I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities-Chapter 223: The Night Before

He made rice and salted pork.

Nothing complicated. The pork had been braising in the oven for two hours, low heat, the fat rendering down into the broth until the meat pulled apart with no resistance. He cooked the rice in the broth rather than water. Dense, high-calorie, the kind of meal that sat in the body like ballast. Marlo had offered to take over twice. Vane had sent him home both times.

The others arrived at different intervals. Isole first, which was always the case when she wasn’t preoccupied — she moved through the villa like she’d already been there for an hour regardless of when she’d actually arrived. Valerica came in from the cold with her hair still damp from a training session she’d run past nightfall, and she stood at the kitchen counter watching Vane work with the particular quality of attention she gave things she considered worth understanding. Ashe came last, loud through the front door, boots on the stone, then noticeably quieter when she hit the warmth of the hallway.

"You’re cooking," she said, appearing in the kitchen doorway.

"Sit down, Ashe."

She sat down.

The four of them ate at the large table in the dining room with the windows dark against the spring night. The portion sizes were larger than necessary. Nobody commented on this. Isole ate with the methodical focus she brought to everything functional, and Valerica ate with better posture than the situation required, and Ashe ate like someone who understood that food was fuel and had decided to take the job seriously for once.

The conversation was intermittent. Not uncomfortable — just the natural quiet of people who had nothing left to prepare and had run out of ways to say so.

"The northwest stronghold," Valerica said at one point, looking at the table rather than anyone in particular. "The subterranean vault access on the fourth side. You want it as a fallback."

"Yes," Vane said.

"If we’re pushed back to the vault during a wave cycle, we lose the Core temporarily."

"We lose the Core temporarily. We keep the squad."

She turned her wine glass a quarter turn. "Agreed."

That was the most tactical conversation of the evening. The rest of it was smaller. Ashe described, with visible irritation, the sparring session she’d run that afternoon against a second-year Vanguard student who had been under the impression that Special Admission status was a rumor. Isole asked whether Mara had packed for the villa’s secondary wards properly, because she’d noticed the girl had a tendency to leave her warmth-weave behind when she packed quickly. Valerica mentioned, in the tone of someone noting the weather, that her father had sent a letter asking about the evaluation format, which she had not answered.

"He would want to advise on the fortification approach," she said.

"Would it be good advice?" Vane asked.

"Probably. He held the Greyvast Pass for eleven days against a Grandmaster siege force." She took a sip of wine. "I did not answer because we already have an approach and his advice would be good enough that I would want to take it, and taking it would mean explaining that we modified it, and explaining modifications to my father requires approximately four hours I don’t have."

Ashe pointed her fork at Valerica. "That is the most Valerica sentence you have ever said."

"I am always precise."

"You are always very specifically Valerica," Ashe said, and went back to eating, and Valerica looked at her for a moment with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile but occupied the same territory.

The meal wound down the way meals do when the people eating them are tired and facing something real in the morning. No ceremony, no conclusion. The plates were cleared. Mara had left a plate of something covered with a cloth on the counter, labeled in her blunt handwriting: eat this too. It turned out to be dense seed-cake, practical and slightly bitter, the kind she’d been making since she learned to cook from whatever the kitchens had surplus of. They ate it standing in the kitchen.

Valerica walked to the window that overlooked the lower grounds. She stood there with her wine, looking at the dark. Outside, a pair of Wardens moved along the outer pathway on their patrol rotation, their mana-lanterns swinging in the mild spring wind.

Isole said goodnight quietly from the hallway and went upstairs. She didn’t make a production of it.

Vane cleaned the kitchen. He did it the way he always did — not because he needed to, with a full villa staff available, but because the task was finite and the result was visible and that was useful when the mind wanted something to hold onto. The water was warm on his hands. The rhythmic scrape of the brush on the pot was a small and grounding sound.

He became aware, at some point, that Ashe had gone quiet.

She had moved from the kitchen to the common room, to the armchair nearest the unlit fireplace, and she was sitting in it with one leg folded under her and her elbow on the armrest and her chin on her hand. Her eyes were open. Then they were half-open. Then the rhythm of her breathing changed in the small, definitive way that meant she was no longer making any decisions at all.

She had been running on shortened sleep for five days. Her body had apparently decided that the night before the evaluation was a reasonable moment to collect.

Vane dried his hands. He walked to the common room doorway and looked at her for a moment. Her head had tipped slightly toward the armrest. Her white hair had come partially loose from where she’d tied it back. The last of the lamp light caught the line of her jaw and the curve of her horns, and she looked entirely unlike herself in the way that sleeping people often do — the force of her just temporarily absent, everything quieter.

He took his uniform jacket from the hook by the door.

He crossed the room and put it over her without thinking about it, the same way he would have rearranged a loose strap on a pack or picked something useful up off the floor. Then he straightened up.

Valerica was standing at the kitchen doorway.

She had her wine glass in one hand and her other hand resting against the doorframe, and she was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t immediately categorize. Not surprise. Not quite the particular focused quality she used when she was evaluating a tactical situation. Something quieter than both. She held his gaze for a moment, then she looked down at her wine glass, and then she turned back toward the window without saying anything.

Vane looked at the jacket on the armchair. He looked at Ashe’s sleeping face.

He went to his room.

The chime for 0500 ran through the villa like a current. The deployment window was 0600. Five hours in a transport vessel to the southern continent, then a drop into the Embrasure from altitude. He had packed the night before.

He came downstairs to find Isole already in the foyer with her staff and her bag and a cup of tea she had made herself, because Isole had never once waited for someone else to make tea for her. Valerica came down precisely on time, fully armored, her golden hair tight at the base of her neck, looking like she had slept eight hours in a controlled environment designed specifically for rest.

From the common room came the sound of Ashe waking up. A sharp intake of breath. Then a pause. Then footsteps to the stairs, quick and light, up and back in four minutes, and she appeared in the foyer with her armor on and her hair tied and her axes on her back, looking like she’d been awake since dawn.

She didn’t say anything about the chair. She didn’t say anything about the jacket, which she had folded and left on the armrest.

She picked up her bag. She looked at the group assembled in the foyer.

"Let’s go," she said.