Silas did not come out for the rest of the morning.

He also did not come out at midday, when Due brought the next round of dispatches up from the courier station and laid them on the table in the order Alistair preferred. Following that, he did not come out when Elara, who had been sharpening her blade at the bench by the door, got up and set it down without finishing.

The door of his room stayed closed.

Due read his second dispatch of the day across from Alistair, frowning. The dispatch was no better than the first, since the Sunborne in the southern provinces had moved again, in a direction nobody could justify on a map.

Eventually, two minor factions in the central plains had requested emergency consultations with the nearest Echelon office, and had not received any responses, which the Record was noting in the polite administrative voice that meant the responses were not coming.

"He is going to wait us out, you know," said Due, finally.

"He has waited longer than this before, so I am not surprised by it."

"He has, yes, and that is the part that worries me the most."

Due adjusted his collar, slowly.

Alistair noticed it, because he always noticed it. Due was nervous, obviously.

The afternoon passed in the slow way afternoons passed at the base when everyone was waiting for one person to open a door. Elara cleaned the kettle, Alistair ran a perimeter that did not need running, and Due wrote a letter, burned it, and wrote it again, which Alistair had learned long ago was the only way Due ever finished anything important.

The light went down.

At that moment, Silas came out at dusk.

He came out without his coat, which Alistair did not remember ever seeing him do, and his sleeves were pushed up past his elbows. There was ink on his left hand, and a thin smear of it along his jaw, where he had touched his face without noticing. In his fingers, he carried a single piece of parchment.

Without a word, he set the parchment on the table in front of Alistair, and did not sit down.

Alistair looked at it, his eyes widening slightly.

Seeing this, he already knew. The mark drawn in Silas’s careful, slightly slanted hand was the same shape cut into the slab outside, identical down to the angle of every line.

Alistair did not pick it up.

"You drew this from memory," he said, quietly.

"Yes, every single line of it."

"You are sure about that?"

"I have been drawing it for the last six hours to be sure, and the other attempts are in the fire," Silas replied in a low voice.

Due had already stood up from his side of the table, his hand finding the back of the chair behind him. He stared at the parchment without leaning down for a closer look.

"Where did you see it, Silas?" asked Due.

"Nine years ago, on the wall of a settlement I was not supposed to be in," said Silas.

He stopped there.

The silence in the room was not awkward, but rather the kind of silence Silas was permitted to keep, because Silas had earned it more than once by eventually saying the part that came after.

Alistair waited a few seconds before pressing further.

"What settlement was it?"

Silas did not answer immediately, his jaw tightening.

"Silas."

"I am not going to talk about the settlement, Alistair, not tonight, and not the way that question is being asked."

Alistair did not let his face change. He took the refusal, set it aside, and asked a different question.

"What was on the wall, beyond the mark itself?"

"Names," said Silas. "Five of them, then six, then four again, after the sixth was crossed off. The crossed-off name was scraped down to the stone underneath, while the other four were carved deeper than the sixth had been. I was inside that room for less than three minutes, and I have spent the last nine years remembering the way the cuts were made."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight I was finally certain enough to draw the mark on parchment, and bring it out to you."

Elara had come around from the bench. She did not sit either, but stood at Alistair’s shoulder, her arms crossed tightly.

"Whose settlement was it?" she asked.

"I already told Alistair I would not talk about that one."

"You told Alistair you would not talk about it tonight, Silas. I am asking a different question, since I am not asking who lived there, but whose territory it sat on."

Silas considered her for a moment. He did not seem offended by the cut she had made between the two questions, and instead seemed almost relieved that someone had cared enough to make the distinction.

"It was not anyone’s territory at the time," he said. "It was a settlement on a border, the kind of place no one bothered to claim, because no one wanted to be responsible for what was happening inside of it."

"And now, Silas?"

Silas looked at Alistair when he answered, not at her.

"Now the border is gone, since the land was redrawn six years ago, and the settlement and the ground around it are part of a recognized territory." 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

He waited a breath.

"It is inside what is now Upholder country."

Hearing this, Due had been quiet for the last several lines, his hand still resting on the back of the chair he had stood up from. The grip had tightened to the point where Alistair could see the line of his knuckles plainly in the lamplight.

Alistair did not move from his seat. He kept his hands flat on the table on either side of the parchment, and looked at the mark on the page, then at the same mark in his memory of the slab outside, and at the line of Silas’s ink-streaked jaw.

He understood several things at once, he let himself understand only one of them out loud.

"Then they have been making this mark for nine years, in places they did not even hold at the time."

Silas did not nod, since Silas did not have to.

"Silas," said Elara.

"Yes, Elara."

"How many places have you seen it in?"

"I do not know the number, honestly."

"Then guess at it."

"I will not guess. The settlement is the only one I have seen with my own eyes, but there are others, and there have to be others, because the mark is not the kind a person cuts only once."

She took that in slowly, and did not press him further. Alistair watched her not press, and understood that Elara had taken Silas’s measure, and decided that whatever number he was holding back was a number being held back for a reason.

The lamp on the table flickered, very slightly, the way the lamps in this house had been flickering since the night of the founding, and Alistair watched the shape of the mark seem to move once across the parchment in the wavering light.

’Did it just shift on the page, or is the flame playing tricks on my eyes?’

He thought, for one short second, that the mark had truly adjusted itself. It had not, fortunately, but he was no longer entirely certain he would notice if it ever did.