Chapter 243: His Own Account (2) [BONUS]

Every company of the Silver Crane kept a camp ledger.

It was an old rule, older than anyone in the Order could remember. A plain book bound in grey leather, carried by the junior squire, in which the company’s days were written down. Where they camped. How far they marched. What was eaten, what was bought, which horses went lame. At the end of each season, the ledger was sent to the Order’s hall in the capital and put on a shelf with all the others. As far as Tobin knew, no one had ever taken one down to read it.

He had been given the ledger on his first day as a squire.

"Nobody reads it," the old quartermaster had told him. "So write it properly. That way, if somebody ever does, they’ll find something worth reading."

The old quartermaster had died of a fever the following spring. Tobin had kept writing it properly anyway. It had seemed like a promise he had made to someone who could no longer hold him to it.

That night, after he left the commander’s tent, he sat on an upturned bucket beside the squires’ fire and opened the ledger on his knees.

The other squires were asleep. The fire was low. He held the book close to the coals so that he could see the page.

He wrote the date first.

Then he wrote what had happened that day, the way he always did.

Camp held at the Maren ford. No march. Firewood from the alder thickets. Two horses treated for cracked hooves. Bread and salt pork. The commander dictated a letter to the Council of War, sent south by night rider.

He stopped there.

The pen hovered over the page.

He did not have to write anything else. That was all a ledger needed. Where, when, what. It was not his place to write what the letter said, or what he thought of it. A squire did not write opinions in the company’s book.

But he found himself turning back through the pages instead.

He turned back past the ford and the ridge. Past the long days on the northern road. Past Merrowford.

There it was, in his own handwriting.

Camp held at Merrowford. No march. The commander rests.

The next page said the same. And the next. Six pages, one after another, almost exactly the same, because there had been nothing to write. The horses were fed. The men played dice. The commander rested.

Before that, Harrowmere. Camp held. The commander hunts with Lord Ferrant. The hounds are very fine.

Before that, Gellis. Camp held. The commander’s horse is lame. Waiting for a replacement from the capital.

Tobin read them all slowly, one at a time.

At the time, they had only been days. He had never added them up.

Now he took a scrap of paper from the back of the book and counted.

Fourteen days on the road from the capital to Merrowford. That was right. That was a fair pace for a company with wagons.

But eight of those days had been marching. Six had not.

And at Merrowford, six more days with no march at all.

Tobin turned to that page.

He had written: Departed Merrowford. A rider from the north reports trouble at the Wall. The commander says rumours always travel faster than the truth.

He had written that down because the commander had said it. He had thought it was a clever thing to say.

Tobin sat very still.

According to the outrider at the ridge, the Wall had fallen twenty days before the Order arrived. Tobin did the sum again, and then a third time, because he did not want it to be true.

If the Order had marched on every day it could have marched, it would not have arrived twenty days late on a quiet ridge in the south. It would have met the survivors on the road. It might even have reached the Riven while there was still a bridge across it.

Not in time to save the Wall. Two hundred and ninety knights could not have saved a fortress that forty thousand Roamers had broken. He knew that.

But in time to stand beside the people who had held it.

In time to see the men on it, as the rider had said.

In time to save at least one more life that was lost to the roamers.

He shut the ledger and pressed both hands flat on the cover. His heart was beating too fast.

He could tear out the pages. Nobody ever read the ledgers. He could write new ones, with the days run together. Marched north. Arrived at the ridge. He had a good hand. Nobody would see the difference.

Tobin thought about that for a long time.

Then he opened the book again, turned to the last page, and dipped his pen.

Under the line about the letter, he added one more.

The ledger records the following for the Council of War, in case it is ever asked.

Days of march from the capital to Merrowford: eight.

Days of camp without march: twelve.

The Wall fell twenty days before the company reached the ridge.

He looked at what he had written.

It was not an opinion. It was only a sum. And a sum was the kind of thing a ledger was for.

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The next morning he went down to the river for water before the camp woke.

An old woman was already there, at the far edge of the ford, filling two buckets. She had strips of sacking wrapped around her feet instead of shoes. Tobin recognised her. She had stood at the front of the crowd on the ridge road, with the lances pointed at her chest.

She saw his silver-grey cloak and stopped.

For a moment Tobin thought she would turn and leave. Instead she looked at his face.

"You’re the boy who held the helmet," she said.

"Yes, ma’am."

She nodded slowly. Then she lifted one of her buckets and set it down again, as if it had suddenly become too heavy.

"My son’s name is the forty-first on the stone," she said. "Third column. Edrin Moss. He was a cook in the Fourth Watch. He died at the eighth mile with a ladle in his hand, because they ran out of spears."

Tobin did not know what to say.

"I’m only telling you so somebody in a grey cloak knows it," the old woman said. Then she picked up both buckets and walked away up the ridge path without looking back.

That evening, in the margin of the ledger, beside the day’s entry, Tobin wrote a small, careful line.

Edrin Moss, a cook of the fourth Watch - died at eighth mile holding a ladle.

Then he wrapped the ledger in his spare shirt and put it at the bottom of his saddlebag, where nobody would think to look.

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Bonus Chapter for 300 Golden Tickets~