Chapter 618: Surety

The Household did not burn anything. Afterward, Vane thought that would have been easier to watch.

At mid-morning the chapel bell began to ring, and it kept ringing, slow and even, until every door in Carrow had opened and every soul in the town had walked down the slope to the market square. Vane watched it happen through Brynn’s old brass spyglass from the headland above the cove, lying flat in the gorse with Ashe on one side of him and Brynn on the other. Behind them, out of sight in the hut, Isole was feeding seven children and Tobi Rusk on bread and smoked fish, and trying to keep the youngest from asking where his mother was.

The trestle table was still under the awning. The silver rod still lay on its velvet. The clerk sat behind it with his ledger, exactly as he had the day before, as if nothing had happened at all.

The High Expert stood in front of the table. Even at that distance, Vane could see how he was holding his ribs.

"Can you hear him?" Vane asked.

Nyx answered from the shingle below them, where she sat with her eyes shut and the Dreamscape stretched thin across the water toward the town.

"Every word," she said. "You won’t like it."

She gave it to them flatly, a sentence at a time, in the officer’s own words.

Last night, seven registered persons were unlawfully removed from Imperial custody in this harbor. Under the statute, a community that harbors unregistered persons stands surety for them. One surety will be taken for each person removed. Sureties will be registered and transported with the next convoy. Should the persons removed be returned to custody, the sureties will be released. Should they not be returned, the sureties will answer for them.

"Answer how?" Ashe said.

"He doesn’t say."

The clerk stood up and read seven names from a sheet of paper.

Vane watched each of them walk forward out of the crowd. Nobody had to drag them. That was the part he would remember. A broad-shouldered woman in a fisherman’s smock, whom Brynn named in a whisper as Marta Rusk, Tobi’s wife. The sexton of the chapel, an old man with a stick. A boy of perhaps seventeen, white to the lips, whose mother had to be held back by two neighbors. And Pell, the fish seller, who wiped his hands on his apron as he came, as though he had been called away from his stall to do something tiresome. Three more whose names Brynn did not know. All seven came to the table and stood in a line where the children had stood the day before.

The clerk took up his pen. He wrote something beside each name. Then one of the agents went down the line with a box, and hung a cord around each neck. At the end of every cord was a small tin tag.

Brynn made a sound beside him that was not a word.

"They know," she said. "They know the network. They know whose boat it was. They’ve known for weeks, and they let it run, because that’s cheaper than finding us. And now they’ve taken the people who’ll make us come back."

Ashe had gone completely still. Vane felt the Warlord rise in her, slow and enormous, like a tide coming in under a door. Her horns had begun to glow very faintly through the gorse.

"Eleven of them," she said. "Two Mid Experts, the High Expert, and eight ordinary soldiers. I can be in that square in four minutes."

"I know."

"I could end every one of them before the bell stops."

"I know you could."

"Then why are we lying here?"

He did not answer at once, because the answer was in his chest, and it had been there since the moment the bell began to ring. He made himself look at it.

Last night he had decided something, and then he had done it. He had gone up the chain in a borrowed coat with his face hidden and taken seven children out of a hold, and it had been clean and quiet and quick, and he had been proud of how little he had used. Then he had gone back to the hut and slept. Carrow had woken up this morning to pay for it, because Carrow was the only thing left in the harbor with a name.

He thought of Lancelot standing in the clearing two hours past the boundary, saying I’m going to take it apart. He had told himself then that the difference between them was what they wanted. It had never occurred to him that it might also be how they went about it.

"Because if you go down there," he said, "they’ll take seventy next time. And the time after that, they’ll stop taking sureties and clear the town." He kept his voice low. "We did this, Ashe. We did it well and we did it quietly and we left. That’s what the network has been doing for years, and they’ve been paying for it the whole time."

Brynn turned her head and looked at him. Something in her face eased, very slightly.

"Yes," she said. "That’s what it costs. We knew. We just didn’t have anyone we could make it cost instead."

Ashe’s horns went dark again. It took her longer than it had on the boat. When the Warlord had drained back out of the air, she put her forehead down against his shoulder for a moment, hard, the way she sometimes did when there was nothing else useful to do with her body.

"I hate this," she said into his coat.

"I know."

"I hate it more than I hated losing to Kest."

"I know that too."

She lifted her head. Her eyes were wet, and furious, and clear. "Then tell me what we do instead."

Below them, the black ship’s boats were rowing the seven sureties out across the harbor. The crowd in the square had not moved. The bell had finally stopped.

They held the council in the hut, standing up, because nobody could sit.

"The next convoy leaves Holloway on the first," Valerica said. "Eleven days. The sureties go with it, and so does everyone else the Household has taken in the west this month. Everything goes through Holloway."

"So we take it there," Ashe said.

"We take it there," Valerica agreed, "and this time we do it so that nobody can be made to answer for it except us."

"How?"

Valerica looked at Vane, and he understood what she was asking. He had been thinking the same thing since the gorse.

"They took sureties because they didn’t know who to blame," he said. "Next time, they’ll know."

Isole had come to the doorway with the youngest of the seven asleep against her shoulder. She looked at him for a long moment over the child’s head, and did not say anything, which from Isole was a kind of agreement.

Mara was sitting in the corner with her ledger open and the seven tin tags laid out in a row in front of her. She had written down the names of the seven sureties as Nyx repeated them. Now she raised her head.

"Do sureties get numbers?" she asked.

Nobody answered.

She looked down at the page and wrote something, very carefully, beside Pell’s name.

"Two hundred and nineteen," she said.