Chapter 661: Fordham

The snow had come to the Marrin valley while they were away.

It lay thin and grey along the river and thicker on the hills above it, and the Lark came down through a low winter sky over a country Vane barely recognized: the fields gone white, the roads gone to mud, smoke rising from every chimney in a long straight line in the still cold air. They flew over Holloway without stopping. He saw the yard from above, its gates standing open and its long sheds empty, and the forty wagons still drawn up in their two lines, roofed with snow.

Corin had been at the rail since dawn.

He had not said anything. He had not hummed either, not once since the Drowned Palace, and Vane had not known until it stopped how much he had grown used to the sound. The boy simply stood there in a borrowed coat three sizes too big for him, with his hands on the rail and his eyes fixed on the hills to the north, and waited.

"There," he said at last.

Fordham was a hill village: two dozen stone cottages strung along a single lane on the side of a long white slope, with sheep folds above them and a small grey chapel at the end. Sarai Vell brought the Lark down in a field below the chapel. Before the gangplank had finished folding out, Corin was over the rail.

He landed in the snow, fell, got up, and ran.

Vane did not follow him. None of them did. They stood at the rail in the cold and watched the small figure in the enormous coat go stumbling up the white field toward the cottages, and they saw a door open halfway along the lane, and a woman come out of it with a bucket in her hand. She saw him. The bucket fell.

They were too far away to hear what she said. They did not need to.

Her name was Hanna. She was a shepherd’s widow with red hands and grey in her hair, and she had been told in the spring that her son had been transferred, and nothing else, and she had walked to the Holloway chapel every week since then to ask Father Cray if there was news, until Father Cray had gone away on a ship in the sky.

She did not ask where Corin had been. Not that day. She sat at her kitchen table with the boy in her lap, though he was far too big for it, and held him, and looked at the seven strangers crowded into her small warm kitchen, and at the spear and the horns and the opal eyes and the white fur coat, and did not seem to see any of them.

"He’s thinner," she said finally.

"He’ll eat," said Isole.

"He’s got his voice back." Hanna’s hand moved on her son’s hair. "He used to hum. All the time, since he was small. When they took him, I thought..." She stopped. "I thought I’d never hear it again."

"He’ll hum again," said Mara.

Hanna looked at her. Mara was sitting on the end of the bench by the fire with her ledger open on her knees. She had turned to the page where she had written, in the vault beneath the Meridian, the tenth name under the nine. Now, as they watched, she took her pen and drew a single neat line beside it.

Not through it. Beside it.

"What’s that?" asked Corin.

"It means you’re found," said Mara.

They stayed in Fordham two days, because Isole would not let them leave sooner and because Hanna would not stop feeding them.

On the second afternoon, Brynn came up from the valley.

She came on foot, through the snow, with Marta Rusk beside her and her arm out of its sling at last, and when she saw the Lark in the field below the chapel she stopped dead in the lane and stared at it for a long time.

"I heard," she said, when Vane came out to meet her. "Everyone’s heard. Some boy from the hills came home on a ship made of glass." She looked past him at the cottage, where Corin’s face had appeared at the window. "Is that him?"

"That’s him."

Brynn let out a breath that steamed in the cold air.

"The table hasn’t come back," she said. "Not yet. Not in winter. They’ll try again in spring, I expect." She looked at him sideways. "Though I’m told the Household’s western office has been very quiet since a certain dispatch reached the capital. Something about the Throne making no claim. Nobody quite knows what it means. They’re all too frightened to ask."

"Anastasia," said Vane.

"I don’t know who that is," said Brynn. "But I’d like to buy her a drink."

Marta Rusk had gone straight past both of them into Hanna’s kitchen without a word, as though she had known the woman all her life, and had begun at once to help with the bread. Through the open door Vane could hear the two of them talking quietly over the oven. He could not make out the words. He did not need to. It was the sound two mothers make who have both, in the same year, got something back that they had been told was gone.

On the morning they left, a knot of moving air came down out of the grey sky onto the Lark’s deck, and Sarai Vell caught it in one hand and unfolded the paper inside.

She read it, and her face did something Vane had not seen it do before. It went very still, and then, slowly, it warmed.

"Thessaly," she said. "The other two Palaces have answered. The Thornwood will come. The Silent Palace has refused." She looked up. "And she’s calling the table. At Aelstrom. On the longest night of the year." She folded the paper. "That’s nineteen days from now. She says she’ll come down from the Ninth Spire to sit at it herself."

"How long since she came down?" asked Isole.

"Forty years," said Sarai Vell.

Valerica already had her pen out. Isaac was already writing to his mother. Ashe had sat down in the middle of the deck, and Nyx beside her, and Isole was looking north toward the Glacial Palace with an expression Vane could not read.

Corin was standing in the snow at the bottom of the gangplank with his mother’s arm around his shoulders. He looked up at Vane.

"Will they keep it?" he asked. "The promise. No more children."

Vane looked down at him for a long moment.

"I’m going to make them," he said.

Corin nodded, as if that were the same thing. Then, very quietly, for the first time since the Drowned Palace, he began to hum.