Appendix B: It’s not my Life

(Lysander)

1. The Bolt-Hole and the Boy Made It

I had better begin by admitting what I was, because the rest of it will not make sense otherwise, and because I have decided — this is the whole of what happened to me, in a way, that I decided it — that I will not be that thing any longer, and a man who has set a thing down should be able to describe it plainly.

I was unreadable. That was the achievement of my life, and I had worked at it the way other boys worked at the sword. I had grown up in my grandfather’s shadow, in a court that had learned to watch the old man fail by inches and to price, very exactly, what each inch was worth to them — a court of careful men doing sums about a dying king and a boy who would or would not be the next one, depending — and I had understood, young, earlier than I should have had to, that anything they could read in me was a thing they could use against me, or sell, or trade up the line to whoever was buying that season. So I gave them nothing. I made myself a pleasant blank. I was charming, and I was kind, and I was light — they called me light, I knew they did, the lightweight prince, the boy who’d never have the weight of the throne in him — and I let them call it, because a man they have decided is light is a man they stop watching closely, and I wanted more than anything in the world not to be watched closely. I gave a warm smile and a soft word and an opinion that committed me to nothing, and I did it so well that I do not think there was a single person in the realm who could have told you, with confidence, what I actually thought about anything at all. Lady Kara — of whom they said she could read any heart in a room, told me, once, much later, that mine was the only one she had ever failed to get the bottom of. I took it, when she said it, as the finest compliment of my life. I see now it was the saddest thing anyone ever said to me, and that she knew it was, and said it gently on purpose, the way she does everything.

That was the man they carried, on a winter evening, down into the dark under the castle, and shut behind a door that had not been opened in a hundred years.

It was a good hiding-place. I want to be fair to it. The old families built for the bad night, and somewhere back along the line one of mine had built this — a room in the deep stone, behind a turn no one living knew, stocked against exactly the catastrophe that had finally come round again: dry stores, water, oil for a lamp, blankets going to dust but serviceable. We were not going to starve. I knew, the moment Lys woke me an we got down there and the door was shut and I had a chance to take stock of it, that we were not going to starve, and that this was the worst news of all — because hunger would at least have given the thing a clock, an end, a reason to be over. As it was we had stores for weeks and we did not have weeks. We had until they found the door. And they would find the door; the whole castle was being taken apart stone by stone over our heads, I could hear it, the distant patient violence of a search that does not intend to fail; and a hiding-place is only ever a way of choosing when you are found, not whether. I had perhaps a day. I might have two. I sat down on the dusty floor of my ancestors’ last refuge and arranged myself, as well as I could, to wait for the end of my life.

Because that was the sum of it, and I did the sum at once, the way I had been trained to do sums. Alder had murdered my grandfather to take the throne. A man who has murdered the king cannot afford the king’s heir to go on breathing; an heir is the one thing in the world that unmakes a usurper, so I was, simply, the most dangerous object in the realm to the man who now held it, and there is only one thing you do with the most dangerous object in the realm. So: death. I was quite clear about it. I was not even particularly frightened of the death, when I held it still and looked at it — I had been raised to the possibility, every heir is. What I was frightened of, what I could not look at steadily, was the shape of it. Because Alder would want to know things first — who had hidden me, who had helped, what I knew — and a man wants those things badly enough to be unpleasant about the wanting, and I had heard, as everyone has heard, what it is they do to a body to make it tell. So I sat in the dark and worked, very hard, at not thinking about the hours between the door breaking and the death, and at being, on the outside, calm — for the other two, mostly. Because they are the whole of why this account is not simply the diary of a frightened young man waiting to die, but something I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand.

Lys I knew. As much as I knew anyone — which is to say, not at all, in the way I have just described, the give-nothing-away way; but she had been about my person for two years, one of the half-dozen maids who did the near work, and I had marked her the way I marked everyone, filed her, Lys, quick, steady, sees more than she says — and when the warning came in the dark it was Lys who brought it, Lys who decided we are going to hide him without telling anyone, Lys who got me down here through passages none know that my own castle had. So Lys I could account for. She was my owned servant; servants of long standing sometimes love the house they serve, or the person, in a quiet sideways fashion I had observed without ever once thinking it might one night be the thing that kept me alive; and Lys, I supposed, was hiding me out of some version of that — a maid’s loyalty, the loyalty of a person to a place and a face she has tended. It was outside my frame, a little — I did not, in truth, understand why a girl would risk a slow death to save a prince who had never once, that I could remember, said a word to her that was hers and not the room’s — but it was near my frame, near enough to file and set down. Lys hid me because she was mine. That sum more or less came out.

It was the other one I could not make come out, and it is the other one I have thought about every day since.

The other one was a boy named Wick, and Wick was nothing to me at all.

I want to be exact about this: He was not my servant. He was not of my household, nor of the castle’s; he was, I learned across those hours, a slave of Alder’s own — Alder’s message-boy, a piece of the usurper’s own furniture, the lowest and most invisible thing in the establishment of the man who was at that moment tearing the castle apart to kill me. By every line I knew how to draw, Wick belonged to the other side. He had every reason on earth to be up there, carrying Alder’s messages through the search, and no reason that I could construct, sitting in the dark turning it over and over, to be down here, in the killing-place, sharing the death that was coming for me. And yet there he was. A thin watchful boy, younger than sense, who had come into the castle on the night of a coup — into it, against the whole tide of all sense that would make one flee the other way — and found Lys, who had trusted him, and helped her drag me down into the stone, and was now sitting against the far wall with his knees up, waiting, like us, for the door.

I could not read him. Understand what I am telling you: I, who had made unreadability my life’s one craft, sat three feet from a half-grown message-boy and could not for the life of me work out why he was there. It was not that he was opaque. He was the least opaque person I had ever met; he had no seal on him at all, nothing held back, a boy entirely without my disease. It was that the answer was opaque — the reason — because every reason I owned came out of a world where people did things for advantage, for safety, for the long sums, and this boy was sitting in a death-cell for a prince he did not know, at a cost that could only ever be total, and there was no advantage in it anywhere that I could find.

So I asked him. With the search a little nearer overhead, I asked him — carefully, the way I ask everything, giving nothing — why he had come. What it was to him. Whether someone had sent him, and to whom he reported, and what he expected for it; I asked it three or four ways, the practised ways, the ways that open a man up without his feeling the hinge turn. And Wick, who had not one scrap of guile in him to meet my whole armoury of it, looked at me as though I had asked something genuinely strange, and gave me the answer that took the floor out of me, and that I have been standing in the hole of ever since.

He said: “Dilly asked me to.”

That was all. That was the whole of it. I waited for the rest — the and so, the because, the angle — and there was no rest, because for Wick there was no rest; that was the reason, entire and sufficient, the bottom of it and the top of it both. A girl named Dilly, a friend of his, had asked him to help hide the prince, and so he had walked into a falling castle to do it, and would die for it without complaint, because his friend had asked, and you do what your friend asks when it matters, and there was nothing more to say about it and he could not understand why I kept asking as though there ought to be.

I have been about the crown my entire life, and read a great many treaties and accounts and intelligences, and I tell you I have never since encountered a fact harder to hold than that one. Dilly asked me to. It did not fit anywhere. It was loyalty, but it ran along a line I had no name for — not up, to a crown or a master or a god, but sideways, friend to friend to friend, a web of it, person choosing person, no rank in it anywhere and no payment and no blood. This was kind of bond my whole education had taught me not to count, because it could not be bought and so could not be banked and so, in the ledger I had been raised inside, did not exist.

It existed. It was sitting against the far wall with its knees up. It had a name, and the name was Wick, and it was going to die for me for no reason except that the world is held together, down at the bottom where I had never had to look, by people asking other people, and being answered.

So when I wrote to the Lady Kara - it was, I told myself, the rational move, and it was: of everyone in the realm, she was the one who took people in — the Gracious Heart, the door that opened, the woman with the quiet web that could make a person disappear into safety; if anyone could hide me better than a hundred-year-old hole the searchers would shortly find, it was her. So I wrote it small, an appeal, sanctuary, the heir of the realm asking the realm’s great mercy to do for him what she did for the lowest — and I gave it to Wick, because Wick was the one who could carry it, the invisible boy who could slip out through a coup unremarked, one more slave on a road no one watches. And he went. He went up out of the safe dark into the searched castle and the broken city with my life folded in his hand, and Lys and I sat in the lamp-light and waited, and I learned, in the hours he was gone, a new way to be afraid — because now there was a person out in it carrying my death sentence in his pocket if he were caught, and it was the boy, the one who’d come for no reason, and I sat there and discovered I was more frightened for him than I had been for myself, which was itself a thing I did not yet have the frame to understand. Wick has not come back, I thought, in the worst of it. I have sent the boy out to die in my service.

Then he came back. Slid the door, slipped in, whole — and I have never in my life been so glad to see anyone, and I marked that too, the gladness, filed it with the rest of the evidence I was assembling against my own seal. He came back with her answer, which he gave me plainly because he did not know how big a blow it was, and it was the truest no I have ever been told.

I’d shelter you in a heartbeat if you were a man, she had said — Wick gave it me close to her own words — but you’re not a man, you’re the state, and I can’t hide the state in my kitchen; it’d cost you your life and a hundred others theirs. I’m sorry. I am. But no.

I sat with that a long while. It went into me deeper than the fear had. Because here was the thing I had spent my whole life being — the heir, the blood, the most important person in any room, the one everyone wanted something from — and at the one moment I needed an ordinary human mercy, that exact importance was the thing that barred me from it. The door that opened for every beggar and runaway and ruined girl in the city did not open for me, and would not, because of what I was; the rank I had carried like a weight my whole life turned out also to be a wall, and on the far side of it was the simple human rescue that any nobody could have had for the asking, and that I could not, because I was not allowed to be a nobody. You’re the state. I had never once been told no by a subject in my life, and the first time I was, it was kind, and clear, and completely right, and it taught me in a sentence that to be the state is to be, in the way that finally counts, alone — past the reach of the mercy that holds everyone else up. She would not save the prince. I understood it. I even, in some cold corner, admired it — the clarity of a woman who could turn the heir of the realm from her door out of pure correct judgement and put a real sorry on the end and mean both halves of it equally. I had reached for the official mercy, the famous one, the saint’s — and the saint, rightly, had said no.

And then Wick, settling back against his wall, done with the grim part of his report and glad to be home in the dark with us, said the thing that took the last of my bearings away — said it lightly, as a small good note at the end of a bad errand, not knowing, not in a thousand years knowing, what it did to me. He said: “At least Dilly was happy to see me.”

I said — carefully, because my voice was suddenly a thing I had to manage — “Dilly was there. At the Lady Kara’s.”

“‘Course,” said Wick, as though I’d remarked that water was wet. “It’s her house.”

And the floor, which I had thought already gone, went again, further down, to a place I had not known was under it. It’s her house. Dilly — the one who had sent Wick; the one who had run the whole rescue; the unaccountable child at the dark heart of the web that was keeping me alive — Dilly was the Lady Kara’s own daughter. The woman who had just refused, with perfect correctness, to shelter the state — had a child under her roof who had, that same night, hours before the refusal, without anyone’s leave, set in motion the entire machinery that had saved the state’s life. The mother had closed her door to me. The daughter had already pulled me out of the fire. The no and the rescue had come out of the same kitchen, and there was no contradiction in it anywhere, and that was the most frightening and the most beautiful thing I had yet understood about that family or about anything.

And once I had that — once I had the thread-end that Wick had handed me without knowing it was anything — I could follow the rest of it back myself, the whole impossible chain, because the rest of it I had the knowledge to read. How had this Dilly known to warn me, hours ahead, when my own castle slept? She had known because she was friends with a girl named Thea — and Thea I could place, Thea I knew, the dreamy one from the debate, and Thea was Hadrel’s daughter, the coup-commander’s own child; and I could see it then, the whole of it, see exactly how it had gone: the commander’s tender-hearted girl, unable to carry what her father was doing, breaking and running in the dark to her friend — not the kingdom, not the throne, just: but the prince, he was nice — and her friend being Kara’s Dilly, who did not waste a moment being a child about it but ran a rescue; and Dilly’s friend being Wick, who went because Dilly asked; and so the warning had come to me not down any line I had ever guarded or even thought to guard, but sideways, all the way down and along, child to child to child — Thea to Dilly to Wick to me — every link of it a friendship, not one link of it a duty or a rank or a coin, the commander’s coup undone from inside its own house by a girl’s soft heart, and the heir of the realm saved by a chain of children who were simply, every one of them, being loyal to each other. I knew how the Thea part was; I had seen Thea; I could believe a girl like that would warn a boy because he was nice. It was the rest of it — that such a warning could find hands to carry it and a mind to run it and a door, in the end, that opened — that I could not have invented, and did not deserve, and will spend the rest of my reign trying to be worthy of.