CHAPTER 754: THE CONSORT’S DISAPPEARANCE (3)

Cerys hit the margins with a small squad that already understood what she wanted: no neat lines, no drum-beat feet. They moved ugly on purpose—one heel heavy, one toe quick, then a pause that didn’t match anyone else’s pause. From the road, they looked like a group that couldn’t keep time. From up close, they were a net that never rang.

The old aqueduct made ribs against the pale sky. Gulls sat like knots along the stone. Water hissed somewhere far under the street, the sound thin and constant. Cerys swept a glance along the arch tops, then under them. She could smell damp lime, old lily roots, someone’s cook smoke drifting from a squatter’s brazier. No sharp stink of fear. No quick sweat pressed into dust where someone had been dragged. No scuff in the places people always forget to hide—the inside edge of a step, the low brick under the curve of a gate.

Her second, Taron, kept two paces back and a little to the left. He did not speak, but he pointed once with his chin at a shadow under the fourth arch. Cerys cut toward it on a crooked line. The shadow held a nest of broom twigs, a child’s carved horse with one wheel missing, and a roll of old net. She touched nothing, only breathed over it. Dust lifted and settled. No rush of a new thing beneath.

"Move," she said softly, and they slid back into the lane.

Rat-lines ran under the arches and out through alleys where people with sense didn’t walk alone. Smugglers used them. Knights used them when the clean roads would make them visible from too far. Tonight they were quiet. Doors wore the look of lids closed on watchful eyes. A cat leaped a broken wall, saw them, and decided they were dull.

She took the lane Mikhailis had once walked with her at dusk, the day he’d taught her prime-step with a handful of pebbles and a grin he tried to hide. She had disliked him then for making learning feel like play. She still used what he taught her. Heel rude. Toe brief. Don’t let the ground count you. Let it guess.

The squad followed, mouths shut, eyes up. She saw what they saw: a torn pennant caught on a nail, a loose shutter that tapped once, then stopped, a jar placed where jars do not go unless someone uses it to hold a door just enough. She nudged that jar with a boot and listened. It didn’t sing. Good.

Nothing smelled like a human snatch. No panicked scuff. No wrong pattern. Too clean.

She hated clean because it lied. A crooked lane should tell you a crooked story. When it didn’t, someone was trying to turn the page for you.

Still she posted placards. Under the first arch, she nailed one where hands would find it when they reached on habit: NO CALL-AND-RESPONSE. Under the next: ONE PEBBLE. The letters were plain and dark. She didn’t bother making them pretty. People read faster when words look like work.

A man in a patched jacket loitered near the second placard, chewing something that made his jaw move slow. He watched her nail without moving away. "What’s all this then, Captain?" he asked, tone friendly enough to test her title without using it.

"Advice," she said, not looking up from the hammer. "Free."

He glanced at her squad. They didn’t look like soldiers—no cloaks, no crest. Just belts, plain blades, and that odd way of standing that said they could stand for hours without moving. The man spat aside and shrugged. "Never liked clapping anyway," he said, and left it there.

Cerys slid the hammer back through her belt. Under her breath, to the stone itself, she said, "If you bled, I’ll find the thing that drank you and break its teeth." It wasn’t a prayer. It was a promise made to the ground.

They moved on. She counted the usual traps—the shrine that liked to collect steps, the alley tar where sandals slide, the stretch of brick that always sounds hollow, as if it wants to remember the tunnel beneath. She avoided them without thinking. Her second placed one pebble at the mouth of a side street and rolled it with his boot, an old trick to misalign a pull she couldn’t see. He had learned, and she respected that in him without saying so.

Past the dye-works, a trio of boys tried to see if they could get a laugh out of soldiers by chanting a rude rhyme in a syncopated rhythm. Cerys’s second stopped, turned his head, and looked until the boys felt their faces and not their mouths. The chant died into snickers. One of them kicked at the gutter and pretended that had been his plan.

At the northern arch she paused and tipped her face up. The sky had gone pale at the edges. Smoke from the river barges lay low, a flat smear that made her tongue taste ash. No glint. No signal where a partner might flash steel for a friend. She took the squad down past the old kiln, where heat used to live, and found two sleepers curled in its black belly. They weren’t actors for anyone. Their breaths were long and unafraid. She let them sleep.

"Enough for now," she said. "Next loop."

They turned, the squad re-spacing themselves without needing an order. Cerys held the picture of the lanes in her head and looked for the one different thing. There wasn’t one. That, more than anything, told her this was not a common kind of trouble. Whatever had happened to the prince-consort had not happened in a corner like this, or if it had, someone had washed the corner with skill she respected and feared.

She kept moving anyway

___

Serelith climbed the tower until her ears popped. The wind higher up had a thin taste. She shut the windows into narrow slits and pulled the wooden bar across them. The room became a long throat of cool air and shadow. Brass arms held mirror-plates in a slow turn, catching nothing but the pale seam of sky and handing it to the others in a patient circle.

On the central stand, three glass discs waited. She breathed on one without meaning to and watched the fog of her breath pull into letters she did not write. She wiped it with her sleeve and began again, slower.

She lit three candles in a row, not for drama, but because a steady flame helped her measure time when her head went too fast. She set out her lenses on their felt squares. One by one, she tried what she could try without making the city sing.

She listened for pockets that were not rooms. She swept for the cold that necromancy leaves when it has spent itself. She blurred her own view for a count and then let it sharpen, to see if anything hiding in the middle appeared when her eyes got bored.

The answer kept being the same: not here, not there. The trace held in the air like heat that has just left a hand and then was gone. She caught it and lost it and caught it again. Sideways, her mind whispered, though she had promised herself she wouldn’t use that word out loud. It felt like looking for a fish in clear water and seeing only the shadow of a fin.

Her nose bled when she pushed too long. She pressed under it with one finger, frowned at her own impatience, and went back to the lenses with a fresh square of cloth. She did not swear. She did not make a joke. She said, to the empty air, "Don’t you dare be too clever to be found," and left off the rest of the sentence because she did not want to hear herself call him anything tender.

A page sat on the stairs because she had put him there with a board and a piece of chalk. He wrote down doors that opened and closed in the hall below, lines and times, nothing else. When his chalk broke, she handed him another without looking.

She tried calling to the trace by ordinary means. "Mikhailis," she said once, quietly, as if he sat across a table and had not heard his name the first time. Nothing moved. She switched from his name to the weight of it in memory and waited. The quiet held. She didn’t push harder. Pushing sometimes drove things farther away.

When her headache flattened into one long plank behind her eyes, she put her forehead to the cool edge of the mirror frame, counted to twenty, and lifted her head again. She wasn’t done. She didn’t know how to be done.