Free Unbound by Shawn Speakman Page B

of the inner pentacle and all the college theaters and annals and halls. I would miss this place. I would miss the pursuit of knowledge and thought and understanding of the sky.
    Oh, I’d keep at it myself, wherever I went. But I’d be alone. That much I knew, even before I reached Anna.
    “Don’t let them do it, Lour,” she said in her convalescent room. “Fight them.”
    I took her hands. “I have. And I won. But this fight I can’t win.”
    “I’ll come,” she said, moving as if to pack, then realizing she had no idea what belongings she might have.
    “You need the attendance of the blackcoats,” I said. “For a while anyway. You’re weak.”
    “And still stronger than you,” she quipped, her eyes heavy.
    “And still stronger than me,” I repeated, hoping it was true.
    She wrapped me in her embrace then. The one that was very tight, but not so tight that a brittle-boned man need worry. We touched foreheads. We stayed that way a long time.
    “Thank you,” she finally offered. “For getting me out. I hadn’t remembered until tonight. And Lour . . .”
    “You’re remembering more,” I deduced.
    She found no words about it. I didn’t ask her to try.
    I promised to steal back into the city each moon cycle to visit. I told her she’d get stronger each day. I told her we’d find a way to be together again. They were the right lies to tell. Except for me coming to visit. That wasn’t a lie. That I’d do.
    ~
    I settled north of Aubade Grove a piece. Set to raising corn. My dad had raised corn. I’d been in my new home the better part of a month when the note came. Martin brought it himself. He stood by me while I read it.
    Anna hadn’t suffered the memories well. They’d gotten the better of her. She’d realized she’d never outlast those memories. And she’d found a way to escape. She’d had another moment of clarity—different this time, from when the Velle first touched her.
    “I’m so sorry, Lour,” Martin said. “She was a strong woman.”
    I gave him a puzzled look, even as my heart broke.
    “For my stars, a woman who goes through what she did, then chooses to end her life to escape the memory of it . . . Damn brave. Oh, I wish she were still with us. But don’t you go feeling anything but proud of that gal.”
    I cried. That’s the only way to say it. I cried. She should never have loved me. She’d have been a college savant somewhere, if she hadn’t stayed in the Grove because I was so frail.
    Damn my bones. My sensitive skin. My humped walk.
    You make me laugh , she’d always said.
    And I had survived several run-ins while putting together my argument for the forum, hadn’t I. I remember thinking philosophy was getting dangerous.
    A dangerous philosophy.
    That’s gods-damned right. And that’s exactly what I’d give them.
    I showed Martin a thin look.
    “I like what you’re thinking,” he said, smiling. “Whatever it is.”
    “Meaning you’d like to help?” I replied, folding the note and pocketing it.
    “What you got in mind?” said Martin.
    I looked up over my young crop of corn at a clear sky of stars above. “Did you know Pliny Soray appears to be off ?” I pointed up at the wandering star.
    “That I did.” Martin stroked his thin white beard. “There’s a sharp woman out of the College of Mathematics—Nanjesho Alanes is her name. She might be taking a run at another Succession of Arguments on Continuity. She knows about Pliny Soray. She’s a friend of Scalinou’s.”
    There was a connection in it all, somewhere. I could feel it. Almost like a compass needle turning south in my hand.
    “League’s coming,” I said, still watching Soray. “Not today or tomorrow. But soon. And they hate the ideas about the Bourne and all it stands for.”
    “Ayeah?” Martin said, coaxing.
    Darius had been right. I hadn’t really proved my argument. I’d won. But that wasn’t good enough. Not by a damn jot.
    “I have a proof in mind,” said I. “One that’ll