Chapter 619: Names Before Numbers

Tobi Rusk took the seven children north along the coast that night, in the trader, to a salt farm at Teller’s Point where the network kept a cellar nobody had ever found. He did not want to go. His wife was in the hold of the black ship with a number around her neck. But he was the only one of them who knew the coast well enough to run it without lights, and he went, because someone had to, and because Brynn told him that Marta would never forgive him if he didn’t.

The rest of them went inland.

Holloway lay two days’ walk from the sea, at the place where the river Marrin came down out of the hills and three of the Western provinces’ old roads met to cross it. It had been a market town once, Brynn said. Now it was a yard. On its eastern edge, behind a high stone wall that looked newer than anything else in the town, forty empty wagons stood in rows with their shafts on the ground, waiting for the first of the month.

They took two rooms above a tannery, because nobody asked questions in a building that smelled like that.

"I want it noted," Valerica said, standing in the doorway of the larger room with a handkerchief pressed to her face, "that I have now slept in three Dark Worlds, a fisherman’s hut and the hold of a fish trader, and this is the worst."

"You liked the hold," Ashe said.

"I liked the company in the hold." Valerica lowered the handkerchief long enough to give Vane a pointed look. "The hold itself smelled of fish."

Nyx dropped her pack on the nearer bed and lay down on top of it with her boots still on. "I’m taking this one. Someone come and lie down on top of me so I can’t be moved."

Mara, who had followed them up the stairs with the ledger under her arm, looked at the two beds, then at the six of them, and frowned in genuine concern.

"There aren’t enough beds," she said.

"There never are," said Isole.

The priest who kept the list was called Father Aldwin Cray, and he was not what Vane had expected.

He was perhaps seventy, tall and stooped, with a chaplain’s collar and the white sash of the Church of the Eternal Light worn so long that it had gone the color of old milk. His chapel stood at the edge of the wagon yard, close enough that its shadow fell across the wall in the afternoon. He met them in the vestry after evening prayers, with the door locked and a single candle burning, and he looked at Brynn’s sling, and at Brynn, and said quietly, "Carrow. I heard. I’m sorry."

Then he unlocked a cabinet behind the altar and took out a book.

It was a plain ledger, thick, bound in cheap brown cloth. When he opened it, the pages were covered in his own small, careful hand.

"The registry requires a chaplain at every measurement," he said. "To bless the children before the rod. It’s an old courtesy. The Household keeps it because it makes the parents quieter." His mouth tightened. "So I stand beside the table. I bless them. And afterward, I come back here and I write down everything I can remember."

Mara had moved to the edge of the table. She did not touch the book. She stood with her hands at her sides and read it upside down, the way she read everything.

Aine Coll, nine. Marrin valley, the mill at Fordham. Mother Brid, father dead. Likes birds; drew one on my sleeve with her finger while we waited.

Tomas Weir, twelve. Holloway, the cooper’s yard. Brother Danny, eight, not taken. Asked me if it would hurt. I told him no. I did not know.

Unnamed girl, about seven. Would not speak. Held a wooden horse. Clerk took the horse.

Every entry had a number beside it, in a different ink, added afterward.

"They write the number," Father Cray said. "I write the name first. Someone has to remember they had one."

Mara looked up at him. Vane had seen that look on her face only a handful of times in his life. It was the look she gave a person when she had decided they were real.

"Can I copy it?" she asked.

"Child, it’s three hundred pages."

"I know," Mara said. "I can do it in two nights."

Father Cray studied her for a long moment. Then he turned the book around and slid it across the table to her, and she sat down without another word, opened her own ledger beside it, and began.

It was Isole who asked about the rod.

She had been quiet since Carrow. Vane had felt her quiet the way he could feel the weather. On the walk inland she had stayed close to the children until Teller’s Point, then close to him, saying very little. Now she stood by the vestry window with her arms folded, looking out at the wagon yard in the dusk.

"The rod at the table," she said. "Silver. About this long. It reads resonance against the wrist."

"Yes."

"I’ve been measured with one." Her voice was perfectly even. "At Zenith. Before my panel. I thought it was an Academy instrument."

Father Cray was silent for a moment.

"They’re made in the Church foundries at Ilvermoor," he said gently. "Every one is blessed before it leaves. The Household won’t use one that hasn’t been." He hesitated. "By a Saintess."

Isole did not move.

Vane went to stand beside her. He did not touch her. He knew her well enough to know that, if he did, she would come apart in front of a stranger, and she would never forgive either of them.

"Which Saintess?" she said.

"I don’t know, child. They don’t put names on them."

She nodded. After a while she unfolded her arms and laid her hand flat against the cold glass of the window, the way she had once laid it against his jaw in the outer ring at Korreth, checking for fever.

"My family has produced every High Saintess for three hundred years," she said to the glass. "I used to think that was the worst thing they’d done to me."

Vane put his hand over hers on the window, and she let it stay there.

Behind them Mara’s pen scratched steadily on, a name and then a number, a name and then a number.

Father Cray cleared his throat.

"There’s one more thing you should see," he said. "I didn’t understand it at first. I’m not sure I understand it now." He reached past Mara and turned the great book back a dozen pages, to a column of entries from early spring, and laid his finger beside one of the numbers.

Next to it, in the clerk’s ink, someone had drawn a small, neat circle.

"Some of them get marked," he said. "Fourteen, so far. Those ones don’t wait for the wagons with the others. A rider comes for them."

Nyx, who had been leaning against the wall in the shadows, straightened up very slowly.

"Show me," she said.