Chapter 625: Nothing to Read

For three days, Vane let Ormond watch him.

He did it the way Valerica told him to, which was by doing nothing that needed hiding. He got up at dawn and ran the forms in the tannery yard where anyone passing in the lane could see. He bought bread from the baker on the corner and paid for it with eastern coin, and let the baker stare at the coin and then at him. He walked Mara to the chapel every morning so she could sit with Father Cray and check her copy against the original, line by line, and he walked her back every evening along the river road past the yard gates, and he did not once look at the Household riders who stood there and looked at him.

There were always two of them. They changed at noon and at midnight. He knew their names by the second day, because Mara heard one call the other across the lane and wrote them down.

"It’s very boring," Mara observed on the second evening, "being watched."

"That’s the idea."

"Whose idea?"

"Valerica’s."

Mara considered this. "She likes boring things," she said. "When they’re hers."

On the second afternoon the cooper whose son was in Father Cray’s book was trying to roll a hogshead up a ramp into a cart on his own, and failing, and Vane went and took the other end of it without asking. The cooper looked at him, and at the spear on his back, and at the two dark coats watching from the corner of the lane, and said nothing at all. They loaded eleven barrels together. When they were done the cooper’s younger boy, Danny, eight years old, brought Vane a cup of water and stood very close to him while he drank it, as if Vane were a wall he could put his back against.

"My brother’s called Tomas," Danny said.

"I know," said Vane. "It’s written down."

Danny looked up at him with an expression Vane remembered from the inside: the face of a child who has just been told something about the world that he did not know could be true.

"Who wrote it?"

"Someone who wanted you to be able to find him."

At night Valerica sat on the narrow bed with the map of the yard spread across her knees, and walked him through the convoy route again, and again, until he could have drawn it with his eyes shut. On the third night she stopped halfway through and simply sat there with the map in her lap, looking at nothing.

"They should be back tomorrow," she said.

"They will be."

"I know." She folded the map. "I don’t like it when we’re in different places. I didn’t used to mind. I used to prefer it." She glanced at him sideways. "This is your fault, you know. All of you. I used to be very good at being alone."

"You still are."

"I’m adequate at it," Valerica said, and leaned her head against his shoulder, and stayed there until the candle went out.

On the morning of the fourth day, the chapel bell began to ring.

Slow and even, the way it had rung in Carrow. Vane was in the tannery yard when it started, halfway through the third form, and he stopped with the spear raised and listened, and felt the cold come into his stomach.

By the time he reached the lane, the Household was already moving through the streets. They went door to door, politely, with a clerk walking behind them reading from a list. Every resident under the age of sixteen will present themselves for measurement under the statute. Every resident. No exceptions. The two riders who had watched him for three days were standing at the mouth of the tannery lane, and when they saw him they did not move toward him. They simply looked past him, up the stairs, toward the room where Mara was.

Brynn came down those stairs with her face white.

"They’re doing the whole town," she said. "Before the first. Anyone they missed." She looked at Vane. "Mara’s not on any list. She’s not from here. If she’s not at the table when they come to this door—"

"Then they come looking," Vane said. "I know."

Mara had come down behind her. She had the ledger under her arm and her coat buttoned to the throat, and her face was very calm.

"I’ll go," she said.

"Mara—"

"There’s nothing to find." She said it the way she said numbers, flatly, without arguing. "The ring at Verrin’s Landing didn’t find anything. The thing under the boat didn’t find anything." A pause. "They won’t either."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he made his choice, and found that it had already been made.

"Then I’m coming with you," he said. "Not behind you. With you."

The table stood under its awning in the market square, exactly as it had in Carrow. The same grey clerk. The same velvet. The same silver rod. Half of Holloway stood in a line that reached back across the square to the chapel steps, parents and children, silent.

Vane and Mara joined the end of it.

He did not hide. He did not pull his cap low or keep his face slack. He stood in the line as himself, with the spear on his back and his hand on his sister’s shoulder, and he felt the square notice him. It started with the people nearest and spread outward, a slow turning of heads, a ripple of whispers. The Usurper. That’s him. From the graduation. Nobody moved away. A woman ahead of them in the line looked back at him, and at Mara, and then pulled her own son a little closer, and turned to face the table again, and stood a little straighter.

The yard gates opened. Ormond came out and stood beneath the arch, watching.

When they reached the table, the clerk looked up at Vane and went pale.

"Name," he managed, to Mara.

"Mara."

He wrote it down. Then he picked up the rod, and touched its tip to the inside of her wrist.

Nothing happened.

It was a nothing Vane had never seen before. Every other wrist had made the rod either stay dull or begin to glow. Now the silver seemed to lose its shine entirely, the way metal looks in fog, as if it were touching empty air. The clerk frowned and lifted it and touched it to her wrist again. And a third time.

Nothing.

A shadow fell across the table.

Ormond stood beside the clerk. Vane had not seen him cross the square. He looked down at the rod, and then at Mara, with an expression of polite, absolute attention, the way a craftsman looks at a piece of wood whose grain he does not recognize.

"Name?" he said.

"Mara."

"That isn’t a number."

"No," said Mara.

Ormond studied her for a moment longer. Then he raised his eyes to Vane, standing behind her in the full light of the square with his hand on her shoulder, and something in his face that might have been respect came and went.

"Next," he said to the clerk, and walked back toward the yard.

That night, a little after midnight, Isole came back up the stairs of the tannery with Ashe on one side of her and Nyx on the other. She did not say anything for an hour.