Neb shook his head.
Petronus pondered this. He’d paid someone, promised something, made some of kind deal to get his hands on the spell. The wasteland where the city once stood had to be the work of Xhum Y’Zir’s Seven Cacophonic Deaths. Somehow, the Androfrancines had put the fragments together and Sethbert had used it to his advantage. Somewhere along the way, all of the intricate safeguards, the locked boxes and vaults, the subterfuge of two thousand years of protecting humanity from itself, had failed.
Petronus felt a hand at his sleeve and looked down at the paper.
Petronus put his hand on Neb’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “If I could see your scheming, it was only a matter of time before one of Sethbert’s scouts or guards picked up on it. How did you imagine you’d be able to assassinate one of the most powerful men in the Named Lands?”
Petronus watched Neb’s face. The corner of his mouth twitched and his eyes shifted. It was obvious that he was wrestling with how much truth to give. “You don’t have to say, son.”
The boy’s hand reached into his shirt and came out with the pouch. Petronus recognized it immediately and chuckled. “Clever,” he said. “But that alone wouldn’t have seen you to safety, even if you’d managed to kill the sed eve bastard.”
But even as he said the words, Petronus realized that the boy didn’t care at all about being seen to safety. That hardness in his eyes, and once more, the line of his face, said without words that Neb would’ve gladly traded his life for that of the mad Overseer.
“Listen well,” Petronus said. “Taking a life-even a life like Sethbert’s-robs your own soul in the end. I agree with you that he deserves death for what he’s done. A thousand deaths couldn’t be enough. But Androfrancines do not kill,” he said. Unless you’re the Pope, he thought. Unless you merely give the words to the most seasoned captain of your Gray Guard and close your eyes and pretend that there is no connection between your own words and the deeds of others.
He felt the tug at his sleeve again and looked down.
“No,” Petronus said, “I suppose you are not. But someday you may be. And last year’s ghosts haunt next year’s forests.”
The boy thought about this, then wrote more. Petronus read it. “What now? I don’t know. I suppose I’ll try to find someplace for you to stay here in Kendrick. I’m only here long enough to rally some men, and then I’m back to Windwir.”
When the boy looked at him, eyebrows raised in question, Petronus’s felt his own jaw tighten. “I’ve a city to bury,” he said in a quiet voice.
The boy scratched more words onto the tablet, and Petronus was surprised to see it was a statement, not a question.
Neb
Neb watched Petronus work the town all that next day. He stopped at the inn to talk with the lumbermen at their breakfasts. He wandered through Kendrick speaking with women and paused in the crowded village square. The large open space had filled up with the tents and carts of those waylaid en route to Windwir, waiting in shocked silence for some better destination to drop into their minds. And still waiting.
He spoke in hushed tones with the mayor while Neb watched from a distance. At first the mayor was agitated, waving the old man away. Then he was nodding, brows furrowed with anger. In the end he looked intent, and when they shook hands, the mayor left to call an emergency council meeting.
It was easy to see now how this man had become the Order’s youngest Pope. Neb had remembered his lessons-Petronus hadn’t merited much mention in The Works o sin Ordf the Apostles of P’Andro Whym, but there’d been a bit. He’d been the youngest. He’d been assassinated. He’d been a strong King and Pope. Though the book didn’t say so, Neb had heard the old men talking from time to time. “His tongue’s as silver as Pope Petronus” had become a common phrase among that generation of Androfrancines. Now Neb saw it firsthand.
The mayor sent riders out into farmlands, sent runners throughout the village, and called in everyone willing to listen within two hours ride. By the time the couriers had gone out, Petronus had sent birds to Caldus Bay and two other villages Neb didn’t recognize in care of names that Neb wasn’t close enough to read. Last, he wrote a long note in a script Neb recognized as from somewhere on the Emerald Coasts. This he attached to the strongest, fastest looking bird, and he whispered longest into its ears before lifting it to the sky.
When they finished Petronus took Neb to the inn, and they stuffed themselves on catfish stew and fried bread.
As Neb wiped the last of the stew from the bowl with his last crust of bread, he smiled at the old man.
Petronus smiled. “We’ve done a good day’s work.”
Neb nodded. They had. And though he really hadn’t done much himself, he’d learned in a way that he’d never learned in the Orphan’s School. Watching this man work, building trust here and suspicion there-grabbing a grin from this one and a nod from that one. He’d never seen anything like it, and it stirred a part of him. He was suddenly pushed back into his past.
“But I don’t know what I want to be,” he’d told his father during one visit.
Brother Hebda smiled. “Do not be what you do,” he said. He’d been trained in the Francine Disciplines and Neb had always enjoyed seeing them lived out in real life. “Doing and being aren’t the same.”
“But isn’t who I am determined by what I do?”
His father’s face broke into an even wider smile. “Sometimes. But what you do can change from situation to situation. Can a good man kill?”
Neb shook his head.
“But the Gray Guard kill… are they good?”
Neb thought about this. “I think they are. Because they are doing their job to protect the light.”
Brother Hebda nodded. “They are. But say they were ordered to kill a man because he was a heretic, but really he was an enemy of a spiteful c sf a822uckold? Are the Gray Guard then defined by what they do?”
Neb laughed. “I only said I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”
Brother Hebda laughed, too. “Oh. That’s easy, then.”
“Really?”
His father nodded and leaned in. “Watch for the ones who leave your mouth hanging open. Study them, find out what they love and what they fear. Dig the treasure out of their soul and hold it to the light.” He leaned in even closer now, so that Neb could smell the wine on his breath. “Then
He remembered thinking in that moment that Brother Hebda was a man he wanted to be like. That very winter, Neb turned in his first grant request to study in the care of an expedition to the Wastes, preferably assigned to Hebda Garl as a student apprentice.
Now, after a day of watching Petronus-or Petros-at work, he’d found someone else he could want to be like.
After dinner, they went out to the gathering crowd. It wasn’t a large crowd. Not everyone had come. But enough had. And they stood in the square among the tents and carts, near the open doors of the inn. They stood around an overturned tub that the old man climbed onto, holding a shovel over his shoulders.
Neb watched from the side. The mayor, all agreement earlier, now seemed agitated and anxious to speak. Neb wondered what had changed.
“I’ll be brief,” Petronus said before the mayor could try to introduce him. He dropped the shovel from his shoulder and pointed north with it. “You all know what happened to Windwir. It’s a field of ash and bones for as far you can see.” There were muted gasps in the crowd. “We are all the Children of the New World, and at some place in our lineage, we are each kin-clave unto one another. We know this to be true.” He waited for heads to nod, a few voices to speak out. “I’m not a man to leave my kin unburied,” Petronus said.
Then the old man went on for another fifteen minutes, laying out a plan of action that astounded Neb with its
