CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
?
SEREN
Maunt the herald stood at the long table of the drovers’ inn at Marrow with the Writ held out at arm’s length, reading my name off it into a room where twenty men had stopped eating. Corvin stood against the gable wall behind him and said nothing at all, which is not his habit.
He did not look up at my face while he read it, and he has not looked at a tracker’s face in nineteen years of coming to the yard.
Sleet since midmorning, driven flat, half rain and half ice, and a quarter mile of the world and no more.
Tallow. Spilled ale. The byre through the gable wall, warm and sour under everything else.
The yard door had no latch that worked. It swung and knocked and swung, all afternoon.
Table, bench, lintel, worked smooth by hands, and the road salt had dried white on the lip of every cup on the board.
Three doors. Yard, stair, kitchen. My chin went with the count, the way it does.
“Boots off.” Corvin had stopped inside the threshold with two fingers on the frame. “In a public house. On a Council road—there’s a man who’s been comfortable since Friday and I resent the comfort.”
The Hand sat at the end of the second bench with his boots under it and his feet in gray wool. He had a book open at his elbow and a pen across the gutter of it, and he did not get up when the Warden of the Hunt came in out of the sleet.
Three of the Council’s men stood along the yard door with their hands where a man puts them when he has been told to look like furniture.
Corvin was between me and that door.
Vaughn put himself between me and the foot of the stair by standing where he was.
“Warden.” The Hand had a mild voice and he pitched it at the whole room. “Before anything else. I can’t take her.”
“No,” Vaughn said.
“I want that said out loud in front of the house, because it’s true and because it saves us all an afternoon. The Writ of Severance hasn’t run. Until it runs she’s yours, and I’ve no more claim on her than the landlord has on my horse.”
“Then we’re finished here.”
“We’re not, and you know we’re not.” The Hand turned a page over with one finger. “I’ve sat here since Friday and I haven’t asked one man one question. I’d like that understood as courtesy and not as idleness. I could have had the road watched at both ends.”
“Then why didn’t you?” I said.
“Because you’d have gone around, and around is open moor, and there are six hounds loose on the open moor that aren’t mine.” He said it to the fire and not to me. “This way you came in out of the sleet like people.”
“That’s a kindness,” Corvin said. “I’ve never in eleven hundred winters heard a kindness cost so much on delivery.”
“What I’m entitled to do is lay a glass on a collared half-blood on a Council road. That’s the whole of my warrant, and I’ll hand it down the table if you’d like to read it.”
“I’d like to read it.”
“Of course you would.”
Corvin read it twice, and the second time his hands went slow.
“It’s good. It’s better than good—it’s dull, and a real one is always dull.”
“It’s good, and I’d not have brought it out otherwise.”
The Hand came off the bench in his wool socks and took the glass out of a felt bag. A disc the color of dirty ice, on a wire hoop.
“Stand still, please. It’s cold and it doesn’t hurt, and I’m required to tell you both, and I’d point out that nothing I’ve said in this house so far has been a request.”
“Take it off her,” Vaughn said.
“I can’t.”
My hands dropped open at my sides and my feet planted, and I had not decided to do either of those things.
He laid the glass flat against the front of my collar, over the seam. Nobody had asked me to stand for it. It was on his warrant. It was cold the way a coin is cold when it has been left out on a wall.
Nothing happened.
He waited longer than a man waits.
“Again. I’m sorry. It’s colder the second time.”
He set his thumb on the disc and brought it down closer, the back of his hand against my throat, and he was sorry about the cold of it and he meant it, which was worse.
Nothing happened again.
The Hand went back to his bench and sat and picked the pen up.
“Instrument laid twice,” he said, to the book and not to the room. “No reading.”
“Is that all?” I said. “Two lines and my name?”
“Three lines and your name, and the date, and my own name under that, which I don’t enjoy writing on a day like this one.”
“What does it mean?” Corvin said. “I’m asking as a man with no education.”
“It means the instrument was laid twice and gave no reading. It means what it says.”
“And then it goes where?”
“Where they all go.” The Hand blotted the line with the heel of his hand. “That’s not my part of it, and I’d not guess at it in front of you.”
Twenty drovers along the wall did not know what they had watched. I did. A fae who cannot take a woman writes her down instead, and paper gets to Vaeloth faster than a horse.
“Landlord.” Corvin was up on the corner of the long table by then, swinging a boot. “That’s a good fire and a poor cellar and I want to talk about both, at length, in front of everybody—”
“There’s ale, and there’s the other ale,” the landlord said.
“There. A man who knows his own stock.” Corvin had the whole room’s face turned to him inside a breath, which is the entire point of Corvin.
“Bring the other ale. Bring it to those four gentlemen at the wall who’ve had their heads down since we walked in, and put the lot on the Warden.
He’s good for it and he’s never bought a round in my hearing. ”
Ilyan had turned his left forearm in against his own body, burn side to the ribs.
?
Maunt came down the table wiping his fingers on his coat. Corvin came off the wall while he did it.
He had handed me the roll at the yard gate and wiped his fingers then too, and I said nothing.
“The record wants the seam described,” he said. “Front of the collar. One pale line, is it?”
“Ask the book,” Corvin said. “It’s had a better look at her than you have, and it hasn’t put a hand on anything.”
“The book hasn’t got eyes and I have. And I’ll thank the Blade to remember I’m the Council’s mouth in this house and he’s a guest in it.”
“Leave it,” Ilyan said.
“It’s a collar. I’m allowed to touch a collar—”
His hand came down on the front of my throat from above the jaw.
Nobody comes at me from above the jaw. My chin went up and my nostrils opened and I took that room’s air in one long pull, tallow and ale and wet wool and byre, and my feet would not do anything at all.
Then Vaughn.
He did not cross the room. He arrived in it. He had Maunt off the flagstones by the throat and into the lintel post, and the brand burned into that post still smelled scorched, and Maunt’s head went into it twice.
That was fast and it was close and it was not clean. It took four seconds and it made a sound I am not going to write down anywhere.
Maunt went down under the brand with his boots turned in.
Vaughn’s right hand had opened across two knuckles, and the blood came off it onto the flags in a line.
“No,” he said, to nobody.
The three at the yard door came off it because they had to. Two went at Vaughn and he took them both, and that is never the part I look at.
The third came around the table at me.
There was a boning knife on the board by the salt, thin, worn to a curve by somebody’s whetstone, and I had it before he had cleared the bench end.
He was a foot taller than me. Everybody in that room was.
So I went under his arm, low, and I put it in under the ribs and held on.
He got a hand in my hair. He got a knee up into my hip. He was strong and he was frightened and he took a great deal longer than a man should take, and I stayed under his arm until he stopped, with my shoulder in his chest, working.
I did not let go until he was on the floor and quiet.
I was glad.
It was not that it was over. It was that I had done it, and that it had taken him a long time, and I have found nothing in me since that wanted it shorter.
The knife came out of my hand and rang on the flags, and I straightened up, and my hands were steady, and the room was very loud.
“He’s dead, is he,” one of the drovers said from the wall. “The herald.”
“He is,” Ilyan said.
“Well.” The man sat back down. “He never bought anything.”
“Nor did the other three,” said somebody further along.
“They weren’t given the chance.” Corvin did not turn his head. “Landlord, that’s four accounts closed and one opened, and I want the open one in my name.”
“Give me the hand,” Ilyan said.
Vaughn held it out, palm up.
“Close it.”
“I’ve closed worse than this on worse men.”
He had both hands around the knuckles and his head down. A Songkeeper shuts an open hand the way a person shuts a door.
He worked at it while the fire spat and the yard door swung and knocked.
The knuckles stayed open.
“Ilyan, that’s four minutes.”
“I know.”
He kept at it with a thumb either side of the split, and his mouth had gone thin.
“You’ve had longer than—”
“I know what I’ve had.”
“Songkeeper.” Corvin had come around the table end and he was not swinging a boot any more. “Talk to me. Is it the hand, or is it you?”
“It’s a hand,” Ilyan said. “Get me linen.”
“That isn’t an answer, and I’ve made a lifetime’s study of those—”
“Linen.”
He wound the strip he was given and he wound it well, and he did not look at me or at Vaughn or at anything except the knuckles.
“Right.” Corvin came off the table. “Everyone’s had a lovely time. Landlord—I want the room at the back, I want it warm, and I want you to charge the Council for it.”
The landlord looked at four dead men on his flagstones.
“Sir—”
“You’ll want to itemize. Firewood, ale, laundry, and a herald.” Corvin’s hands had stopped dead on the table edge and his mouth had not stopped at all. “Put the herald last. It reads better last.”
Somebody along the wall laughed and was sorry about it.
?
Vaughn came to me across the room.
He came up from below the jaw with the back of his fingers, the way all three of them have done since the first week. There was Maunt’s blood on his knuckles and his own under it, and he put his hand there and held my face.
“He’s on the floor. You’re in my hand now.”
I looked at him.
“That was my tracker’s throat.”
Something dragged low in my cunt, hard, with a dead man eight feet behind me and the fire spitting, and I stood in it and did not take my face out of his hand. He did not ask me whether I was hurt. He took my face and kept it, and I let it be kept.
He let go and stepped back and put himself between me and the yard door by standing.
Nobody in that room asked him one question. Nobody ever does. The Hunt has ridden four hundred years behind a man who will not explain himself, and I had spent nineteen of mine annoyed about it, and I was not annoyed now.
“Warden,” Corvin said. “We want to be gone before the relay comes through.”
“We go at four.”
“Four’s late. Four’s an hour after this road has decided what it saw, and by dark there’ll be a version of this afternoon in every taproom between here and the Gullet.”
Vaughn stood where he was and the four stood with him, and the yard door swung and knocked.
“Four, then. I’d argue, but I’ve watched what happens this afternoon to people who argue.”
Ilyan was crouched over Maunt with two fingers under the jaw, doing the thing he does for everybody, including men he would have killed himself. He got up and shook his head once.
“Mistress.” The landlord had come as far as the end of his own bar and no further. “Is there more of it coming?”
“There’s a relay through at five and a Council record going south tonight,” I said. “You’ll want your flags washed before either one gets here.”
The sleet came through the open yard door in a flat gray sheet, and one of the drovers picked his mug back up, because a man has to hold something.
Then the pen moved.
The Hand had not got off his bench. He had sat through it with his feet in wool and his book open, four men dying inside nine feet of him, and he had not so much as closed the cover.
He picked the pen out of the gutter and wrote for some while, and every head in that room turned to watch a man write.
Vaughn watched him too. The leash was on his belt. His right hand hung open at his side, bound in a strip of linen, and he could have crossed that room in a breath.
The Hand finished the line he was on and looked up.
“Warden. Kill me as well and it changes nothing. I’ve already written down what my glass couldn’t see.”