He slept for four hours in the villain's chair with his boots still on.

  Not ideal. Not comfortable. The chair was built for presence rather than sleep — high-backed, severe, the kind of furniture that made statements about the person sitting in it rather than caring about whether that person's neck would ache in the morning. Junho's neck ached in the morning. He woke up to grey light coming through the study window and the immediate, pressing awareness that he had things to do and no idea how to do most of them.

  Okay. Morning. Day two. I'm alive, which is the baseline goal, so that's a win. Lyss has the stone. The creature is in the storage room. Seris is somewhere in this building being perceptive at things. I need food that isn't stale bread and I need to check on the Messenger and I need to find out if there's a protocol for how the morning works around here because I cannot keep wandering around the Keep pretending I know where things are.

  He found a pitcher of water on the desk — someone had left it there at some point, probably last night, which meant someone had come into the study while he slept and either hadn't noticed or hadn't said anything. Both options were mildly unsettling. He washed his face, which the mirror confirmed did nothing to make him look less like a villain, and went to check on the Messenger.

  The storage room was where he'd left it. The creature was not asleep anymore.

  It was sitting in the center of the cloth he'd set it on, upright, watching the door with the patient attention of something that had been waiting for a while and was prepared to keep waiting indefinitely. Its eyes caught the grey morning light and held it. When Junho opened the door it didn't move, didn't startle — just tracked him with the same calm attention it had given him in the vault.

  Right. Lyss said they respond to direct questions once the delivery is complete. She said I'd need to know the method. I did not ask her what the method was before she left because I was busy composing my face into an expression that said I definitely already know what the method is, which was a tactical error in hindsight.

  Okay. It's a creature that carries messages between significant places. It delivered a stone. It's sitting there looking at me. Logic says the communication goes both ways — question and response. The question is what counts as asking and what counts as receiving an answer.

  He crouched down to its level, the way he had in the vault.

  The creature's head tilted slightly. Waiting.

  "Who sent you," he said.

  The creature looked at him for a moment. Then it raised one of those long pale hands and pressed two fingers — if they were fingers — against the center of its chest. Then pointed at Junho.

  ...That's not an answer. That's a gesture. Press chest, point at me. What does that mean. Does that mean the sender is me? That doesn't make any sense. Does it mean the sender is connected to me? Does it mean — wait. Does it mean the sender knew me? Knew Vael?

  "The person who sent you," Junho said carefully. "They knew Vael Duskmoore."

  The creature pressed its hand flat against the floor between them and held it there.

  Flat palm down. Is that yes? Is that a confirmation? I'm trying to have a conversation with something using a gesture system I've never encountered and it's responding to my questions with hand signals that could mean anything.

  "Is the person who sent you still alive," he said.

  The creature's hand lifted from the floor. It held it sideways — palm vertical, perpendicular to the ground — and tilted it slowly, once each direction. Like a scale with nothing on either side.

  Unknown. That's unknown. Or they don't know. Or it's a complicated answer to a simple question, which means the answer is actually complicated, which is worse.

  "Is what's sealed — the thing the stone points to — is it dangerous?"

  The creature considered him. Then it did something new: it pressed both hands flat over its eyes for a moment, and then opened them again and spread its fingers wide, like something revealing itself.

  I have no idea what that means. Hidden, then revealed? Something that was concealed that's now — or will be — visible? Or it means the answer itself is hidden and even the Messenger doesn't know. Or it's a completely different gesture system than what I'm mapping onto it and I'm reading tea leaves.

  He looked at the creature for a long moment. It looked back at him.

  "You're not very easy to understand," he said.

  The creature tilted its head again. It looked, faintly, like it agreed.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Junho stood up, rubbed the back of his neck where the chair had done its damage, and made a decision. "You can stay here," he said. "Don't go through any more warded doors."

  The creature settled back onto the cloth with the easy acceptance of something that had nowhere else to be and was fine with that.

  ?

  He found the kitchens by following the smell.

  Ashenveil Keep turned out to have actual food — real food, not just the bread-and-dried-meat situation he'd been bracing for. There was a stew on the fire that smelled like something with vegetables in it, and dark bread that was fresh enough to have actual give to it, and something in a clay pot that turned out to be a kind of thick grain porridge that wasn't ramyeon but was warm and solid and made the world feel immediately more survivable.

  Okay. Okay, there's food. This is significant. I can operate under pressure, I can bluff my way through a council meeting, I can have a conversation with a magical creature using improvised gesture interpretation, but I cannot do any of that sustainably on stale bread and willpower. This changes things.

  He was standing at the kitchen counter eating the porridge out of the pot — which was probably not a thing Vael did, but the kitchen was empty except for one cook who had taken one look at him, gone completely still, and then with the energy of someone making a very deliberate choice to mind their own business had turned back to the fire — when the door slammed open.

  "There you are."

  The man in the doorway was medium height, wiry, wearing a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a leather vest covered in pockets, most of which appeared to be full of things he'd collected with no particular organizational system. Messy brown hair with sun-bleached ends. Amber eyes that were already moving — clocking the room, clocking Junho, landing on the pot in Junho's hand with an expression of pure delight.

  Rael Ashwick. Covenant Enforcer. In the webcomic he shows up in chapter eight with a brief introduction scene and immediately causes a problem that takes two chapters to resolve. He's described in Vael's notes as my most chaotic problem and most effective field operative, which tracks for someone who just threw open the kitchen door hard enough to bounce it off the wall at — Junho checked the light through the window — seven in the morning.

  "You're eating from the pot," Rael said, sounding genuinely thrilled about this. "You're standing in the kitchen eating directly from the pot. I have been trying to get you to do normal things for three years and apparently all it took was whatever happened last night."

  "What do you need," Junho said.

  "Nothing, I just heard there was something in the vaults and you went down alone and I wanted to make sure you weren't — are you eating the cook's porridge?"

  "Yes."

  "Can I have some?"

  He came down here to check if I was alive and immediately started trying to steal my breakfast. This is — actually this is extremely normal behavior and I don't know what to do with extremely normal behavior. Everyone else in this building treats me like a loaded weapon pointed at them. This man is asking to share my porridge.

  Junho looked at him for a moment. Then he held out the pot.

  Rael grabbed a spoon from somewhere on his person — Junho chose not to ask why he had a spoon on his person — and ate standing next to him at the counter, apparently completely unbothered by the silence, by the fact that their leader had apparently spent the night in his study and was eating breakfast at seven AM from a pot he'd taken directly off the stove.

  "So," Rael said, after a minute. "Vault thing."

  "Being handled."

  "The guards said you carried something out."

  "I did."

  "And you're not going to tell me what."

  "Not yet."

  Rael considered this with his mouth full. Then he nodded in the way of someone who had gotten exactly the answer he expected and was fine with it. "Okay. Are you going to the yard this morning? Mira's been asking."

  The yard. Training yard, probably. Does Vael train in the morning? I have no idea if Vael trains in the morning. Mira Solenne is asking, which means it's something that happens with enough regularity that she notices when it doesn't. If I skip it I'll get a question I can't answer. If I go I have to pretend to train with abilities I don't know how to use in front of the Covenant's battle commander, which is a different problem but possibly a worse one.

  "Later," Junho said.

  "She's going to make that face."

  "She can make whatever face she wants."

  Rael snorted. It was an extremely undignified sound in an extremely undignified kitchen situation and it was — Junho noticed, without meaning to — the first genuinely unguarded noise anyone in this Keep had made around him since he arrived. Everyone else was composed, careful, operating at some level of professional distance. Rael Ashwick was eating stolen porridge and laughing at him about Mira Solenne's facial expressions at seven in the morning.

  The webcomic said he was the only one who ever talked to Vael like a person instead of a symbol. I didn't fully understand what that meant until right now.

  "There's something coming up," Junho said. He wasn't sure why he said it. "Caelen Ashthorn. He's moving."

  Rael's chewing slowed. The easy energy in him didn't disappear but it sharpened at the edges, the way a room sharpened when someone said something that mattered.

  "You're sure," he said.

  "Yes."

  "How long?"

  In the story, Caelen reaches his first major milestone — the retrieval of his bloodline sword — in chapter eleven. That gives the Covenant roughly — I don't know how chapter-time maps to world-time. Weeks, probably. A month at most before he starts becoming someone the Covenant needs to take seriously.

  "Weeks," Junho said. "Maybe less."

  Rael handed the pot back. His expression had settled into something more focused, the easy brightness still there but sitting on top of something more solid. "I'll tell Mira."

  "Don't yet," Junho said. "Council. Two days."

  Rael nodded. He pushed off the counter, shoved his spoon back into whichever pocket it lived in, and headed for the door. Then he stopped with his hand on the frame — and Junho was starting to think there was something structurally significant about doorframes in this building, some architectural feature that compelled people to turn around in them.

  "You seem different," Rael said. Not like Seris had said it — not measuring, not testing. Just a straight observation, offered and left there.

  "Everyone keeps telling me that," Junho said.

  "Yeah, well." Rael shrugged. "I like it." And he left.

  He likes it. The one person in this building who knew the real Vael as something close to a friend thinks this version of Vael is better. I don't know whether to find that reassuring or depressing.

  I'm going with reassuring. I need the wins.