Chapter 36 The Grey Climbs
The water changed its voice in the dark.
All evening it had been a flood, pushing and muttering against the hull; now it ran thin and tasted of salt, and it lapped at the strakes like something that had smelled the sea-flat far ahead and was leaning toward it.
Elowen sat in the stern with the page at her throat and the thread beneath it, and she counted the water's change, because counting was what you did when you could not sleep.
Cobb rowed. He had rowed since dusk and would row until the east turned grey, and he did it without sound, the oars going into the current and coming out of it in a rhythm he kept without marking.
His tally-cord hung at his wrist, knotted and re-knotted, and once in the dark he took the end of it between his teeth and worked a fresh knot into it one-handed, never shipping the oars.
Elowen did not ask what the knot was for.
He had not asked whose names they carried.
A drowned tree went by in the dark, its branches in the water like fingers spread, and nobody marked it.
Under the oilcloth in the middle of the boat, Seren slept.
The grey had climbed while she slept. Elowen knew it without lifting the cloth, as a keeper knows a column without turning the page: two branches past Idra's line had become three, a thin pale fork lying on the back of the girl's hand, patient, still moving.
A branch a night had been the pace since the island.
Three branches in two nights meant the working was leaning harder, and nobody in the boat said it aloud.
The ferry was a night's row off, and the arithmetic came out leaning, and the lean was toward Seren.
She counted the girl's breaths against the oar-beats, and the totals never matched, and she counted them again. It was the only counting that would not come out right, and she did it anyway, because a breath counted was a breath kept.
The thread at her collar was slack, but the slack carried weight.
All night the give had braced from below against something pushing, and once, near the second hour, the far end flinched — a tremor that ran the length of the rope and was gone before she could read it.
She touched the strand with one finger. It was warm, held, slack but not loose.
The far end held yet. It had held through the island and would hold through this, and she was not going to be the one who let it go.
She priced the strain in the dark. The cracks in his bone were out of sight; what she could feel was the rope taking the weight and holding, and she held her own end unspent, because it was the only coin left to pay with.
Forty-six days to her own name-day, and the count no longer leaned on her name.
It leaned on the sleeping girl, and the only things between the lean and the line were a night's row and a reader she had never met.
She touched her own wrist under the sleeve.
The grey had held there for weeks at three finger-widths past the elbow, frozen, unspent, held in place by a give that had cost the seal a finger's width and the far end a crack.
Hers did not climb. The count had let her name go, and Seren was the price of the letting, and she counted that price every hour and could not pay it back, because there was nothing left to pay with.
The salt had dried white on her collar where the river had been. Seren's breath under the cloth changed, and Elowen's hand was on the oilcloth before she had decided to move it. Seren came up out of sleep all at once, as children wake, and said, "Ellie," as if she had only been gone a moment.
"Here."
"Water."
Elowen passed the skin. Seren drank, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and held that hand up to the dark, turning it, looking.
The moon was behind cloud, and the cloud had the color of water.
There was no seeing by it. She turned the hand anyway, as you check a thing you already know by its feel.
"It grew," Seren said. "It's three now."
"Three," Elowen said.
"Past Idra's line. Three branches. One for every night since the island." She counted on the fingers of her other hand, making the total come out right. "We've been on the water two nights. That's two. This is the third."
"The last greyroot's gone, Ellie." Seren said it plainly, as she said the worst things. "There's nothing left to hold it back. Does the count write the name, or does the harvest?"
Elowen's hand went to the page at her collar before she could stop it. The paper gave off nothing, neither warm nor cold, as it had all day — the quiet of a thing waiting. She took it out and unfolded it in the dark, though there was nothing yet to read by.
"Show me," Seren said.
Elowen held the page toward the first grey line of the east. A little light was coming, and the ink came up out of the paper like old bruises: the column of names, her own half-erased above, the grave beneath it half-closed, and at the foot, fresh and black, Nessa's name.
Below Nessa's name, a line that was blank.
Seren looked at it a long time. "That's mine," she said. The ink had told her, or the blankness had; she did not say which. "The line's been waiting since the island. Nessa's name went in ahead of me." She looked up. "Does it hurt, when the name goes in?"
Elowen folded the page and put it back beneath her collar. "I don't know."
"Good," Seren said. "If it hurt, you'd know the answer.
So it's not written yet." She lay back down under the cloth, and Elowen sat in the stern and watched the east for a long while, turning the one arithmetic that mattered over in her hands.
The only way to keep a name off a page was to cross it out, and crossing out had a price, and she had not priced it yet.
In the last dark before dawn, the thread did it again.
A pull came up out of the far end with a shape to it, like something taking hold of the rope and hauling, and Elowen's working rose in her without being called, the void answering the pull the way a hand answers a hand.
She held it, shaped it, and drew it back before it could spend.
The cost of spending was written in the rope: the far end would take the heavier half, and the cracks would take the load, and Seren would still be dying.
She sat in the stern with the working drawn back into her, unspent, and let it go, and the thread settled to slack, held, and neither end had let go.
Then the light came up grey behind the reeds, and the river opened like a door, and the water spread wide and shallow, standing in long pale sheets between hummocks of salt reed, and the smell of it was iron and cut grass and the sea beyond.
A long way off, a column of smoke stood straight up out of the reeds, thin and deliberate, a fire someone was keeping.
Between them and the smoke, the ferry landing was a dark scar of pilings against the pale water.
On a mud-bank near the channel, two gulls stood and preened, one lifting a wing, and neither of them looked at the boat. The boat went past, and they went on preening, and the morning was only the morning.
"Mud takes the keel past the reeds," Cobb said, and shipped the oars. "We walk the flats from here."
Aldric woke when the light came. He looked at the smoke a while. "A fire that burns past dawn is a fire that wants to be seen. Either it's the reader's, or it's the watch's." He watched it, and the boat drifted. "The writ runs on this bank. It ends where the water gets thin enough to wade."
"The field's on the other side," Elowen said.
"The field's on the other side," Aldric agreed, and said no more, and that was the whole of the risk set out in two sentences.
The current carried them on toward the pilings, slow now, the keel beginning to find the mud. The smoke stood over the reeds, straight and patient.
Seren had come up from the cloth and sat in the bow, her hands in her lap, fingers laced together over the grey, hiding it as she had hidden it from Idra. She looked at the landing a long time, and the smoke.
"If the reader asks for a name," she said, "she can have mine. It's going on the page anyway."
"Not yet," Elowen said.
"Not yet," Seren repeated, the way you file a thing away, and then, without turning around: "Ellie. Will the count take me before we reach the field?"
Elowen looked at the smoke. The page at her throat gave nothing. The thread beneath it was slack and held, and at the far end of the rope, where she could not see, the hold answered back. The boat drifted on toward the pilings, and the smoke stood over the reeds, and she did not answer.