The tallow candles in the Grand Master’s office smelled of sheep grease.
Klee remembered them smelling like bayberry and beeswax, but that was because Jean used to buy the expensive tapers from the apothecary down by the south gate to keep the paperwork from souring the air. These ones sputtered with an ugly, yellow stink. They coated the roof of Klee’s mouth with lard every time she inhaled. She hated mutton tallow. She hated it more than cold carrots or the prickle of thistles through her socks.
She kept her fingers buried in her left coat pocket, turning a dried plum stone against her thumb. Flat edge. Sharp tip. Smooth ridge. She turned it six times, one for each year the sky had stayed the wrong color, before she let her hand sit still.
"You didn't use the window this time," Kaeya said.
He leaned against the tall bookshelf near the map of Brightcrown Canyon. His arms were crossed over his chest, his eye patch catching the weak taper light, but his shoulders weren't as loose as he wanted them to look. His right hand stayed two inches above the hilt of his sword.
Klee looked down at her boots. The leather at the toes was scuffed down to the gray suede, and the brass buckles were missing their tongue-prongs. She had wired them shut with copper three winters ago when the smithies stopped taking mora.
"The window has a latch on the outside," Klee said. Her voice came out small, catching in her throat like dry flour, so she cleared it twice. "Master Jean put three iron screws in the frame after the fish in the moat died. You have to use a broad-headed wedge to pop it. I didn't have one."
Jean did not look up from her ledger immediately. Her pen made a steady, scratching stroke across the cream parchment, then stopped. When she raised her chin, her hair was pulled back into the high ribbon, smooth and gold without a single silver thread behind the ears. Her skin was clean. There were no powder burns on her collarbone, and the blue fabric of her tunic had not yet faded to slate gray along the cuffs.
"The ledger says you were escorted to the library at noon, Klee," Jean said. Her tone had the hard, practiced patience she used for drunken merchants and stubborn cavalry captains. "Lisa was supposed to oversee your penance until sundown. Yet Huffman found you walking along the Cider Lake shallows an hour ago, soaking wet up to your knees, carrying ordnance we have never authorized."
Jean gestured toward the corner of her desk.
Sitting between an inkwell and an unopened stack of tax rolls from Springvale was Dodoco.
Only it was not the Dodoco that lived in the toy chest downstairs. This one was sewn from grease-darkened sailcloth. The button eyes were mismatched—one horn-shell, one pitted iron—and its tail was stiffened with dried quicksilver paste to keep damp air from ruining the fuses coiled inside its belly.
"That isn't ordnance," Klee said. "It's just Dodoco."
"Dodoco does not tick," Kaeya murmured. He didn't smile, but the corner of his mouth twitched toward his cheek. "And Dodoco certainly doesn't register with Master Albedo’s resonance scales. When he touched the tail, the needle jumped three points past the standard limit for concentrated Pyro sediment. Where did you get the thread, Klee? It isn't Mondstadt hemp."
Klee bit the inside of her cheek until the skin gave way with a tiny, salty pop. "My mother gave it to me."
"Alice has not been in the territory for seven months," Jean said flatly. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, a habit Klee had watched her repeat through three hundred different war councils that hadn't happened yet. "Her last missive was dispatched from Jueyun Karst. It took four weeks to arrive by Guild courier. Unless you mean to tell me she slipped past the gate guards during the morning watch?"
"No," Klee said.
"Then where was she?"
"Everywhere," Klee said. She hadn't meant it to sound rude. It was simply the shortest way to say that the woman had dissolved into the white salt between the borders of what stayed and what vanished, but Jean’s mouth tightened at the corners.
The heavy oak door swung inward before Jean could demand an apology.
Albedo entered without knocking. His coat was dusted with fine, pale limestone along the right sleeve, and he carried a narrow wooden tray lined with velvet. On the velvet lay three brass measuring calipers and a scrap of coarse red wool he had cut from the hem of Klee’s cape while she was sitting on the bench by the armory stairs.
He did not look at Jean or Kaeya. His teal eyes went straight to Klee, resting on the small silver clover pinned through her lapel.
"The fiber isn't sheep's wool," Albedo said. His speech was clipped, flat, and perfectly measured, like drops of aqua vitae falling into a glass bulb. "It is vegetable fiber treated with a silken resin derived from an extinct variety of Valberry. Chemically, it possesses twenty times the tensile strength of our standard garrison cloaks. More importantly, the ash-point is well over eight hundred degrees."
"She made it herself?" Kaeya asked.
"No," Albedo replied, stepping closer to Klee. He stopped precisely four feet away, outside of arm’s reach, observing her with the detachment he usually reserved for cross-sections of hilichurl marrow. "The hand that spun this thread had seven joints per finger, or used an elven drop-spindle weighted with lead. Klee does not possess the grip strength to turn a lead spindle without bruising her palm."
Klee pulled her hands out of her pockets and sat on them. Her knuckles were raw from the lake water.
"Albedo," Jean said, her voice dropping into the quiet register that signaled her temper was fraying. "Is this an explosive risk? The city is preparing for the wine harvest festival. If Alice has sent another unstable prototype through an unregistered channel—"
"It is not an explosive," Albedo said. He reached down and picked up the battered Dodoco from Jean’s desk. He turned it over once, his pale thumb tracing the thick, clumsy cross-stitch across the doll’s spine. "It is an anchor."
Klee’s stomach dropped. "Put him down, please."
Albedo paused. "You generally prefer to show your crafts to the entire room, Klee. You insisted on detonating your last jumping mine in the fountain square so the water would wash away the scorch marks. Why are you asking me to put it down?"
"Because the seams are old," Klee said. Her chin trembled, but she clamped her teeth down until the shudder stopped. "If you drop him, the quicksilver leaks into the velvet. Then he won't be heavy anymore. If he isn't heavy, he doesn't stay."
"Stay where?" Jean asked.
Klee didn't answer. She looked at the floorboards near Albedo’s boots. There was a scratch in the pine, three inches long, shaped like an inverted sickle. She remembered making that scratch with her practice dagger when she was seven, after Kaeya told her that buried treasure always lay beneath knots in the grain. The scratch was there. It was fresh, pale yellow wood showing through the dark wax.
She had spent three weeks trying to find that scratch in the ruins after the sky went white. She had scraped away four feet of wet ash with her bare fingernails until the stone foundation showed, but there hadn't been any floorboards left. Just the cellar vault, packed tight with cold black sand that smelled like vinegar.
She reached out her hand. Her sleeve slipped back, exposing the pale skin of her wrist.
A thick, circular brand ran around her forearm, three inches above the bone. It wasn't red; it was the color of boiled bone, slightly raised, patterned with tiny, interlocking circles that looked like clock gears ground flat by a millstone.
Jean stood up so fast her chair scraped two feet backward across the rug.
"What is that?" Jean demanded. Her eyes were fixed on the mark. "Who put that on her arm?"
Kaeya stopped leaning on the shelf. He crossed the room in two long, soundless strides, his hand dropping directly onto the pommel of his rapier. He didn't draw, but his thumb flipped the safety catch on the scabbard with a sharp *clack*. "That isn't a burn from black powder. I've seen that script on the markers out by the Falcon Coast, near the ruins the Guild won't map."
"It's cold," Klee whispered.
"Who touched you, Klee?" Jean walked around the desk, her boots heavy on the pine. She reached down, intending to take Klee by the shoulders, but Klee flinched.
It wasn't a child's duck; it was the sharp, reflexive drop of someone who expected a shock wave. She folded her knees to her chest right there on the stool, tucking her elbows against her ribs and burying her nose in the collar of her worn red dress.
Jean froze, her gloved fingers hovering six inches from Klee’s hair. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. In all the months she had spent dragging Klee out of ditches, pulling sulfur cakes from her pockets, and locking her in the small stone room under the western stair, the child had never ducked away from her hand. Klee hugged; Klee kicked her heels against the baseboards; Klee cried until her nose ran red, but she never flinched.
"Jean," Albedo said softly.
The Acting Grand Master drew her hand back slowly. She curled her fingers into a fist against her thigh. "Report to the cathedral. Have Barbara bring the basin for systemic cleansing. If there is an Abyssal brand on her—"
"It isn't Abyssal," Albedo said. He held Dodoco up to the candlelight. The yellow flame reflected off the brass teeth of the zipper hidden under the doll’s arm. "The logic is circular. Look at the tailing marks on the fifth ring. It isn't an inversion; it's a closure. Someone sealed a container."
"What container?" Kaeya asked. His blue eye was narrowed, cold and calculating. "The girl?"
"No," Albedo murmured, his voice dropping into that strange, terrifying calm he used when an experiment went fundamentally wrong in the crucible. "The room she was standing in."
Klee kept her eyes shut tight against the wool of her collar. She could smell the sheep fat again. It was thick and greasy, but underneath it, if she breathed through her teeth, she could smell Jean’s lilac hair oil and the bitter almond on Albedo’s cuffs.
They were all here. They were wearing their clean coats. They didn't have the red salt on their fingernails, and Kaeya’s teeth weren't black from drinking well-water that had sat under the red moon.
"Where is the other one?" Klee asked into her knees.
The room went dead silent.
"What did you say?" Jean asked.
Klee lifted her face just enough to peer over her collar. "The other Klee. The one who dropped her cherry bombs in the kitchen chimney this morning. Did she get three days in the quiet room, or did she get five?"
Kaeya glanced at Jean. Jean didn't look back; her eyes remained pinned to Klee’s face, taking in the bruised hollows under her eyes, the dry skin at the edges of her lips, and the way her fingers stayed curled into tight, defensive knots.
"She got four," Kaeya said, his voice unusually light, though his hand remained on his sword. "Her ears were ringing so loudly she couldn't hear the reprimand. Master Jean had to write it down on a slate."
"She hates the slate," Klee whispered. "The chalk makes her teeth itch."
She reached out and took Dodoco from Albedo’s hand. He let her have it without resistance, though his gaze stayed fixed on the way her thumb settled into the worn groove behind the toy’s ears—a groove worn by ten thousand repetitions of the same terrified gesture.
She hugged the dirty sailcloth against her stomach. It was heavy. The lead shot and the quicksilver settled against her ribs like a lump of cold butter.
"You should lock the door," Klee told the desk. "The water in the lake is going backward. It's coming up through the reeds instead of going down to the sea. That's how it started last time. First the fish turn upside down, and then the salt smells like iron, and then... and then Mum said we had to pack the red bag because the sky was getting too heavy for the pillars."
Jean turned her back to the room. She walked to the high casement window that looked out over the plaza, her boots clicking once, twice, three times before she stopped. She pulled the heavy velvet drape aside and looked down into the courtyard.
The fountain was running. The water rose and fell in clear, white arcs beneath the oil lamps, splashing over the stone rims into the basin.
"Kaeya," Jean said, without turning around. "Take the northern perimeter yourself. Double the watch at the cliffhead."
"Understood," Kaeya said. He stepped toward the door, then paused, his eye lingering on the scuffed tips of Klee's boots. He reached into his coat, produced a small, sugar-crusted almond from his pocket, and set it silently on the edge of the low bookshelf before he slipped through the threshold.
He didn't offer it to her. He knew she wouldn't take it from his hand.
Albedo remained where he was, his calipers hanging from his thumb like an iron plumb-line. "You didn't walk across the shallows, did you?"
Klee tucked her chin back down. "I didn't walk anywhere. I was sitting under the big tree where the wind doesn't blow. Mum told me to count to ninety-nine and not open my eyes until the thunder smelled like sugar."
She pressed her thumb against the plum stone in her pocket.
"Did it smell like sugar?" Albedo asked.
"No," Klee said. Her voice was barely a breath against the sailcloth. "It smelled like burnt hair."
Across the room, through the glass of the high window, the wind caught the weather vane atop the cathedral. It groaned on its iron spindle, spinning three times against the breeze before it locked, shuddering, toward the south.