Chapter 617: Seven Tags

Valerica laid out the plan on the floor of the hut with seven pebbles and a strip of net. It took four minutes.

"Nyx puts the deck watch to sleep. Vane and Ashe go up the anchor chain. Vane takes the hold, Ashe takes the hatch. Isole, Brynn and I wait under the stern in Pell’s skiff. The children come down to us one at a time." She moved the pebbles as she spoke. "Nobody dies. Nobody wakes the town. We’re back in this hut before the tide turns."

"And if the High Expert wakes up?" Ashe asked.

"Then you put him back to sleep the other way." Valerica glanced at Vane. "Try not to improvise."

"You like it when I improvise."

"I like it when it works." She gathered the pebbles. "Those are different things, and you know it."

That left Mara.

She had already worked it out. Vane could see it in the way she was sitting, very upright, the ledger strap wound twice around her fingers. He had told her every hour, with him. He was about to climb a ship’s chain into a hold full of Household agents.

"You’re staying in the skiff," he said. "With Isole."

"You said every hour."

"I know what I said."

"You said not with Ashe, not with Nyx. With you." Her voice stayed level, but the strap was tight enough to whiten her knuckles. "That was the rule."

"Tonight Isole is me."

Mara looked at Isole. Isole looked back at her with grave, patient attention and nodded once, as if accepting a formal appointment.

Mara thought about it.

"That isn’t how rules work," she said finally.

"Tonight it is."

She unwound the strap from her fingers. "Then I’m counting you back," she said. "All of you. One at a time."

The fog came in off the water after midnight, which Brynn said was luck and Nyx said was nothing of the kind. She lay on the shingle at the water’s edge with her eyes closed and her breathing slowed to almost nothing, and the Dreamscape went out across the harbor like ink spreading through water. Vane felt it pass him, a cool, heavy softness at the back of his mind, and he had to set his teeth against it. On the black ship, the two men on deck watch sat down where they stood and went to sleep against the rail.

"Go," Nyx murmured, without opening her eyes. "If you fall in, I’m not diving after you."

"You would."

"I would complain the whole time."

The anchor chain was cold and slick with weed. Vane went up it hand over hand, the spear strapped across his back, and Ashe came up behind him with the eel-seller’s hood thrown back at last and the horns bare in the dark. Neither of them used anything. Vane had spent a year learning how much he could do with his body alone, and the answer turned out to be most things.

The deck was empty except for the sleepers. The hatch to the hold stood half open. Ashe took a position beside it, and as Vane went past her she touched two fingers to his wrist, very briefly. It meant I’m here.

The hold stank of bilge and fear.

Tobi Rusk was chained to a stanchion near the bow, a big, bearded man with a split lip and one eye swollen shut. The seven children sat in a huddle against the hull, and every one of them was awake. They had been awake, Vane suspected, since they were brought aboard. In the faint light from the hatch he could see the tin tags at their throats.

He crouched in front of them and pulled off his cap so they could see his face.

"My name’s Vane," he said quietly. "I grew up in a place like Carrow. I’m here to take you somewhere they can’t count you."

The eldest girl stared at him. Then she put her arm around the boy next to her and nodded.

The irons on Tobi’s wrists were good Imperial steel, warded against tampering. Null Point found the weakest seam in the ward in under a second, and Vane put the tip of his spear into it and turned. The lock gave with a sound like a knuckle cracking. Tobi swore softly, rubbing his wrists, and then gathered the two smallest children into his arms as though he had been waiting four days to do exactly that.

They were at the foot of the ladder when the ship woke up.

It began as a pressure against the back of Vane’s neck: a mind pushing against the Dreamscape, finding the shape of it, refusing it. The High Expert. He had been asleep below, out of Nyx’s reach, or deep enough in his own discipline to shake it off, and now he was moving fast along the passage toward the hatch.

Ashe met him there.

Vane did not see the fight. He heard it: one short, flat impact, a grunt, a second impact, and then the soft, heavy sound of a body sitting down hard against a bulkhead. When he came up the ladder with the eldest girl, Ashe was standing over the man with her blade still sheathed. She had used the hilt.

The officer was not quite unconscious. His eyes were open, unfocused, fixed on the horns.

"Razar," he said thickly.

Ashe looked down at him for a long moment.

"Go back to sleep," she said, and he did.

The children went down the stern ladder one at a time into the skiff, where Isole caught each of them and Valerica held the little boat steady against the swell with a faint, careful thickening of the air around it. Brynn took the oars. Tobi went last, and the skiff sat so low in the water that it shipped a cupful of sea with every stroke, and nobody cared.

They were back in the hut before the tide turned. Valerica checked the time and said nothing, which from Valerica was applause.

Mara was waiting at the door. She counted them in exactly as she had promised, one at a time, saying the names of the six from Korreth under her breath and then, for the children, asking each of them for their own name before she would let them past. When the last one had gone inside, she knelt down beside the eldest girl and very gently lifted the cord over her head.

The girl flinched, then let her.

Mara did it seven times. She did not hurry. When she had all seven tags in her palm, she closed her hand around them and put them in the pocket of her coat, and kept her hand there, over them.

"Now they’re mine to count," she said to Vane. "Not theirs."

He could not think of anything to say to that, so he put his hand on her head for a moment the way he had when she was small, and she let him, which she had not done in a long time.

Brynn was standing at the little window, looking down the coast toward Carrow, where the harbor lights showed faintly through the thinning fog. She had not taken her coat off.

"They’ll know it was us," she said.

"He saw me," Ashe said. "They’ll be looking for a Razar."

Brynn did not turn around. "I didn’t mean you."