The Room They Kept Her In

Neris did not come the following morning.

At first there were ordinary explanations. A clerk detained by another task. A queue at an office. Rain making a short road inconvenient. Ada worked through each explanation while pretending to compare the northern load figures.

By noon, Hald sent word that Neris was answering questions about unauthorised copies.

He did not call it detention.

Ren read the message, folded it once and handed it to Tovan.

“Ask whether she can leave.”

The answer took an hour. She could leave when the questions were concluded.

“Then ask who concludes them.”

The Chancellor's examining officer.

Ada was already fastening her coat.

“Not through a service door,” Tovan said.

“You said our witnesses would be protected.”

“I did. So we'll use the front one.”

The records office looked disappointingly ordinary. There were people waiting with permits, a boy carrying a broken stool, an official arguing with a woman about a misspelled boundary. Ada wanted the building to declare what it was doing. Instead it smelled of wet coats and floor wax.

Tovan gave her name at the desk. The clerk went very pale and very helpful.

Neris was in an upstairs room with a table, two examiners and a window painted shut. No one had struck her. She had not been given food. Her hands rested in her lap with such deliberate stillness that Ada knew how much effort it cost her not to pick at the raw place on her neck.

The senior examiner rose.

“This is an internal matter.”

“It concerns a witness called under my protection,” Tovan said.

“She remains an employee of the Hall.”

“Then name the employment rule requiring a locked door.”

“The door is secured to protect the records.”

“Move the records.”

He looked towards the papers on the table, as though they might provide a procedure for removing an inconvenient Marshal.

Ren asked to see the accusation. It concerned copied schedules whose release was alleged to endanger the winter system. Some were the very schedules the Regent had ordered examined in public. Others included names from the infirmary and quarry.

Neris looked at Ada once.

“They want the people who helped,” she said.

The examiner objected to the characterisation. He was establishing the route by which official materials had left lawful custody.

“Were the people at Quarry House in lawful custody?” Ada asked.

“That is not the question before this office.”

“It seems to be the question your other question depends on.”

Tovan lifted a hand. Not to silence Ada entirely; to stop them from being led into a dispute the examiner could prolong all afternoon.

“Show me the order authorising her confinement.”

There was an instruction to retain her for examination. It bore a departmental seal and no time limit.

Tovan read it, asked for a copy and wrote beneath it that Neris would answer further questions at the public hearing with an independent scribe present. The examiner said she lacked the authority to intervene in Hall discipline. Tovan told him to seek a ruling while she sought food for the witness.

They waited.

It was not a rescue made possible by one good sentence. Two messengers went out. Hald arrived and spoke quietly with the examiners. Tovan remained in the doorway. Ren took down the names of everyone present. Ada sat beside Neris and gave her a roll Pella had pushed into her pocket before they left.

“There's cheese in it,” Ada said.

“I can see.”

“I didn't know if you'd eaten.”

Neris broke the roll in half. Her hand shook as she lifted it.

Ada stopped explaining the bread.

The ruling came near the evening bell. Neris could leave. The inquiry would continue, but the material under examination had to be listed, and any demand for identifying witnesses would require a stated purpose connected to a specific allegation.

It was less protection than Ada wanted and more than Neris had possessed when they entered.

At the stair, Hald caught Ada's eye.

“I didn't order the room locked.”

“Did you ask whether it was?”

He did not answer quickly enough.

Outside, the rain had stopped. Neris stood beneath the portico, looking at the street as though measuring the distance to a freedom no one had acknowledged taking from her.

“Do you want to come to the customs house?” Ada asked.

“Yes.”

“Your room?”

“Someone else can fetch my things. Tomorrow. Not tonight.”

Tovan sent Serit with a written permission and another officer as witness. She did not ask Neris for a list immediately.

On the walk back, Ada took her friend's basket. It contained a handkerchief, a pencil worn nearly to the wood and the copied request that had brought her to the office. Nothing that justified the room. Nothing that would have protected her from it either.

Pella had made soup. Tomar had rearranged the chairs so Neris could sit with her back to a wall and see both doors. Nobody announced the arrangement.

After supper, Neris slept at the long table with one cheek on her folded sleeve.

Ada covered the ink pot before it could be knocked over. Then she sat beside her and refused three separate invitations to discuss what they would do in the morning.