CHAPTER TWO
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SEREN
“Seren. Shut that, would you, the stove’s giving up on me.” Rhodry said my name down into the tally-shed desk without looking up.
He was stooped over the season book with his shoulders up near his ears, because that book is chained to the desk and the chain is short, and nineteen years of kennel masters have bent themselves down to it.
I pushed the door to and left it off the latch by the width of a hand.
The frost was still on my shoulders. Past the doorway the yard lay emptied out, the gate chain paid out and locked, our one bar of tallow light lying across the frozen ruts.
The cart had gone at the seventh bell with Bel in it. His place beside the stove was empty. I kept setting my heel away from it, making room for his bad leg.
“That’s not shut,” Rhodry said.
“It’s a hand’s width.”
“A hand’s width of the north is the whole north, girl.”
“Then you’d have the door shut and the tallow in your throat,” I said, “and you’d blame the door for that as well.”
“I could shift the desk nearer the stove and have the both of them,” Rhodry said.
“The desk is chained to the floor.”
“So am I,” I said. “They’ve had me up and down this yard since I was nine.”
Rhodry laughed before he had decided to, and then he put it away where he keeps things.
He let it go, the way he lets me have the small things.
The shed runs twelve feet by twenty and the ceiling comes down to six and a half. One lamp stands on the desk, and everything past four feet of it is guesswork.
Tallow and iron filings, and soot sitting on the back of my tongue. One slate in the stove ticked as it cooled.
I came along the wall to the desk, the way I come into any room, and set my hands on the lip of it. Sleeves have polished it slick as wet stone.
“Read me my own line.”
“It’s the same line it’s always been. There’s nothing in it.”
“Read it.” I set two fingers under the front of my collar and pulled half an inch of air under it. “Out loud, off the leaf.”
Rhodry wiped the pen on the heel of his thumb and did not straighten up.
I have counted the shape of my own line off that page every season of my life, the way a woman counts stairs in the dark.
“Vale, Seren,” he said, and his finger went along under it. “Half-blood. Held. Collared in her ninth winter. Then the seasons after it.”
“The marks.”
“The marks are the annual certifications. One a season. That’s my hand on it and the Warden’s under mine.”
“Count them out loud,” I said, and I kept my eyes on his hand and not on the page.
He counted them out loud, in the voice he keeps for the Warden’s men, and the count came to nineteen.
“Now the next column over.”
Rhodry’s thumb stopped on the page.
“That one’s the smith’s witness to the re-forging,” he said. “Every iron collar in this yard comes off a throat once a year and goes on the yard smith’s bench. Fresh metal, fresh seam. A collar nobody re-forges goes thin, and then it goes sharp.”
“Read me the marks in it.”
“There’s nothing in it.”
“I know there’s nothing in it.” I put my hand flat on the leaf so he could not turn it. “I’ve had my eye on that column since I was eleven years old and I’ve never seen ink in it once. Read it to me anyway.”
He did not read it to me.
I turned the book as far as the chain would allow and ran my finger down the two columns.
Nineteen marks in the first. In the second, the whole length of my life, and the paper under my finger as clean as the day the lines were ruled.
Bel’s line carried nineteen in one and nineteen in the other. So did the line above his, and the one under it, and every line on that leaf.
“So your signing says the work was done. And the smith’s column says no smith did it.”
Rhodry’s finger lay across the empty line. He did not move it.
“Nineteen marks in one column and nothing at all in the next one,” I said. “Who’s been paying for that?”
Something went hot under my sternum and would not sit back down.
“What is this thing on my neck?” My voice had dropped. “Somebody put it there. Somebody knows. Was it a smith, Rhodry? Was it anyone you can give a name to?”
Rhodry came up off the book as far as the chain let him and wiped both hands down his coat, though he had not touched anything wet.
“The butt’s iced over again,” he said. “Break it before it splits. Go on. Break it.”
“Rhodry.”
“Go on,” he said, and he turned the leaf over, and he would not let me put my hand back on the desk.
I went out and broke it with the flat of the axe, and the cold came up my sleeves, and I stood in the yard afterward with my wet hands hanging and looked at the one bar of light coming out of that door.
He had signed the leaf by the time I came back in. He was blowing on the ink in short breaths and not looking at me.
That is his whole answer to anything. A signature and a task.
“You’ll leave that leash where it is tonight,” Rhodry said. “On the Warden’s belt. You won’t go asking him for it back. That’s decided. You had no say in it and I had none either.”
“I don’t ask any of you for anything. I never have.”
“I know it. I’ve watched you not do it for nineteen years and it’s the worst habit in this yard.”
“Then don’t tell me not to.” I took my hands off his desk. “Sign your leaf.”
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The door came in off the frost hard enough to pull the lamp flame down to a bead, and the cold walked in ahead of the man. Rhodry pulled the season book in under his forearm.
“Four hundred miles on the Council’s relay, three borrowed seals, and the first thing this place gives me is a shut door. Turn round. Toward the lamp. I want your face.”
He could borrow a place on that road while he traveled alone under a clerk’s name. A Warden, an army, a woman named in a writ—those the relay recognized, and kept off.
Corvin Ash put two fingers on the door frame as he came through it, the way he does every doorway I have ever watched him use.
He did not seem to cross the room. He was inside it, and I was no longer near the door.
Coat wet through at the shoulders. Black eyes with no edge to them in that light. Ink under his nails, black down to the quick, because Corvin keeps his own ledgers.
He took me by the wrist and turned me into the lamp.
The hand was hot. My pulse went down low into my belly and did not ask me first, and my nipples tightened under my shirt in a room cold enough to stiffen wet wool.
I had let a man I had not seen since spring hold my arm up into the light and read my face like a page, and I had not pulled against him once. I hated how much I liked it.
He held it a beat past the reason for it. So did I.
“You’ve got a hand on me,” I said.
“I have. It’s a very good hand and you’ll want it in a minute.”
Corvin let go first. He kept talking while he did it.
“You’ve not slept, you’ve been crying in the last three hours and you’ve stopped, and there’s a cart-track in the ruts out there that goes south and doesn’t come back.” He rubbed at the ink on his thumb. “Where’s your leash?”
“The Warden’s belt.”
“Good. That’s the only good thing between here and the Shelf.”
“It’s a strap,” I said.
“It’s a strap with a Warden on the end of it.” Corvin sat himself on the edge of the desk, which is where he sits, never in a chair. “Why do you think they let a collared tracker walk this fortress from the gate to the tower with nobody’s fist in her hair?”
He answered it himself before I had my mouth open.
“Because a nose kept in a cell goes blind. You’re worth nothing to anybody shut in a box. So the leash laws let you range, they hang the strap on a man with a rank, and if you’re ever somewhere you shouldn’t be, it isn’t you they take it out of. That’s not mercy. It’s book-keeping.”
“And the paper,” I said. “The one they read at the wall. What is that, when it’s lying on a table?”
“A writ’s paper. Paper wants a body, a body wants a hand to come and fetch it, and till the hand comes you’re the Warden’s trouble and not theirs. That’s the whole law. You’re owned by a document, and the document is patient.”
Rhodry had gone very quiet.
“There were two of them in that satchel,” I said.
“There were.”
“How do you know what’s in the second one?”
“Pell.” Corvin looked at his own nails while he said it. “His name’s Pell, he’s a clerk in the Vaeloth registry, he writes on his own cuff like a drover, he’s mine, and I’m not sorry about one part of that.”
“You’ve bought a man in the Council’s own house,” Rhodry said.
“I’ve bought four. Pell’s the one who sits nearest the door.”
“And if they find him?”
“Then I’ve a gap and a dead clerk, and I’d rather have neither.” He said it the way another man says the road was wet. “Ask me the thing you’re actually chewing on, Seren. You’ve been chewing on it since I came through that door.”
“The Court’s glass has never lit on me.” My voice went exact.
“They put me under it after I came here at nine and it sat there like a dish of water. Every year since. Nothing in it. So there’s no bond on me they can name, and no gift they can name, and I’m a half-blood with a nose and nothing else on the roll. ”
His hands stopped moving. The mouth did not.
“They don’t file off a glass. They file off a roll. You went into the Cold Harrow quota book at nine and everything since is paperwork agreeing with paperwork.”
“That’s before the collar.”
“Before you reached Ravensgate. Same winter, different entry.” His thumb stopped at the side of his nail. “Somebody keeps copying the old description instead of asking why it no longer matches the woman.”
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“Is it a big bird?” I said. Corvin was on the edge of the desk with his coat steaming.
Corvin stopped with his mouth open, which is a thing I have seen three times.
“You flew here?”
“I rode. Flying’s for—it isn’t the point, and it’s not a small bird, and I’d thank you to—”
“It’s a raven.”
“It’s a—” he said, and his hand came up to his own coat front.
“It’s a bird that eats what’s finished.” I did not let him have the rest of it. “I’ve had you at four miles downwind, and it’s not a smell I’d choose to wear.”
Rhodry made a sound over the book and swallowed it.
“Sit down, the pair of you,” he said. “I’d sit down myself, only these knees retired sixty years back and nobody’s had the heart to tell the rest of me.”
Nobody sat. There was a writ coming to that desk and the old man was doing his knees, and it was worse than crying would have been.
“Where’s the cart taking him?” I said.
“Vaeloth.”
“And after.” I did not move off the boards. “The part you rode here with.”
“After, they sever the bond out of him.” Corvin did not look away, and he did not slow down. “Then they send him home. That’s the mercy they’ll put their own name to. He’ll come off a cart at Marrow on his two feet with his own face on him.”
“So he’ll be alive.”
“He’ll be alive. You want me to lie about the rest of it and I won’t.”
I put my thumb across my ruined knuckles and ran it back, and once again.
“Finish it.”
“He’ll know your name and he won’t know why it matters to him.” Corvin looked at the lamp for that one. “He’ll be pleasant with you. That’s the part nobody warns anybody about, and it’s why I came north instead of writing.”
Rhodry sat down. The stool took him badly and he made a noise out of the chest.
“I kept you off it,” he said. “Sixty years in this yard, girl, and whatever else I never did, I kept you off it.”
He meant it as love and I heard it as love.
Underneath it I was thinking something I have never said out loud: that a man who keeps you is keeping you from something he has never told me, and something in me wanted him broken open in that shed, in front of Corvin, where he could not have it back.
I did not ask him. I have never asked him.
Corvin took a folded sheet out of his coat and laid it on the desk, under the lamp, beside the chained book.
“Copy of the second one. Word for word, off Pell’s cuff, and he was three hours getting it.”
He put one finger on the page and read it out in a voice with nothing in it at all.
“Held at Ravensgate. Half-blood. Tracker. Ninth winter, Cold Harrow quota.”
“That’s—” My chin came up and my breath went in deep and stopped there, full of tallow and cold iron.
“It’s your name on the second one, Seren. That’s what I rode four hundred miles to put in front of you. You’re mine to keep breathing from tonight, and I wasn’t asking. Now sit down.”
One man in that room was eleven hundred winters old. The other had kept these kennels for sixty, and the pair of them were watching my throat and not my face.
“No.”
I wanted to know what is on my neck. Nineteen signings, not one re-forging, and no smith with a name. And I wanted my own name struck off the Cold Harrow roll. If I didn’t get both, I would come off a cart one day on my own two feet, and know Rhodry’s name, and not know why it mattered.
The stove-slate ticked twice while it cooled, and I stood in the dish worn into the boards in front of that desk, and I did not sit down.