CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
?
SEREN
The horn in the night had been for the northern crossing. Council hounds had driven three families onto the ice; a child had gone through. The outrider who brought the message wore Hesk’s colors, and I could smell the drowned boy on his gloves. It was no invented emergency.
Vaughn went to hold the crossing. Ilyan went because a half-frozen child needed more than a soldier. Corvin took the raven to bring Hesk’s northern detachment in before the hounds reached the families.
I stayed with Nettle. There were thirty-nine trackers, stone walls, and twelve days still promised to us. Ilyan said the collar would hold against a hook. Vaughn said he would be back before we took the north road.
By dawn all three were thirty miles away. The hounds on the crossing had done exactly what they had been sent to do.
“Seren. Seren, girl, don’t—” The long yard had gone white to the knee since first light.
Rhodry said my name twice at the tally post and then quit saying anything, and he said both of them to the writ-board and never to me.
The blizzard had opened out of the north and taken the far wall away with it. Ninety feet across I could see. After that there was weather where a wall had been.
So I read the yard the way I read ground, because my hands had nothing else in them.
Eleven horses, two lines, snow packed solid in the stirrup irons, which meant they had been standing in it since before the light came. One Council carriage with the shutters down. I had seen that carriage five days earlier.
The gate chain was paid out over its drum and lying slack in the snow. The Winter Gate had been standing open a while.
Coal smoke came off the smithy and got flattened and shredded before it cleared the roof line.
Trackers watched from the stall doorways down the long side, one to a door. None of them came out.
“You’ve lost sleep since Friday,” Ottoline Crane said. “The report said the north road was closed. I expected to find you here.”
She had come up on my left with no noise in her at all, hands folded behind her back, standing close enough to talk at a conversational pitch in that wind and no closer than that.
“You came up in the dark,” I said.
“Ahead of the weather. It’s the only thing in this country I can’t serve a writ on.” She looked at my face and went on looking at it. “You’re not going to ask me anything, are you.”
“You’ll tell me.”
“I will. There’s no part of this I’m keeping off you, and don’t take that for a kindness before you’ve heard why.
I’ve done this a great many times. The ones who get told are quieter, quiet is quicker, and I’d like my men out of this wind.
” She raised her chin an inch at the escort. “Bring the table.”
Two of the escort set a folding table down in the ruts, and Crane laid out four instruments in a row on the cloth and touched each one once with two fingers, in a blizzard, the way a clerk squares a stack of paper before the office opens.
“That won’t read anything out here,” I said.
“It won’t. I’m not using it here. I’d like you to have seen it.”
“Why show me?”
“Because you’ll spend the whole ride south deciding what it does, and whatever you decide will be worse than what it does.” She squared the last of them with the others and shut the case. “Be frightened of the right thing. It saves us both a morning.”
My heart went up under the collar and stayed there, and the collar was warm, and this was the first morning of my life that I hated how much I wanted it there.
“The child first,” Crane said. “Record her as intake, not as quota.”
She said it to the Hand, and the Hand wrote it, and by the time I had turned my head two of the escort were already at the kennel doorway.
Nettle came out between them with her boots unlaced and her hair on one side flat from the pallet. Twelve years old. She came out at a walk.
“You want me to get in the cart?” she said, to the nearest man, in the exact voice he had used, and she said it like she was checking the weight of a sack he had handed her.
He did not answer her.
“That’s a yes, then,” she said. “You could’ve said yes. It isn’t hard.”
She looked past him and found me and put her hand out flat, palm up, across forty feet of snow, instead of asking me anything at all.
My hands came open at my sides, and my weight shifted onto the foot nearest the gate.
I wanted to put the near man’s face into the ruts. There was a night’s crust standing over them, and I wanted to feel it go, and then his teeth, and then whatever was under his teeth.
I wanted the second man to come while I was doing it. And I would have done every bit of it in front of that child and told her afterward that I had done it for her.
I stood where I was and counted the notches on the tally post instead. The newest one was Nettle’s. A pale splinter still stood up at the edge of it.
“I’m going to tell you what happens now, and then it happens,” Crane said. “I’ve found it goes easier when nobody has to guess.”
She counted it off on her fingers without any hurry in it.
“You’ll be searched. You’ll be loaded. You’ll be on the relay south before the smith’s got his fire up.
Nothing that happens to you today is a punishment, and I want that understood, because you’ll be told otherwise by people who mean well.
You were owned from the hour that seal went on, and nobody punishes what they own. ”
“Understood,” I said.
“Good.” She lifted one hand, two fingers, no higher than her own belt. “Take her.”
The Hand came around the tally post with the writ held open against the wind and read it over the top of my head to the yard, the way a man reads a notice to a wall he has been sent to nail it on.
“The tracker is called for and claimed. The Warden’s mark is not required and will not be waited for.”
He got through it. He never used my name.
“Can I hold it?”
The Hand folded the writ along its creases and held it against his chest. “It’s been read,” he said to Crane, and Crane wrote something down.
Then he opened the writ again and put it flat on the board in front of Rhodry, and held out the pen, and Rhodry looked at the pen the way you look at a dog you already know is going to bite.
“There’s a way it’s done, there’s a season book and a hook and a line for it, you don’t just—”
He stopped himself.
“Every collar on this ground has got a hook,” he said. “Every hook’s got a name burned into it. That’s how it’s done here. That’s how it’s been done since before I had the yard.”
“I know how it’s done,” Crane said. “Sign.”
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One of the escort asked for my leash, and Rhodry went into the shed and came back out and cut a spare off the hook rail with his knife, and stood holding it.
“We don’t lead them on the relay,” Crane said. “Drop it.”
He dropped it. It lay in the snow between us with the snow already filling the coil of it, and nobody picked it up, and mine was thirty miles north on a belt that was not in this yard.
Rhodry wiped both hands down the front of his coat. He does that before he handles a hurt dog. He has done it in front of me since I was nine.
“Seren,” he said.
“Sign it.”
“Nineteen years I signed that book. Nineteen years somebody paid me to write down a lie about your throat.”
The wind took a whole breath out of me and I let it go and did not take another one for a while.
“Who paid you?”
“I didn’t ask. That’s the whole of it. I never once asked.”
“You wrote in the book that it had been re-forged.”
“Every year.” He had the pen in his fist now like a nail. “Fifth of the month, same as the rest of them. Collar drawn, collar cut, collar set fresh.”
“Your column,” I said. “The smith never signed beside it.”
“No smith would. I left that blank. I thought if I didn’t forge his name as well, I was still an honest man somewhere.”
“And it wasn’t.”
“It’s the one that went on you when you were nine. It’s never been off you. I wrote that it had, nineteen times over, in my own hand, and every one of those is in a book in that shed with my mark against it.”
“Why,” I said.
“Because a man came and said she’d been claimed and she stays on your ground and the book says what I tell you it says, and I thought—”
He stopped. His mouth kept working with nothing coming out of it.
“I thought I was keeping you off a table. That was all the thinking I did. Every year I wrote it, and every year you were out in this yard in the morning, so I reckoned it was working.”
“What did he look like?”
“Nineteen years is a long while.”
“You’d know him again,” I said.
“I’d know the voice. He came at night, he came in winter, he paid in Court coin and he never put the hood back, and I never asked him for a name because I didn’t want one.
” Rhodry’s shoulders came up and went down.
“If you’re looking for a man to hate this morning, girl, you’re spoiled for choice and I’m the nearest.”
“It was working,” I said.
He looked up at me then, and I wished he hadn’t.
“That’s the part you don’t get,” I said. “It worked. It worked for nineteen years and it’s finished this morning and you never found out what you were doing it for. You aren’t going to get to feel better about it, Rhodry. Sign the writ.”
He signed the writ.
He wrote his name across the bottom of a Hand’s paper with his hand wiped clean first. The wind lifted the corner while he did it and the Hand set a thumb on the corner to hold it down.
Then Rhodry sat on the tally-shed step, heavy, all at once, the way a man sits who has carried a sack up a hill and is finished with it.
“You’ve come twelve days before the deadline,” I said.
“That’s correct,” Crane said. “The forty days run from the activation seal, not the night a herald reads them to you. This seal was set twelve days before service.”
“Then the Court-held bond—”
“Was completed after the Council’s title had already vested. The execution was deferred, not the ownership. Your Blade would know the difference if he had been shown the seal.”
Nobody in the yard had been shown it. They had given us a number of days and kept the day that number began.
“You know it’s a cheat.”
“I know it’s a rule. It’s written down, it’s been written down for sixty years, and any fae clerk in Vaeloth would read it to you the same way I’ve just read it.” She turned her collar up against the north side of the wind. “I didn’t make it. I’d have made it the same.”
“That’s supposed to be honest.”
“It is honest. You’ll get a great deal of that from me and very little else, and before this is finished you’ll find it costs you less than the other thing.” She put her glove back on, one finger at a time. “The men who dress it up are the ones who can’t hold their hands steady afterward.”
Then they searched me, because she had said they would.
A woman off the escort did it. She was not rough and she was not slow. She told me to lift my arms, once, and said nothing after that—both sleeves, the seams of the coat, under the arms, down each leg to the boot, and the boot cuffs turned out into the snow.
Then her hand went flat on the back of my neck and lifted the collar a finger’s width off the skin so she could look under it. I stood still for that. I have fought men for less.
Nobody told me when it was finished. She stepped back, and that was how I knew.
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They walked me past the tally shed with a man at each elbow, and the shed door was standing open on its hook because Rhodry had gone in for the leash and had not thought to shut it.
Nettle’s collar blank was on the bench inside the door, cut to her measure and still unfitted. The open ends stood a finger apart. I recognized the small nick my thumbnail had caught when I held it on the night of the measure.
I took it off the bench with two fingers as I went past, one motion, and it went inside my coat under my arm, and nobody in that yard was looking at my hands. They were looking at my face, which is the mistake everyone makes.
I did not know yet what it was for. I knew it was mine now.
Then the thread moved.
It had been lying north-northwest since the horn went up last night.
The weight on Vaughn’s thread changed. Its bearing stayed north-northwest, but it drew harder, closer. I put my nose into the wind and found his horse turning on the far edge of my range. Not a word through the bond. Hooves, crushed ice, the familiar black gelding taking the southbound track.
My breath went out through my teeth. My hands got hot inside the mitts, in a blizzard, and I had to take the next breath twice.
He had turned around.
Somewhere under that I could still feel the tower on my skin from last night, in a yard full of Council horses with a Hand holding a signed writ ten feet away. My body answered anyway, and it does not check the calendar.
“Do you know how many of you I’ve moved?” the Hand said.
“No,” I said.
He waited for it to land. It didn’t.
“You could tell me,” I said. “We’ve got the ride.”
The nearest man on the escort turned his head away and looked at his horse’s ear like it had said something to him.
They put Nettle up into the second cart and she stood at the rail of it with her hands in her sleeves.
“Is he coming?” she said.
“He’s thirty miles north and he’s turned around.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I’m the best nose alive. It’s the only thing anybody’s ever written down about me that’s true.” I got a hand on the rail below hers. “Nettle. When they ask you your name, you give them the whole name, slow, and you don’t—”
Crane spoke across me without raising her voice at all. “Keep the child in the second cart. Close the shutters. They travel better when they can’t see each other.”
The gate shut behind the second cart. From inside it I heard Rhodry call for his riding coat. The driver did not wait to learn why.