Chapter 622: Two Lists

Ashe walked him back from the yard without a word, and she did not let go of his arm until they were inside.

Mara was standing at the top of the stairs. When she saw him she let out a breath and looked down at the ledger in her hands, where she had been making a mark for every minute he was gone.

"Forty-one," she said. "You said one hour."

"I was early."

"You were." She closed the ledger. "Don’t be late either."

He told them everything Ormond had said. He told it as closely as he could, word for word where he remembered the words, because he had learned from Nyx that the shape of a sentence often mattered more than what it claimed to mean. When he got to the offer, nobody spoke. When he got to the part about the binding and the space between deciding and moving, Ashe’s hand closed slowly into a fist at her side.

Brynn was the first to answer.

"Take it," she said.

They all looked at her. She was sitting on the edge of the second bed with her sling across her chest, and she did not look away from any of them.

"Marta Rusk taught me to mend a net when I was six," she said. "Pell gave my mother fish on credit for eleven years after my father drowned. The sexton buried him. I’m not going to stand here and pretend I’m thinking about two hundred children I’ve never met when seven people I’ve known my whole life are sitting in that yard with tags on." Her voice did not break, but it came close. "You asked what this costs. That’s what it costs. Take the offer, and go home."

Nobody argued with her. Vane was grateful for that. It would have been an insult.

"He wants us gone before the first," Valerica said at last. She said it gently, for her. "Why?"

"Because we’re inconvenient," Ashe said.

"We’re inconvenient now. He said himself he could close a binding on Vane in that yard. He has fourteen Experts. He didn’t need to make an offer." Valerica had begun to pace the narrow strip of floor between the beds, three steps each way. "He doesn’t bargain from fear. So he’s bargaining because something about the first matters to him, and he wants it to go cleanly. Without us."

"The circled ones," Nyx said from the bed. "A rider comes for them. They don’t wait for the convoy."

"Then the convoy isn’t what he cares about." Valerica stopped pacing. "Greywater is."

"So someone has to look at Greywater," Isole said.

She had been sitting by the window since they came back from the chapel. She had not been able to put the silver rod out of her mind since Father Cray said the word Saintess. Vane had watched her try, twice, to set the thought down, and fail.

"The rods come from the Church," Isole said. "If the Church blesses the rods, the Church may bless whatever is done at the other end. I want to know which Saintess. I want to see it." She looked at Vane. "And I’m the only one of us who’d recognize her."

"I’ll go with her," Ashe said. "Upriver, one night there, one night back."

"And me," said Nyx. "You’ll want someone who can see through walls."

Valerica looked at Vane, and he knew what she was going to say before she said it.

"You stay here," she said. "Where he can see you."

"He’ll know the others are gone."

"He’ll know some of us are gone. He’ll be looking at you while he wonders where." She folded her arms. "You’re the thing he invited. Be the thing he’s watching."

It was a good plan. Vane hated it.

Mara finished copying the book a little after midnight.

She had worked straight through the argument, through Brynn going down to sit alone in the tannery yard, through Nyx falling asleep for real and Ashe sharpening a blade that did not need sharpening. When she finally put down her pen, her fingers were black with ink to the second knuckle, and she flexed them slowly, wincing.

"Done," she said.

She turned her ledger around so they could see. She had not simply copied Father Cray’s entries. She had sorted them. On the left-hand pages were the names, in the priest’s own words. On the right, in a neat column, were the numbers the clerk had written beside them.

"His list," Mara said, touching the right-hand column, "only has numbers. Mine has names." She touched the left. "He can’t use mine. I can’t use his."

"Why not?" Ashe asked.

"Because a number doesn’t tell you who someone is," Mara said, as though it were obvious. "And a name doesn’t tell you where they went."

Valerica had gone very still.

"Say that again," she said.

Mara looked uncertain. "His list has numbers."

"The clerk’s ledger." Valerica crouched down beside her chair. "That’s the register. That’s what the surety clause is written against. Should the persons removed be returned to custody. Returned against what? Against the numbers in that book." She was speaking faster now. "Ormond is a man who sends invitations instead of orders. He uses a statute when he could use his hands. He cares about form. Everything he does in this valley is done against that ledger."

"So if it’s gone," Nyx said slowly, sitting up, "there’s nobody to return. And nobody to answer for them."

"There’s nobody he can prove is owed," Valerica said. "Not in his own terms."

Vane looked at the two books side by side on the table. Father Cray’s names, in brown cloth. Mara’s copy, sorted and black with ink. And somewhere in the yard behind its new stone wall, a clerk’s ledger full of numbers, which for a year had been the only record that two hundred children existed.

"There’s only one of his," he said.

"Yes," said Mara.

"And now there are two of ours."

Mara nodded. She looked down at her blackened fingers and then up at him, and for the first time since Carrow, something like a smile touched the corner of her mouth.

"That’s why I copied it," she said.

Brynn had come back up the stairs at some point and was standing in the doorway with her good hand on the frame. Nobody knew how long she had been there.

"If that book is gone," she said slowly, "Marta doesn’t have a number anymore. None of them do."

"No," said Valerica.

Brynn looked at the two ledgers on the table for a long time. Then she nodded once, the way a fisherman nods at weather she has decided to sail into anyway.

"Then burn it," she said.

Later, after the candle had burned down and the others were asleep, Valerica lay on the bed beside him in the dark with her shoulder against his, not quite touching.

"You went into that yard alone," she said quietly.

"You told me to."

"I told you that if you went, you’d go alone. That’s different." She was quiet for a moment. "Don’t do it again without letting me hate it properly first."

"I’ll put it in the plan."

"Put it on the fourth page," she said, and he heard her smile.