
"Every watch-post south of here is drowned or cut off. I have eleven Sentinels fit to walk and one arm. I need someone who can go down that shore and come back and tell me what is there, and not what I would like to be there."
"You have scouts."
"I have girls with owls. I watched you go into that harbor nineteen times."
"Twenty-two. Some were empty."
Shaleth's mouth did something brief. "I have not changed my mind about your trade. Knives in the dark are how the Highborne began, and I will say so at your funeral. I am not offering you the dark. A place on the roll. A scout's pay, which is an insult. Your own name, written down where anyone may read it, and you answer to me in front of people."
Nyssara stoppered the skin. The stream still ran brown, with small pieces of other people's lives in it.
"Why did you look away?"
Shaleth did not pretend to need it explained. "I had a confession with six names on it and a warrant to match. Nobody had given me an order about rafters. And she had just spent her last hour buying something. I did not care for her. I was not going to rob her."
"Then hear what you are hiring. Ashenvale. The Raynewood road, your patrol, the Warsong in the ferns on both sides." It came out as she had rehearsed it for years, flat as an entry. "I was in a tree above them. I had an errand, and an order to bring back nothing else. I watched them lay it, and I watched you walk into it, and I kept to my orders."
Shaleth looked at her for a long time with a face like a shut gate.
"Three," Shaleth said.
"Three."
"I have their names. You will learn them, and where their mothers live. That is my term. Now give me yours. You have the look."
Nyssara gave them. She would read anything she was handed to carry. What she found went into the report whole, the convenient part and the part that would start a quarrel, and anyone who wanted a page burned could come and argue for it out loud. And she would not put a knife in one of her own people because somebody's peace required it. Not for Shaleth. Not for Darnassus.
"Hm," said Shaleth. "The roll is with the quartermaster. Go and be written down."
The quartermaster had a split lip, bare feet, and a ledger she had evidently saved from the watch-house in preference to her boots. She asked the name without looking up.
"Nyssara Duskwhisper."
"Spell it."
"Give me the pen."
She wrote it in a dock clerk's hand, both names, and after it, scout. She had not put that name on paper since she was fourteen. The ink sat wet and black on the page where anyone could read it.
Then she picked four stitches out of her shirt hem with a thumbnail, took out the two silver leaves, and hung them from her belt on a length of net twine, in the sun, where they could ring.