Ch. 158 The Empty Road

Chapter 158: The Empty Road

The last place on the Castellan’s list had three names.

None appeared on a current map.

Mary laid the copies beside one another.

“That seems excessive for somewhere we can’t find.”

“The names belong to different periods,” the Castellan said.

“I assumed it hadn’t changed them to inconvenience us.”

“Not that I can establish.”

I looked at him.

His golden eyes remained perfectly steady.

Across the table, Evelyn lowered her face.

Aurelia arrived carrying the wool cloak over one arm.

The hem had finally been shortened.

She had done some of the sewing herself, which had caused Helena to bring better light and then remain to discuss the stitches.

It appeared that godhood offered little protection from advice about seams.

Aurelia sat beside my wife.

The Castellan turned the oldest copy toward her.

The arch and star stood beside a narrow column of writing.

“Do you recognize any of these?”

She read them.

Then returned to the first.

“Veyr’s Rest.”

“Not Lord Roderic’s family?” I asked.

“No. Much older.”

Her finger moved to the second name.

“This one I remember hearing. I didn’t know they referred to the same place.”

“What was there?”

“A house on a high road. Travellers left it before dawn to cross the ridge.”

The chart placed it among mountains.

Unfortunately, the mountains had been drawn as a series of little pointed hills with no apparent concern for which ones existed.

I studied them.

“That could be half the northern country.”

“Yes,” Mary said.

Aurelia looked at the page.

“There was a spring.”

The Castellan inclined his head.

“And a long building with an open gallery. You could see the road from it.”

“Did you stay there?”

“Once.”

I waited.

She smiled slightly.

“Nothing broke that time.”

“That must have been memorable.”

“Extremely.”

There was no road on the later chart.

The settlements on either side appeared, but the line joining them curved well to the south.

Evelyn traced it.

“Could the crossing have closed?”

“Possibly,” the Castellan said. “Weather. Rockfall. A change in trade.”

“Or someone stopped wanting people to go there.”

I heard my own voice and disliked how readily the suspicion had come.

Aurelia looked at me.

“We should find out.”

I nodded.

Mary gathered the place names.

“I’ll send copies to the northern stewards and ask about old roads.”

The Castellan kept one sheet before him.

“I may have another source.”

He took us to a room I had visited only twice.

It lay behind the old stores, with a ceiling low enough that I had to remember the doorway.

Shelves held stone fragments, metal fittings, and pieces of the castle whose purpose had not yet been recovered.

The Castellan stopped beside a narrow drawer.

Inside lay three rectangular plates.

“Road accounts,” he said.

I leaned closer.

The writing was shallow and dense.

“These were kept on metal?”

“The working figures were usually written elsewhere. These recorded obligations intended to outlast a keeper.”

Evelyn looked at the plates.

“Repairs?”

“Among other things.”

He lifted the first.

At the bottom, almost hidden beneath discoloration, stood the same arch and star.

The account concerned timber.

Forty beams.

Iron fastenings.

Payment for twelve men and six mules.

“Greykeep supplied the house?” I asked.

“Greykeep supplied the bridge below it.”

Aurelia moved closer.

“There was a bridge.”

The Castellan turned the plate.

“An agreement with the settlements using the crossing. Grain and wool came south. Tools and salt went north.”

Mary had begun copying.

Then she stopped.

“What is that mark beside the payment?”

The Castellan held the plate toward the lamp.

For a moment, he did not speak.

“A cancellation.”

“Of the work?”

“Of the obligation.”

“When?”

He read the damaged date.

“After the fall.”

I looked at Aurelia.

She stood very still.

The castle had been destroyed.

Its accounts cancelled.

Somewhere, men had waited for wages or timber that would never arrive.

A bridge had continued to weather.

A road had gone quiet.

It was such a small part of what had happened.

That did not make it small to the people who had lived there.

“Can you place the settlements?” Evelyn asked.

“One,” the Castellan said. “The name survives in a toll record from Northwatch.”

Mary closed her book.

“Then we know whom to ask.”

The answer came from Merrow three days later.

He knew the road.

At least, he knew the southern approach.

Nobody took wagons there now. The lower bridge had failed long before his grandfather’s time, and a later route carried trade through a wider pass.

Shepherds still used some of the old track.

Above the tree line stood a ruined wayhouse.

He had never visited it.

A woman in his district had.

Her name was Tessa Bracken.

Merrow’s letter described her as a reliable guide.

Beneath that, in a different hand, someone had added:

Provided nobody tells her where the mountains are.

I suspected we would get along.

We did not leave immediately.

Snow had already begun closing the higher ground.

Merrow sent for Tessa instead.

Eliza approved.

So did Eleanor.

I had not asked Eleanor, but she had heard the word bridge and arrived with opinions.

“If the approach is broken, you don’t discover that with a wagon full of people.”

“We’ve been using horses.”

“They also object to falling.”

Evelyn looked at me.

I spread my hands.

“I have agreed with everyone so far.”

“That worries me,” Eleanor said.

While we waited, Aurelia’s prayers changed.

Not all of them.

Not in a way I could see.

But sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, she would grow quiet.

Then answer someone who was not in the room.

The first time it happened, I stopped speaking.

She held up one finger.

Waited.

Then said softly, “Ask her to sit with you. You needn’t finish the letter tonight.”

A moment later, she looked back at me.

“I’m sorry.”

“Someone needed you?”

“Yes.”

“Could you hear them before?”

“Sometimes.”

“And now?”

She rested her hands in her lap.

“Now they can hear more of my answer.”

Evelyn asked about it that evening.

We sat together after the children had gone to sleep.

“Does it tire you?”

“Yes. Though less than trying to reach through what held my voice.”

My wife nodded.

“I’d like to know which requests we can help with here.”

Aurelia watched her.

“The ones you are told about,” she said gently. “I won’t bring you every grief I hear.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Evelyn looked down at her hands.

For a while, she did not answer.

Then she said, “I’m learning.”

Aurelia reached across and took one of them.

“So am I.”

I sat beside them and listened.

There were worse ways to spend an evening.

Tessa arrived on a small grey horse.

She wore a patched coat and carried a walking staff with a horn grip polished smooth by use.

Her first question concerned the weather.

Her second concerned payment.

Her third was whether the people who wished to visit the ruin could follow instructions.

Eliza answered the third.

“They can.”

Tessa looked at me.

“Even him?”

“Usually.”

I considered objecting.

Then decided to improve the answer by remaining quiet.

She spread our copied chart beside a much smaller map of her own.

Hers had fewer decorations.

It also had streams, steep slopes, and a place marked with the words bad ground.

I trusted it immediately.

“That’s the old road,” she said.

Her finger followed a broken line.

“The bridge is gone here. There’s a foot crossing farther up if the water is low.”

“And the wayhouse?”

“There.”

She tapped a square beneath the ridge.

“Roof’s mostly gone. East wall stands. Spring still runs.”

Aurelia leaned forward.

“Is there a gallery?”

Tessa looked at her.

“Stone pillars along the front?”

“Yes.”

“Three standing. One leaning. The rest are down.”

Aurelia sat back.

“That is the place.”

Tessa studied her for a moment.

“You’ve been there?”

“A long time ago.”

“It hasn’t improved.”

“No,” Aurelia said quietly. “I imagine it hasn’t.”

Tessa turned back to the map.

“There’s something else.”

I looked up.

“People have trouble sleeping near it.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Dreams. Waking with the feeling they’ve left something behind. One of the shepherd boys went back three times to check his pack.”

Eliza folded her arms.

“Did he find anything missing?”

“No.”

“And you?”

Tessa’s finger remained on the little square.

“I dreamed my mother was calling from inside.”

The room became quiet.

“Was she?”

“My mother had been dead for fourteen years.”

I looked at Aurelia.

Her face had changed.

Not with surprise.

Recognition.

“Tessa,” she said, “did you go inside?”

“No.”

“Why?”

The guide looked faintly uncomfortable.

“She called me by my full name.”

Aurelia waited.

“My mother only did that when she was cross. If she wanted me to come out of the cold, she’d have called me Tess.”

I felt Evelyn’s hand settle over mine beneath the table.

Tessa shrugged.

“It was enough to make me wait until morning.”

After she left to see the rooms Helena had arranged, Aurelia remained at the table.

I waited until the door closed.

“What is it?”

She touched the arch and star.

“They called it the House of Returning.”

“The wayhouse?”

“The place beneath it.”

Mary opened her book again.

Aurelia looked toward the window.

“When I was first confined, I dreamed that my son was waiting for me.”

I did not move.

“Not as he was at the end. As he had been when he was small.”

Evelyn’s fingers tightened around mine.

“He would stand in a doorway,” Aurelia said. “Just beyond where I could reach. Sometimes he asked why I wouldn’t come.”

I remembered the old recording.

The child.

The garden chair.

The grown king whose refusal had been hidden until we found it.

“Did you know it wasn’t him?”

“Not at first.”

Her voice had become very quiet.

I wanted to ask how long.

I did not.

Aurelia looked down at her hands.

“Later, I began to notice things he said that he would never have said. Things the people holding me wanted me to believe.”

“That you should stop resisting,” Evelyn said.

Aurelia nodded.

“That I could have him back if I would only come through the door.”

My stomach turned.

“And the final restraint?”

She touched the mark again.

“I think it has been keeping that door open.”

Nobody spoke for a while.

Then Eliza moved Tessa’s map to the center of the table.

“We’ll need to understand what it can do before anyone sleeps near it.”

“Yes,” Aurelia said.

Mary wrote that down.

I looked at the little square below the ridge.

A ruined roof.

A spring.

A place where travellers once warmed themselves before crossing the mountain.

“Does it still call you?” I asked.

Aurelia met my eyes.

“Sometimes.”

“When?”

“When I am tired. Or lonely.”

I thought of the lamp beside her bed.

The song she had begun again.

Her room down the corridor.

Evelyn rose and went around the table.

She sat beside Aurelia.

“You can tell us when it happens.”

“I know.”

“Even if you know it isn’t him.”

Aurelia’s mouth trembled.

Evelyn took her hand.

“Especially then.”

That night, I checked the nursery before bed.

Both children slept.

Garrick had one hand above his head.

Carol lay turned toward the sound of her brother’s breathing.

Aurelia stood beside the cradles.

I stopped in the doorway.

After a moment, she looked up.

“I’m all right.”

I nodded.

Then came to stand beside her anyway.

We watched them for a while.

At last, she said, “He used to sleep like that.”

I looked at Garrick.

“The hand?”

“Yes.”

She smiled faintly.

“His father said he was already expecting someone to bring him things.”

I laughed softly.

Aurelia did too.

It was a memory she had offered herself.

I stayed until she finished telling it.