Chapter 374 - 374: No Cousin

The quarry cut was older than the war and uglier than the maps.

Cart ruts climbed, then stopped against a shelf of broken stone where a wagon sat with its traces cut and its bed empty except for slats that had never held cloth. Salt was sprinkled on top like a lie someone had remembered at the last minute.

Erna dropped off first, hammer already in her hand.

"That is not storage, that is a stage, and if your ten complainers walk up there in a line they will be a chorus, spread them, I want eyes on the rim before anyone touches the bed."

Rigel sent them anyway, just not as a choir.

Two up the left scree.

Two on the cart.

The rest held the path so nothing polite could come down behind them wearing a sentry's face.

The men on the cart called down that the slats smelled like the miller's house, flour after rain, and that a crate lid at the back had a pale smear in the shape of a hand too neat to be work.

Rigel did not climb yet.

"If a cousin lives here he can say so from cover, if a merchant lives here he can show his hands, if this is only a mouth it can save the courtesy, I am tired of being welcomed by rock."

No cousin answered.

Wind did.

Then a woman's voice from the cut above the wagon, adult, worn, a little hoarse from calling, the same texture as the well and not the same person.

"You brought the craftsman again, that is a habit, Lord Gousel, she refuses fair pay and still follows you into holes, I would keep her if I were building a house."

Erna laughed without humor.

"You could not afford the nails, come down where I can see your wrists, I have had enough of voices that think a wage is a leash."

A woman stepped out onto the shelf.

Village clothes.

Empty hands.

Eyes that knew how to look like a person who had been waiting for a ride that never came.

One of the complainers muttered that she looked like the missing wife from Riverbend, the one nobody had found, and then he shut up because Rigel had already told them not to name the dead into a conversation.

Rigel walked up the last of the ruts and stopped short of the cart bed.

"If you are her, you can tell me the watchman's soup, if you are not, you can tell me what you stored in a wagon that left the castle with cloth on its papers."

She smiled as if the distinction were charming.

"We stored a route, the load was never the point, the point was that men wave at leaving carts and do not count what comes back smiling, you have seen that, you are standing in the proof."

Her gaze dipped to his coat.

"The scrap has gone quiet because it already rang, you can throw it in the pit if you like, it will not save the house that learned your cadence, it will only make you feel like a man who did something with his hands."

Erna moved to his left, not his back.

"If she takes one step toward the rim I am putting this hammer in her knee, I am not discussing theology with a shelf."

The woman took the step anyway, slow, guest-slow.

"You can break this body, we have others, Jorn is still sitting, your Count is still practicing the word no, the sisters at Gousel already heard a sentence they were trained to finish, and you came to a quarry as if iron in a hole would be the center of it."

Rigel's men shifted.

He did not look at them.

"Then this body is still useful as a door I can shut, Erna."

"Gladly."

The woman moved faster than village bones should have.

Not a fighter's clean rush, a wrong, light pull, as if the weight had been taken out of her and borrowed back for the lunge.

Erna's hammer caught the knee as promised.

Bone went.

The woman did not scream like a wife.

She made a small interested sound and grabbed Erna's belt with fingers that wanted the clasp Rigel had undone in a corridor two days ago.

Rigel cut the wrist.

Not off.

Through enough that the grip failed.

The body dropped against the cart wheel and kept talking, polite, as if pain were a rumor about someone else.

"That was rude, she liked you better when you were inside her and not pretending this is about masonry."

Erna kicked the woman off her belt and spat on the stone.

"Say that again after I brick your mouth."

Rigel gagged the woman with a strip of the fake salt sacking, bound the broken leg, and had two complainers drag her into the wagon bed where she could be a load for once.

The pit behind the shelf went down farther than the day's light.

A pale film clung to the first visible footholds.

No cousin.

No cloth.

A second set of small prints that he refused to follow with more than a glance, then boards, then oil, then fire enough to dirty the route without collapsing the hill onto the path home.

They did not wait to watch it finish.

On the downslope, with the wagon lurching and the gagged woman thumping like cargo, Erna caught his reins hard enough to stop both horses in the lee of a cut the men could not see around.

"You used what she said, do not look blank, she put us on a bed in front of soldiers, and I am not riding back into that castle with that sentence sitting in my teeth and your quiet face on top of it."

Rigel glanced once at the bend, then at her.

"You want it done or you want it argued."

"I want it done so I can hate you for the right reason again, not for a wall's gossip, and if you talk through it I will bite."

It was quick and angry and adult, trousers shoved, her back to stone that did not speak, his hand over her mouth only until she jerked it off and told him she could keep her own noise down.

She was wet from the fight and furious about that too.

He took her standing, hard enough that her boot scraped grit, and she came first with a muffled curse into his shoulder because she would not give the quarry a cry.

He pulled out and finished on the dirt, not on her, not on the road where a smear might become another map.

Erna fixed her belt with hands that wanted a hammer more than a kindness.

"That was not proof she was right."

"No."

"If that thing in the wagon heard us I will set the wagon on fire and you can walk the rest."

"She heard wood and wheels, that is all she gets."

They came around the bend.

The ten complainers were still complainers.

The castle roof sat in the distance with too many lamps for the hour.

A rider was coming the other way, fast, Mesterica's seat, and she did not slow until she was close enough to see the wagon and the bound woman and Erna's ruined chalk-white sleeve.

Mesterica's words came out in one hard stretch, no greeting in them.

"The first post is gone, not burned, empty, the horse I sent on with your letters was standing in the yard with the bags open and the paper still there, and a clerk who smiled too long asked me whether the Marquis's younger slave still answers when told to kneel, so I turned around, because a letter that has already been read by the road is not a letter, it is bait you were meant to chase."