CHAPTER SIXTEEN
?
SEREN
We left Hollow Ash before dawn on Saturday, ten days after the Writ was served. Cold Harrow kept the oldest copy of my entry; Corvin meant to put it beside the new one. Sixty miles north of us Rhodry had Nettle. South lay the village that had sold me, and then the road to Bel.
Corvin Ash reined up beside me at the mouth of the shale cut, the drovers’ cairn of stacked plate at his knee, and said my name into the first clear dawn we had had on the Salt Road.
“Seren. Ride second and stay on the outside—this thing’s a fourteen-foot road with thirty-foot walls and I hate the arithmetic.”
“You’ve been in worse.”
“I’ve been in worse. I had sky over me in the worse ones.” Corvin worked the rein through his fingers while he said it. The ink under his nails had gone blue-black with the cold.
Six in the morning. The rain had quit two days ago and the freeze came in overnight, and the road was set hard as a flagged floor.
Clear over the rim, and it would not stay clear.
Vaughn Ironmere put his black into the mouth of the cut without a word about any of it. The shale plate rang under the gelding, one flat note and then a run of them, like slates dropped off a roof onto more slates.
Ilyan Frost came last and left the drovers’ gate standing open behind him, the way he leaves every door in the world open behind him.
Wet stone and rust. The rust came down the west wall in long bleeds and sat at the back of my throat, iron and cold.
I went second, outside, where I could see both ends of a thing at once.
“Warden.” Corvin had his chin up at the rim. “If there’s a man up there with a bow, I’d like it noted that I said so at the gate.”
“Noted,” Vaughn said.
“He noted it.” Corvin was delighted. “That’s practically a speech. That’s a whole word out of a man who once rode from the Rimewood to Cold Harrow without spending any.”
“There’s nobody on that rim,” I said. “Nothing’s crossed it since the rain but a fox, and he came and went on his own.”
“That’s the most comforting thing anybody’s told me since Hollow Ash, and I’ve decided to distrust it.”
At the third milestone I got down.
The stone was cut with a wedge mark and no numerals, which is drovers’ work, and the frost at the foot of it had held everything that crossed.
I put my palm flat on the plate and my face close. The shale sliced the heel of my right hand somewhere in there, the way it does, and I felt it later.
Hounds.
“Six hounds. Council meat, Council kennels. They went south through here before the freeze.”
Vaughn came down off his horse in one piece, the way he does everything, and stood over the mark.
“How far ahead of us?”
“Nine miles. Ten. They’re moving at a walk on a long lead and there’s two men on foot with them.
” I pulled the collar forward off my throat with one finger and the frost went in after it.
“Council kennels feed on Council meat and it comes out of a hound different. It’s the one thing about that place I’ve never had to guess at. ”
“Before the freeze,” Corvin said. “Before the freeze. Before we left.”
“Before we left.”
Corvin let that sit in the cold.
“The Council walked six hounds south down a Court road while Sarn was in our hall having wine poured into him.”
“That’s the shape of it,” I said.
“That’s the shape of a man at one of those tables writing to a man at the other one.”
Nobody answered that.
Ilyan looked down the empty mile of the cut and then back the way we had come, and offered no reason.
Vaughn’s hand went still on the rein and stayed there, and I had learned to watch that hand in three years of riding beside him.
“Warden,” Corvin said. “Say something ugly. Anything at all.”
“Ride on.”
We rode on.
I got my mare’s head around and put my eyes on Ilyan’s saddle roll, because I have ridden behind it since I was twenty-six and it was wrong.
Short by a hand. Light on the near side. It rode up off the cantle instead of dragging it down.
“Your roll’s short.”
“It is,” Ilyan said.
“It’s short by the one thing in it that weighed anything, and it’s been riding wrong since the gate, and I’ve had that shape in front of me on this road for years.”
“You have, at that.”
“The hammer’s on the anvil at Hollow Ash,” Ilyan said. “Its core split. It won’t hold heat any more.” He squared his stirrup leather to the girth and kept his eyes on it.
I had seen him wrap that hammer before every journey. A smith could replace a handle. Whatever had split in this one was not wood.
The cold came up under the collar at the back of my neck, the back edge pulling at the hair there, and I had my shoulders around my ears before I knew it.
Ilyan brought his horse in on my left. The coat came off him and went over me, and he had it settled before I had my mouth open. He did not offer it. Nothing has been offered to me in nineteen years, and I have stopped keeping the list.
It smelled of the forge. It smells of the forge in high summer, in rain, on the fourth day out from anywhere.
He rode on ahead half a length and never looked back at me.
Corvin saw it and, for once in eleven hundred winters, said nothing.
?
A Warden’s-relay rider came up behind us at the narrow and shouted for the road, and Vaughn put us against the west wall.
“Ravensgate,” the rider said, hauling his gelding around in a circle. “For the tracker. Kennel master’s hand.”
He put the fold of paper into my glove and was gone south before I had it open.
I handed the folded page to Corvin. He read it aloud, twice, the second time without putting a joke between the lines. Then he gave it back.
“He says she’s safe with him.”
“That’s a good thing,” Corvin said, watching my face.
“He says he’s taken her off the yard and put her in the loft over the tack room and that I’m not to worry.”
“Also good, and I notice what you heard in it.”
“He’s written it on the back of a feed order and sent it on a Warden’s relay with my name on the outside, in the week the Council’s counting collars.” I folded it into the breast of Ilyan’s coat. “Six hands read a relay bag before it gets where it’s going.”
Corvin said nothing for a moment. “He’s put her where you’d look for her.”
“He’s put her where anybody would look for her. He’s been keeping me safe like that since I was nine and it has never worked once.”
“What would you have had him do instead?”
“Put her on a wool cart under a false name and let me hear about it in a year.” I got my glove back on. “He’d never do it. He loves her and he’s slow, and in a kennel those are the same failing.”
Corvin dropped back and rode at my knee with a heel of bread out of his glove, talking with his mouth full.
“The lords asked for you again on Thursday and he hasn’t answered a raven out of that hall in two days, and I’d tell you what that means if I had the first idea.”
I took the half he was holding out and ate it standing in the stirrups.
“You always have an idea.”
“I always have an idea. It’s rarely the first one.”
“It’s never the true one.”
“That’s slander.” He was pleased about it. “That’s slander, and you’ll notice I’m not denying it. I’ll have the truth of it by Marrow and I’ll sell it to you.”
“I’ll settle in bread.”
“It’s my bread.”
Four words in the middle of it and he was laughing, and behind us Ilyan made a sound that in another man would have been a laugh.
Vaughn rode the outside of my mare the whole length of that mile.
He did not look at me. He watched everything within nine feet of me and never at me, and he held it for an hour.
The leash rode on his belt, black, doubled twice, the brass keeper knocking at every stride, and I had it in the bottom of my eye all morning. He has never taken it off to spare me the sight of it. It says whose I am on a Council road and he means it to.
Then the mare’s off hind found loose plate and went out from under her.
I was three-quarters gone and turning when his hand shut on my elbow. He had me up and square before she had her feet back. He moved me and there was no asking in it, and something went through my cunt like a fist closing, and he let go of me so fast the arm swung.
At the next widening we checked the mare. Her off hind was sound enough to walk on, not to run. We would get her to Marrow and leave her with a stableman instead of making her carry our hurry.
He put his eyes back down the cut.
“Wall,” he said.
I took the wall.
At the deep part, Ilyan brought his horse level with mine and asked the thing he always ends up asking.
“You could end it at Marrow. One night. It’d be done.”
“It would.”
“And you won’t,” Ilyan said.
“It’s arithmetic.” I ran my thumb across my own knuckles, over the ridges nineteen years of wet leather leaves in a hand, and I kept my voice where it lives. “Eleven days ago I did not know my own name was on anything. Nothing about that has got better. They’re ahead of us on our own road.”
“That’s an argument for the shield—”
“It’s an argument against it. Say they take me anyway.
Uncompleted, they get one collared half-blood and a bad afternoon.
” The horses went four strides. “Completed, they get one collared half-blood, and three of you go down in whatever hall you’re standing in.
Three funerals instead of one, and the same woman in the wagon at the end of it. ”
Ilyan rode a while with that.
“And three of us burying you instead of one?”
“I want nobody buried. I’m not given that.”
The heat came up under my sternum, hard, and stopped at the collar, and I sat with it.
“All right,” Ilyan said.
“That’s the whole of the objection?”
“You’ve done the arithmetic and it comes out right. I don’t like the answer and the answer isn’t wrong.”
Ten feet ahead, Corvin did not turn around.
“I heard every word of that,” he said. “I’m saying nothing about it, and I’d like it noted that it’s the hardest work I’ve done all week.”
I kept turning the severance roll at Ravensgate over: the quota on it, Nettle’s name written under mine.
The Council had put our names on one roll, but that did not make our lives exchangeable. Nettle would be counting the days by the people who came home. I meant to be one of them.
I rode on.
Two hundred yards down, where the wall steps in, something was standing in the middle of the road.
Upright. Man-height. Dead in the center of fourteen feet, black against the shale, and it did not move when we did.
Vaughn was off the black and eight feet clear before the rest of us had our hands going. Corvin’s knife came out flat along his forearm. Mine was half drawn and my mare had stopped without my asking.
Ilyan did not reach for anything. Ilyan never does.
A cart wheel. Iron-shod, six foot, standing on its rim in a shale crack.
“It’s a wheel,” Corvin said.
Nobody answered him.
“It’s a wheel. It’s a wheel. Fourteen hundred winters and he’s drawn on a wheel.”
“It was standing in the road,” Ilyan said.
“It was standing in the road. So’s the milestone. Warden, if the milestone comes at us I want you to go straight in and don’t wait for the rest of—”
Vaughn got back on his horse.
“Ride on.”
Corvin laughed the length of a hundred yards, and quit, and started again, and he was laughing at the noon end of the cut with the water coming off his jaw.
?
Corvin went up off the rim at the last bend, black and loud, flew the cut end to end and a mile of road past it, and came down on the far cairn with his coat on before his boots touched.
“Nothing. No hound, no man, no wagon in eleven miles.”
“That took you long,” I said.
“It took me four minutes. There isn’t a courier in the Nine Thrones who’d do it in nine.” He tapped the milestone with two fingers as he went by it. “Say thank you.”
“You’re the only raven in the Nine Thrones.”
“I’m the best raven in the—”
“You’re the only one,” I said.
“I’m the only one.” Corvin took it on the chin and enjoyed it. “It’s a poor field and I’d win it anyway.”
The strip over us went from blue to white to nothing while he said it, and both walls went the same gray, and at noon we had the light of an hour before dusk.
The drovers came north at a quarter past, twenty beasts and four men, and the lead man went by my mare with his hat in both hands, the way a road man passes a collar.
“Marrow’s a hard bed tonight, mistress,” he said. “You’ll want to be in it before dark or not at all.”
“How’s the water at the ford?”
“Down, with the frost in it. It’ll be down till it isn’t.”
Corvin was off his horse and in among them inside a breath.
He was six minutes about it. I watched from the saddle with Ilyan’s coat around me and my hands up inside it, and I could not hear a word.
Then he came back down the line to my knee. He had stopped being funny somewhere in those six minutes, and his hands had gone still on the rein, and his mouth kept going anyway.
“There’s a Hand sitting in the Marrow common room with his boots off. The drovers say he’s been there since Friday and he hasn’t asked a single soul a single question.”