Ink and Bone

The next thing that caught his attention were the Welsh troops massed outside the walls. They were loading something into carriers. He didn’t say anything, and neither did Morgan. They watched as the carriage chuffed and clanked across the mud, and passed them.

It was filled with the dead. Not Welsh dead; none of the bodies wore those uniforms. These were dead civilians, headed for a shared grave.

‘I don’t know where my father is,’ Morgan said quietly. ‘If he’s dead, I’ll never be sure.’

She turned and walked back towards the tent. Jess followed. She didn’t slow for him, and he panted and sweated as he caught up. When he slipped and would have gone down in the mud, Morgan took his arm and steadied him. He didn’t speak. Neither did she, all the way back to the tent.

‘You didn’t say you were sorry,’ she said.

Jess looked up, and found her gaze full on him; the shock of those eyes, so intently focused, was like a lightning strike. She could out-stare Wolfe, if she tried. ‘What?’

‘Most people would have, you know. Said they were sorry about my home. My father. You didn’t. Why not?’

He shrugged a little. It hurt. ‘What’s the point? Does my being sorry for you make you feel better?’

‘No,’ she said, and blinked away tears. ‘Nothing makes me feel better. But thank you for being honest about not caring.’

‘I never said I didn’t care.’

He left her to think about that, went inside, and collapsed back on his bed with sweaty relief.

Morgan said nothing else to him that day. She remained quiet while his classmates helped him to the Welsh mess tent, where he ate his first solid meal – tasteless, even if an improvement over the weak broth he’d been enduring. But it felt good to be sitting at a table with his fellows again. They were quiet, and he could tell that the time for idle jokes was past, at least for now. They were all healing, still.

Khalila and Dario held hands.

Wolfe sat with Santi at another table, and the two were in deep conversation. Serious conversation, it seemed.

Jess felt oddly divorced from it all, even as he was in the middle of it. Delayed shock, he supposed. Slow recovery. He found himself looking more at Morgan than anyone else – Morgan, who wasn’t really one of them any more. Morgan, who’d either slip away before London, or be dragged to the Iron Tower once they got to Alexandria. Wolfe wasn’t protecting her now.

I can get Brendan to hide her. Put her on a ship, away from here. Maybe to America. Jess wondered what price his brother would charge him for that, and decided that it didn’t matter.

Wolfe suddenly nodded at something Santi said, and stood up. He walked over to their table. The students’ laughter and conversation died a quick, strangled death.

‘I wanted to tell you that you’ve done well. All of you.’ Wolfe hesitated, then fixed his gaze on Jess as he continued. ‘I also want to make something clear. You all saw a harsh illustration of why it can be difficult to do this job. We can’t take anyone from the city – child, family member, no one. The moment we stopped being neutral, we would have been dead. We had no choice but to leave the child Brightwell took.’

‘So you did it for the best reasons,’ Jess said. ‘Is that it?’

‘I did it to save us,’ Wolfe replied. ‘And to preserve the tradition of neutrality of the Library.’

‘Neutrality? They tried to kill us in Oxford!’

‘Desperate people do desperate things. You ca

‘You wanted me to leave her in the mud to drown,’ Jess said. ‘I don’t call that better. The fact you changed your mind doesn’t make me forget it.’

Wolfe held his stare for a long moment, then turned and walked back to join Santi.

The others all looked at Jess, with varying degrees of alarm. Khalila leant forward. ‘Jess …’

‘There are six of us left now,’ he said. ‘Six. Wolfe’s giving six placements. He’s not going to fail me now. And if he does, I don’t care.’

EPHEMERA

Text of a private paper correspondence between Frederick Brightwell and his uncle Callum Brightwell, written in a family code for safety and decoded to read:

Safely out of Oxford with all the goods, though can’t say much for the state of my men. Going to have to hire fresh once I get to the new set-up in the north; I’m not staying anywhere near the damned Welsh, so don’t try and bribe me into it. One close brush with them was enough, and I’ve got the still-healing scars to prove it.

On to family business: I saw Jess in Oxford. Boy’s grown up well; I should say man, rather, because he’s carrying himself more like one, and no coward, either, though coming from our family stock I’d not expect so. Seems comfortable with his new Library friends. Here’s hoping he doesn’t go native on you and turn his coat to Egyptian gold. Be quite the laugh on you if he did, wouldn’t it?

Speaking of laughs, that fierce Scholar fellow who ran the show knew his goods, all right. He let Jess trade me a fine, rare copy of Aristotle’s On Dreams. Would have been worth enough to ransom a half-dozen kings under normal circumstances, but these weren’t, and he didn’t hesitate to give it up to buy my help for his escape.

More family news: I’ve become a father. Adopted a girl I took out of Oxford, just a tadpole of a thing. I know, you don’t need to tell me about sentimentality. Maybe I’m just thinking of the future. Always good to have more kids to take on the trade, eh?

I’ll write when I set up the new digs in Yorkshire. Until then, I remain faithfully yours,

Frederick

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The High Garda carriers clanked them away from the ruins of Oxford. It was a grim ride for Jess, even though he was given one of the padded front seats. It didn’t help that he felt isolated from his friends, who were all in the back of the carrier.

What made it worse was that he found himself riding with Wolfe and Santi. He didn’t want to talk to Wolfe. His somewhat irrational anger had gone from a boil to a simmer, but it was still on the stove.

‘You’re quiet,’ Captain Santi said after about an hour of bone-jarring progress. Jess didn’t respond. He assumed Santi was talking to Wolfe. ‘I mean you, Brightwell. Wolfe’s never a chatterbox when he’s on duty.’

‘I took a pain pill,’ he said, quite truthfully. Half of one, not a whole one, but enough to file the edges off the knife he could still feel sawing at his liver.

‘Is it working?’

‘Not enough.’

‘That would explain the sullen silence,’ Wolfe said.

‘Sullen?’ Jess let the anger out in half a shout, and twisted in his seat to face him, never mind the burst of pain that hissed up and down his side. ‘Don’t I have enough reasons yet? You used me, you bastard.’

Wolfe seemed completely unruffled. ‘Of course I did. I knew your family were criminals. I also knew that one of your fellow students was a Burner agent.’

Jess opened his mouth and couldn’t find anything to say. Wolfe waited. The question finally came down to, ‘Who?’

‘It no longer matters, but you see why knowing so much is important. Your family business is of concern to me only as a very relative issue.’

Burner. Jess tried to fit that on each one of his classmates, but he couldn’t. ‘Portero?’ he finally guessed.

‘You only say so because you didn’t care for him much. Not Portero, poor devil.’

‘Not Morgan.’

‘No. Morgan’s father became a Burner after she left him.’

‘But—’ Jess suddenly remember that long-back conversation in the study of the Ptolemy House, when Dario had tormented Guillaume with information about his long-dead Burner ancestor. ‘Guillaume.’ Had Dario known? Or had it just been a lucky thrust? He swallowed hard. ‘Was it deliberate, then? That Translation accident?’