EPILOGUE
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SEREN
“Seren! Seren, come and see what they’ve done to the gate.” Three in the afternoon in the long yard at Ravensgate, deep winter.
Nettle was up on the tally post rail at the top of the long yard with her heels drumming on the wood. She was shouting my name across ninety feet of frozen mud.
The low sun came flat through the open Winter Gate behind her and put a rim of light down the whole of one side of her.
Old snow lying gray in the lee of the wall, and white everywhere the sun got at it.
Nettle had the hammer. She had been given it, and she had not been told what it was for yet.
That is a forge hammer with a long ash handle. She has carried it since the autumn, to breakfast and to the stable and up onto that rail, and nobody at Ravensgate has taken it off her.
“They’ve hung the chain up on the drum and pinned it. It can’t come down. I went and looked, and it’s got a pin through it like a shoe on a horse.”
She had one boot on the rail and the hammer balanced across her knee. She says everything now as though somebody is about to disagree with her.
“That’s what a pin’s for.”
“Don’t be dull at me. I’m thirteen now and I’ve decided I won’t have it.”
“What happens at thirteen?” I said.
“People stop explaining pins to me, is what happens at thirteen, and I’d like it to start today.”
She got down off the rail backward, which is how she does everything. Then she took the yard ahead of me heels first, her face to me the entire way and the hammer up over one shoulder.
“Four ruts behind you and the third one’s the ankle-breaker.”
“I know where the ruts are.”
“You know where two of them are.”
The long yard runs ninety feet by two hundred inside a curtain wall twenty feet high. The frost had the wheel-ruts standing proud like ridges of iron, the way it does from the year’s end on.
Coal smoke came off the smithy and blew flat along the wall and never got above the top of it.
The leash rail on the kennel wall had twenty empty hooks on it. Somebody had gone along it with a rag and cleaned every one. That was nobody’s job and nobody’s order.
The kennel doors stood chocked open with bricks. There was a brazier by the gate, not yet lit, with a boy of about nine standing guard over it and taking it seriously.
Nobody had told anybody what to do with the day, and I kept waiting for an order that never came. Somebody had decided on a brazier and somebody else on four o’clock, and that was the whole of the ceremony.
“You can’t light it before four,” the boy said, to both of us, to the yard, to anybody. “Rhodry said four. I’ve been here since noon and I’ll be here at four.”
“Then you’ll be the warmest person at Ravensgate,” I said, “and everybody will come and stand next to you.”
“There’s nothing on the post,” Nettle said. “Not one. I looked twice.”
I looked anyway. The post still stood, notches close enough to count at arm’s length, and everybody in that yard had counted them. This year nobody has cut one, and nobody is going to.
“One year and forty days,” I said.
Nobody did the arithmetic out loud. Nobody had to.
Bel Arrowood stood at the kennel door with his shoulder to the frame, facing the wall, holding himself together at the elbow.
His head came round to me late, the way he still does and probably always will.
“Cold,” Bel said. “Cold, and—and the sun’s on the wall. There. I can see it on the wall from here.”
That is a whole sentence and it took him a year. I did not make anything of it. He does not like it when people make anything of it.
Corvin came along the wall with his coat hanging open in weather that takes skin off. He is vain. He has not flown since the Shelf and he will not discuss either of those facts.
“There he is. There’s the man himself, upright, out of doors, in the light, and I want it on record that I have been telling him to come out of that kennel since—”
“Pigeon,” said Bel.
The whole near end of that yard heard it. The boy at the brazier put both hands over his mouth.
“I heard that.” Corvin had stopped dead, and his hands had stopped with him. “I heard that, and I want it on record that he’s been saving it up all year.”
“He has. He asked me for the word in the autumn.”
“You taught him.”
“I taught him the word. He worked out where to put it on his own, and he waited for a yard with fifty people in it, which is more than you’d have done.”
Corvin opened his mouth. Then he shut it. Then he opened it again, and what came out of it was not worth anything, and Bel turned his face back to the wall with very nearly nothing on it.
Rhodry was standing at the edge of the crowd with his collar off, the white line of it under his jaw where the chisel went. He had come no closer than the corner of the tally shed.
His cut collar is on a nail in that shed. Nobody has taken it down and nobody has thrown it out.
“You don’t have to talk to me, you know. Not the polite thing, anyway.”
“I’m not being polite. I’m just not finished.”
“That’s fair.” He looked at the ground, and then at the gate. “That’s—right. That’s fair. I’ll take not finished. Not finished has got an end on it somewhere, and I’ve had worse said to me by people who owed me a great deal less than I owe you.”
“Don’t make it a speech.”
“No. All right. I’ll stand over here, then, and you can come at me when you want, and if that’s next year it’s next year.”
“It might be.”
“It might be,” Rhodry said, “is the best thing anybody’s said to me since the Shelf.”
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“Two Courts still haven’t signed,” Corvin said, “and one of them’s written to ask who’s keeping the halls, and I’ve written back that nobody is.” We were at the tally shed table with the door standing open on the yard.
“And the villages?”
“There are rolls in villages I’ve never been to.
Quota rolls, in drawers, with children’s names on them, and not one of them has been burned.
” His hand went to the ink at the side of his thumb.
“That’s this year’s work and next year’s, and I’d like everyone to stop looking at me as though I’d said something cheerful. ”
“Forty names came off the ownership roll,” Rhodry said. “Nineteen came back to work here for a wage, and I mean a wage, on a board, in coin. The rest chose where to live. I wrote down where every one of them went, because that’s the one useful thing I know how to do.”
Ilyan came out of the smithy with his sleeves down and his left forearm turned in against his ribs, which is what that arm does. His hand was closed.
“What’s it made of?” Nettle said.
He opened his hand. Three rings, plain, no stone and no mark, the metal gone the color of a winter sky where the hammer had been over it.
I knew what it was made of before his hand was all the way open. One finger wide, warm to the touch, one pale seam across the front. It sat on my throat from the year I was nine until the night I took it off in Vaeloth.
“It once held what was left of Sirel,” Vaughn said. “She’s at rest. The metal is Seren’s.”
He had told me about her in pieces through the year, when he could, and I had stopped hearing a rival in her name. Nobody in that yard argued with him and nobody tried to make it better.
“And it took three days, and I ruined the first one, and I’m not telling you which of the three it was.”
“That’s a horrible thing to tell somebody,” said Nettle.
“It is.”
“Now she’ll look at all three of them forever,” Corvin said. “That’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever watched a Songkeeper do and I’d like to shake his hand.”
One went onto Ilyan’s hand.
“Eleven hundred years and I’ve never had anything on these hands but ink, and now I’ve got a—”
Corvin held the second one up in the low sun and looked at it a good deal longer than was decent, and then he put it on and said nothing else at all.
I hung the third on a leather cord at my throat, because the man it belonged to had no hands for a ring.
It sits where the collar sat. Nobody in that yard said so out loud, then or since. The bruise that was across my throat all last winter has gone.
“What’s the hammer for?”
“And what do you think it’s for?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” Ilyan said. “It isn’t.”
“You’re going to make me wait for it, aren’t you. You’re going to make me wait a whole—”
“And would you have me tell you now?”
Nettle stood there with the hammer across both shoulders and thought about it for a long moment. Then she said that no, she would not, and went off to shout at the boy with the brazier.
Ilyan put a piece of bread and a wedge of hard cheese into my hand as he went past me. He did not look at me while he did it and I did not look at him. We have not mentioned it once since the night we finally mentioned it.
I took the bread to the bench where I could see the gate. I sat beside Bel and ate the cheese first. He liked the crust, so I broke it and left the larger piece within his reach. Neither of us said anything about it.
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Vaughn came and stood at my shoulder in the yard. The leash was on his belt, braided, worn pale at the loop.
He asks me to buckle it on when we go out. The clasp is gone; the braid stays because we both remember the day he took it off the hook.
“You’re cold. Come here and stand in front of me. You’re mine and you’ve been out in that wind since noon.”
I stood in front of him with my back on his chest and his chin down on the top of my head, and his leather-covered forearms came around and crossed over me and held me there by weight.
I belong to him. I belonged to him in this yard a long time before either of us would put the word in a sentence. What has changed is that I will say so out loud.
I had learned it over the year, in the dark, from a man with no hands: plain words, out loud, or nothing. When I want his mouth on my cunt I tell him so, and he does it, and neither of us has ever been embarrassed.
Down the yard the boy got the brazier lit at the third try and cheered for himself.
“One year of this,” Corvin said, “and she sits down in a yard full of people without checking whether I’m watching. I’ve decided that’s a personal affront.”
“Sit down, then.”
“I never sit down. That’s different and you know it’s different.”
The yard filled after that. Trackers who used to sleep in those stalls came in through the open gate with their families walking behind them. People off the marches who had been walking since morning came in after them.
They came in past the tally post and most of them put a hand on it going by, which nobody had arranged either.
Somebody had brought a drum. Somebody else had brought worse than a drum.
“Is it going to be today every year?” Nettle said.
“Every year on this day, for as long as anybody keeps doing it.”
“Then somebody had better write down which day it is.”
“I have,” I said.
Corvin looked at me. I had been learning a little every evening—names first, because I would not be taught from a king’s genealogy. The month on my page leaned badly to the left. It was still the right month.
Nettle took the pencil out of her pocket. The same one, sharpened almost to nothing. “I checked her letters. You needn’t.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Corvin said, which was a lie, and everyone at that end of the yard knew it.
“He’s written it down four times,” Nettle said. “She only needed once.”
Corvin got up on a mounting block and was unbearable about the number of Courts he had personally handled, out loud, at length, to people who had heard it in the autumn.
Nettle got back on the rail with the hammer.
This time Ilyan went with her. He set the claw under the first empty hook and held the head while she pulled.
“That’s what it’s for,” she said.
“It is.”
The hook came out of the wood with a long squeal. She almost fell off the rail and did not. The boy at the brazier cheered as though she had brought down the wall.
Nettle handed the hook to Rhodry. He took it without explaining where it belonged. By the time the drum started again, nineteen more lay on the shed step.
Her apprenticeship began after the winter lessons: wages for her hours, no collar, and a hammer of her own. She had made Corvin read the whole agreement twice, and then made him take out a word she did not like.
Rhodry stayed at the edge of it by the tally shed corner. Nobody made him come in and nobody sent him away. At some point in the afternoon somebody put a cup in his hand and kept walking.
“Nettle. Off the rail.”
“Make me.”
Vaughn looked at her for a while. Then he turned his head toward the gate and not his body, which in that man is the end of a conversation, and Nettle stayed where she was and grinned at the back of his head.
The gate is open and it stays open. They had pinned the chain up on the drum in the autumn and left it, with nothing left to run out.
We walked down toward it, the four of us, into the flat light coming level through the arch.
Nettle walked backward down the long yard ahead of us. Corvin caught my left hand; Ilyan took the right. Vaughn’s shoulder was warm against mine, and the ring on its cord lay over my pulse, where the collar used to be. The gate was open. We went through it together.