He told his mother that night.
He waited until Elsie was asleep and his father had gone out to check on Barley, and then he stood by the hearth where Mara was banking the fire and told her all of it, in order, in a low voice, the way he'd tell her about a sick goat. The black water in Lise Fenwick's Sounding. The clear water after. The hooded man at the back of the chapel who shook his head. The blue on his sleeve. The lamp in the window of the good room at the Plough, and the page in the chapel records that the High Examiner turned to every night.
When he got to the page, his mother's hands stopped moving on the poker.
She did not say anything for a long time. The coals ticked. Outside, Adrian could hear his father talking softly to the horse.
"Stay away from the Plough," Mara said finally.
"That's all?"
"That's all tonight."
"Mother, he said it has your name on it. Why would-"
"Because your father and I were married in that chapel, Adrian, and Brother Fennick wrote it down, and anyone who wants to know who I am will start there." She put the poker down. Her face in the firelight was very calm, and Adrian had learned by now that the calmer his mother's face was, the harder she was working to keep it that way. "He will find a woman named Mara who came from Westmarch town nineteen years ago and married a soldier home from the war. That's what's on that page. That's all that's on that page. I made very sure of it."
Adrian stared at her.
"Made sure," he said slowly. "You mean you lied to Brother Fennick."
His mother looked at him for a long moment.
"Go to bed," said Mara Vale.
❖ ❖ ❖
Rowan came the next afternoon with two fishing poles over his shoulder and a face like a shut door.
"Watch-Sergeant Harl's given me the afternoon," he told their mother. "I thought Adrian and I would try the deep pool under the alders. Like old times."
It had never been like old times. When Rowan was fourteen and Adrian was nine, Rowan had taken him fishing exactly once, and Adrian had fallen in, and Rowan had spent the entire walk home saying that if Adrian told their mother, he'd feed him to the pike. But Mara just looked from one son to the other and said, "Bring back supper," and went on kneading dough.
They walked down to the river without talking.
It was a warm day, the last warmth of summer, with that heavy golden stillness that came before the weather turned. The river Mere ran slow and brown under the alder trees, and the deep pool lay in their shadow like a piece of dark glass. Rowan baited both hooks with worms from a tin, handed Adrian a pole, and sat down on the big flat rock where their father had taught both of them to swim.
He didn't cast. He just held the pole across his knees and stared at the water.
Adrian cast. His line plopped into the pool. Circles spread out across the dark glass and faded.
"Are you going to say it," Adrian said eventually, "or are we actually fishing?"
Rowan made a sound that was almost a laugh.
"You were always like that," he said. "Even when you were small. You'd just sit there and look at people until they told you things." He turned the pole over in his hands. "Mother does it too. It's horrible."
Adrian waited.
"I've been given orders," said Rowan.
The line in the water twitched. Adrian didn't move.
"Watch-Sergeant Harl called me in two days after the Sounding. He'd had a note from the High Examiner." Rowan's jaw was tight. "I'm to make a report every seventh day. On my own family. On this house."
Adrian had known. Some part of him had known since Hollis sat on the fence and said the Examiner asked for him by name. Hearing it still felt like being kicked in the stomach.
"What kind of report?"
"Everything." Rowan's voice was flat, the voice of a squire reciting. "Visitors to the house. Letters sent or received. Any journeys beyond the village. The health of the household, with particular attention to unusual illness - fevers, chills, bleeding, loss of memory." He paused. "And the conduct of Adrian Vale, Null. His habits. His companions. Anything he says about the Sounding."
Fevers. Chills. Bleeding. Loss of memory.
Adrian's hands had gone cold on the fishing pole. Not Dissonance. Just fear.
Those were the signs of the Abyss. Every child in Calvane knew them. Brother Fennick taught them in chapel, the way you taught children the signs of a mad dog. And the High Examiner had written them into an order for a seventeen-year-old squire to watch for in his own little brother.
"Have you made one?" Adrian asked. "A report?"
"One." Rowan still did not look at him. "Last seventh day. I wrote that you'd been working the fields with Father. That Father had hired himself out as a mower. That Mother had been mending for the Tulls. That no one in the house had been ill." His knuckles whitened on the pole. "It was all true."
"Then that's good. Isn't it?"
"It was true last week," said Rowan.
He finally turned his head and looked at his brother, and his eyes were red.
"Elsie was down here yesterday at dawn," Rowan said. "I was on the early watch at the chapel. From the bell tower you can see this whole bend of the river. She was right there, on that stone, washing a pillowcase. She was scrubbing it for half an hour. And when she held it up to wring it out, it was pink."
Adrian's heart stopped.
"She's seven, Adrian. She doesn't wash anything. She's never washed a pillowcase in her life unless Mother stood over her with a spoon." Rowan's voice cracked. "So I went and asked her. I said, Elsie, who's bleeding? And she looked right at me and said she'd had a nosebleed. And then she said it again. And then she said it a third time, like she was reciting it. Like she'd practiced." He swallowed. "Elsie can't lie. You know she can't. She told the whole chapel about Goodman Tull's snoring. So who taught her?"
The river went on running. A dragonfly came and hovered over Adrian's line and went away.
"It was my nose," Adrian said.
He did not know he was going to say it until it was out. It seemed stupid to lie. It seemed stupid and useless and cruel, to sit on their father's swimming rock and lie to Rowan's red eyes when Rowan already knew.
"How long?" said Rowan, very quietly.
"Twice. A few days ago." Adrian made himself keep going. "It's stopped now. It's gone. I'm fine."
"Why?"
"I don't know." That was a lie. It came out much more easily. "I was working too hard. I got too hot. Father said it was the sun."
"Father doesn't know, or Elsie wouldn't be scrubbing pillowcases at dawn." Rowan put the pole down on the rock. "Were your hands cold?"
Adrian did not answer.
"Adrian. Were your hands cold?"
"Why does it matter?"
"Because it's on the list!" It burst out of Rowan so loudly that a heron took off from the far bank in a clatter of wings. He was on his feet. "Because it's on the list, Adrian, it's the second thing on the list, and I have to write the list every seventh day and hand it to Harl, and Harl hands it to Crane, and Crane reads it by the window at the Plough, and I have to write what's true, because I swore!"
He stood on the rock, breathing hard, his fists clenched at his sides.
"I swore on the Luminant," Rowan said. "In front of the whole barracks. On my knees. I swore to speak truth to the Temple in all things. Do you understand what that means? It's not like a promise to Elsie about a bed with curtains. It's everything. It's the whole of what I am." His voice shook. "I believe in it. I'm not like - I'm not like Father, or Mother, with their faces, whenever someone says the word Temple. I believe it. The Canon keeps the Abyss out. The Sounding saves children. The Watch protects people. I've seen Hollowbeasts, Adrian. On patrol, in the hills past Westmarch. I've seen what they leave behind. The Temple is the only thing standing between that and Elsie."
"I know," Adrian said.
"No, you don't. You don't. Because if you knew, you'd tell me the truth." Rowan dropped into a crouch on the rock, so that their eyes were level. "What happened in that chapel? What did you see? What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing's wrong with me."
"Then why is Elsie lying?"
"Because I asked her to!"
"Why?"
And Adrian had no answer. He had a grey window hanging at the edge of his sight, flickering like a candle in a draft, and a word erased from the world, and a mother who had made sure of what was written in a book. None of it was his to give away. None of it was safe.
He looked at his brother, and did not say anything.
Rowan saw him decide. Adrian watched it land. Rowan's face did something terrible, something slow and hurt, and then he reached out and shoved Adrian so hard that he went off the back of the rock and into the river.
❖ ❖ ❖
The water was cold and brown and much deeper than Adrian remembered. He came up gasping and choking. Rowan was already in, up to his waist in the shallows, and grabbed a fistful of Adrian's shirt, and Adrian swung at him.
It was not a good swing. It was a boy's swing, all arm and anger, nothing like the silver seam of his father's scythe. Rowan caught his wrist without even looking.
Rowan's Trait was [Shieldbearer]. Uncommon. It had been the pride of the family, the reason the Grey Watch had taken a farmer's son at all. Adrian felt it now: his brother's grip closing on his wrist like a door, heavy and immovable and absolutely steady, and Adrian twisted and kicked and threw the whole of his weight against it, and it didn't move. It was like fighting a wall.
So Adrian stopped fighting the arm, and let his weight drop, and swept his foot through the silt behind Rowan's heel.
It wasn't a technique. He didn't have one. It was just the thing he had seen, a hundred times, watching his father swing a scythe: the heel carried the weight. Take away the heel, and the rest had nowhere to stand.
Rowan went over backward into the Mere with a splash that sent a wave over the swimming rock.
He came up spluttering, streaming water from his hair, with a look of pure astonishment on his face. For a moment the two brothers stood waist-deep in the river under the alder trees and stared at each other.
Then Rowan started to laugh.
It wasn't a happy laugh. It was the wet, broken, helpless laugh of someone who has been carrying something for too long and has just dropped it in the river. He laughed until he had to put his hands on his knees. And Adrian, shivering, furious, soaked to the bone, found that he was laughing too, and that his face was wet with more than river water, and that he did not care.
"Where did you learn that?" Rowan gasped.
"Watching Father."
"Father doesn't fight in rivers."
"No. But he stands on his feet."
Rowan laughed again, and wiped his face, and waded to the swimming rock and hauled himself up onto it, and after a moment reached down and pulled Adrian up after him. They sat side by side in the sun and dripped. The fishing poles had been knocked into the water. Adrian could see one of them drifting slowly downstream, bobbing, toward Westmarch and the sea.
"Mother's going to kill us," said Rowan.
"You pushed me."
"You swung at me."
"You pushed me first."
"I'm going to tell her you started it," said Rowan, "and she's going to believe me, because I'm the one with the oath."
They sat in silence for a while. The sun was warm. Adrian's teeth stopped chattering.
"I can't tell you," Adrian said at last, very quietly. "Not because I don't want to. Because if I tell you, you'll have to write it down."
Rowan didn't say anything for a long moment.
"Yes," he said. "I would."
"So I can't."
"No." Rowan picked at a thread on his sodden grey sleeve. "You can't."
He was quiet again. Adrian watched him think. It was a strange thing, to watch Rowan think. It was a slow, heavy process, like watching a millstone turn, and Adrian had never noticed it before - that his big brother, who always seemed so sure, had to push every thought all the way around before it came to rest.
"Then here's what we're going to do," Rowan said. "I'm not going to lie in my reports. I won't. I can't. But I can only write what I see." He turned his head and looked at Adrian, and his red eyes were dry now, and very serious. "So don't let me see anything. Do you understand? Whatever it is. Don't do it where I can see. Don't bleed where I can see. Don't let Elsie wash pillowcases where I can see from the bell tower. Don't tell me anything, and don't give me anything to find, and then I'll write that nothing's wrong, and it'll be true."
"That's the stupidest oath I've ever heard."
"It's the only one I've got." Rowan held out his hand. "And in return - if there's ever a day they decide to come for you, I'll know first. I'm in the chapel. I'm in Harl's office. I'll know before anyone. And I'll get word to you." His jaw set. "I don't know how yet. But I will."
Adrian looked at his brother's hand. It was bigger than it had been fifteen months ago. There were new calluses on it from the sword, and a pale scar across the knuckles that Adrian didn't recognize.
He took it.
Rowan's grip closed on his - steady, heavy, immovable - and held on for longer than a handshake needed.
"And the pillowcase?" Adrian said.
Rowan let go. He looked out at the river for a long moment.
"This week's report," he said slowly, "is going to say that my little sister Elsie had a nosebleed. And that she washed her own pillowcase in the river, like a good girl, and that it's stopped." He did not look at Adrian. "It'll be true. She did wash it. She told me three times it was a nosebleed. And I saw her do it."
Adrian opened his mouth.
"Don't," said Rowan. "Don't say anything. Just catch us a fish so Mother doesn't kill us."
❖ ❖ ❖
They caught no fish. They walked home soaked, with one fishing pole between them, and their mother looked at them standing dripping in her kitchen doorway, and at the single pole, and at Rowan's face, and at Adrian's, and did not ask a single question.
She made them sit by the fire. She made them take their shirts off. And while Rowan was pulling his wet surcoat over his head, Adrian saw his mother go very still, looking at something on his brother's back - a long, pale, fresh scar across the ribs, which had not been there fifteen months ago, and which Rowan had never mentioned in a single letter.
That night, after Rowan had gone back to the chapel, Adrian lay awake in the loft and opened the grey window.
He's going to get in trouble, he thought at it. Because of me.
[Yes.]
Is there anything I can do?
The window was still for a long time.
[Be worth it.]