CHAPTER THIRTY
?
CORVIN
“Corvin. Down here. Draw it for me.” Hesk said it at dusk, off a plank table set on the shale at the mouth of the cut, with the snow going across it sideways.
He had weighted the chalk down under two stones so it would not roll away.
“Draw it for you. Fine. Give me the chalk and stop breathing on the table.”
I came off the wind as a raven and stood up out of it as a man, and my boots went from under me on the plate, because blue shale under snow is a floor somebody has oiled and then lied about.
I had flown its length twice at first light and once near noon, in low cloud and driving snow the whole day.
The cut ran a mile and a quarter, walls thirty feet, both of them in shadow from dawn to dark. All the sky it gave me was a strip.
It smells of wet stone and rust, and the rust puts iron at the back of the throat and leaves it there.
Halfway down, the wedged cart wheel from the southbound run stood upright in the snow, half-buried, black against white.
At two hundred yards through weather that wheel reads as a man standing in the road with his shoulders squared, waiting.
I stooped at it twice this morning. Twice. I am eleven hundred winters old and I fell out of the sky at a piece of a cart, and then went back up and did it again.
“You’ve flown it,” Hesk said.
“I’ve flown it. Three times, and the third one was rude.”
I took the chalk and drew the walls first, two long strokes, because a man draws what kills people before he draws what saves them.
“The cut’s a mile and a quarter and fourteen feet wide, which means you’re four men long and one man broad, which means you’re dead. So you don’t take the cut.”
“The Warden will want the cut. It’s the fast line.”
“The Warden will want the cut, and the Warden can want it in a warm room somewhere, and I’ll tell him so myself and enjoy it.”
I put the cairn in at the mouth, then the wheel, then a mile of nothing.
“Fourteen feet, Hesk. Two abreast and a knee. They’ll put eight men on top of that wall and drop shale on your column and go home for supper.”
Hesk put a knuckle on the chalk. “Show me the mouth again. The cairn.”
“The cairn’s drovers’ work, waist high, and it’s the only cover between the wall and the road, and if I were them I’d have a man sat behind it since Thursday.”
Hesk leaned his fists on the plank and looked at the chalk the way he looks at a horse he is thinking of buying.
His forty riders had come down from the northern diversion. The other three hundred and sixty of the Hunt were still holding the southern Gullet. The bridge would put this detachment past the first Council post and onto the road to them.
“Then what?”
“Then this.”
I went a mile south and drew the river bend, and drew the thing that mattered.
“Rope and plank, drove-bridge, laid across for the salt herds and never taken up, and it holds four abreast because four abreast is what a drover moves.”
“And the bridge holds four?”
“The bridge holds four, the bridge is rope and plank, and the bridge is why you’ll be somewhere they aren’t looking.”
He put his thumb on it. Hesk keeps roads in his head. Names he writes, because men are easier to lose than roads.
“Forty riders over rope and plank,” he said. “In the dark. In snow.”
“In snow, one at a time at the sag in the middle, walked across, and don’t let a single one of them look down, because a horse that looks down at rope—”
“I’ve crossed a drove-bridge before,” Hesk said.
“Then you can say the rest of it along with me. Feet, not hooves, and the last man carries the lanterns and doesn’t light one.”
“The northern Gullet outpost sits over the bridge’s south approach,” Hesk said. “Forty men, more since the Writ. They’ll see us cross.”
“They’ll see you cross. They’ll see forty riders where the road says there’s no road, and they’ll spend a happy while sending somebody to ask permission to have an opinion, and by then you’re past.”
“And if they don’t?” he said.
“Then it’ll cost you men, and I’d rather it cost you men there than in a fourteen-foot ditch with the sky in a strip.” I set the chalk down. “They took Ilyan out of the hall last night. He’s ahead of us on the Council relay. They think that makes him theirs.”
Hesk’s jaw did something. He let it go.
“The Warden say anything?”
“The Warden and I have stopped disagreeing about her. There’s nothing left to hold a position about, and it’s a great saving in breath, and I miss it.”
“She’s mine and she’s his and she’s the Songkeeper’s,” I said, “and we settled that in a burnt tree in the Rimewood and we haven’t had one cross word about her since. Put that in the Hunt’s book, if the Hunt keeps one.”
Vaughn and I spent three years arguing about how to keep her.
Hesk went to check his girth strap, which is what he does instead of feelings.
“Fly it again, then,” he said, over his shoulder. “Off you go, pigeon.”
Half a second went past me. A whole half second, on a shale road, in the snow.
“...That’s hers. You don’t get that one.”
“Didn’t know it was spoken for.”
“It’s spoken for.” I put my hand flat on the table. “And while we’re on it, that word’s wrong on every count. A raven’s a corvid, which is the cleverest family of bird that’s ever existed, and I’m the largest and least pleasant one in it.”
“Mm,” Hesk said, into the strap.
“The bird you named gets eaten. Ravens get consulted. Ravens have been kept by kings, ravens sit in three of the Nine Thrones’ own devices, and a raven took the eastern wool tax out of a locked room in Vaeloth and nobody’s worked out how.”
“Mm.”
“I’ll give you a hint. The hint’s that it was me.”
“You can be a raven,” Hesk said, “and I can have a horse that doesn’t go over. Both at once.”
?
I took the ledger out of my coat. Seren was three hundred and ten miles south down that road.
Black, thumb-worn through at the corner. My master index: the names and keys that made the whole archive legible. Without it, the volumes at Hollow Ash were a private language nobody else could use.
The ink in it was oak gall and iron and lampblack, and I had mixed every pot myself in the same proportions since the year I started, because bought ink left a seller who could be asked.
The ink has been under my nails since before Vaughn had his marches.
Hesk had a fire in the lee of the cairn, mean and low and burning wet.
I went through the ledger one page at a time.
The whole thing sat in one hand. One motion into the fire and the next hour of my life was mine. Page by page instead, because I had to read each name to know what I was spending.
A fae woman in the Vaeloth registry who had copied me every writ of severance filed against a half-blood for two centuries. Gone.
Three roofs on the Salt Road that will take a bleeding man at night and ask him nothing. Gone.
A quartermaster at the Gullet who sells me his own garrison’s movements at a price I have never haggled over, because a man who haggles is a man who gets remembered. Gone.
Every page bought her something. That is what the record would say, except there is no record now, and she does not know I did any of it.
She will not know. Then I will tell her, because I tell her everything, and that is the one hole in me that has never closed.
Four nights ago in the tower she had her mouth on the inside of my wrist and her teeth in it after, and I said something filthy, and she laughed with her mouth still on the skin and I felt the laugh go up my arm.
That is what I thought about while I burned the wool tax and the eastern roads and the salt house at Marrow.
Sedge stood beside the posting house, holding his hat. The clerk I had framed had fled Vaeloth under a wool merchant’s name. Pell had sent him here. This was the first time I had seen the man whose handwriting I had used.
He came out when he saw the Hunt’s colors, because the message in his pocket said the northern riders would take him somewhere safer.
“Hesk. Put him with the returning remount handlers,” I said. “North. No Council posts. His girl at Marrow goes with him.”
“That’s the Hunt’s colors on the road, that is. I’ve a girl at Marrow, and I thought—”
“The name you’re traveling under is finished. Burn the message before you leave.”
“Your word.”
He turned the hat around in his hands, once.
“My word,” I said. “And a horse, which is worth rather more of your confidence.”
He kept turning his hat. I had written him into a death I did not intend to watch. Getting him out of it did not make the writing disappear.
I waited until he was on a horse with a named rider beside him. Hesk made me pay for the mount before either man moved. I paid.
Then I went back to the fire. I did not have time to become a better man. I had time to stop making one particular thing worse.
Halfway down the stack there was a page with her name at the head of it.
Nineteen years of a girl in a kennel yard, bought a piece at a time off men who had no idea what they were selling me. What she ate and how fast. What Rhodry certified in his book each winter, copied out to me inside the week.
I never asked her for a line of that page. I have never considered asking.
I read it through before I put it in the fire, which is not what a man does who is in a hurry.
The last page was Rhodry.
Kennel master, Ravensgate, half-blood, collared himself, and my own hand had written the price beside his name in a column with prices in it going back to the first page.
“You old fool. You were the only one of them who thought he was helping.”
Then I burned it, and it went the way the others went, which is to say quickly and without dignity.
At the posting house at the south end I pressed a Court lord’s signet into hot wax on a requisition for forty horses and their forage, in his name, and he would sooner have opened his own throat than sign it.
Then I struck the Court’s posted protection off Marrow and off Cold Harrow, by name, out loud, so the riders billeted there could ride south with the Hunt.
I said both names as I did it. Two villages under Vaughn’s own marches, unshielded from that hour, by a man with a stub of wax and a borrowed seal.
?
So that is eleven hundred winters, gone in an hour on a road in the snow, and I did not think about it twice. Rhodry’s name was the last one in it.
Here is the part I will never say to her.
Every name in the book went into that fire and every one of them belonged to somebody who believed they were mine, and that being mine was worth something.
I did not grieve one of them. I counted them.
I counted them the way a man counts coin across a table, and what came up in me was that it was not enough coin, and that if there had been four hundred more names I would have burned those and wanted more.
That is what is in me. She has kissed that.
“I’ll tell you what nobody puts in the songs about burning your own life,” I said. “It’s damp work.”
“Mm.”
“Nine hundred years, and the wind’s in the wrong quarter, and here’s the Blade of the Winter Court crouched behind a heap of shale blowing on it like a kitchen boy.”
Hesk fed a fistful of wet gorse into it. “You want it drier, burn it indoors.”
“I wanted a pyre, Hesk. I’ve been promised a pyre by every song ever written. What I’ve got is a smoky domestic thing that’ll go out if I look away, and it’s eating my handwriting at the pace of a man reading badly.”
And what I thought about, standing over a fire full of my own hand, was the road.
Three hundred and ten miles from this cut to the White Shelf, and I did the sum again. Forty miles in a day out of a horse on the Salt Road in snow, and fifty lamed it.
The Council relay crossed that distance between one dark and the next, and the Winter Court was barred from it.
My own wings outflew a horse and lost to the relay, and I had to come down to eat, and I carried nothing but myself.
A living passenger would not go into the change. I could fold a coat and a knife into feathers; I could not make a child vanish into them. The Council had built its road around limits it knew better than I did.
I turned the three numbers over from every side. No arrangement of them put me on that Shelf by nine tomorrow morning.
The ink at the side of my thumb had ash on top of it. I worked it with my forefinger, and the ash came off gray and the ink stayed black underneath.
My hands stopped. Both of them, dead, where they were. My mouth kept going, because it does.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Hesk said.
“I’ve never gone quiet in my life. Get the horses up.”
“Corvin—”
“Get the horses up, and check that strap again while you’re at it, and don’t look at my hands.”
The flat of my hand went to my own sternum, where my one mate-mark lay. Seren carried three. Mine was enough to make the whole empty road hurt.
The shale started ringing a mile south of us, where there is no road at all, and Hesk came up off the table and said, “That’ll be ours.”