Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Stock Tip from a Ghost

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Supper went on very long.

I sat where my mother put me, which was halfway down the long table opposite Lord Brennan and three seats from Damien. I ate seven bites of the mutton, two bites of the apricot, and three sips of the watered wine. I made polite, small, dull conversation with the Bluemoon dowager on my left about the price of summer linen. I let Father carry the head of the table. I let Mother carry the foot. I let Lyra carry, with vicious skill, the entire lower end. I did not look at Damien more than the polite three times a Lady looks at a guest at her father's table; I did not, when he tried to catch my eye over the tureen of leek soup, allow it to be caught.

By a little after ten the older guests had withdrawn to the drawing room and the men had retired with brandy to the smoking room. I made my excuses to Mother — a small headache, a long day, very kind, very tired — and she put a hand to my cheek with a look that I would not, in another life, have understood, and let me go.

I went up the long gallery to my room. I did not, however, change for bed. I changed instead into the plainest dress I owned — a soft grey day-dress I had not worn in two years past life — and pulled a dark shawl over my hair. I waited until the stable clock rang the quarter past, and then again, and then I slipped down the back stair.

The small library lived behind the gallery, in a corner of the manor that the household used very seldom. Father preferred the great library; Mother preferred her sitting room; Lyra preferred her own bed. The small library had three walls of shelves, an old leather sofa, a desk under a north window, and a single oil lamp Garrison kept trimmed, and at this hour it was the most private room in Silvercrest.

Garrison was already there.

He had set out, on the desk, two things: an open ledger and a small brass-rimmed cup of tea. He had drawn the curtains. The lamp was low. He had been at the desk long enough that the ink in the well had begun to skin.

"Lady Selene." He stood. He did not bow. He had stopped bowing to me when I was eight, after the morning I had told him, gravely, that I would prefer he didn't because he was old and his back hurt; he had laughed for a full minute and after that we had agreed to a small inclination of the head between us. He inclined his head now. "Sit, Lady. The sofa, if you would."

I sat.

He set down the second cup.

"You did not eat," he said.

"You watched me from the sideboard."

"I always do, Lady."

I took the cup. I took one sip. The tea was hot and faintly bitter; bergamot, the leaf my father preferred. Garrison had been pouring my father's tea for forty years, and somewhere in the long quiet of those years he had become, in the way of long-serving stewards, the most private memory the household had. He knew where the silver was hidden. He knew which Beta had been a midshipman and was therefore not to be sent to sea. He knew that my mother had cried, on the morning of my fifth birthday, because she had thought she would never have a second child, and that she had cried again on the morning of my seventh, when she had felt Lyra quicken.

I had decided, at half past four this morning, that he would also know my war chest.

"Garrison."

"Lady."

"I will say a thing first. You will not understand it. I will not, tonight, explain it. I am asking, instead, for your trust."

He set down his cup. He folded his hands in his lap. He had, I now saw with a clarity I had never before given him, the quietest face I had ever known. It did not announce itself. It only listened.

"Speak, Lady."

"In nine weeks," I said, "a small Lycan-Court technology firm called Argent Loom will announce a contract with the Drakhold mountain comms array. Their valuation, currently sitting at fourteen thousand crowns, will triple inside six weeks of the announcement. Inside four months, it will quintuple. By the spring, my father's quarterly tithe will be a small sum next to it."

The pen, which Garrison had picked up in some absent steward reflex, slowed and stopped.

"In four months," I went on, "a parcel of land outside the eastern Wolfe Pass, currently held by the Pinewood line, will be quietly sold to a Lycan-Court agent. The buyer's identity will not be public for a year. The price they pay will be three times what it was put on the books at last spring. Anyone with a piece of the option contract before the sale will see a return of roughly eight to one."

"Lady."

"In nine months," I said, "a small private bank in Bluemoon territory called Thorpe Henley will fail. They will fail because the Beta running their treasury — a man named Ferrick — has been borrowing against deposits to feed a habit no one has yet noticed. Their depositors will lose the lot. Anyone short their notes when the failure prints will not lose, however."

"Lady Selene."

"I have one more," I said softly. "But I will not give you the fourth tonight. The first three are enough to begin."

The lamp guttered. I watched Garrison's hands, folded on the cup. They did not shake. They had not shaken in forty years; they were not going to shake tonight. After a long moment, he set down his cup very carefully on the desk. He removed his half-moon spectacles. He polished them on a square of linen he had drawn from his pocket. He put them back on.

"Lady Selene."

"Yes."

"Do you know," he said, "that what you have just told me is not the speech of a girl of seventeen."

"Yes."

"Do you know that two of those companies' names I have only ever heard spoken in this house, in confidence, in your father's own study, when his treasurer comes up from the city in autumn."

"I had guessed."

"Argent Loom is not a name a young Lady of this pack should know."

"And yet."

"And yet." He looked at me. He looked at me a long time. Garrison did not have grandfatherly eyes. Garrison had old wolf eyes — pale, lashless, unblinking. He looked at me with them now, and through them, in the way a man holding a gem to a candle holds it, looking for the cleavage and the colour and the truth.

"You were sweetly stupid this morning, Lady."

"This morning?"

"At breakfast. With your sister. You crossed the room and held her too long, and you looked at the bread basket the way a starving woman looks at a table she did not believe she would see again. And then —" his eyes flicked, very faintly, sideways, to the curtained window "— at the receiving line, you greeted Lord Damien Cross like a woman who knew the colour of his blood."

I did not breathe.

"Garrison."

"I have served your father forty years, Lady Selene. And his father seven. I have read three weddings and four wars and twelve births of this house in the line of an eldest daughter's wrist. I am not a wolf for ghost stories. I am not a wolf for prophecy. I am a wolf for ledgers." He paused. "But I know a daughter who has come back from somewhere when I see one."

The breath in me let go in one shaking exhale.

"Don't say it," I whispered.

"I will not say it." He was still looking at me, steady, kind, terrifying. "I will not say it tonight, and I will not say it tomorrow, and I will not say it on the day a man comes to ask me what has happened to Magnus Hartwell's daughter, because I will tell him she has been ill in the spring and she is now as managing as her mother. Is that satisfactory, Lady?"

"Yes," I said. "Garrison."

"Mm."

"How did you —"

"Forty years." A small dry sound; not quite a laugh. "Eight Hartwell women. Three of them I have watched come back from places they should not have come back from. I am not as surprised as you imagine."

I had not, in the past life, ever heard him say such a thing. I had not, in the past life, ever asked him a single useful question. He had been the steward in the corner. I had been the daughter who flounced past him to her own ruin.

I would not be that daughter again.

"Argent Loom," I said, gathering myself. "I would like the whole of my dowry account on it before the announcement. Discreetly. Through three different brokers under three different names, two of them ones my father's office cannot trace."

"It will be done."

"On Thorpe Henley I want short notes acquired, slowly, over the next six months. Drip-fed. No single position large enough to attract a glance."

"It will be done."

"On the Wolfe Pass parcel — I want options. Cheap and forgotten options. Held in a name that traces back to nothing."

"There are two such names available to me," he said. "I will use the cleaner."

"Garrison."

"Mm."

"The fourth piece I did not give you tonight is a piece I will give you in the spring. It is the largest of the four. It will require a structure we do not yet have."

"Then we shall have one by spring," he said calmly. "Drink your tea, Lady. It has gone cold."

I drank. I drank the rest of the cup down. I set it on the desk. I rose.

"Garrison."

"Lady?"

"Thank you."

He inclined his head. He did not say anything else. He did not need to. As I went to the door, he turned the lamp down a notch, and the small library went, by one degree, deeper into shadow; the ledger on his desk closed itself under his hand.

I walked back through the gallery in the dark. My slippers made no sound on the boards. Outside the long windows, a fingernail moon was up over the eastern lawn, very thin, very white.

I had, in the long count of the past life, ridden into my own death with three things that mattered: a husband, a name, and a daughter's faith in the world.

I had now, in this life, on the night of the Welcoming, three different things.

An Ezra who had agreed to live.

A Garrison who had agreed to count.

And a small soft cold place in my chest, very steady, where the war was beginning.

I went to bed. I slept, for the first time since the pyre, without dreaming.