The Starwatch Gate

"What exactly did you use to—"

The rest of it was lost in the rain.

It had settled in for the night, thin and steady, cold enough that the water beading along the porch rail had crusted at the ends. The wind came around the eaves in long pushes, and the lamps in their brackets swung, and the lattice dragged its shadow one way across the floorboards and then the other. Inside the hall, the light was bright enough to sting.

Selena Voss sat at the end of the bench nearest the door, hands loose in her lap, studying her own fingertips. They had gone white past the second knuckle. When she flexed them the blood came back slowly and dragged pins and needles in behind it, and when she lifted her head toward the notice board at the far end of the room, the ceiling needed half a second longer than she did to arrive.

She put her head back down and left it there.

The crowd had been thinning for an hour, in the usual order: the ones with somewhere to go, then the ones with somebody waiting on them, then the rest. A single sheet had gone up on the board under the lamp above the door, names in a firm black hand, and she had watched the Warden pin it there without reading a word of it. You learned more from the back of a man's neck than from anything he nailed to a wall.

Footsteps came along the covered walk outside, unhurried. She heard them a long way off and used the time to arrange her face.

"Miss Voss." He stopped at a courteous distance and held out a closed umbrella, grip first. "Our list is posted. It's late. You'll want to be off before the road turns."

Was it that she didn't want to go home?

She didn't have one.

She took the umbrella in both hands, which gave her a reason to look down, and by the time she looked up again the double vision had done the work for her. Her eyes had gone hot and full, and one blink would tip it over. That part had never been a performance. She had never found a way to explain that part to anybody.

"Warden," she said, and blinked, slowly, once, because the arc mattered. She had spent a ridiculous amount of her life getting the arc right.

"If I'm not taken this time, my family will send me to…" She caught her lip between her teeth, turned her face aside, and let the sentence die where it stood. The small silence afterward did the rest.

He was quiet for a moment.

She glanced up through the blur, and there it was: his head, doubled and wavering, and behind the doubling, printed on the air the way the numbers hide inside a color-blindness test plate, a green figure.

94.

Well. That settled it. He was the best target she'd had all week, and she hadn't seen a number like that on anybody but herself in a very long time.

"Kestrel isn't the only house," he said, and his voice had gone gentle in the way a voice goes when its owner has decided the kind thing is to point you at a different door. "There are nine others, and their windows stay open to the end of the month. You could—"

Then why had she come on the last day, when Kestrel was closing its books and the other nine were full? She had thought that through on the walk up, and twice more while she waited for the doors to open.

"I have tried them all, Warden." Her lashes were heavy and wet now. "Ten times. Ten times the Assay has come back empty. Is there nothing in this world for somebody with no grade at all?"

The tears were doing real damage to her voice, and she let them.

He shifted his weight. "It isn't as simple as that. A few years back, one of our Instructors took an apprentice who assayed badly. No gift worth speaking of. But his insight—" He stopped himself, and seemed to weigh the end of the sentence before he handed it over. "There are people who make up in one place what they lack in another."

Insight. That was the word she had come up the mountain hoping to hear.

She had gotten the notion out of a cheap story, the kind sold off a blanket at the foot of the hill, and out of half a rumor to go with it: that there was a house somewhere that took people on insight alone, grade or no grade. And if a house would open that door even a crack, then a man lying senseless on wet flagstones outside the assembly hall was exactly the sort of thing a house set out to test. A body left lying, to see who would stop. Who would spend themselves on a stranger with no better reason than that.

That had been her arithmetic. It had cost her ten points to find out what the rumor was worth, and not one of the ten had come back to her since.

She held the grieving face while she did the sums again. If she had taken one look at him and kept walking, she would be ten points richer tonight and her head would not be doubling the world. Could a man be returned, the way a bad purchase could? Handed back over the rail, the ten points refunded?

"How does a house see a person's insight, then?" She said it to the umbrella in her hands, and her voice came out small and eager, an applicant's voice, and underneath it she was thinking: or does everybody here walk around with an insight bar floating over their heads, and I'm the only one who never learned to read that screen? Because if that's it, I would like to log out and come back on a better account.

The Warden's face had gone uncomfortable in an honest way, which was what made him kind. "The apprentice I mentioned — he assayed poorly, but he didn't assay empty. Not empty." He made a small gesture with one hand, the way a man measures a sliver of something at a market stall. "There was that much to build on."

She understood the rest of it without being told.

So a person with nothing at all couldn't even scrub a floor in a chartered house. She had read the notice nailed up at the foot of the mountain on the way in, between the cart ruts and the wet leaves: grounds and cleaning posts, board and meals included, one requirement — a passing Assay grade. Which raised a question she had never once gotten a straight answer to, from anybody, anywhere. Did a man with a grade scrub a latrine into paradise?

"Warden." Her voice had gone very small. "There's no chance at all, then. Not the smallest one."

And while she said it, she was pricing out the floor. If she went down now — properly down, the good faint, the one she had practiced on the rug in her room until she could manage it without bruising her knees — would he carry her in, or haul her out by the collar and leave her in the gravel? He had the kind of face that wouldn't drop a fainting girl in the mud. And if he carried her in, if she got one foot past that door, then somewhere in this house there was a roster with a line on it for a girl who cleaned things. She could lock the latrine doors behind her. She would adapt.

She was still running those numbers when she saw him hesitate.

She came up off the bench fast. "Warden. If you help me now, I'll owe you a debt I never finish paying. In this life and the next one. I'll swear to it."

Some oaths in this world had teeth, and she did not yet know which ones, so she kept the words big and round and the terms agreeable, and let her face carry the rest.

He bought it. That was the thing about kind faces.

He glanced once at the open door and once at the empty hall behind them, and then he leaned in and dropped his voice to something she had to work to hear.

"There's one house," he said, "that doesn't look at the grade at all. It looks at something else. Whether you can sense what other people can't. Word is it will take anybody who can. There was a beggar who came in off the road one winter—" He stopped. Something in his own sentence had caught up with him. "The stories about Starwatch are—"

The wind hit the doors. Both leaves came in off the latch with a crack and a long scrape across the boards, and the Warden flinched like a man who had heard his own name called out of the dark.

When he spoke again he was already moving. "That was nothing. A joke. You never heard it." He was two steps down the covered walk, then four. "Go home while there's road left."

Then he was gone, and the lamps swung behind him.

She sat on the bench and watched him go, and watched his green figure drop four points before he reached the end of the walk.

90.

Something in that name had cost a good man four points, and he'd been in too much of a hurry to notice the price. She sat with it a while, because it was worth sitting with.

Then the brand under her hair began to heat.

Eighteen years in this world had taught her exactly one thing about its families, and it had taught it the way you learn anything with a punishment hall attached to it. A family was a microwave.

Children born to a house were branded, all of them, before their eyes finished opening. The elders of each branch held the senior brands. A child born with real gift might be handed a mid-rank brand, always in the language of protection. Everyone else got the low rank and was told to be grateful for it.

The ranks were not symbolic. A senior brand could find a lesser one on any road, in any city, and end it where it stood. She had watched the punishment hall burn a runaway dry from the inside — a boy out of her own branch, brought back up the mountain in a cart — and he had stood in front of all of them and burned from the inside out while the elders watched the room, making sure every person in it understood what a switch was for.

And even among the low ranks, the direct line held the handle. Her father's brand could reach hers across a mile of rock. It did, whenever he wanted her attention.

A whole person, and somebody else had installed a switch behind her forehead. Which was all a microwave had ever been: a box with a switch on it, and a light that came on when somebody else got hungry.

She had tried, over the years, every stupid thing a person could try to get the brand off her, and the beatings life had handed her for it had narrowed the field to one answer. A chartered house could wash a brand out. That was why people stood in line at the halls before dawn with their papers inside their coats. Not for the ranks. Not for the work. For the washing.

And she was running out of time to find one that would take her. The brand at her hairline had gone from warm to hot, and on the far end of that heat was her father's patience, which had been thinning for weeks.

Fine. Starwatch, then.

A house that took people with no grade at all, that kept beggars, that made a good man drop four points just by saying the name. Even if it was a nest of teeth and old blood, it beat going home to the microwave.

She left the umbrella on the bench, walked out past the lamps into the rain, and started down.

The pines on the slope had gone into the fog, and she had no attention to spare for them. There were two things in her head and no room for a third: the temperature at the top of her forehead, and how much road was left in the day.

By the third switchback the burning had eased a fraction. That was the only reason she noticed how fast she was moving.

Which was why she nearly ran straight into the man standing in the middle of the road.

He was tall, and he stood the way a nail stands when it has been driven into a plank — no slouch, no shift, no weight anywhere but down. She came around the corner at speed and had a boot and a black coat and a face, and then she had to throw her whole body sideways to keep from going into his chest. Gravel skidded out from under her boot. She caught the rock face with her free hand and hung there, breathing, and looked up.

The figure over his head was pale red where the fog thinned it.

53.

She knew him.

That was the man from the flagstones. The one she had hauled up out of nothing and pumped back into breathing, who had opened his eyes, looked at her, and walked off down the mountain without so much as a nod, leaving her with a skull that doubled the world every time she moved too fast.

Hello, Mr. Fifty-Three.

If he was standing in this road to settle up, then they could talk like reasonable people. And if he wasn't — if there was nobody important standing behind him — then she meant to get her ten points back out of that fifty-three, and she did not plan to be gentle about how.

She got her feet under her.

His hand closed around her wrist, hot as a brand laid on skin.

"What exactly did you use on me?" His voice came out scraped and used up, as if he'd been shouting into wind. "Why couldn't I see those things when I woke up? And why do I see them now?"

He was breathing hard. Not from the climb — the way a draft horse breathes at the end of a day in the traces, the whole chest hauling, every breath through the nose like it cost him something. Up close, his face was perfectly still and perfectly cold. And on his forehead, under the wet black hair, he wore a brand inked in black, and the brand was a snake, and the snake was moving.

Yours is a microwave too, then—

The snake turned its head and showed her its teeth.

She took a slow breath of her own. Fine. A brand with fangs and a brand that moved was no low rank. That was the sort they burned into people who could end a branch line without asking anybody's permission first. Which meant she could lie to him all night and never lose a minute of sleep over it.

Although his number had already climbed all the way back to fifty-three. Fast, for a man who had been carried off this mountain half dead. That put him level with the man she was engaged to, and she did not find that encouraging.

The pain behind her hairline rolled over her again, slow and patient, the way her father was patient.

She ignored it. She gave him the smile she had practiced more than any other — the calm one, the gentle one, the one she could hold while somebody shouted at her.

"Shouldn't you tell me your name," she said, "before you ask me for mine?"

For half a second she thought he would close his hand and break her wrist out of pure irritation. Then something in him settled, the way a man settles when somebody hands him back the rules of a conversation. He looked at her a moment longer, cold and steady, and let go.

Then he stepped sideways, without hurry, and put himself between her and the road down.

She kept the smile on and said nothing, and let the rain talk for both of them.

His name came out the way a man hands over something he assumes you already own.

"Corvin Slade."

The rain kept coming. She had never heard the name in her life.