She kept the page through a winter.
It lived in her cuff, then in the lining of a boot, then in a split she made in the back of a hairbrush, and wherever it was she knew its distance from her hand. She did the work Maethril gave her. She followed a steward. She carried a packet to Rut'theran and did not read it, which she had not managed in years, and knew that this was not obedience. She had only stopped expecting the packets to tell her anything.
In spring the leaves along the north side of Darnassus came in early, and too dark, and thick as the leaves of a plant that has been overfed. People remarked on how well the tree was doing. Faelen Starbough told her that three acolytes were to be raised at midsummer and that he had reason to hope. Once he took the mantle he would be theirs to the bone.
Nyssara took the page out of the hairbrush.
They met where they always met, on the steps below the Cenarion Enclave where the bank ran down to the water, because an acolyte could sit there with a friend from his old village and nobody thought anything of it. That had been the reason for choosing the place. She could no longer have said which of them had chosen.
He had brought honeyed nuts in a twist of leaf, and he was full of news. An elder had praised his root surveys. He told it well, laughing at himself where he should, and all the while his eyes kept going up the steps to the great doors, to see that they were still there and still his. In Dolanaar he had been the boy everyone watched, and he had never stopped checking. Faelen had not wanted anything quietly in his life. It was what she liked best in him, and it had made him very easy to watch.
"You're not eating," he said.
"I need you to look at something. Then I need to tell you how I came by it, and you will like that less."
She gave him the page.
He read it as he read everything, fast and then slowly. She saw him reach the stamp. He did not start. He turned the sheet over, and back, and when he spoke it was in the voice he kept for sick animals.
"That seal lives in a box with three locks."
"I know the kind. I could have it open before you finished those nuts."
"That is not the comfort you think it is." He nearly smiled, and then did not. "Nyssara. Who taught you to open boxes?"
So she told him. Not all of it; enough. That there was a woman in grey, and an order of seven called the Hidden Bough that went where the light did not fall and watched the people nobody else was permitted to watch. That she had not failed at the moonwell. That years ago she had been asked to know him, and had, and had passed on what he said over river-pears; and that she was telling him now because she had found she could not keep doing it and also keep sitting on these steps.
She said Maethril's name. She had never said it to anyone outside the Bough. It came out easily, and that should have warned her.
Faelen sat with his hands hanging between his knees. He was quiet a long time, for him.
"And this woman showed you a ledger."
"I found the ledger. She burned it. That is the one page I kept."
"The one page. Copied by you, in your hand, from a book nobody can now produce, with a seal drawn by someone who has just told me she can open the box." He said it gently. "Do you hear how that sounds?"
"I hear it. I also saw the casks."
"You saw casks on a dock."
"I read where they went."
"In a book she burned." He turned to face her, and there was nothing false in him at all. There never had been, which was the difficulty. "The Archdruid grew this tree. When our people had lost the one thing they thought could not be lost, he gave them somewhere to stand. You are sitting in it. I have been inside those doors half my life. I have carried his letters. I am telling you there is nobody in there buying water from smugglers."
"You carried his letters. Did you read them?"
"Of course not."
"No," she said. "You wouldn't."
It was unkind, and he let it go by. He folded the page along her creases. "Leave it with me. Let me ask from inside, quietly. If some steward is lining his sleeves, I'll find him." He took her hand, inky cuff and all. "I'm glad you told me. All of it. I mean that."
She had been reading faces since she was six. She read his and found worry, and affection, and a clever man beginning to think. It was exactly what she had come there to see.
She left the page with him.
He found her four days later on the Tradesmen's Terrace, outside her own lodging, which he had never visited. She had not known he knew of it. He was out of breath, and he was shining.
"It's done," he said. "You're safe."
She had a loaf under her arm. She remembered that afterward: the warmth of it through her sleeve.
He had taken the page to his master, and his master had taken it higher, and they had not been surprised. That was what he wanted her to understand. For years the Circle had known that something in the dark was working against it. Letters arrived opened. Stewards were followed home. Things were said about the Archdruid in the Temple that nobody would own to saying. They had never had a name to put in front of the Sentinels.
"And then you come to me with a forgery in your own hand and no idea what you are carrying. She had you write it out yourself. Don't you see? So that if it was ever found, it would be yours."
"Faelen."
"I kept you out of it. I swear. I said a dock clerk in Auberdine was shown a false ledger and frightened with it, and came to the Circle because she trusted the Circle. Which is true. You did come." He had her by both arms. He was so glad. "She took you at fourteen. I was there. I stood by that well and laughed at you with the rest, and all the while she was in the dark, deciding to use you. I have wanted to mend that for longer than you know."
The counting part of Nyssara had gone on working without her, the way a clerk's hand goes on down a column.
"How many names did you give them?"
"One," he said. "It was the only one you gave me."
It was read from the Temple steps the next morning: that a nest of assassins calling itself the Hidden Bough had for years spied upon the Circle and the Sisterhood alike, had shed kaldorei blood in secret, and would be rooted out.
Nyssara knew three of the seven by sight and none by name. The Bough was made that way. There was an old lamp-trimmer on the Temple bridge whose ladder she had sometimes found left under a useful window; on the second night his lamps stayed dark. There was a ferry-woman at Rut'theran with a silver leaf sewn inside her glove; on the fourth day another hand had the pole. The scribe under the bank arch went on the fifth. Nobody saw them taken. They were there, and then the places where they had been were there instead.
On the sixth night she went over the roofs to the dyers' sheds. Above the vats was a drying loft where Maethril kept a table and a kettle and nothing else that could be called hers. Nyssara came in under the eaves and out along a tie-beam, among hanks of blue wool hung to dry, with her speech ready. There was a boat. There was a way down through the vat-house. She would say what she had done, and then she would get her out.
Maethril sat at the table with a pot of tea and one cup. A sheet of close writing lay squared in front of her. She did not look up.
"Do you remember the log?" she said to the room.
Nyssara's mouth was open. Nothing came.
"Moonrise to moonset. Sit in it." Maethril drank, and set the cup down empty. "They are on the stair."
They were. Nyssara had not heard them, and she heard everything. Five came up. The first through the door was Captain Shaleth Moonspear, helm under her arm and a warrant in her fist, with the face of a woman carrying something that smelled.
"Maethril Quietstep. I am ordered to take you, at the Enclave's asking and under the Temple's seal."
"I have saved you some trouble." Maethril turned the sheet round with one finger. "It is all there. I shall say it aloud as well, so that four Sentinels can swear they heard it."
She said it, and did not hurry. She had kept an order of seven, answerable to nobody, for as long as there had been a Darnassus to keep. She had opened the letters of druids, priestesses and Sentinel captains. She had with her own hands killed nine kaldorei, and she gave their names and the reason for each, and did not say whether the reasons had been good. Then she named her order: herself first, and five more.
Nyssara had worked beside those five for half her life, and learned what they were called from a confession. The lamp-trimmer had been Oreth.
"Three of these I have in cells," the captain said. "Two I do not, and nobody will tell me who has them."
"Ask whoever wrote your warrant."
Moonspear's jaw moved. "That is six. The warrant says seven."
"It was seven. There was an apprentice, once. She failed, years ago, at a moonwell; she stopped to feel sorry for the water. You cannot make one of us out of a girl who stops to feel sorry. I tried for a while. It did not take."
Up among the wool, Nyssara held on to the beam.
"And your books? Nobody watches a city this long without keeping books."
"In my head. It is about to become unavailable." Maethril touched the rim of the cup. "I finished this as you reached the landing. It is my own work. Send for a priestess if it eases you, Captain, but I never made the other half. It is the one thing I ever made that I could not undo. I have always told my people that was bad practice."
Moonspear swore and sent a Sentinel running regardless. Then, there being nothing else to do, she pulled out the other chair and sat down across the table.
"I have said since before this tree was planted that knives in the dark are how the Highborne began."
"You were right."
"I had a note once, in Auberdine. No name on it. That was right too. I used it, and I have not liked myself since." She looked at the warrant. "I like this less."
"Good," said Maethril. "Stay so."
It was not quick and it was not long. Her hands went first; she folded them in her lap so they would not be seen to shake. Her breathing grew careful, then shallow. Near the end she lifted her head, not toward the rafters but toward the window, where the lamps of Darnassus were kindling along the bough, and watched them like someone who had always meant to and had never had the evening free.
Nyssara had a dagger in her hand. She did not know when she had drawn it. There were three Sentinels left and the captain, and she could have been down among them before the first glaive cleared. She could see where each would fall. She saw it with perfect clarity. And she lay along the beam and did not move, because she had been told to, and because she had lain like this once before, above a ford, and had learned then what she was.
When it was over she made a sound.
It was not loud. It was the first she had made without meaning to since she was six years old.
Captain Moonspear looked up.
She looked straight into the hanging wool and found Nyssara's face, and knew it. Nyssara watched her know it. The captain's hand went to her glaive and stayed there for a breath, and another. Then she looked down at the sheet on the table, where six names stood in a clear hand, and did not look up again.
"Six," she told her Sentinels. "It says six. I'll not go hunting through this city for something a dead woman swears is not there, on behalf of people who lose their prisoners. Take her up gently."
At the door she stopped. She unhooked the cord from Maethril's belt, with the silver leaf on it, and held it in her palm as if weighing evidence. Then she set it on the table beside the cup, went out, and pulled the door to behind her.
Nyssara came down at moonset. It was the longest she had ever kept still, and there was nobody to hear her recite what had passed.
At midsummer three acolytes were raised in the Enclave. She watched from a bathhouse roof across the water. Faelen was the youngest of them and was called first. He knelt, and was given the mantle, and stood up a druid of the Cenarion Circle. In the moment after, while the others looked to their elders, he turned and searched the crowd on the bank for one face. He searched for some time. He looked like a man who has done a right thing and is waiting to be told so.
The log lay where it always had, soft with moss, big enough for a girl of seventeen. She had sat in it from moonrise to moonset more nights than she could number, and had never thought to feel along the roof of it. The books were there, wrapped in oiled grey cloth: eleven, small, in a hand as plain as water. She did not open one. She put them in her bag.
Then she took the silver leaf out of her collar, where it had been since the loft. She had taken a leaf from that belt once before, on an evening when she wanted nothing, and that had been the making of her. She wanted a great deal now, and none of it was to be had. Her own leaf hung on its cord at her hip, as every one of the seven had carried theirs. She threaded the second on beside it and drew the knot down.
When she stood, they touched. It was a small sound, the smallest she knew, and she had spent half her life learning never to make it. She walked down toward the Rut'theran road and let them ring.