The Scotion Tower

They took her in under the bridge, which she would later consider an embarrassment of geography.

One guard came from each end of the underpass and a third dropped from the road above — she hadn't thought to account for above — the kind of mistake you only made once. She had half a second to decide whether to use the Ekta and she decided against it, because using it required stillness, and there was no stillness to be had when three men in plate were closing the distance at pace.

She ran at the one on the left, which surprised him, and got two steps past him before the one from above caught her by the back of the coat. The collar pulled hard against her throat. She twisted and bit his wrist through the glove — she felt the leather give, felt him swear and his grip loosen — and she dropped low and went for the gap between them again, and this time the third one had closed the gap.

He caught her around the middle with both arms and lifted her off the ground.

"Put me down," she said.

He did not put her down.

She kicked him twice in the shins and he said, "Will you stop that," in the tone of a man doing a job he found tedious rather than dangerous, and that, she decided, was the most insulting thing about all of it. They were not afraid of her. She was not a threat. She was a small annoying girl and they had dealt with small annoying things before.

She stopped kicking. Not because she'd accepted the situation, but because kicking wasn't working and she had to think.

The streets were ridiculous.

That was her honest assessment of the capital that morning, being carried through it against her will — the streets were ridiculous, drowning in colored cloth and paper flowers and banners bearing the Sylpharia crest in gold and red and some additional shade she'd heard a vendor call "ceremonial cream" with a straight face. Every storefront had something hung above its door. Children were running between the market stalls with streamers. A man on a corner was selling gilded ribbon by the yard and doing tremendous business.

"What's all this?" she said.

"Princess's wedding," the guard carrying her said. He'd shifted his grip so she was under one arm — more comfortable than the first arrangement, no less humiliating.

She looked at a banner. The Sylpharia crest: a tower wrapped in what might have been vines or flames depending on the rendering. "Which princess."

"Eldest."

Ophelia had no feeling about this either way. The royal family existed in the same theoretical category as the weather — real, impersonal, occasionally inconvenient. She'd never seen any of them up close. She'd never had reason to think about them beyond the guards they employed and the roads their palace occupied.

She observed a woman weeping into a handkerchief at the sight of a banner and made a private decision about that woman's priorities.

The Scotion Tower was in the administrative quarter, between the civil courts and a records building she'd once broken into looking for a dry place to sleep and found mostly ledgers. The Tower was older than both, older than most things in this part of the city — its stone a darker gray, its mortar thick and crumbling at the corners, its shape slightly crooked, as if the original builders had been working from competing instructions. It looked like it had opinions.

They brought her in through a side entrance, down a half-flight of stairs, into a corridor that was underground enough to feel it. The cold was immediate and settled. She counted turns out of habit: left, straight, right, right, another set of stairs down. The torches were spaced too far apart and the spaces between them were truly dark, and she understood this was probably intentional.

Her cell was at the end of a passage that smelled of old water and stone. Small. A cot along one wall with a pallet that had seen better decades. A bucket. A window slit near the ceiling — a foot wide, six inches tall, positioned in a way that suggested the architect had included it specifically to taunt rather than to ventilate. The door was oak reinforced with iron straps and the guard locked it with a key that was not a small key.

She sat on the cot and breathed and did not show anything.

There was a trick to that — to managing the cold, tight thing that was happening in her chest right now. You did not look directly at it. You looked at the facts instead: the room, the door, the window, the ceiling, the bucket. You counted them. You counted your assets and your liabilities the way Breswick used to count the morning till, briskly and calmly. She had her coat. She had her knowledge of the route from the entrance. She did not have her food or her oilcloth or her flat stone, which she would not think about. She had her Ekta — something, though she didn't know yet what exactly it was good for down here. She would need to find a mind worth reading through that door.

She lay back on the pallet and stared at the ceiling and did not think about the fact that nobody in the world would notice she was gone.

The man who came was not what she expected — probably the point.

She'd been waiting, by her reckoning, several hours. Long enough for the damp cold to get into her knees, which she'd been trying not to acknowledge. She'd done two loops of the room looking for anything useful and found the loop was eleven steps, the iron straps on the door were solid, and the ceiling crack in the far corner was not structural but was interesting in a purely aesthetic way. She'd heard footsteps twice in the corridor and neither set had stopped at her door.

This set stopped.

The lock was a sound she would remember.

He was old. Not ancient, but well into the years that make themselves known — the kind of age that settles in the jaw and the set of the shoulders. His coat was dark and well-made without being showy about it. He carried nothing. He had the manner of a man who'd spent a long time watching other people be nervous and had decided, at some point, that he didn't need to perform anything in particular himself.

He looked at her with eyes that were — she took them in immediately — not unkind and also not soft. Both of those things at once.

He said, "Ophelia."

It wasn't a question. It was the first disconcerting thing he did.

"How do you know my name?" she said.

"I know a number of things about you." He stepped into the cell and the guards outside pulled the door to — not locked, she saw. Not locked. "My name is Ghoardor. I serve as consultant to the queen." He pulled the room's one stool out from under the cot and sat on it and looked at her with the patient expression of a man who had nowhere to be. "How old are you?"

"Twelve."

"About?"

She looked at him. "Yes. Roughly."

"Parents?"

"No."

"Where do you live?"

She said nothing.

He nodded as if she'd answered. "How long have you been on your own?"

"A while." She watched him. He was watching her back, and how he was paying attention was unusual — not the sizing-up of the guards, physical and impersonal, but something more like actual interest. She didn't like it. Interest from strangers tended to be a prelude to something. "What am I being charged with."

"You haven't been charged with anything."

"So I can leave."

"No."

She sat with that for a moment. "What do you want."

Ghoardor settled his hands on his knees. "I want to understand a few things. Then I want to decide what we do next." He paused. "Do you know why you're here?"

"No," she said, which was not completely true.

"I think you do."

"Then why are you asking."

Something shifted in his expression — not quite a smile, but the possibility of one, briefly visited. "The report we received was specific. There's a young girl who moves through the market district and knows things she shouldn't. Where a merchant keeps his private funds. Which guards are coming on duty before they arrive. What's inside a parcel before it's opened. She's known around town as supernaturally crafty, which is how people describe the inexplicable when they don't have a better word for it." He let the silence settle. "You've been doing it for years, by the account."

"People exaggerate."

"They do," he agreed. "But not always." He looked at her steadily. "I want you to tell me that I'm wrong. That there's a perfectly ordinary explanation for everything in that report. That you have very sharp eyes and a good memory and the people who described you overestimated what they saw." He waited. "Tell me I'm wrong."

"You're wrong," Ophelia said. "They lie. They'll have to prove it."

She'd said it before she finished deciding to say it — the stubborn thing just got out on its own, which Breswick would have recognized, though he'd always made the politic choice not to comment on it. She held Ghoardor's gaze because looking away would be worse.

He studied her for a moment.

"Very well," he said, without the inflection that would have made it a judgment. He stood, returned the stool to its position. "One more thing." He paused at the door with his back to her, almost casual about it. "The report included a detail from two witnesses — independent, unknown to each other, different parts of the city on different days." He turned only slightly, enough to speak toward the room. "They said they saw your eyes glow."

The cold thing in her chest did something complicated.

She said nothing.

"How strange is that?" Ghoardor said. He was looking at the door frame rather than her. His voice was thoughtful more than anything else. Like he was talking to himself about a puzzle he'd found mildly engrossing. "Imagine seeing something like that and not knowing what to make of it. The people who reported it were quite specific. Gold, one said. White-gold, the other. They didn't know each other. They used different words and described the same thing." He opened the door. The guards stood waiting on the other side. "I have a royal event to attend. I'll return later with more questions. I'd encourage you to rest."

"You're leaving," she said. The composure in her voice was not fully in her control.

"Yes."

"You can't just—" She stopped.

He looked at her over his shoulder. It was a patient look — somehow worse than an impatient one. Then he stepped out, and the guards stepped back, and the door closed, and the key turned in the lock with that sound she was going to remember.

She sat still for three seconds.

Then she was off the cot. She hit the door with the flat of her hand first, then her fist, and she was aware it was doing nothing but she did it anyway. She put her mouth close to the iron-banded wood and found words she'd learned from the south market stalls and used them squarely.

"Come back," she shouted. "Come back, I haven't — you can't just leave me here. I haven't been charged with anything, you said that yourself. You can't hold me here. Come back—"

She could hear his footsteps in the corridor. Unhurried. Moving away.

She hit the door twice more, which hurt, and then she stopped because her hand hurt and it still didn't help. She pressed her back to the door and slid down it until she was sitting on the cold floor, breathing, and the corridor outside went quiet.

White-gold. Two witnesses. Different parts of the city.

She pressed her palms flat against the stone floor and stared across the small room and did not let herself think about what it meant that he'd known to ask about that. That he'd saved it for last.

That he'd left before she had to answer.