The Second Dawn

(Kara)

I was asleep, and then Dilly was waking me, and she was crying.

And the worst of it, the very worst, was that for one whole second I was back there — back in yesterday’s grey light with Wick at my table and the floor going out from under my whole life — because it was the same, it was exactly the same, the same weeping girl at the same hour shaking me up out of the same dark, and my body knew the shape of it before my mind did and braced for another sister.

“What is it? Dilly. What’s happened —”

“I’ve got a mess, Mum. Downstairs.”

I got my breath. A mess. Not a death; a mess. The two are not the same and I have learned the difference in the dark a hundred times. “Again?” I said, and tried to make it light, because she needed light. “Dilly, love, you’ll wear the stairs out.”

“Much bigger this time, Mum.” She wasn’t taking the light. Her face in the grey was white and stretched, older than fourteen. “Really big. The biggest. You need to come.”

So I came. Of course I came. I had only just, the evening before, on the flat gold water with Ron’s arm around me, found the floor again after yesterday took it — and I came down the stairs into the cold half-knowing that whatever was at the bottom of them was going to take it a second time, because that is how the world had decided to arrange this particular week of my life.

At my table, in the first light, was Thea.

Thea. Annora’s girl. The commander’s daughter, the sweet scattered thing who’s been half-living in my house since she and Dilly found each other — Thea, who belongs at her own father’s table at this hour and not at mine, sitting white and trembling in the grey with Dilly’s coat around her shoulders.

I sat down with the two of them. I did not say anything sharp or fast; you don’t, with frightened girls; you sit, and you make your voice the still pool they can put a hand in. “All right,” I said. “I’m here. Tell me what happened.”

And they told me what they’d done in the night, the two of them and two boys who weren’t there, and my floor fell out of my life for the second dawn running.

A coup. Alder. The king dead or as good as by now, the castle taken, and my daughter and her friends — children, my fourteen-year-old and a slave-boy and a runner and this trembling girl — had heard it coming in the last hour of the dark and sent a warning into the castle and got the prince out of his bed before the soldiers reached it. They had done that. While I slept off my own grief on the floor above them, my children had reached up and turned the realm.

Alder. I sat very still and let it go through me. Alder, who two nights ago had done the thing to my sister that I will carry to my grave — Alder, who is more evil and depraved than I could believe, I’d said it to myself a dozen times since and I said it again now — Alder was king. The man who did that had the realm. The two horrors fitted themselves together in me with a click I felt in my teeth, the private atrocity and the public one, the same man, the same week, and I understood with a cold falling certainty that they had never been two things at all.

But that was for later. That was a grief and a war for later, and I have learned to put those down and pick up the thing in front of me, and the thing in front of me was Thea.

Because Thea was in terrible trouble, and she didn’t know it yet, and I did.

She’d done a lovely thing — a brave, good, decent thing, betraying her own father’s cause because a person she liked was going to be killed, and there is more honour in that one act than in the whole of the coup it cut against. And she’d done a catastrophically stupid thing, the way only a good scattered sixteen-year-old can, which was to be out of her house, at her friend’s, on the one night in twenty years it could hang her — because the moment anyone in that household thought to wonder where Thea had been when the prince was warned, the answer pointed here, to my door, to Dilly, to all of it.

And I knew whose household it was. I’d known it the second I saw her face at my table and my mind ran the arithmetic the way it runs. Her father. A senior man of the army — and not just senior; I’d watched him at the ball, sat at Alder’s right hand the whole evening, the two of them leaning to each other over the wreck of the king’s performance with faces they thought no one was reading and I was reading. I’d marked it then and thought little of it. I thought a great deal of it now. If this was a coup and the army had led it, then the man who led the army to it was, near enough to certain, the man sitting next to Alder all that night. Thea’s father. Which meant I was sheltering, at my own table, the daughter of the man who had very probably just killed the king — and it changed nothing at all about what I owed her, because she was a frightened child who’d done a brave thing, and the child is never the father’s deed.

I thought it through fast. Every road that didn’t end with Thea back in her own bed within the hour was a road to ruin — for her first, and maybe for us behind her. A missing daughter on the morning of her father’s coup is a girl with a question mark over her, and the question leads here. A present daughter, home in her bed, sleepy and cross and ordinary, is no question at all. She had to go home, and she had to go home now, and she had to walk in as if she’d never been anywhere worth asking about.

“Thea,” I said. “Look at me, love, you’re not in trouble with me, none of this is your fault and you did a good thing. But I need to ask you something and I need the true answer. Do you ever slip out of your house? At night, or early — for any reason at all, on your own, without telling them? Is that a thing you do?”

I should have known what I’d get. Her face cleared a little, glad of an easy question, and she went dreamy on me even there, even then, even white with terror at my table.

“Oh — yes,” she said. “Lots of times. There was a morning I wanted to see the sunrise from the hill, the proper sunrise, and I just went — Mother was so cross. And there was a boy, by the river, but we never even— it was nothing, really, but I went to meet him twice. And the sleepover, the girls were all staying and Mother said I couldn’t and I went anyway, that one was fun—” She caught herself. “I’m bad at staying in. Mother says I’m a will-o’-the-wisp.”

A will-o’-the-wisp. God love her, she’d just handed me her own salvation and didn’t know it.

“Good,” I said. “That’s good, Thea. That’s going to keep you safe. Now listen, because this matters and I’ll say it once. You go home, right now, before the house is properly awake. If anyone’s waiting up for you — your mother, anyone — you don’t tell them one story. You tell them three. You went to see the sunrise; no, you were at a friend’s; no, there was someone you went to meet and you won’t say who. Muddle them. Get them wrong. Be a will-o’-the-wisp who can’t keep her own night straight, the way you always are. One of the three is a boy — let her think it’s a boy, let her think you’re hiding a boy, that’s the one she’ll fix on and stop asking. And whatever else you do, whatever happens, however frightened you get — you never, ever say Dilly’s name. Dilly wasn’t in it. You weren’t here. Can you do that?”

“Three reasons,” she said, slow, getting it. “One a boy. Don’t say Dilly. Be muddled.”

“You can be muddled,” I said gently. “You’re the best in the realm at muddled. It’s the safest thing for everyone, Thea — for Dilly, and for the boys, and most of all for you. A girl who snuck out for a boy is a girl who gets a scolding. That’s all you are. A girl who got a scolding. Can you carry that home?”