Chapter 265: The Last Mile

"There, young lord. The Maren ridge."

The Reaper had stopped at the top of the rise and was pointing north with two fingers,, as if using the whole hand might be rude. Encrid pushed the blanket off his shoulders and stood up in the back of the cart to look.

They had crossed the Serpentine at first light, at a ford so shallow that even Brindle had walked through it without complaint, and since then the road had climbed steadily through bare birch woods. Now the trees opened, and the land fell away in front of them. A long grey ridge lay across the horizon with an old keep squatting on its highest point. Below the keep, scattered along the slopes, were villages, and from every one of them smoke was rising into the cold blue air. Kitchen fires. Bread ovens. One darker plume that had to be a forge.

The last time Encrid had seen these people, they had been standing on the south bank of the Riven in the dark, holding whatever they had managed to carry. Now they had roofs, and somebody up there was baking bread.

"By tomorrow morning," the Reaper said, "if the mule is generous."

"He’s never generous."

The reaper laughed, agreeing with the fact.

At midday, at a crossroads ringed by old oaks, the Reaper stopped Brindle and lifted the strongbox down onto a flat rock. Encrid understood what was coming before a word was said.

"I won’t come up the ridge with you, young lord."

Encrid knew why.

"The Blue Moon house?"

They had discussed this earlier. The Blue moon had branches all over the empire and the reaper was now headed to one of those.

"It’s a day east of here. It sits on one of my five roads." His voice was as calm as ever. Before they left the garden, he had told each of the five people who knew about his daughter a different road, so that whoever came looking for him on the wrong one would reveal who had talked.

"If anyone has come there asking for me, I need to know who sent them.."

It made sense, but Encrid did not like it. For more than a month, this man had taken care of him - to make sure that he recovered, and Encrid had grown used to him.

"How will I find you again?"

"You won’t need to. I’ll find you." The Reaper said simply.

Then he stepped forward, folded down the side of Encrid’s collar that the wind had turned up, and smoothed it flat with two fingers. It was a small, ordinary thing, the kind of thing a father does before sending his son into a hall full of strangers.

"You are about to stop being dead," he said quietly. "Be ready for what that costs."

"What does it cost?"

"Everything that being dead was protecting. The Inquisitors will want answers. The Crown will want you in the capital. And the people who built that altar on the Wall will hear that the man who took their vessel is alive." He stepped back. "Until now, you were only a name. From tomorrow, you are a man again, and a man can be found."

"Thank you," Encrid said. "For all of it."

"You paid for all of it, a long time ago. Look after the mule."

He settled his empty carrying frame on his back and walked away down the eastern road. Within a minute, Encrid could no longer see him and he once understood that reaper was merely matching his pace.

? ? ?

By evening, Encrid had driven the cart to a farmstead at the foot of the ridge. The farmer’s wife looked at the thin, grey-streaked stranger with open suspicion, but she took a silver coin to stable Brindle and keep the cart until someone came for it. Encrid did not sleep in her barn. He spread his blanket under a hedge at the edge of the yard to sleep, with the strongbox on a flagstone beside him and its lid open the width of a finger.

A little before midnight, the familiar weight came down out of the dark. A thread of white light rose from the gap in the lid, and there was a soft hiss as the dragon drank the breath that had leaked out of the cushion that day. It had done so every night since the garden, though it hurt, and it had never once complained about that part.

It complained about other things instead.

{ That hill is very loud. }

"They’re all asleep."

{ Not all of them. Some are coughing. Some are snoring. One is singing to a goat. Eight thousand noisy mortals. } It sounded genuinely offended.

{ Why would anyone choose to live so close to so many of them? }

"Because they’re safer together."

{ Mortals are never safe. They only feel safer when they are crowded. }

Encrid smiled into the dark and asked whether it would stay close. The dragon said it would stay where it always stayed, out of sight and near the box, and then added that he was not to tell anyone on the ridge about it. Encrid promised he would not.

He woke before dawn with frost on his blanket. The strongbox was much heavier than his coat, and the Divine Sage’s list said, in letters, that he was not to carry anything heavier than his coat until he received a letter saying otherwise. Encrid tied it to his back with a length of rope anyway and took a stick from the farmer’s woodpile to lean on.

He could have sent for a wagon. But he had told eight thousand people to walk away from their home in the dark and leave behind the stones their fathers had died on. The least he could do was walk back to them on his own feet.

So he started up the path.

? ? ?

On the steps of the old granary, Wren was checking the morning issue. Forty-one sacks of oats, nineteen of barley, and one cask of salt pork that Merta swore had been two casks yesterday. She wrote it all down in her small, neat hand, frowned at the pork, and looked up to rest her eyes.

Down the hill, where the path came up out of the frost, a man was climbing. He was thin and walked slowly, leaning on a stick, with something square and heavy tied to his back. One side of his hair was grey, though he did not move like an old man. Every twenty steps he stopped to breathe, and then he kept going.

Wren watched him for a while, the pen still in her hand. Then she stopped breathing altogether, and the ledger slid off her knees and tumbled down the steps, and she did not go after it.

She ran to the guild leader instead.

? ? ?