Chapter 628: The River Road

Vane walked out of Holloway in the grey before dawn, alone, with his spear on his back and his hands empty.

He went straight down the middle of the river road, past the tannery and the chapel and the yard wall, where lanterns were already moving behind the gates. He heard the wagons being brought round inside. He heard children’s voices, very quiet, and a man’s voice telling them to climb up and sit down and keep their hands inside the canvas.

He did not stop.

At the cooper’s yard a door opened. Danny Weir stood in it in his nightshirt, barefoot, and watched him go by. Then Vane heard small feet on the road behind him, and a man’s heavier ones, and the cooper’s voice saying, low and furious, "Danny. Danny, come back here," and then not saying it anymore.

By the edge of town there were a dozen of them. By the mile-stone there were thirty: the cooper with his hand on his son’s shoulder, the baker still in her apron, two of the old men who sat on the chapel steps, the woman from the line in the square who had pulled her own boy closer and stood a little straighter. Nobody spoke. They walked behind him at a careful distance, as if he were something that might go off.

At the mile-stone he turned around.

"Stay here," he said. "Please."

They stopped. Most of them. The cooper looked at him for a long moment, then nodded and drew Danny back against his legs.

Vane walked on another two hundred paces, to where the road narrowed between the river and the long stone wall, and stood in the middle of it, and waited.

Mist was coming off the Marrin in slow sheets. On his right the wall rose a little higher than his head, old fieldstone furred with moss. He did not look at it. He knew Valerica was lying flat along its top thirty paces up the road, and that Ashe and Nyx were crouched behind it with their backs to the stone. He knew that somewhere in the reeds on the river side, Brynn had one good arm around Mara’s shoulders and was holding her very still.

He let the wings stay folded. He let the Usurper run quietly. He let the Warlord’s base layer settle low in his channels, the way Ashe had taught him, like coals banked for the night.

He heard the convoy before he saw it.

Hooves first: sixteen riders in pairs, the long dark coats coming out of the mist like the mist was making them. Then the wagons, forty of them, canvas covers drawn tight, wheels groaning on the wet stone. Small faces at the gaps in the canvas. In the second wagon, beside the driver, a grey clerk sat with a locked iron box on his knees and both hands flat on top of it. In the last wagon, behind a lattice of bars, seven people sat on a bench in irons. A broad-shouldered woman in a fisherman’s smock was nearest the tailboard.

At the head of the column, on a grey horse, rode Ormond.

He saw Vane. He raised one hand, and the whole convoy stopped behind him, wagon by wagon, in a long creaking ripple that ran back into the fog.

"You were offered a boat," Ormond said at last.

"I know."

"The seven will go where the others go. I told you that."

"You did." Vane did not move. "They’re going home. So are the rest."

Ormond’s pale eyes moved past him, up the road, to the mile-stone and the thirty people standing there in the mist.

"You’ve brought an audience."

"They came on their own."

"Yes," Ormond said, after a moment. "I can see that." He swung down from the saddle and walked forward until there were twenty paces of empty road between them, and stopped. He wore no blade this time. His hands hung loose and open at his sides.

"Since we’re being honest," he said, "I’ll tell you something I haven’t told my own men. A year ago, the boy I made walked across a clearing and took the blade out of my hand. I have thought about it every day since. I know how he did it. There was nothing in him to hold. He had closed the space." He tilted his head. "You haven’t."

"No," said Vane.

"I wanted you to know that I know." Ormond lifted his right hand, palm out, the way a man might lift it to feel for rain. "It seemed fairer."

Behind him, the sixteen riders began to spread out across the road.

The wall moved first.

Valerica rose up along the top of it, slim and dark against the paling sky, and brought her open hand down, and the road in the narrows grew heavy.

Vane felt it go past him like a pressure change before a storm. The Celestial Heart did not crush. It leaned. The whole stretch of wet stone between river and wall tilted inward toward one point in the middle of the road, and every rider on it was suddenly carrying three times his own weight. Horses screamed and went down on their knees. The front pair came out of their saddles in a tangle. The riders behind them tried to spread wide and found the ground pulling them back to the center, toward each other, into a funnel only two men wide.

Ashe came over the wall into the mouth of it.

Her horns were out and her arms were burning, and the Warlord came off her like heat off a forge. The first rider who got to his feet met her blade and went back down again. The second got his guard up and lost it. Nyx dropped from the wall behind her, light as a cat, and the ground around the next three riders folded quietly in on itself, so that each of them took a step and found he had taken it somewhere slightly to the left of where he had meant to.

It was beautiful work, and it was not going to last.

He could read the riders through the Usurper as they recovered, and they recovered fast. Mid Expert, High Expert, Mid Expert. They had been built to hold lines, and they were already holding one: dismounted, paired, backs together, giving ground to Ashe one step at a time and taking it back two steps later. Three Low Experts against sixteen. Every second, all three of them were spending more than they had.

Minutes, he thought. Not more.

Out of the reeds by the river, Brynn came up the bank at a dead run with her sling torn off and her good arm swinging. The driver of the second wagon turned just in time to meet her shoulder. He went off the bench into the mud. Mara came up behind her, small and silent and intent, climbed the wheel like a ladder, and stood up on the footboard in front of the grey clerk.

The clerk clutched the iron box to his chest and stared at her.

"That’s not yours," Mara told him.

Vane did not see what happened next. He was looking at Ormond.

Ormond had not moved. He had not looked at the wall, or at Ashe, or at the wagon. He had been looking at Vane the whole time, with his palm raised and his pale eyes calm, waiting with great patience for the exact moment when Vane decided to go and help them.

Vane decided.

The binding closed on him before he had finished.