CHAPTER NINETEEN
?
SEREN
The toll chain at Cold Harrow hung across the Salt Road on two posts, and I stopped in front of it with my horse’s reins wound through my ruined hands. Vaughn brought his own horse up level with mine and stopped it there.
The woman working the windlass at the well straightened up off it, thirty feet away, and looked at my face for three seconds. “Seren Vale. God’s sake. You’ve got your mother’s chin and none of the rest of her.”
Nineteen years since anybody in this place had said it out loud. It went into me under the sternum and sat there, and my hands did not move on the reins.
I turned my head to smell the village before I turned it to look at the village.
“Nine fires lit. Eleven people. There’s a mare in the third byre that’s been down two days and nobody’s called for her yet.”
Vaughn’s horse shifted behind me and stopped. Corvin had arrived three feet from where he had been standing without appearing to cross the ground between.
“Go on,” Corvin said.
“One of those nine’s burning green wood. No horse has come through this chain since morning, and there’s rust on the hook where the hurdles tie.”
Corvin came up on my off side to look at the hook.
“Rust on the hook. And that tells you what, precisely?”
“That nobody’s untied them in a fortnight. Nobody’s had a reason to.”
Corvin put a finger on the hook, looked at what came off it, and rubbed it away against his thumb.
“Eleven people and nobody’s had a reason to open their own road.”
“They open it when the Council’s man wants it opened.”
Vaughn hadn’t moved since the chain. “That’s the whole village, then.”
“That’s the whole village. I could give you the dogs as well, but there’s only the one and it’s old.”
“Give me the dog,” Corvin said.
“Deaf in the near ear, sleeps against the third byre wall, and it hasn’t been fed since yesterday.”
“That’s obscene. That’s genuinely obscene and I’d like it noted that I’m the one who asked.”
Ilyan brought his horse up level with mine. He didn’t say anything about my knuckles, which had gone white where the leather crossed them.
The frost was coming down while there was light left in the sky, hard blue over the roofs, the rain gone off east after two days of it.
The quota clerk’s shelter stood beside the chain, hurdles and hide, a table under it and a lamp on the table. A small full-blood fae in a good coat, working at seven in the evening in the cold.
His inkwell was open and there was a tally of marks down the near edge of the table.
We went in past him and nobody stopped us.
The green ran two hundred feet by eighty, cropped turf gone to mud at the edges, and the severance quota-board stood at the north end with a lamp bracket over it and no lamp in the bracket.
Ilyan reads a thing all the way through before he says any of it. He read it twice.
“And the board’s been painted this year. You can still read what was under it, can’t you.”
I could. The old lines came through the paint like veins under skin, one season laid over another, and one of them was nineteen years down and had my name’s shape in it.
“They paint it every spring,” the woman at the well called across. “It’s the one job that gets done.”
“Does anybody read it?” Corvin said.
“Everybody reads it. Nobody says anything about it.”
“And the four on it this year,” Corvin said. “Are they going willing?”
“They’re going. That’s all any of us know about it, and it’s all we’re told.”
Corvin went to the clerk’s table and picked this season’s list up off it. He didn’t ask and he didn’t slow down.
“That’s this season’s list, that’s a nice hand, and that’s four names for a village of nine fires—who’s leaving?”
The clerk put his hand out for it. Corvin finished reading, every name, at his own speed, and then gave it back.
“You could have asked,” the clerk said.
“I could’ve. I’d have got a different piece of paper.”
“Four names,” Vaughn said.
“Four.”
“Two of them written small,” Corvin said. “There’s a hand a clerk keeps for children and it’s on that page twice, and I’d like somebody here to stand up and tell me they didn’t know.”
“We knew,” the woman at the well said. “Every one of us knew, and we let the cart come, and it’ll come again in the spring.”
Nobody had to say the rest. The machine that put a nine-year-old on a board here was open for business at seven in the evening, on a Tuesday, with a lamp lit and a list going. It was open that night on two children who had not been told.
?
Corvin came down off the road with me to look at it. The well stood south of the green, mortared stone five feet across, ninety feet down, a slate cap and a windlass over it. It smelled of cold water and wet rope, and under that of limestone, chalky, the way the water here has always tasted.
A rushlight burned in a niche in the well-head and threw the shadow of the windlass out across the ground in a bar.
The granite apron round the foot of it was dished from feet, and slick in the dish.
The woman went back to the windlass and let the bucket down, and the pawl clacked all the way, and the bucket went down out of the light.
There is a handprint set into the mortar of the well-head where somebody laid a hand in it wet, a long time before I was born.
It is a child’s hand, and it is small.
I rested two fingers on the stone beside it and left them there and did not put my hand into it.
I had come two hundred miles from Ravensgate half hoping to come round the shoulder and find the roofs off and the thatch burned and every fire in it dead in the mud.
The village was standing. Nine fires lit and a mare down in a byre and somebody painting a board every spring, and I stood on the granite and hated it for being alive.
I have never given that to anybody out loud, and my two fingers did not come off the mortar. I went down the nine fires in my head sorting them into the ones who had taken money for me and the ones who had only watched, and I could not make the second list.
“I can send a boy up,” the woman said. “It’s no distance. He’d run it.”
“Don’t.”
She looked at me a moment longer than she needed to and then went back to the rope.
Corvin and Ilyan had got onto stags, which happens, and neither of them was joking.
“A stag isn’t a predator,” Corvin said. “A stag is a large nervous vegetable with weapons on it.”
“A stag will kill a dog,” Ilyan said.
“A cart will kill a dog. Is a cart a predator? Go on, I’ll wait.”
“He’s a predator. He’s just bad at it,” I said.
“A stag isn’t a bird,” Vaughn said.
Corvin turned his whole head. “Nobody said it was a bird.”
“You said vegetable.”
“I said—yes. Fine. I withdraw the vegetable.”
“Settle it, then,” Corvin said. “You’ve got the nose. Is the deer a hunter or is the deer a hedge?”
“I’ve settled it. You weren’t listening, which is what happens when you’re waiting to talk.”
“That’s slander.”
“That’s a description.”
Ilyan took a strip of something out of his coat and put it into my hands without offering it.
“I’m not hungry.”
I ate the strip standing on the apron, fast, watching the shape of the quota-board across the green.
Then Ilyan unwound the dressing off Vaughn’s right hand at the well-head, over the slate cap, in the rushlight.
Two knuckles, opened at Marrow. Three days on and the edges of them were as wet and open as they had been in the byre.
“Three days, and it hasn’t closed. You’ve had me on my feet with a fever in an hour.”
“A fever isn’t missing flesh.” Ilyan laid fresh linen over the split. “I can warm him. I can’t make this knit.”
He turned the burned forearm inward as he said it, out of the light.
I let him have it. Ilyan went back to the linen without looking up, and neither of us went round again.
Vaughn set his palm flat on the slate cap of the well and left it there.
“Court-held or Council-held. There’s no third thing.”
“There’s the thing I’ve got now.”
“You’ve got a leash on my belt and a board with your name under the paint.”
The rushlight guttered in its niche and the shadow of the windlass swung across the mud and came back.
“It’s held nineteen years.”
“It’s held while nobody wanted you,” Vaughn said. “Somebody wants you.”
I ran my thumb across my knuckles and looked past his shoulder at the north end of the village, where the roofs stopped and one window was lit and the smoke off it went straight up.
“That house is a hundred and forty feet from where I’m standing, and somebody in it told me it was for my own good, and then they took what was offered for me.”
Nobody answered that. The pawl clacked. The bucket came up and knocked the wall twice on the way.
“It wasn’t for my good and they knew it wasn’t, and they said it in a warm room with the door shut, and you’re saying it at a well.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s the same sentence.”
Corvin came off the well-head and spread both hands the way he does when he is about to be enormously agreeable.
“I agree with every word of that, entirely, and I’d like to point out that I never once—”
“You’re answering a different question again.”
“I’m answering a better one,” Corvin said. “Mine’s got a joke in it and yours has got a village in it.”
Vaughn’s hand did not come off the slate. I watched the bandage on it and kept my own hands where they were.
“Say the word shield to me once more tonight,” I said, “and I’ll walk to the Gullet.”
“You wouldn’t get eleven miles in this frost,” Ilyan said.
“I’d get thirty.”
“She’d get thirty,” Corvin said. “I’ve seen her do it in worse and complain less.”
?
The far side of the well-head was dark, and Vaughn came around into it out of the night and came at me from below the jaw. Never from above.
I did not step back. My weight was already on the foot nearest the road and I left it there.
His hand went flat on the front of my throat under the collar, thumb laid along the pale seam, no press in it at all. The other one, the bandaged one, went to the small of my back and pinned me against the granite.
Cold stone through two days of rained-on wool. My nipples went hard against the cloth and there was wet between my thighs, standing in a frost, in the dark, in the village that sold me.
“You didn’t go up to that house. I’m not asking you why.”
His mouth came under my jaw and onto the tendon of my neck, once, and he did not hurry it, and I knew I’d find the mark of it in the morning.
“You’re cold everywhere but here.”
Then the pawl clacked, and boots came onto the apron on the far side with a pail swinging, and Vaughn took his mouth off my neck and did not hurry that either. He didn’t finish. He put me back on my own feet and stood where he was.
I got the reins in my hands and I turned the horse’s head down the green, toward the chain and away from the north end of the village, and I got a foot into the stirrup.
All three of them watched me not go up that road. That silence was the correct thing, and it cost them something to hold it.
The clerk had come out of his shelter by the time we were back at the chain, with the roll under his arm.
“I’m entitled to sight the mark. It’s on the roll, it’s a lawful sighting, I don’t make the—”
“Sight it from there,” Corvin said. “It’s one finger wide and it’s warm and there’s a seam across the front, and now you’ve been told, and you can write that you saw it.”
“That isn’t how a sighting—”
Vaughn stood up off the post.
He didn’t step. He stood, and the space between the clerk and my horse stopped being space, and he didn’t explain any part of it.
The clerk sat back down at his table and put the roll flat and wrote something short on it.
“He’s within his rights,” I said.
“He’s within his rights,” Corvin agreed warmly, and lifted the old book off the shelf under the table while he was saying it, and had it open before the clerk’s hand got there. “So am I, more or less, and I’ve never let more or less stop me.”
“That’s the old roll,” the clerk said.
“That’s the old roll.”
Corvin’s finger went down the page and stopped. Ink under his nails, and the page nineteen years old and gone brown at the fold.
“That’s the year,” he said. “That’s the year, and there’s a line under it with money on it, and I’d love to hear whose money.”
“It’ll be the quota purse,” the clerk said. “It’s always the quota purse.”
“Read me that line.”
The clerk leaned over it. He didn’t want to and he read it anyway, the way people do when the other man’s coat is better than theirs.
“Paid out, Vaeloth registry, against writ standing.”
“That isn’t the quota purse.”
“No,” the clerk said. “No, it isn’t.”
“There’s a number on it.”
“Writ 9-114.”
Corvin didn’t move. His mouth kept going and the rest of him stopped, and that is the worst of the two ways he gets.
The village was never the decision. The village was the till. I had been owned before it ever took a coin for me. Somebody two hundred miles from here had written my name down before the money ever moved, and the sale was a receipt.
“Read me that number again,” Corvin said, and his hands went still.