Chapter 413: The Time He Told Twice

Lethan wanted the mule.

He made that clear before I had found my place in the book.

Mule.

“The mule is in the next part,” I said.

Skip.

Liora looked up from the basin she was rinsing.

“You can't skip to the parts you like.”

Lethan's eye moved toward her slowly.

Why.

She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

I turned to the second chapter.

The courier had escaped the magistrate's misunderstanding by agreeing to inspect the privy, which led him into a stable yard, which led him to the mule. The mule's name was Patience. The author seemed to think this was very funny.

So, apparently, did Lethan.

The bell rang once when the mule refused to cross a bridge the courier insisted was sound.

It rang again when the bridge collapsed behind them.

I stopped reading.

Liora had stopped rinsing.

Lethan's fingers rested on the paddle. The frost beside his hand was forming a word, but slowly, as though he wanted to choose it properly.

Right.

“The mule was right,” I agreed.

Yes.

I read until his blinks grew longer between sentences. When I closed the book, I left the bookmark showing where he could see it, just as before.

He watched me put the volume on the shelf beside his bed.

Leaving.

It was not quite a question.

“For a day or two. North.”

Careful.

“I'll try.”

His eye stayed on me.

I recognized the look. Liora gave it to me regularly.

“I'll be careful,” I said.

One blink.

Liora walked me to the corridor.

“He's never told anyone else to be careful,” she said.

“Perhaps he thinks I need it more.”

“You do.”

She went back inside before I could argue.

Perrin had come about the door.

I found him kneeling in Vaust's room with the frame half exposed, a pot of glue warming beside him and Aldren holding a lamp at an angle Perrin plainly considered incorrect.

Vaust was sitting up.

He had not been permitted to sit up for this. Evelyn had permitted him to sit up for breakfast, and he had simply neglected to lie down again.

“The swelling is at the joint,” he was saying.

“The swelling is in the wood,” Perrin replied.

“The wood is at the joint.”

Aldren looked at me over the lamp.

“They have been doing this since sunrise.”

“Has anything been repaired?”

“The disagreement has become very precise.”

Perrin pressed his thumb against the frame and frowned.

Then he frowned harder.

He reached for a thin chisel, removed a sliver no thicker than a fingernail, and sat back on his heels.

“There's a shim in here.”

Vaust nodded.

“Someone fitted it wet.”

“Who would fit a shim wet?”

“A man who said wood was wood,” Aldren suggested.

Perrin looked so personally offended that Vaust laughed. It hurt him. He pressed one bandaged wrist against his chest until the pain passed, but he did not seem to regret it.

Fenrir had been right.

The argument came first.

What followed it was a carpenter and a god of thresholds bent over a door frame with the same expression, as if the rest of the world could wait while they agreed what was wrong with the joint.

I left them to it.

From the corridor, I heard Perrin say, “Show me where it catches when the air is damp,” and Vaust answer, “It isn't damp yet.”

“Then describe it.”

“Lower corner.”

“How far?”

That conversation sounded likely to outlast my journey.

We gathered in the map room before noon.

Eliza had chosen eight people for the road. Four scouts, two soldiers who could pass for drovers without much effort, Elyan to carry messages, and Rhenna, the scout who had helped the carter lash his wheel.

Thor would come.

So would I.

That decision had taken longer than any other part of the planning.

“You are not a scout,” Eliza had said the previous evening.

“No.”

“You are not a carter.”

“No.”

“You have a mark on your hand that glows when you are upset.”

“Not always.”

She had looked at Thor.

Thor had looked at me for a long time.

“Why?” she asked.

It was a fair question. I had made myself answer it honestly.

“Because if we ask those people to trust strangers, one of the strangers should be the person who will have to keep the promise.”

Thor considered that.

Then she set conditions.

I would wear plain clothing. I would keep my right hand gloved. I would remain with Rhenna and speak only when someone spoke to me. If soldiers from the basin appeared, I would be a man who had stopped to help with a wheel and nothing else.

“Nothing else,” she repeated.

“Nothing else.”

“Not lightning. Not frost. Not a clever answer.”

“I don't always have a clever answer.”

“You always try.”

Eliza wrote the conditions down.

I suspected she intended to read them back to me later.

Adeline joined us that morning with her arm in a fresh sling. Mary had copied the recovered names from the green ledger onto a single sheet, and Adeline had marked the ones she knew personally.

There were eleven marks.

“Those are the clerks and porters who were sent north from the weighhouse before you came,” she said. “If anyone is being held in a counting room, it may be them.”

“Would they know you?” Thor asked.

“Some.”

“Would they trust you?”

Adeline considered that more carefully than most people would have.

“They would trust that I hated the green book as much as they did.”

She tapped one name near the bottom.

“Tobin Reed counted wagons beside me for four years. He writes his sevens backward when he's tired. If you see a note with backward sevens, it's his.”

Rhenna wrote that down.

So did I.

Thor watched me do it and said nothing, which I chose to interpret as approval.

Evelyn and Adriana met me in the courtyard.

Adriana straightened my plain collar, then looked at it with dissatisfaction.

“You look like a man who sells turnips.”

“That was the intention.”

“You look like a man who sells turnips badly.”

Evelyn handed me a small wrapped bundle.

“Bread, cheese, and the ointment for your wrist.”

“My wrist is fine.”

She lifted my sleeve without asking. The burn from the gate's binding had faded to pink.

“Use it anyway.”

I promised.

Adriana took my gloved hand and placed it against the curve beneath her ribs.

Nothing happened.

We waited.

Still nothing.

“They're asleep,” she said.

“Lucky.”

“Very.”

She kept my hand there a moment longer anyway.

Then Evelyn kissed me, and Adriana kissed me, and Thor cleared her throat from beside the horses in a manner that suggested she had been patient for a measured and finite amount of time.

The transit gate carried us to the northern relay station by midafternoon.

From there, the road was only a road.

We rode through hill country that had been farmed once and grazed later and was now mostly gorse and stone walls with gaps in them. The weather turned gray. Rain came and went without committing to anything.

Elyan rode ahead and returned twice to report that there was nothing on the road worth reporting.

The second time, he had mud on both boots.

“The same stream?” I asked.

“A different stream. It had the same opinions.”

By evening, we could see the ridge shaped like a broken hook.

The scouts had not exaggerated it. The rock bent over the valley like the end of a shepherd's crook that someone had snapped and failed to repair. Below it, the land fell toward the abandoned quarry, where great pale blocks still lay where workers had cut and left them, half swallowed by brambles.

Beyond the quarry, the western road began to climb.

We made camp in a fold of ground out of sight of both.

No fire.

Thor took the first watch without asking anyone. I sat beside her because I could not sleep, and because she did not tell me to go away.

The rain stopped.

Above the ridge, the clouds thinned enough to show a few stars.

“Avarn said something after practice,” I said eventually.

“He says a great many things after practice. Most of them are 'again.'”

“He said I should defend the shield while remembering why I was there.”

Thor waited.

“Tomorrow is the same exercise.”

She looked at me sideways.

“Is it?”

“The shield is the carters. I'm there to protect them, not to defeat whoever comes down that road.”

Thor was quiet for a while.

Then she said, “That is the most sensible thing you have said in a week.”

“It's only Wednesday.”

“I know.”

The roadside shelter stood below the climb, beside the spring the maps agreed upon.

It was a low stone building with a slate roof, an open front, and a long trough fed by a pipe from the hillside. Someone had carved the outline of a lantern above the doorway, very faint now. I thought of the chapel in Westmere Hold, years ago, and the woman whose image had once stood beside every transit gate.

The Keeper of Roads.

Safe passage and hospitality.

Whoever had built this shelter had believed travelers should have water and a roof regardless of where they were going.

Othellos's court still used it.

That seemed fitting in a way I did not like.

Thor, Eliza, and most of the scouts took positions above the road where the gorse grew thick. The two soldiers who could pass for drovers sat at the far end of the shelter with a pair of tired horses and a cart we had bought at the relay station. Elyan went somewhere I could not see and probably did not want to know about.

Rhenna and I waited by the trough.

“What do I do?” I asked her quietly.

“Look bored.”

“I can do that.”

“You're doing it badly.”

“Everyone keeps telling me that.”

She almost smiled.

The carter came down the road an hour after dawn, exactly when he had said.

He had told Rhenna the time twice.

He drove a long, narrow cart drawn by two mules, loaded with empty barrels that knocked against one another with every rut. Behind him came a second cart, smaller, carrying lamp-oil jars packed in straw. A woman drove that one. She had gray hair pinned under a cap and the kind of forearms that suggested she lifted the jars herself.

The carter stopped at the trough and let his mules drink.

He looked at Rhenna.

Then at me.

Then back at Rhenna.

“You brought someone.”

“He helps with wheels.”

The carter studied my gloved hands, my turnip-seller's collar, and whatever my face was doing.

“Does he.”

He climbed down slowly. His knees cracked loud enough for the mules to notice.

“Dunstan Marl,” he said. “That's Maud Fenner. She's got the oil.”

Maud climbed down from her own seat without assistance and filled a dipper at the pipe.

“We've got until the spring runs clear,” she said.

I did not know what that meant.

Rhenna seemed to.

Later, she explained. The basin's receiving officers sent riders down to check the road twice each morning, once after the first convoy began climbing, and once when the dust had settled. From the shelter, the riders' approach muddied the spring before anyone could see them, because the pipe drew from a cistern beside the upper road and the horses always stopped to drink there first.

When the water ran brown, someone was coming.

It was the sort of knowledge no map would ever contain.

Dunstan did most of the talking.

Maud corrected him when he was wrong, which was often enough that I suspected they had been doing this for decades.

There were eleven people in the counting room beside the receiving shed.

Two kitchen girls from the outer settlement, Wenna and Ilse, who had been delivering bread when the bells rang and had not been allowed home since.

A mason named Corran, who had been repairing a drain near the inner wall and had seen something he should not have. Dunstan did not know what.

“Corran doesn't know either,” Maud said. “He told the officer as much. That's why they're keeping him. Nobody believes a man who says he didn't notice.”

The other eight had come from the south some weeks earlier. Clerks and porters. Not locals.

“Quiet sort,” Dunstan said. “Kept themselves to themselves. Except one. Bandy fellow. Talks to the barrels.”

“Counts them,” Maud corrected.

“Out loud. That's talking to them.”

I took the sheet from my coat and read the names Adeline had marked.

Dunstan listened with his head tilted.

He did not recognize most of them.

When I reached Tobin Reed, Maud lifted her chin.

“That's him. The counter.”

“Is he hurt?”

“He was walking last week.”

She did not say what had happened since.

I folded the sheet away.

“How are they being kept?”

“Locked in at night. Let out to work the receiving floor by day, two at a time, with an officer watching. The rest stay in.” Dunstan scratched his jaw. “The officer's name is Sallow. Counts everything twice. Counts it a third time if you look at him.”

“He's not cruel,” Maud said.

Dunstan snorted.

“He's not cruel,” she repeated. “He's frightened. That's worse. A cruel man you can predict.”

I thought of Captain Edric Vale, all those years ago, telling his twelve-year-old daughter to hide her hand.

Fear made people into many things.

Some of them could be reached.

The spring ran brown halfway through Maud's account of the gate schedule.

She stopped in the middle of a sentence and set her dipper on the trough.

“Riders.”

Rhenna moved to the cart's rear wheel as though she had been examining it all along.

I knelt beside her.

The rope from her earlier repair was still lashed around the spokes. She began loosening it with every appearance of irritation.

“Hold this,” she said.

I held it.

Three riders came down the switchbacks at an easy trot. Gray coats. Silver at the throat of the leader. No pennant.

They stopped at the shelter.

The leader did not dismount.

He was younger than I expected, with a careful mustache and the look of a man who had been given authority recently and had not yet decided what shape it should take.

“Marl.”

“Officer Sallow.”

So this was the man who counted everything twice.

Sallow looked at the barrels.

Then at the drovers at the far end of the shelter, with their tired horses and the cart we had bought for more than it was worth.

Then at me.

“Who are these?”

“Travelers,” Dunstan said. “Wheel trouble. Mine. They stopped to help.”

“You had wheel trouble last week.”

“I have wheel trouble every week. The road's a disgrace. I've said so to your people.”

Sallow's gaze returned to me.

I kept my eyes on the rope.

“You. Where are you bound?”

Thor's conditions sat in my mind like stones in my pocket.

A man who had stopped to help with a wheel. Nothing else.

“South,” I said. “After the wheel.”

“From where?”

Rhenna answered before I could.

“The relay road. We sell feed to the stations.”

Sallow looked at our cart.

There were, in fact, four sacks of oats in it.

Eliza had insisted.

He seemed to accept that. He turned back to Dunstan.

“The receiving floor wants your barrels counted before you leave the upper yard. Not after.”

“I counted them.”

“You counted them after.”

“The number didn't change on the way down.”

“Before,” Sallow said.

Then he leaned from his saddle and struck one of the barrels with his riding crop.

Not hard.

Hard enough.

The barrel rolled sideways against its neighbor, then against the cart's side, then over the edge. It hit the road and split along one stave.

Dunstan looked at it.

Sallow looked at Dunstan.

“That one is short,” Sallow said. “You'll answer for it at the gate.”

He waited for an answer.

Dunstan gave him none.

I realized I had stopped breathing.

My right hand was hot inside the glove. I could feel the Crown beneath the leather, not glowing, but close to it, the way a kettle is close to singing before it makes any sound.

I could have closed the distance before Sallow's horse took another step.

I could have made the road between us very cold.

I could also have destroyed the only arrangement that let eleven people in a locked room see their friends drive past twice a week.

Rhenna pressed the rope into my hands.

“Tighter,” she said quietly.

I pulled it tighter.

Sallow turned his horse.

The three riders went back up the road at the same easy trot.

When they had passed the first switchback, Maud let out a long breath.

“Well,” she said. “He's worse this week.”

Dunstan picked up the broken barrel and examined it.

“Oak,” he said sadly. “Good oak.”

Then he looked at me.

“You wanted to hit him.”

I considered lying.

There did not seem to be much point.

“Yes.”

He nodded slowly.

“Good. Means you're not one of theirs.”

He set the barrel back on the cart, broken side down.

“Means you're one of someone else's, mind. I'm not asking whose.”

“You told Rhenna the time twice.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

Dunstan looked up the road, toward the basin he could not see from here.

“My sister's girl is Wenna. The bread girl. She's sixteen. She's afraid of the dark.” He wiped his hands on his coat. “I've driven that road thirty years. Never once asked who's behind the walls. Didn't seem my business. Now they've got Wenna behind a door, and nobody up there can tell me why.”

Maud put her hand on his shoulder.

He did not shake it off.

“I'm not brave,” he said. “I want that understood. I'm not going to fight anyone. I can't.”

“We aren't asking you to,” I said.

“Then what are you asking?”

I opened my mouth.

Then I remembered Adriana handing me my cloak.

Ask the man what he knows before deciding how to save him.

“What would you do,” I said, “if you were trying to get them out?”

Dunstan stared at me.

Maud laughed, short and surprised.

“Nobody's asked him that,” she said.

“Nobody's asked anyone that.”

Dunstan looked at the broken barrel for a long time.

Then he said, “They count us in.”

“The carters?”

“Every cart. Every driver. Every mule, near enough. They count barrels in full and barrels out empty. Sallow counts all of it twice.” He rubbed his jaw. “But they never count people out. Never had to. Who'd want to stay?”

Maud's hand tightened on his shoulder.

“Dun.”

“I'm only saying.”

“I know what you're saying.”

The two of them looked at each other with an understanding I could not share.

Then Maud reached beneath the straw in her cart, removed one of the lamp-oil jars, and pried out a wad of packing from its base.

Inside was a folded scrap of paper.

“This came out in an empty last week,” she said. “I didn't know who to give it to. I kept it in case.”

She held it toward me.

I took off my glove before I could think better of it.

The Crown was faint against my palm. Maud saw it.

She did not drop the paper.

She looked at the mark for a long moment, and then at my face, and then she put the paper into my bare hand and closed my fingers over it.

“In case,” she said again.

We rode back toward the relay station without stopping.

Thor did not speak until we reached the first ridge.

“You took off the glove.”

“Yes.”

“After I told you.”

“After Sallow was gone.”

She rode beside me for a while.

“You kept your hand still while he broke that barrel.”

“Yes.”

“I watched.”

I did not answer.

“That was harder,” she said.

I looked at her.

Thor kept her eyes on the road.

“Avarn would say 'again,'” she added. “I'm only going to say it once. That was well done.”

We reached Havenreach after dark.

Adeline was still awake. Mary had found her a room near the archives, and she had apparently decided that sleep was a form of waiting she could postpone.

I gave her the paper from the lamp-oil jar.

She unfolded it beneath the lamp.

It held three columns, very small, in the tally shorthand the weighhouse clerks had used for wagons and sacks and, later, for people.

Several of the sevens were written backward.

Adeline's hand pressed flat against the table.

“Tobin,” she said.

Mary leaned over her shoulder.

“What does it say?”

Adeline read the first column with her finger.

Eleven marks. A date beside each. The dates were the days the prisoners had been brought into the counting room.

The second column held a single word repeated eleven times.

Hold.

The third column was not a word.

It was a single date, written once at the bottom with a line drawn up to every name above it.

Adeline read it twice.

Then she looked up at me, and her face had gone the gray color of the ledger's scorched edges.

“They aren't being held for questioning,” she said. “They're scheduled.”

“For what?”

“For the next inward transfer.”

Mary reached for the convoy calendar the scouts had copied from Dunstan's account.

She did not need to search long.

The date Tobin Reed had written with his backward sevens was the same day the next food convoy would climb the western road.

Six days.

I did not go to bed at once.

I stood outside the nursery instead, where Evelyn found me.

She did not ask what had happened. She put her hand on my back and waited.

Inside, Carol slept sideways across her bed. Garrick had pulled the wooden horse under his blanket. Down the corridor, I could hear Adriana's low voice telling the baby something too quiet to make out.

“Six days,” I said eventually.

“For what?”

I told her.

Evelyn listened to all of it. Dunstan and Maud. Sallow and the broken barrel. The glove. The paper.

When I finished, she said, “Then we have six days.”

“It isn't much.”

“It's six more than we had this morning.”

She took my hand and turned it palm up. The Crown had faded to almost nothing.

“And a carter who knows they never count people out,” she added.

I looked at her.

She smiled slightly.

“You weren't the only one listening.”

Down the corridor, Adriana's voice paused.

Then she called softly, “Uriah. Come here. Quickly.”

I went.

She was sitting up against the pillows with both hands on her stomach and an expression of complete outrage.

“Now,” she said. “Now they've woken up.”

I put my hand beside hers.

A firm push answered.

Then another, from a different place entirely.

Evelyn sat on the edge of the bed.

For a while, the three of us did nothing but wait for the next one.

Six days could begin in the morning.