CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
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VAUGHN
The wind came up the Gullet at one note and held it there. I set my palm flat against the cliff and left it where it was. Seren Vale was two days south down that road.
Hesk brought his horse up past my shoulder and spoke at the ground between us.
“Warden. Vaughn Ironmere. They’ll want it out of you and not out of me.”
He lifted his head on the last word. He will carry an order four hundred miles and he will not carry a reason for it.
Behind him four hundred horses stood on scoured rock with no snow anywhere on it. The stone under my palm was cold enough to take skin. Eight hundred feet above us the sky ran in a strip about the width of a belt.
The air tasted of copper and dry rock dust. Down at the north post the gate chain hung slack and rang against the wood every time the wind leaned on it.
“Somebody say the thing,” I said.
A rider two ranks back put his hand up like a boy in a tally shed.
“There’s no Court order on this. There’s no Court left to give one, from what I hear.”
The men on either side of him did not look at him, and they did not look away from me either.
“Go on,” I said.
“The treaty’s ash. We came south on your relay and nobody’s said the word Vaeloth out loud until this morning.”
“Say the rest of it.”
Getting his shoulders square in front of the ranks took him a moment, and he took it.
“There isn’t a rest of it, Warden. That’s the whole complaint. We’ve none of us been told anything since the Winter Gate and we’re two days out of a capital.”
An older man on the left had his hat off and was holding it in both hands.
“We’re being asked to take a capital. That’s the size of it.”
“You are,” I said.
“For a collared tracker that most of us have never said the name of.” He turned the hat over once. “That’s not a complaint either. I’m telling you the shape of it, since he won’t.”
“Her name’s Seren Vale,” I said. “She’s mine, and I’m not going to dress that up for anybody standing here.”
“I know her name. I’m saying the man next to me doesn’t, and he’s the one you want on that road.”
No hand had gone to a weapon and no horse had left the line. Four hundred men had ridden three hundred miles and not one had got down.
I took my hand off the stone.
“I don’t explain myself. I haven’t in fourteen hundred winters.”
The wind ran the slot. Nobody put anything into it.
“It’s the only thing I’ve got in place of a Court. A Court gives reasons and then hides behind them. I give an order and you live through it.”
Hesk looked down the ranks and back at me and did nothing with his face.
“Get down off the horses. This takes a while.”
Four hundred men came off four hundred horses, and the noise of it went up the slot and came back down thinner. Some of them sat on the rock. Hesk stayed up on his.
I handed one over at four in the afternoon in a stone slot, because the other road was to spend four hundred men on my say-so, and because I wanted them to know what they were being spent for.
“They took one thing off me once. I watched what was left of her die of it. I’m not doing that twice, and that’s the whole of it.”
A horse shifted somewhere back in the ranks, and somebody hushed it, and then the wind had the pass to itself again.
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Then I gave them the name. Not Seren’s. I had not said this name to the Hunt in four hundred years, and standing on that road my mouth did not want the shape of it.
“Sirel,” I said. “She was my mate four hundred years ago and the Council took her off me.”
Four hundred faces and not one of them moved. The chain rang on the post.
“They didn’t kill her,” I said. “It was a severance. They cut the bond out of her and gave her back to me breathing. She lasted the winter and part of the spring.”
“Warden, you needn’t—”
“I’m saying it once,” I said.
The leash was on my belt. It has been there since the day I took it off Rhodry’s hook. I put two fingers on the braid without looking down at it. Her coat smell went out of mine a while back. I keep checking anyway.
“Four hundred years ago they took her. Nineteen years ago I gave what was left of her away.”
Nobody in the ranks did the sum out loud, and I did not do it for them.
“There is a piece of me missing. I know exactly where it went. It went around her neck, and I would cut the rest out tomorrow.”
A man near the front sat down on the rock like something had gone out of his legs.
“That’s what she wears,” I said. “That’s what’s under her jaw. One finger wide, warm to the hand, one seam across the front. Every fae here has walked past it in a yard and thought it was a kennel collar.”
The old man with the hat had stopped turning it.
“Who forged it?”
The question came out of the middle of the ranks, and I did not go looking for the mouth it came from.
“Ilyan Frost. In the Ravensgate smithy. He’s got the burn up his left arm to show for it and he’s never complained about it in my hearing.”
“And you gave—”
“I gave what they left me. Ask me the rest of that at the top of the road and I’ll answer it there.”
“Then there’s moonset,” I said.
“We know moonset,” somebody said.
“You’ve watched moonset. You haven’t known it.” I put my palm back on the cliff. “What they left me of her went into a forge nineteen years ago. Without the moon, a wolf needs more of a man than I have left.”
The wind took a breath and came back.
“That’s the wolf. That’s all moonset’s ever been. You’ve watched me not hold it for nineteen years and now you know what you were watching.”
Nobody cheered and nobody swore at me. They stood in a cold slot and looked at their own hands.
Then a man on the left picked up his reins.
He walked his horse two steps out of the line, checked the girth strap, and stood with his hand on the leather. He was waiting for somebody to name him.
I did not name him.
A second man went out beside him, and then four more, and then a whole line of them peeled off the wall the way ice comes off a rock face in one sheet.
“Hesk. The saddle flap off my spare. Write them.”
Hesk got down. He cut the flap loose with his belt knife, laid it across his thigh, and started in with a charcoal end.
“You’re taking our names, then.”
The man who asked it was thirty years old at most, and he did not look away while he waited on me.
“Yes,” I said.
He sat with that a moment. Then he swung up into the saddle and turned the horse’s head north without another word.
“Ride if you’re riding. The road’s open behind you.”
Two hundred and six went up the Salt Road and not one horse hurried. I stood in the throat with my palm on the stone and watched the last of them go small in the light. I have their names in a coat pocket.
Hesk wrote with the flap on his knee and the wind trying to take it off him, and he never once asked me whether I meant to keep it.
“Two hundred and six,” he said, when the charcoal stopped moving.
“Read them to me tonight. They rode this far. Their wages stand, and nobody calls them deserters.”
“You’ll want them read out?”
“Every one,” I said. “The living do not have to die before we learn their names.”
He folded the flap twice and put it inside his coat, against his chest, where a man puts a thing he intends to hand back.
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The Council’s picket held the head of the shelf road, eleven men behind a wall two feet high, with four miles of cut rock at their backs and no rail on the drop side of it. Hesk had had it drawn for me at the shale cut, and Corvin had drawn it right.
There is a parley for a thing like that. I did not send one.
“Don’t let one of them get down the road. Not one.”
It took less time than the walk up to it. They had a horn and nobody got a hand to it.
It cost us two. One of them was the boy who had held my horse at the shale cut, and I knew that horse’s name before I ever knew his.
The other went off the drop side with a Council man’s arms around him, and the wind carried the sound of it up the shelf a long way before it stopped.
“Two,” Hesk said. “Ours.”
“I know it,” I said.
“You want them named on the flap?”
“On the other side of it.”
We laid our two under stones at the head of the road and left the Council’s eleven where they lay.
“They’ll be missed by dark,” Hesk said. “There’s a garrison under us in the Gullet and a relay bird off the shelf head every evening.”
“Let them be missed.”
“You want that road held tonight, or walked?”
“Held tonight. Walked at first light, and we walk it in a single file with the drop on our left.”
A drover came up the Gullet at half past four with six remounts on a string and a cart of forage, and he had the bad luck to be coming north through the throat while I was standing in it.
“Take the horses,” I said. “Take the cart.”
“Warden, that’s a man’s whole—”
“Take them.”
He looked at me, and then at the hundred and ninety-two behind me, and worked the arithmetic faster than I could have explained it to him.
I did not tell him, and I did not tell him why, and he walked out of the throat with his hands empty in front of every man I had left.
I would take the next man’s cart the same way and I am not sorry about this one.
“You’ll be paid at Ravensgate,” Hesk said, and looked at me before he promised the rest.
“Out of my winter stores,” I said. “Write the horses and the cart on the other side of the flap. Nobody pays for my war by having his name forgotten.”
Hesk watched the cart come in and said nothing else about it.
“The Blade’s road,” a rider called down from the wall, looking along the shelf. “He drew this for you on a table. Four miles at eleven feet.”
“He flew it himself.”
The rider spat over the wall and grinned at the rock.
“He’d want us to know that.”
“He does want that. He’ll tell you twice and draw it again.”
Corvin has never in eleven hundred winters left a thing he did lying where somebody might miss it.
Another one came up on my off side with his thumbs in his belt, an old hand, the kind who says a thing he has been saying for two hundred years.
“A stag’s not a predator, Warden.”
“It’s got a rack of knives on its head.”
“It eats grass.”
“So does a boar.” Nobody behind him said a word. “I’ve seen what a stag does to a dog.”
“There it is,” he said. “Six hundred years and he answers it the same.”
“It’s the same question.”
He nodded like a man who had been paid. Down the line somebody laughed once, short, and the sound went up the slot and did not come back down.
A hundred and ninety-two men stood in the throat with their horses’ heads turned out of the wind. I knew the horses before I knew the men. Hesk’s charcoal had made that failure impossible to put out of sight.
It came up in me while I was looking at the roan the boy used to ride. What I caught myself wanting was that none of them would ask me straight out whether I would.
I was not going to lie to them today of all days.
She comes to about here on me. That is the whole size of the thing they are standing out in the cold for.
I stood in a stone slot at four in the afternoon with her leash on my belt and thought about her cunt around me at the hollow oak, and then I went back to counting horses.
One of her marks was mine, settled beneath her breastbone in the burnt oak. I had given her orders since. That was a habit, not a right the bond gave me.
When she is frightened her chin comes up and she takes the whole room’s air in one long pull. I have made her do that twice in nineteen years. Both times are in me somewhere with the rest of it.
Hesk came and stood at my right shoulder with the flap of names folded into his coat.
“I’ve seen her work a line at thirty miles,” he said. “That’s not nothing to stand in the cold for.”
“No.”
He got his hand on his girth strap. He has done it four times in six hundred years and every time he was right.
He took his hand off it.
“That’s your reason, then. That’s what it was the whole time.”
“It is,” I said.
Hesk looked at the two hundred on the rock, and then up at the strip of sky.
“You could have said it at Ravensgate.”
“I could have,” I said.
“Then you’d have four hundred.”
“I’d have four hundred who’d never been told.” I looked down the pass at the road she was at the far end of. “I’ll take the ones who stayed.”
He pulled his girth strap tight and put his boot in the iron.
“The rest of us stay,” Hesk said to the ground, and lifted his head on the last word.