CHAPTER TEN
?
SEREN
The Winter Gate chain ran out over its drum behind me, paying off in one long grinding note, and I was four steps onto the flags when Nettle shouted my name across ninety feet of frozen yard.
“Seren. Seren Vale.” She had both heels going against the tally post, drumming. “You’re back and you’ve been gone since Saturday and nobody fed the brown one right.”
“Nobody ever does.”
“I told Rhodry that. He said mind your own.” She came off the rail and landed flat on ground hard enough to turn an ankle. Then she walked backward in front of me the whole way down the yard, which is a thing a person can do at twelve and at no other age.
Half a day north on the Warden’s relay. Sixty miles of hard road and lying snow, and the sky scoured clean from ridge to ridge, and the cold doubling as soon as the light came off the drifts.
The wheel-ruts stood proud like iron ridges. Frost in the mouth tastes of nothing and clears everything else out, and I took a long pull of it and read the yard the way I would read a bank of scrub.
The measuring frame was up on trestles by the water butt.
Two stools. A wax slate on a board. Somebody had broken an inch of ice out of the butt and left the plate of it leaning against the staves. Feed sacks stacked six high, and the stack was wrong, shifted to make a lane.
“Give it here, then,” Nettle said.
She had gone straight across to Vaughn without slowing, palm up and flat, the way she asks for everything instead of asking.
Vaughn Ironmere looked down at the hand. He did not move otherwise.
“It’s a knife,” he said.
“I know what it is.”
Somebody by the feed sacks made a noise into his sleeve.
Corvin Ash laughed outright, from the rail he was sitting on, and did not stop laughing for some while.
Vaughn took the small knife off his belt and put it in her palm, handle first, and the yard enjoyed that more than it enjoyed anything all week.
“You’ll have that off her by supper,” Corvin said.
“She’ll keep it.”
“He means she’ll keep it,” Corvin said to nobody. “Nine words all evening and four of them spent on cutlery.”
I went along the tally post with my shoulder to it. The notches are countable at arm’s length if you have ever had to count them. There was a fresh one, cut white and clean, with the resin still bright in the cut.
Ilyan Frost came out of the smithy door with his sleeves down and stood where he could see the frame.
“That frame’s been up since noon and they’ve had eleven through it,” I said. “They came in from the south road, not the gate road, and they didn’t want anybody counting.”
“Eleven,” Corvin said. “Eleven. And how would you know the south road?”
“Their boots. There’s no gravel in the yard and there’s gravel on the south road for a mile and a half.”
“Gravel on the south road,” Corvin said. “She looks at a man’s boots for a quarter of a second and tells you which gate he didn’t use, and I’ve got a clerk in Vaeloth I pay in silver who couldn’t manage that with a week and a map.”
“She’s right,” Ilyan said. “She’s always right. It’s tiresome.”
“It’s the only thing I’m good at.”
“It isn’t,” Ilyan said, and left it there.
The senior clerk had the caliper out by then. Brass, two arms, a screw. He wore Council black under a good coat and he had the face of a man who wanted his supper and had one more to get through.
“Nettle,” he said, off the slate. “Come up, please.”
Rhodry got there before she did, with his hands out and his shoulders around his ears.
“She’s twelve years old. She’s not on any roll of mine and she’s not been entered in the book.”
“She’s on this one,” Ammon said.
He turned it to Rhodry. He did not turn it to her.
That was a kindness. It is the worst thing I watched anybody do all evening.
“It’s the quota, master. It came down with the winter roll and it came down to me the same as it came down to you. I don’t write them and I don’t choose them. I measure what I’m sent to measure and I go home.”
Rhodry put his hand flat on the trestle. “You could put her at the bottom.”
“She is at the bottom. That’s what the bottom is, and nobody asks the bottom of a roll what it wants.”
“Then don’t measure her tonight—”
“Then I’d have to come back tomorrow,” Ammon said, “and that’s a second trip out here for both of us.”
She looked at me. I did not move.
“Hold your chin up, girl. It’s a measure, not a fitting.”
He had said come up, please, off a slate that had her name on it before she got there, and please is not a question when the name is written down first.
The second clerk put the back of his pen under her chin and moved it to where he wanted it.
She held her chin up.
The brass went round her throat and closed, and she took a breath in through her nose when it touched her, because it had been lying on a trestle in that yard since noon and it was as cold as the trestle.
Something went through the front of my own throat, low down, a squeeze under the collar that had nothing to do with the collar, and the hand was up on the metal before the thought reached it. I got it down. Forty people in the yard and none of them looking at me.
“Ammon,” the second clerk said, pen ready.
“Nine and a quarter,” Ammon said.
The second clerk wrote it on the wax and said nothing, and had said nothing since the south road, and would say nothing after.
Nobody was cruel. That is what I want set down. Two full-blood fae in good coats did a piece of paperwork in a fortress yard in the cold, politely, and one of them said thank you to a twelve-year-old, and then they packed the frame.
?
“Thirty-five days left on it,” Rhodry said. He had come up on my off side in the yard while the trestles were coming down, and he was talking about my Writ of Severance, and nobody had asked him.
“I know what’s left on it.”
“They read it out at the muster and then it goes in the book and the book’s on the chain, and if a clerk wants it he has to come to me and stoop for it.” Rhodry’s hands were going. “That’s the procedure. That’s always been the procedure.”
“Rhodry.”
“Keep your head down, love. Let them finish and go.”
“They’ve finished.”
“Then let them go.” He got his breath. “Word came down from Hollow Ash about you and a glass. I’ve not been so glad of a bit of paper in my life and I’ve not asked a single question about it.”
That is Rhodry. He will put a hand between me and a door and be proud of it, and never look at what is on the other side. I have let him be proud of it for nineteen years, because a man who believes he saved me goes on doing it.
Vaughn was ten feet off with his back to the gate. He laid two fingers against the leash at his belt, my leash, and left them there, and Rhodry saw him do it and stopped talking. It says whose I am, and the man who raised me went quiet.
Corvin arrived at my elbow with bread and cold mutton on a board. He did not ask. He put it in my hands and my hands took it, which is the way most things have arrived in my life.
I ate standing.
Corvin ate standing too, at my shoulder, his shoulder against mine, at the same speed, and he talked the entire time.
“Eat. Keep eating. I’ll talk and you eat and this whole yard can watch me instead.”
And they did. He told the yard about a raven he insists he is not vain about, and about a clerk who once tried to tax a sack of wet feathers, and about the state of the Ravensgate collar-tally, which he has had his nose in since Saturday. He built every sentence in threes and never took a breath.
He does not mention doing it. I have never mentioned noticing.
Then he said, without changing his voice at all, “A roll’s a list, and a list has a bottom, and they don’t put a child on the bottom of it unless they’ve already decided there’s a space opening at the top.”
The mutton went dry in my mouth.
“You mean me.”
“I mean you. I’m not going to dress it up. I’ve never dressed anything up for you and I’m not starting in a yard.”
“You could start in a yard.”
“I could,” he agreed. “I’ve a gift for it. Ask anyone—”
“How long’s the roll?”
“Two hundred and six names at the last count, and it’s been two hundred and six since I’ve been reading it, which is the part that ought to frighten you.
It doesn’t get longer. It doesn’t get shorter.
They keep the number and they change the names in it, and somebody has been keeping that northern district total tidy for a very long time. ”
“Eat,” I said.
“I’m eating. Watch me eat. I’m a marvel at it.”
“And your system found this in what, a fortnight?” Ilyan said.
“My system,” said Corvin, “found it in three sittings, which for a man with my—”
“It isn’t a system. It’s a coat with paper in it.”
“It’s a coat,” Corvin said, “with eleven hundred years of paper in it.”
“She shouldn’t be out here at all,” Rhodry said. “Not with them still inside the wall. She should be in the kennel with the door shut.”
“She should be in the tower,” Corvin said.
“She should be where she can see the gate,” Ilyan said.
“I’m standing right here, all three of you.”
Corvin put his hands up. Ilyan’s mouth moved.
“She stays in the yard,” Vaughn said. “She stays where I can see her.”
Which ended it, and which was wrong, and no one told him so.
I went back to the bread. Ilyan came along the rail and stopped a pace off, and stood looking at the struck frame and the board with the wax slate on it, and then at me looking at them.
He put the back of his hand against my jaw, below the line of it, the way he does before he says anything to anybody. He did not ask. None of them ask, and I stopped hearing it years ago.
He did not say anything.
“And your hand’s been on that collar since they opened the caliper. Is it the cold?”
“It’s cold.”
“It is,” he agreed, and took his hand away.
“I can smell every living thing inside this wall,” I said. “I’ve never been able to smell you.”
Ilyan looked at the frame for a while.
“No,” he said.
?
The clerks went out through the Winter Gate before the brazier was lit, and the chain ran out over its drum for them the way it had run out for me. Vaughn stayed in the yard with it.
Ilyan stayed with Vaughn, a pace off his shoulder, and the pair of them stood there in the dark outside the shed door like two posts somebody had set.
The tally shed’s oak boards in front of the desk are worn into a dish by nineteen years of men standing where I was standing.
One lamp. Rhodry stooped over the season book. He has stood like that every winter of my life and he has never once said the chain is short. He says the desk is low.
“Brown one’s fed,” Nettle said from the door frame. “I did it myself. You want to know how much?”
“Go on.”
“Two scoops and the wet, and I put the wet in first this time, and he didn’t go for my hand.”
She had Vaughn’s knife out and was turning it over in the lamplight while she said it.
“That’s because you put the wet in first.”
“That’s what I said.”
Corvin came in behind her with the cold on his coat and two fingers off the door frame, and went and sat on the corner of the desk, because in eleven hundred years nobody has taught him what a chair is.
The blank was on the desk.
Cut that evening, to that measurement, seam still open along the front, the two ends of it standing a finger apart. Small. That was the thing about it. It was very small.
I picked it up.
It was warm in my hand, the way metal is warm when it has been worked and set down, and I turned it over twice and did not say anything about that and neither did anyone else.
Thirty-nine trackers slept inside this wall now. I had hunted with most of them. Standing there with a child’s collar open in my fingers, I thought of the space Bel had left, and of a clerk entering Nettle beneath it as though a person were a missing peg.
I set the blank on the desk instead of handing it to Nettle. Her knife lay across her palm. For a moment I wanted to use it on the book.
“What’s that for, then?” Nettle said.
Corvin’s hands stopped. Rhodry looked at the season book, and the season book had nothing in it about this.
“Nettle,” I said.
“I asked what it’s for.”
Nobody wanted it. Corvin opened his mouth and shut it, and I have never in my life seen him do that.
“They’re not fitting it tonight,” Rhodry said. “They cut it to fit and they hang it on a nail, and they tell you there’s time.”
I had been nine when they told my mother that.