Tilda had the long cloak on her arm before I came down the last stair. She held it open from the shoulder; the wool was old lead in color, heavy enough that I felt the seam settle along the collarbone as she fastened the throat. The chain of the astrolabe lay caught under it at the breast. She lifted the chain free and laid it on the wool, and only then did the second clasp.
"You walked past the inkwells without looking," she said.
"I looked."
"You didn't move them."
"No."
She tested the clasp, undid it, refastened it a thread closer. She did not ask why. "Master Pell sent a page to take you across. He has been at the foot of the stairs a quarter of an hour."
I took the small leather case from her. Inside lay the working calendar, the rough copy I would speak from if I were asked to speak. The fair copy was in a folder bound with black ribbon two doors from the king. The king reads in his own time, Crece had said. The king will not see it until the chancellery has prepared him to see it. The king had dismissed the chamberlain at six. The king was about to read something other than what the chancellery had prepared him to read.
Tilda had the latch under her hand. She held it. Two seconds, three. She offered no explanation. Then she pulled, and the cold of the passage came up to meet me.
The page kept the pace I set without falling out of it.
The covered passage from the foot of the tower to the working wing ran along the inside of the west garden, glass on one long side, stone on the other. Above the chancellery's second floor a window stood open in spite of the wet morning. Renata Holst was at the window. She did not lift her hand when the page glanced up. She kept her place. She had come to the window to see me cross, and she let me see that she had come, and she let neither of us pretend otherwise.
I crossed.
The antechamber to the working office had no chamberlain at its desk and no writer along its side wall. A single guardsman stood at the inner door, an older man with a captain's bar, who watched me come without straightening from his quiet.
"Astrologer Kane," the page said to him.
The guardsman opened the door himself. He spoke nothing. He inclined his head a bare half-inch — a man whose courtesy had been formed in places where the doorways were lower — and gave me the room.
The working office had a long table under a narrow east window. Two chairs faced one another across it. A second door in the back wall led, by my guess, to the king's apartments; it stood closed. There was nothing on the table but a low brass tray with a stoppered jug and two glasses, and at the place opposite mine, a clean square of unmarked paper, and a steel pen on the paper's far edge.
Aldric was already standing at the table.
He waited for the door to close behind me. The guardsman closed it the way men close things they wish to close gently. The room shrank in the closing. Aldric kept his eyes on the door over my shoulder until the latch caught, and then he turned them to me.
"Astrologer." His voice carried lower in the room than I had heard it from a dais. "Thank you for coming on the day I asked."
"Your Majesty."
"Sit, please."
The chair he meant was the one set before the paper and the pen. I sat. He drew the chair on the other side toward him and sat after me, which was not the way a king is generally seen to greet anyone. As he settled, he twisted the heavy ring off the forefinger of his left hand without looking at it, and set it on the table between the jug and the paper.
"It's in the way of writing," he said.
That was the only thing he said about it.
He took up no pen. He folded his hands once on the table and put them in his lap. His eyes went to my hands and stayed there a quarter of a beat longer than they ought, and then moved off again without remark. There was iron-gall on the right forefinger and middle, a thinner line along the side of the thumb where the seal had pressed it the day before, and one fresh smudge under the nail from a pen I had taken up for nothing while waiting at the foot of the stairs. He had taken in all of it.
"I want to understand the three methods," he said. "Not the result. The method. I would like you to tell me, in the order in which an astrologer would teach a student, how each one works, and what each one cannot do."
It was not the question I had prepared for. I had prepared for the harvest in the seventh month and the disturbance on the eastern marches in the fourth, which the chancellery would have given him to ask. He had asked a different question. He had asked the question that came before the chancellery's reading, and that the chancellery had not asked me itself in twelve years.
I told him.
The transit came first, because it was what a beginner could see first: planet and house, the movement of one body across a fixed point of birth, the simplest of the three because it could be drawn. The paper between us stayed clean; he had given me paper, but he had not taken up his pen, and I did not take up mine. In words, in the order my father had taught me, I gave him what the transit could give and what it could not. The inputs came in turn — the minute of coronation, the longitude at which the calculation was anchored, the hour of the previous king's last breath as it had been entered into the public register — and the places where each of those inputs could go astray.
He let me speak. He asked nothing.
I went on to the progression. The progression was harder, because it asked the reader to walk a year through a day and a degree through a year, and to hold the symbolic rate of motion against the literal one without confusing them. I spoke of the temperaments of the houses, which had less to do with prediction than with the angle at which a year was lit. He asked me what I meant by an angle at which a year was lit. I told him. He took the answer and turned it once in front of him and set it down and let me go on.
The cycle of returns came last because it could not be hurried, and could not be persuaded, and asked the chart to come back to the precise minute of its first making and to be read again as if for the first time. Any disagreement between the first reading and the return was the disagreement that mattered. The cycle of returns was, in my father's phrase, the sieve.
Whose chart I had put through that sieve four nights ago, I did not say. He let the silence keep it.
He sat back. He made no move at once to thank me or to dismiss me. He let the silence have its full length and a little more. His eyes went to the ring on the table, and to the window over my shoulder, and to me last.
"You are very young for this work."
"I am thirty-one."
"You are very young for this work."
"Yes."
"I am thirty-five." His mouth turned at one corner, only a moment. "I am very young for mine. I find I am told it less often."
I had no answer that was not a courtier's answer, and a courtier's answer was what he had dismissed his chamberlain to avoid. I gave him no answer.
He nodded as if I had answered well.
"Astrologer Kane. Thank you. I will not keep you." He rose. The ring stayed on the table; he forgot it. He saw that he had forgotten it before I did, and picked it up and slid it back onto the forefinger with a practiced half-turn of the wrist. "The chancellery will tell me when it has prepared the formal reading. We will have an hour for it then."
I rose. I went to the door. I had crossed half the room when he spoke again.
"Astrologer."
I turned.
He was still at his side of the table. He stood with his weight on his palms at the table-edge, leaned half a degree forward, like a man who had decided what he was about to say only in the time it had taken me to reach the door.
"There is one more thing." He waited until he had my eyes. "I would like a second horoscope. Not the one the chancellery has. Not one for the archive. One for me. I want it written the way you would write it for a friend, not for a record. The truth that does not fit the chancellery's hand. I have my birth to the half-hour. You have it on file. I will give it to you again, if it makes you steadier in the work." His mouth turned again at the word steadier. "I know you have already cast one. I want you to cast a second. There should be a difference between them. I will come for it in two weeks."
He waited.
I did not say yes. I did not say no.
I stood inside the door with the cloak still on me and the case at my side, and the ring back on his hand, and the column at the end of the eleventh month standing between us in a folder two doors away.
He waited a beat longer.
Then he inclined his head — the smallest inclination a king may give — and turned to the table, and to the paper, and to the pen he had not yet used.
I went out.