The dead, Caelan had noticed, were always buried in the rain.
He didn't know if that was true everywhere in Aetheris or just here in Greymaw County, where the sky seemed to take death personally. But standing at the upstairs window with his forehead pressed against the cold glass, watching his father stand motionless in the grey drizzle below, he had begun to suspect that grief and rain had made some private arrangement with each other that one would never arrive without the other, just to make things worse.
The court scholar's name had been Aldous Fenn. He had smelled of ink and dried herbs, and he had once spent an entire afternoon teaching Caelan how to read Covenant notation, not because anyone asked him to, but because he had looked at a nine-year-old boy asking too many questions and decided, quietly, that the questions deserved answers. He had been fifty-nine years old, and he had died in his sleep, and no one could explain why a man in decent health simply did not wake up one morning.
Too many of them, Caelan thought, watching the gravediggers work at the far end of the estate garden. Too many people are dying, and too quietly.
He was eleven years old, and he already knew that this thought was wrong in shape too heavy, too angular, like something that belonged in an older mind than his. He had felt things like that before. Memories that weren't quite his, reaching up through the floor of his thoughts like water finding cracks. Another life, pressing against the underside of this one.
He didn't dwell on it. He filed it away. He had learned, young, that some things needed to be carried rather than examined.
Below, Count Edric Ashveil had not moved.
He stood at the graveside with his hands clasped behind his back and his head bowed, and the rain plastered his hair to his forehead and soaked the shoulders of his coat dark, and he did not appear to notice any of it. He was not weeping. Edric Ashveil was not a man who wept at funerals not because he didn't grieve, but because Caelan had come to understand that his father's grief expressed itself differently. Quietly. In the continued, careful performance of responsibility even when everything in him wanted to stop.
A count's grief, Caelan thought, was a thing you wore on the inside.
Two of the household staff stood a respectful distance behind, hunched under a shared umbrella that was doing almost nothing against the sideways slant of the rain. One of them old Maris, who had run the estate kitchen since before Caelan was born—was openly crying. She had brought Aldous Fenn a hot meal every evening for eleven years. The other staff member, a young stable hand whose name Caelan always forgot and always felt guilty for forgetting, was simply staring at the ground with the expression of someone who had not yet decided how to feel about death.
Caelan pressed his palm flat against the glass. The cold seeped into his skin.
There is something wrong with how people die in this county.
He didn't know where the thought came from. Only that it had been sitting in the back of his mind since the kitchen boy Pell had died of a fever in the summer, and before that, the miller's wife, and before that, two farmhands from the eastern holdings who had simply not come home from an evening walk along the Greymaw's edge. Each death had its own sensible explanation. Fever. Age. Dungeon proximity.
But Caelan had the kind of mind that couldn't stop counting, and the count was wrong.
The Greymaw dungeon crouched at the county's eastern boundary like a sleeping thing a dark rent in the earth that breathed cold air and absolute silence outward in equal measure. From the upstairs window on a clear day, you could see the tree line where the estate's cultivated land gave way to the strange, slightly-too-bright grass that grew in the dungeon's mana field. Today the rain had eaten the distance; the Greymaw was invisible, swallowed by grey.
The farmers called it a blessing. Thirty years dormant, they said, over harvest tables and in the village square, with the particular satisfaction of people who lived next to something dangerous that had temporarily chosen not to be. A blessing and a mercy.
Caelan's father never used the word "blessing." When the Greymaw came up in conversation, Edric would listen to the farmers' relief with a small, careful nod, and then he would change the subject. And later, in the library, Caelan had found margin notes in his father's hand beside the dungeon survey records. Not prayers of gratitude. Calculations. Pressure readings. Dates.
"A held breath," his father had written once, next to a particularly long dormancy record. Nothing else. Just those two words.
Caelan had copied them into his own small journal and stared at them for a long time.
The funeral ended with the particular anticlimactic flatness of all funerals—a moment where nothing happens except that suddenly everything is over, and the living must find their way back to the ordinary business of being alive. The gravediggers finished. Old Maris was guided inside by the stablehand, who, it turned out, was better at comfort than at grief. Edric stood alone at the graveside for another long moment, then turned toward the house.
Caelan stepped back from the window before his father could look up and see him watching. He wasn't sure why he did this some instinct toward privacy, toward letting his father carry his grief in peace. He padded back to the desk where his lesson notes were spread and sat down and stared at them without seeing them.
The house was very quiet. The rain had softened to a murmur.
Footsteps on the stairs. Unhurried, steady. His father never rushed on the stairs.
The door opened without a knock one domestic habit of Edric Ashveil's that Caelan had never been able to assign a reason to. He knocked on every other door in the county. Not this one.
"You were watching," his father said.
"Yes."
Edric came and stood beside the desk. He smelled of rain and wet wool and the faint cedary woodsmoke of the library where he spent most of his evenings. He looked down at the lesson notes without really looking at them.
"Aldous was a good man," he said finally.
"I know." Caelan paused. "He taught me Covenant notation. Last spring. He didn't have to."
"No." A small thing moved across his father's face not quite a smile, but the shape grief makes when it finds something worth keeping. "That was very like him."
They were quiet together for a moment, the way people are quiet when a name has just been put to rest and the space it occupied is still warm.
Then Caelan said, carefully, "Father. The eastern tenants. The ones who died this year." He watched his father's hands, which had come to rest on the back of the desk chair. "It's too many, isn't it?"
Edric was still for a beat longer than a dismissal would require.
"Go to sleep, Caelan," he said. "It's late."
He left without closing the door, and Caelan listened to his footsteps continue down the hall, even and unhurried, and then the soft sound of the library door opening and the careful click of it closing.
He didn't say no, Caelan thought.
He added it to the ledger he was building in his head the one that had no title yet and no conclusion, only entries. Deaths that came too quietly. A dungeon at the edge of the property that his father watched like a man watching a door he expected to eventually open. A court scholar who knew more than he said and said less each month before the end.
He picked up his pen and uncapped the small notebook he kept in the drawer beneath the lesson notes. At the top of a fresh page, he wrote the date in Yeon Junwoo's careful notation style, the one that felt more natural to his hand than any script he'd been formally taught and below it, two words.
Too many.
He stared at them for a long time. Then, below that, a question he couldn't answer yet:
Why?
Outside, the rain had thinned to almost nothing.
The Greymaw crouched unseen at the county's edge, patient and dark and enormously still. The mana it breathed outward moved through the soil and the grass and the roots of things, slow and old and deep. In the estate garden, the fresh earth of Aldous Fenn's grave was already dark with wet.
Caelan blew out his candle and lay in the dark and listened to the house settle around him.
He thought about the note his father had written in the survey record. A held breath.
He thought about what came after a held breath.
Eventually—only because he was eleven, and eleven-year-olds are built by necessity to sleep he closed his eyes.
The Greymaw exhaled softly into the dark, and no one heard it, and the county slept, and the morning was still several hours away.
End of Chapter 1