Chapter 8 Horses on the Water
Hooves on the ford ice, a sound like someone knocking on the underside of a table.
She counted horses by ear before she saw them: five, a led sixth.
Then the grey came over the bank in six cloaks the color of the winter sky over a town that has stopped praying.
The ford had frozen black and smooth, and the horses came across it with their heads down, stepping on water that did not take them.
The town bell did not ring the noon hour. The man who rang it had seen the grey first.
Elowen stood at the window where she had stood since morning, watching the wharf. The wagons sat under their canvas. The river held its ice. She had been pricing the roads since first light, the water, the ice, the road north, and now the pricing had ridden into the square to meet her.
The riders split at the ford. One took the wharf road, one took the lane toward the mill, three stayed in the square with the led horse, men who knew the town's shape from a map drawn on the way.
The sixth crossed to the water's edge and stopped with his back to her, hands open at his sides, reading the channel like a page of the old words, line by line, looking for the count that did not match.
At her wrist the thread lay slack. The far end held, or let; she had stopped being able to tell which.
What she could tell: that reader had turned toward the water before his horse had stopped walking, and he was not looking at the wagons or the wharf or the roofs.
He was looking for her, and he already knew the direction.
A cat sat on the wharf rail and watched the riders go by. None of them looked at it. It was the only thing in the square that morning that was not priced.
Idra's hand closed on her shoulder, light, the way you take hold of a jar you are not sure is warm. "They have come," the healer said. "For the wagon, or the girl, or you. The lamp does not ask which."
Elowen did not answer. She moved with Idra through the house, past the drying lime and the shelves of greyroot, to the wall behind the hearth where the stones did not quite meet.
"There is a place," Idra said, "that has held a girl before. It will hold this one."
Seren woke as they lifted her, clear-eyed, and did not ask why the air had gone tight. Elowen wrapped the greyroot in her own shawl and put it into the child's hands. "Count the roots," she said. "Out loud. When you have counted them twice, we will be back."
Seren counted the first root, then the second, her thumb pressing each one. She went into the slot behind the hearth like a root going to ground for winter, and Idra set the stone, and the wall was a wall again.
"Now the count," Idra said.
Elowen's hand went to her collar. The page had lived against her collarbone for a day and a night; she had priced it, folded it, carried it, the only real ink left in the moving archive. Her fingers did not want to open.
But a page carried into a searched house is a page already found.
She took it out and gave it to Idra, who slid it under the false bottom of the greyroot jar without looking at it. Then Idra went out the back door to answer the knock that would come to the door that asked no names, and Elowen went back to the window.
At the wharf, the led horse had stopped beside the third wagon.
Two riders walked the canvas with their hands, men checking a roof for a leak.
The seal. The wax shards still tilted inward where the hand from inside had pushed through; they would read that too, a door standing open, and they would want to know which way the one who opened it had gone.
She had left the broken seal broken on purpose.
It had cost her nothing; it was costing her something now.
The sixth rider stood where the ice met the open water at the channel mouth.
He had not moved since his horse stopped.
Then his hand came up, palm flat, fingers spread, the same gesture Idra used over a fever-warm wrist. Only Idra read bodies.
He was reading the water, tasting the threads she had left there: the fever tear that had cost her an unnameable sound, the lettering at the junction that had cost her the memory of the road home.
Prices paid, columns closed. She had believed them closed.
His hand turned in the air, slow, like testing a current for a crossing. The grey at her own wrist stayed where it was, stopped, holding. She stood at the window with her hand flat on the sill and weighed the roads.
The ice would not hold the wagons. A black seam had run through the wharf ice before dawn, opening and closing with the current; two days, Idra said, no more, and no horse would cross where the crack ran. She could not take the wagon road early, and the wagon road would not take her at all.
The water would not hide her, not from a reader who had read a working twice and knew the shape of it, and she had left her shape on this channel in the fever tear and the junction lettering and every oar-stroke of the water road north.
The water was the one road the seal had not closed, and it was closing.
The staff was only a staff. Ash-wood, a year of walking, no working in it, no edge. She priced it and filed it. No column.
What she had was the two unspent workings in the column that would not close, the night-working drawn back from Seren's grey and the ink drawn back from the blank ledger, and the books were open now, so she could count the break before she asked for it.
Every working moved the heavier half to his side before the asking.
The sixth crack held a hair's breadth short of the fifth.
She had seen the books. She knew what the last one would cost.
Her left hand moved toward her wrist before she stopped it. Touch was asking. She put the hand back on the sill.
Fifty-one days to the name-day. Every road she priced had the same column under it.
The reader lowered his hand. He stood at the water's edge a moment, and then he lifted it again, open to the pale sky, as if tasting the air.
Elowen watched him from the window, her hand flat on the sill, the page gone from her collar, and knew the threads she had left on the channel were not cold yet.