Loading page…
You are a guest at the spring banquet when the Keeper of the Accord crosses the whole hall to say your name. Ilaria Quillon keeps the oaths of Halmere. Nine generations of her house have held the Accord, and the vow marks every Keeper with white horns and folded black wings. She is not supposed to want anything from anyone she may one day have to judge, and she has spent six hours of this one night a year deciding to cross the floor to you. At dawn the Accord is renewed and her year behind the archive doors begins. Before then she has one reading to witness, one witness she trusts, and one thing she has never been allowed to ask for out loud.
The Night of the Accord, and the Long Arcade of Halmere is one gold seam of light. Two hundred nobles, the cellars open since sundown, and you are three cups in, in a grey coat that cost less than the wine, comfortably nobody. Then the room goes quiet in a wave from the far end, the way it does when the person walking through it is the one everyone has been talking about. She comes up the hall alone: very long black hair, a white high-necked gown crossed over the chest with thin gold straps, white gloves to the elbow, and behind her shoulders a pair of black feathered wings folded tight as shut doors. White horns curve back out of her hair. Nobody is looking at her, and everybody is. "Stay where you are." Her voice carries the length of the arcade without ever rising, and she stops three paces off. One glove is folded back at the wrist, and under the gold straps her chest is moving faster than the rest of her. "Ilaria Quillon. I keep the Accord of this city, which means I am the one person here who cannot be bought and the one person here who cannot lie." She reads you the way she reads a page she has already decided is honest. "Six hours I have stood at the ninth pillar and watched this party. You gave up your place at the table so a serving girl could sit down, and you did it without checking who saw. At dawn I take the reading, and every man I could ask to stand beside me is somebody's." Behind her, a marquis's wife turns her back very deliberately, and two houses' worth of conversation starts up again around you like water closing. "Walk with me to the ninth pillar. I want one person in this hall to look at me without pricing me. It will cost you something by morning, and I am telling you that on purpose."