Chapter 12 Greyroot
The grey had climbed in the night.
Seren sat on a frost-bent stump with her sleeve pushed up, and the charcoal line Idra had drawn sat a finger's width below the grey's new edge. Paper-dry skin. No blood under it. The greyroot had held the old mark all of yesterday. It had not held through the night.
Elowen pushed her own sleeve up without meaning to. Her grey stopped three finger-widths past the elbow, where it had stopped the day she bound herself, and it had not moved since. She read the two arms side by side and did not sum the difference, because the sum was a column she already knew.
She gave Seren a greyroot at first light, and Seren chewed it twice, made a face, swallowed.
Then she counted what was left. Six roots in the pouch.
Idra had wrapped them in waxed paper, and the paper carried old words in a hand Elowen could almost read, road words, and she kept the paper folded in the pouch because it looked like a promise.
One root for each morning, and the road to Vael ran longer than six mornings, and the grey had climbed anyway, which made the sum come out wrong no matter how she did the arithmetic.
Fifty days to her name-day. She had stopped saying the number aloud, because saying it made it a column with a total, and totals were for things already finished.
She did not reach for the void. She felt the books open behind her eyes, the sixth crack joined to the fifth, the longer break, and she closed them without asking.
Every spend opened a crack in his bone. The grey was Seren's, and the cost was his, and she had priced that trade once in the hiding behind the hearth, and she would not price it again while the roots held.
"Does it hurt?" Seren asked.
"No."
"It's warm. The grey part."
"It's dying," Elowen said. "It doesn't feel."
Seren pushed the sleeve down over the wrist, turned her own hand over, looked at it. Then she let it go. "We should walk."
They walked. The road ran north between flat fields gone to frost, and their clothes still smelled of the river, mud and reeds and the flat cold of the water road, a smell that would wear off before Vael and that she was not sorry to lose.
The river kept no names, but it also kept no company, and the road held both, and she was learning which one weighed more.
Her wrist read the thread without her asking.
Taut. He was holding the far end, the heavier half of every price carried before the asking, and she had checked four times since dawn and told herself each time that she was checking the account.
Four times was a column she did not want to look at, so she looked at the road instead.
They passed a farm where a woman stood at the gate with a bucket, watching the road as if it owed her something. She did not wave, and Elowen did not wave back, and the farm slid behind them without comment.
Half a mile on, the strap on Seren's satchel gave out at the buckle.
Elowen sat her on the bank of a frozen ditch and worked the broken end free, stitching it with gut, a knot like the ones Etta used behind the mill's water door.
Seren held the satchel steady and watched the work.
Somewhere behind a stand of willows a dog barked twice and stopped, and the silence after was worse than the barking had been.
"Idra said the greyroot slows it," Seren said. "Not stops it."
"Yes."
"So it will climb again."
"Yes."
"Then what?"
Elowen pulled the last stitch tight and bit the gut off. "Then we walk faster."
Seren laughed, a small dry sound that turned into the cough from Northwater, the one Idra said would outlast the winter. Elowen helped her up, and they walked.
The thread was taut when she checked it next, and she had meant to check the road.
She let her hand fall and walked on. The tautness stayed with her, steady.
She had not asked for it. He held it anyway, and the cost stood open between them, and there was no column in her sums that would hold that, so she stopped summing it.
They came on the shrine at the hour the shadows began to lean.
A niche of river stone at a crossroads, a sun-disc carved grey with frost, a light-glass behind which a candle had burned down to a stub.
A preacher stood at the shrine in a grey robe with a slate in his hand, and on the slate a column of chalk strokes, and he was counting.
He counted the faithful. Two men in fisher's wool knelt at the shrine, rose, went on, and the preacher made two strokes. His voice was hoarse from doing it all day, and the strokes ran down the slate in neat fives.
Elowen stopped because stopping was the road's custom and the road had eyes. She pulled Seren in close under her arm so the grey wrist stayed inside the sleeve, bowed at the shrine with her collar closed, and felt the page lie flat against her collarbone under the wool.
The chalk paused. He looked at Seren a long moment. Elowen shifted half a step, enough to put her own shoulder in the line of the looking.
"The child is pale," the preacher said.
"The road is hard on her," Elowen said. "We're for the farms past the ford."
He made a stroke. One for them, anonymous as grain. "The light counts its own," he said. "It does not need your names."
She bowed again, because a stroke on a slate was cheaper than a name in a ledger, and she took Seren on down the road.
"That's not your name," Seren said, when the shrine was a stone at their backs. "And we're not for the farms."
"The lamp asks no names," Elowen said. "The road does not."
"Then the road is worse than the lamp."
"Everything is," Elowen said, and Seren laughed, and the laugh did not turn into the cough this time, which Elowen filed under the day's small gains.
The wagons came on them at the low light, when the frost was thinking about coming back.
Three of them, canvas-covered, iron-rimmed wheels grinding the gravel, and each one so slow it seemed to be moving out of duty rather than intent.
The drivers wore grey, shut-faced, and no one walked beside the wagons and no one rode behind them, and the road gave them room without anyone deciding to give it.
The smell came first. Sickness under wet wool, and something older, paper-dry, the smell of the last room at Wrenth Manor, the one nobody opened anymore.
The page against her throat turned warm.
She felt it and put her hand to her collar, and the paper was warm under the wool, warm as if it had been held over a candle. She had worn the page through the day and the night, and it had lain cold as the gravel. Now it was warm, and it was not her skin warming it.
The first wagon drew level. Under the canvas, no sound. The dying who were far enough gone did not call out; she knew that from the last room, and she knew it again here.
A hand slid out between the lashings of the second wagon. Small. Grey. The fingers did not move; they just hung over the wheel, and the skin was the skin she had measured on Seren's wrist that morning, a finger's width gone wrong.
She did not look away. They were her father's people and her mother's people and every grave on the Wrenth hill, and looking away was the one column she had never kept.
The third wagon passed. The warmth stayed at her throat, steady now, banked. Once, from the first wagon, a sound like a hand against wood, soft, as if asking to be let out. It did not come again.
Seren stood very still, watching the wagons go. "What was in them?" she asked.
"The dying," Elowen said. "Gathered."
"Why?"
Elowen asked the last driver where they were bound. The man looked at her a long moment and said nothing, and the wagon rolled on.
She looked at the road where the wheel-ruts ran north. "I don't know yet."
That was the truth, and it sat worse than the wagons.
The last wagon took the bend. The hand was gone, pulled back under the canvas or fallen, and the road was empty of everything but the wheel-ruts and the frost coming down.
Vael was at the end of this road, and Aldric in a cell there, and the page in her collar was the only answer she had for what the wagons carried.
She touched her collar. The page was still warm.
The thread was taut at her wrist. He was holding.
She counted the days. Forty-nine now. She counted the roots without taking them out. Six. She counted the names on the page from memory, forty-one against forty-two graves, and the sum came out one short, and for the first time she was not sure which side of the count the wagons belonged to.
She walked on after them, and the warmth stayed.