Chapter 14: The Wall My Grandfather Built

【Sakura — PoV】

The rope in my chest had snapped.

I did not know what it was. I knew when it broke. An hour ago. Mid-sentence. Ink across a clean page. My knees are on the floor.

Now the ink was dry, and I was moving.

I folded the ruined letter and burned it in the candle. I took a fresh sheet. I wrote three sentences in a hand that did not shake. I sealed it. I slipped it under Mira-chan’s door on my way past the second-floor corridor, because her brother came on Fridays, and Friday was tomorrow, and there was work to do before then.

The hallway was quiet.

Afternoon light fell through the south windows in warm gold bars. Students were in class. Instructors were in the lecture hall. The housekeeper was downstairs sorting linen. I had forty minutes before my next lesson.

Forty minutes was enough.

“Sakura-chan?”

I turned.

Mira-chan stood in her doorway with a textbook against her chest, hair messy at the front, eyes red. She had been crying about the boy in her year again. I did not have forty minutes for the boy in her year.

I made five.

“Mira-chan. Your eyes are red.”

“He walked past me in the library.”

“Did he see you?”

“He did not see me.”

“Mira-chan.”

“Yes?”

“He is a fool, and the world is full of better men, and I have a small headache. Would you walk with me to the infirmary later?”

Her face brightened at once.

That was always how it worked with her. A plan shrank a present sorrow. She nodded. She stepped back into her room. I walked on.

The infirmary was not my real destination.

The infirmary was a story in case someone asked. My real destination was the service stair at the north end of the Tower, the one the kitchen staff used, the one that opened into the delivery yard against the outer wall.

The outer wall had a gate.

The gate had a guard.

The guard had a grandmother with a bad knee. Two weeks ago, I had sent her a small pot of honeyed plum ointment with a very nice note.

I went down the stairs.

The stone steps were narrow. My soft shoes made no sound. At the bottom, the yard opened out. Crates of cabbage. Barrels of oil, and a cart unloading flour. Nobody looked at me. Students were allowed here during free hours. I carried a book. I walked like someone who belonged.

The gate stood twenty paces ahead.

I took three paces.

My knees locked.

Not fear. Not weakness. The air in front of me had gone thick, the way honey goes thick when it cools. My feet still tried to move. My body did not. I pushed, and the air pushed back, gentle, like a parent’s hand easing a child away from a hot pan.

I looked down.

A thin silver line ran across the paving stones under my shoe. I had not seen it from the stairs. It was almost invisible under the dust. It curved around the whole inside of the outer wall, smooth and unbroken, and it was warm, and it was humming, and it knew my name.

Grandfather’s ward.

“Haruno-san?”

The guard had seen me.

Tobias-san was a big man with a round, kind face. He had my grandmother’s ointment under his coat right now. I was sure of it. His walk was easier this week than last. He smiled at me. He did not cross the silver line either. The line did not let him cross in. It did not let me cross out. It did its job without taking sides.

“Good afternoon, Tobias-san.”

“You look pale, Haruno-san.”

“I was hoping to walk outside. The sun is lovely today.”

“The sun is lovely. But the wall is the wall.”

“Of course.”

“The Headmistress would have my coat.”

“Of course, Tobias-san. Forgive me. I am a little lightheaded.”

“Go sit in the kitchen. Cook will give you water.”

“Thank you.”

I stepped back.

The thick air released me. My legs shook once and steadied. I kept smiling at Tobias-san until his shoulders unclenched. I turned at the same pace I had come down. Not slower. Not faster. Slower looks defeated. Faster looks guilty.

I climbed the stairs.

I did not go to the kitchen.

I went to the library.

＊＊＊

The library at this hour was almost empty.

Two seniors whispered at a far table. One instructor slept behind an open newspaper. Long oak shelves breathed dry paper and beeswax into the still air. Dust drifted through a sunbeam at the south end like slow snow.

I walked to the warding section.

I had been here before. The binding I needed was on the third shelf, in a thin red book I had already read twice. I pulled it down. I sat at the end of the long table, facing the south window, and I read it a third time.

The third time is when you stop looking for what you want.

The third time is when you read what is there.

The Tower seal was anchored in seven stones. Grandfather’s generation laid six. The grandfather himself laid the seventh. A seal with his stone in it was not going to open for his granddaughter. That was the shape of the magic. That was the shape of the man.

Grandfather had loved me.

Grandfather had also built things to last.

I closed the book. I put it back exactly where it had been, spine aligned with its neighbor to the thickness of a hair.

I walked to the south window.

The gold bar of afternoon sun lay across the wide sill. I stepped into it. The warmth touched my face. I looked south down the long road to the capital, past the bright fields and the slow dust of carts on the king’s highway, past the low gold hills where the Academy sat on its white plateau.

Alfred-kun was out there.

The rope in my chest did not answer me back.

＊＊＊

I went to my room.

I closed the door behind me. I sat at my desk. I opened a clean sheet of paper. I dipped my pen.

I was not going through a wall my grandfather had built.

Grandfather had won that one from the grave. Grandfather was allowed that.

But a wall is only the first thing.

A message could cross a wall. A person could not cross a wall. But a person could be asked to cross a wall on my behalf and carry something for me. And a person who had been paid, or thanked, or fed, or flattered, or made to feel important, could be asked for a great deal more than they thought they had agreed to.

I had a list.

The list was in a different notebook. I took the notebook from the drawer. I opened it to the clean page I had prepared last week, because I always prepare clean pages for nights like this one, and I began.

Mira-chan’s brother: Friday. Palace kitchens.

Tomas-kun: royal correspondence office.

Lady Velmont-sama: capital, daughter at the Academy.

Gale-sensei: Thornwood proctor, accepts plums.

Alfred-kun’s mother: weekly letter, already fond.

The Headmistress: educational visit in autumn, already suggested.

I added a seventh name.

I underlined it twice.

The housekeeper: four grandchildren, youngest sick, holds the master keys to every door in this Tower, including the one I have not yet asked about.

I put down the pen.

I looked at the list.

The rope in my chest gave one small, tired pull. Faint. From very far south. From somewhere deep and cold.

It was alive.

Alfred-kun was alive.

My shoulders came down from somewhere near my ears. I let out a breath I did not know I had been holding. I touched the silver clip in my hair with the tips of two fingers, the way other girls touch a prayer bead.

I dipped the pen again.

I began letter one.

“Dear Tomas-kun,”

Outside my window, the sun was beginning to set across the south road. Somewhere past the gold fields and the long dusk, a boy I had been waiting for since I was seven was in a cave I could not see, wearing clothes I had not chosen, beside a girl I had not approved.

That was fine.

Plans adjust.

The pen moved.