The girl was the one who moved first. I hadn't decided anything yet. I was still standing at the edge of the cliff, still watching the water finish what it meant to do to that beach, when Ellora got up off the wet grass on her own, wrapped in Caleb's coat like a child playing at being a bishop, and said, "We should go inside." Not a question. Not fear. Just a fact, stated the way you'd say the kettle's boiling. I looked at her properly for the first time since I'd pulled her over the edge. Small. Pale in the way people get pale from cold and not from fright, though I suspected she had plenty of the second kind stored up somewhere she wasn't showing me yet. Dark eyes, too old for her face. Lord Rydell's daughter, delivered back to the world by his hired priest and a boy who wasn't supposed to survive the fall that put him underground in the first place. "Inside where," I said. "The church," she said. "It's closer than the house." She said it softly, the way she said everything — not shy, just careful, like she'd learned somewhere that loud things got noticed by the wrong ears. Caleb was grey in the face and favoring the leg so badly he'd stopped pretending otherwise, and the girl was right. The church was closer. "Saint Aldric's, then," I said. "Caleb. Can you walk it." "I walked up a cliff," he said. "That's not what I asked." "I can walk it, Father." I let him have the lie. We'd deal with the truth of his leg somewhere with a roof. *** The vestry hearth took three tries to catch on wood that was too damp, and by the time it did, Caleb had already peeled his trouser leg back himself and was looking at the damage with the flat, assessing expression of a man deciding how bad the news was before he let anyone else hear it. Four lines, deep enough to want stitches, shallow enough that stitches weren't the first problem. The first problem was the seawater and grit that had gotten into them. "Sit," I said. "I'm sitting." "Sit still, then." I poured spirits over the wound. Caleb made a sound through his teeth and mostly swallowed it. I wrapped it tighter than a physician would have liked and looser than I would have liked, because it needed to hold for walking, not healing. Not yet. "You'll want a proper surgeon before the week's out," I said. "I want a lot of things," he said, which sounded like him. Ellora sat across the hearth the whole time, knees drawn up, watching Caleb's leg with the same flat attention she watched everything with. "Does it hurt like the water hurts," she asked him. "What do you mean." "Cold hurts different than a cut," she said. "I wanted to know which one this was." "Cut," he said, after a moment. "Mostly." She nodded, satisfied, and went back to the fire. I filed it away. Strange things said by people who'd been somewhere terrible were usually worth remembering exactly as said, before anyone decided what they meant. *** Caleb didn't rest the way I expected. He reached for the satchel he'd carried up from the beach, still damp, still stinking faintly of salt and something under the salt, and started going through it like a man checking whether his own hands still worked. The Vowkeeper came out first, set across his knees. Then, from the bottom of the bag, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth gone soft with rot, he pulled out a small bundle of bolts. He didn't say anything at first. He just held them up to the firelight, turning them slowly. Three of the four were bent past use — the shafts warped, one head snapped clean off. But all of them, bent or whole, carried the same mark scratched into the base: a small crown, its points crossed out, worn thin like someone had gone over the scratch again and again with something sharp, trying to make sure it wouldn't be mistaken for damage. "Crownless," I said. "They were in with his kit. The exorcist's." Caleb didn't look up. "I didn't touch them before. Didn't want to think about what they meant." "And now." "Now they're just bent metal." He turned one over. "Useless. Can't fire them, can't fix them." I took one from him. Light in the hand, cheaply made compared to the Order's own, but deliberate in its own way — someone had wanted this mark seen, even on a piece meant to kill something in the dark where no one but the dead man would ever look at it twice. I thought of Honoria's voice in that unlit room in London. Closed casket. I thought of Croft, calling this restoration. "Keep the Vowkeeper out of sight," I said. "Don't log it, don't mention it, not to Croft, not to anyone who writes reports back to London." Caleb looked at me. "And these." "These," I said, weighing the bent bolt in my palm, "we hand over." He understood faster than I expected, and I didn't like how fast. "As evidence." "As evidence that the Crownless were here. That they did this." I turned the bolt so the crossed-out crown caught the light. "The Church doesn't need the truth, Caleb. It needs a name to put on the warrant. Give them a mark to point at, and they'll stop asking who really built the door behind the vestry." "That's not fair to whoever these belonged to." "No," I agreed. "It isn't." He didn't argue further. He wrapped the bent bolts back in their oilcloth, carefully, the way you wrap something you plan to use, not something you plan to burn. The Vowkeeper he set aside, near his own boots, where it would stay out of any bag the Church might think to search. "It won't fire anything Order-made anymore," he said, mostly to himself. "Not until I've stripped it down proper. New housing, new spring tension. That's not tonight's work." "No," I said. "That's later. After." After what, neither of us said. Neither of us needed to. *** What Caleb did do that night was simpler, and uglier, and more honestly his: two gaff heads and a boat anchor no bigger than a fist, filed and cut and forced into a shape that would fit the Vowkeeper's empty housing well enough to matter, if not well enough to be proud of. "It'll fly wrong," he said, holding the first one up to the lamp. "Everything down here flies wrong," I said. "That's Crawmoor's whole trade." He almost laughed. It came out as something closer to a breath. *** It was Ellora who broke the quiet after that, the way she seemed to do everything — without ceremony, dropping the thing into the room like a stone into still water. "They come up sometimes," she said. "Not the singing ones. The others." Caleb's hands stopped on the anchor shank. "What others," I said. "The ones in the dark coats." She watched the fire, not either of us. "They don't sing. They talk normal. They come down the stairs behind the vestry with lanterns, and they carry things down, and they carry different things back up." "How many times did you see them." "A lot." She pulled the coat tighter. "They didn't see me. I heard them, though. Numbers. Like counting. And a word I didn't know. It sounded like a bug." Caleb looked at me across the hearth. I didn't need him to say it. "The stairs behind the vestry," I said. "Show me." "Not tonight," she said, and for the first time there was something under the softness that wasn't fear, exactly — something colder, more considered. "They come at night. That's when the counting happens." I looked at the window. The fog outside had gone the deep grey it goes before it goes black. "Tomorrow, then," I said. "In daylight." She nodded, like that had always been the plan. *** Caleb finished the second bolt near midnight, hands shaking from more than cold. He set it beside the first, next to the Vowkeeper, next to the bundle of Crownless bolts wrapped in their rotten oilcloth, and finally let his shoulders drop, the fight going out of him the way it does when a body decides it's done pretending it isn't hurt. Ellora had gone quiet across the hearth, half-asleep and upright, still watching the door the way you watch something you don't trust to stay shut. I didn't sleep. I sat with the fire and the weight of what I meant to do with a dead man's bent iron, and I told myself it was a small lie, in service of the larger truth I still hadn't found the shape of. That was when I heard it. Not loud. Not close enough yet to call it close. But closer than it had been on the cliff — closer than it had been since the sea swallowed the broken door — a thread of sound threading up through the floor, through the old stones, through whatever the rope track had left behind when they sealed it. Singing. Caleb heard it too. He didn't move, but his eyes opened, fixed on the floorboards near the hearth as though he could see straight through them to whatever was making the sound rise. Ellora's eyes were already open. She hadn't been asleep at all. "It's not under us anymore," she said, so softly I had to lean in to be sure I'd heard her right. "It's closer than under." I stood, and went to the window, and looked out at the fog pressing against Saint Aldric's stone, and thought about stairs behind a vestry, and a word that sounded like a bug, and a mission Croft had called restoration in a warm room in London that smelled of candle wax and lies. Somewhere near the church — not beneath it, near it — something began, very faintly, to sing back. I put another log on the fire, and did not sit down again.

Chapter 30: Restoration