Chapter 22 Gareth's Bargain

Sir Gareth's officer didn't come back that night. Nobody knew where he'd gone. Rusk said he'd seen him take a horse and ride out of the gate towards the river road, hard, before dark.

We slept in the depot. All of us, the princess and Miss Quill and Rusk and his guards and me, on the floor of Orrin Pask's storeroom with the doors barred, and Brakka's warband outside on the steps with their weapons across their knees. Pask brought blankets and a pot of tea and then sat in his office all night with a lamp, staring at nothing.

Miss Quill didn't sleep at all. She sat at Pask's desk with the black ledger open and a pile of clean paper and wrote, all night, without stopping, copying it page by page. Her hand went across the paper so fast it blurred. When one pen went blunt she picked up another. At about midnight she finished one copy, and tied it with ribbon, and put it in her satchel, and started another.

The Countess came at dusk. She came in through a high window that nobody had thought to bar, because nobody could have reached it, and dropped down into the storeroom as lightly as a cat, and the guards nearly ran her through. The princess told her everything in about three minutes, in a low voice. The Countess listened without moving. When it was done, her eyes had gone very dark.

"Gareth," she said.

"Gareth," said the princess.

"I had his opera box moved," said the Countess. "I see now I was far too lenient." She went back to the window. "The river," she said. "If they come, they'll come by the river. I'll watch it."

And she went out the way she'd come.

* * *

Sir Gareth came to my fire a bit before midnight.

I'd gone out to sit on the depot's back step, by the wharf, because I couldn't sleep and the storeroom was full of snoring. There was a little fire there in an iron basket, for the night watch. I was sitting by it with the cleaver across my knees, looking at the river.

He came along the wharf on his own. No officers. No squires. No horse, of course. He'd taken his armour off and was in a plain dark coat, and he walked slowly, the way a man walks up to a dog he isn't sure about.

He stopped on the other side of the fire.

"Farmer," he said.

"Sir."

He sat down. Not close. On a mooring post, about three strides off. He looked at the fire for a while.

"You know what's in that ledger," he said.

"Some of it."

"Do you know what happens to people who know what's in it?"

I didn't answer that.

He reached into his coat and brought out two things and set them on the wharf boards between us. One was a purse, a heavy one, by the sound it made when it touched down. The other was a folded paper with a black seal on it. A tower, pressed into the wax.

"Two hundred gold," he said. "In the purse. And in the paper, a remittance. The land tax on Marsh Hold, in the district of Thornfell, revised back to six gold, and the holding confirmed to Tobin Marsh and his heirs in perpetuity. Under the Lord Chancellor's own seal." He nudged the paper towards me with his boot. "Read it, if you can."

I picked it up. I couldn't read all of it. But I could read Marsh Hold, and I could read my name, and I could read in perpetuity. And I knew the seal. I'd had it in my hand on the kitchen table, the day the rider came.

"What do I have to do?" I said.

"Nothing. That's the beauty of it." He spread his hands. "You walk away. Tonight. Thornfell's two days south of here, across country. You could be home by Friday. Milking your cow. Mending your fence, or whatever it is you people do." His voice was almost friendly. "You forget the princess. You forget the ledger. You forget you ever saw inside that strongroom. You go home and you never come back to Harrowgate as long as you live."

I sat there with the paper in my hand.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about it. I thought about it harder than I've ever thought about anything.

Duchess in the home paddock, giving me that look. Elsie, with the milk bucket. The chooks muttering in the shed in the morning. Mum's apple tree. Dad under it. Home by Friday, with the farm mine forever, and no more tax, and nobody ever coming up the track again with a black seal. Everything I'd walked six days to the capital for, and paid every bill for, and done every job for. All of it, in my hand. In perpetuity.

"And Lys?" I said.

Sir Gareth's face didn't change.

"Her Highness," he said, "will return to Harrowgate in my care. Quietly. The Chancellor wants no scandal. She'll marry me at midwinter, as arranged. She'll go back to her library." He shrugged. "She'll be perfectly safe. She was always going to be safe. That was never in question. She's a princess."

"And the ledger?"

"Will be returned to its owner."

"And Miss Quill?"

One provenance fact is clear: carries the author's chapter, while this version was copied without permission.

That time, there was a pause. Not long. About as long as it takes to blink.

"Auditors," said Sir Gareth, "sometimes have accidents. On the road. It's a long road." He looked at me steadily. "That is not your concern, farmer. Your concern is a cow."

I looked down at the paper for a long time.

Then I folded it up again, very carefully, along the creases it already had, and leaned forward and put it back on the boards beside the purse.

"I can't take it, sir," I said.

He stared at me.

"It's not mine to sell," I said. "None of it. Not Lys, and not Miss Quill, and not the book. They're not mine." I thought about it. "It'd be like selling the milk off someone else's cow."

"You'll lose the farm."

"Maybe."

"You will lose the farm." He stood up. His voice had gone tight. "I'll see to it personally. First frost. Every stone. Every animal. That tree you won't stop going on about. I'll see it cut down for firewood and I'll have them send you the ash."

I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say.

He picked up the purse and the paper. He stood there a moment longer, looking down at me.

"You really are a fool," he said.

"Dad used to say stubborn," I said.

He went back along the wharf. He didn't hurry. I watched him go until the dark took him, and then I sat by the fire and looked at the river till the sky went grey. An owl went somewhere down the bank. A fish jumped. Behind me the stockade was dead quiet, apart from Brakka's lot snoring on the depot steps like a herd of bullocks in a shed.

I didn't tell anybody about it. Not then. It didn't seem like it mattered. I'd said no, and that was the end of it.

* * *

The boats came at sunrise.

Three of them, long flat river boats like the ones at the wharf, coming up against the current with men at the oars. There were twenty men on them, maybe more, in grey and brown with cloths over their faces, the same as the Hollin Gap. And on the last boat, under a canvas, something big moved and growled, and a chain rattled. Two of them. Two collars glowing dirty yellow.

The Countess hadn't come back. There was no sign of her anywhere on the river.

Sir Gareth was waiting for the boats on the wharf in full armour, with six of the palace guards at his back. The six who'd listened to his beast story by the fire, every night, since the Gap. He had a paper in his hand, sealed in black. A different paper.

He read it out, loud, to the whole stockade. It said that by order of the Lord Chancellor, acting in the King's name, the commission of Her Highness the Princess Lysandra was revoked. It said that Her Highness was to be returned to Harrowgate in the protective custody of the Knight-Captain, for her own safety, and that all papers and books seized under the commission were Crown property and were to be surrendered at once.

Rusk was standing beside me on the depot steps. He'd gone grey under his beard.

"Bloody hell," he said, very low. "That's the Chancellor's seal. That's legal, lad. That's the King's own law in his hand."

"Is it right?"

Rusk didn't answer.

* * *

The princess came out of the depot with the black ledger under her arm and her warrant in her other hand. She walked down the steps to the wharf and stopped in front of Sir Gareth, very small, very straight.

"No," she said.

"Your Highness doesn't have the authority to..."

"No," she said again, and put her hand up.

The ward came up round her like a soap bubble, gold and green, shimmering in the morning light.

Somebody on the last boat stood up. He was thin and grey-bearded and had a long rod in his hand, a black rod with a crystal on the end that glowed the same dirty yellow as the collars. He pointed it at the ward, and said a word I didn't know, and the ward went out. Not cracked. Just out, like a candle in the wind. The princess staggered.

Then he said another word, and they let the dogs off the chain.

* * *

They came for me. Both of them. Somebody had told them where to aim, the way somebody had told the men in the Gap.

I didn't have time to think about the princess, or the ledger, or anybody. I had two Gravemaws coming up the wharf at me side by side, and the depot steps behind me with Miss Quill on them, and Rusk.

The first one went low, like the one in the Gap. I put it down the same way. Knee to the jaw, cleaver behind the skull. The second one came in high over its back while I was still bringing the blade round, and I had to drop the cleaver for a moment, and take it by the throat with both hands, and turn it, and put it down on the boards hard enough that the wharf split under it. Then I got the cleaver back.

It took maybe half a minute. It felt longer.

When I looked up, they had her.

Four of Sir Gareth's six had her by the arms, and the black ledger had gone out of her hands, and the man with the rod had it now. They were putting her into the first boat. Brakka was in the middle of the wharf with her axe going round her head and men in grey going over the edge into the river on both sides of her. Her warband was fighting on the boats. Miss Quill was on her knees on the depot steps with her satchel clutched in both arms, and one of the men in grey was trying to pull it off her, and Rusk had him by the collar and was pulling him off her in turn.

The first boat pushed off. Gareth was in it, standing in the bows.

I went after it.

I was at the end of the wharf in four strides. The boat was ten feet out and the current had it. I could have jumped it. I know I could. I had my weight on my back foot to do it.

"Tobin! NO!"

It was the princess. She'd got half free of the men holding her and she was at the rail of the boat, with her red hair across her face and blood on her lip.

"Don't!" she shouted. "If you touch him, they'll hang you! He's under the Chancellor's seal! They'll hang you and take the farm and there'll be nobody left to stop them!" One of the guards got her arm again. She fought him off long enough to shout the rest. "Get Hesper home! Get the copy to Harrowgate! That's how we win, Tobin! Not this! Please!"

I stood at the edge of the wharf with my weight on my back foot.

The boat went out into the current, and the oars came down, and it went away downriver. Sir Gareth stood in the bows with one hand on his sword, watching me. When it was far enough off, he raised his other hand in a little salute, two fingers to his eyebrow, very neat, and turned away.

* * *

It was quiet after that.

The other boats had gone too, those that could still float. There were men in grey in the river, and some on the wharf who wouldn't get up again. Brakka was standing in the middle of the wharf, bleeding from three places and roaring at the river. "Come back!" she was shouting. "Come back, you gutless golden shit! Come back and fight!" One of her warband was dead. His name was Thuk. I hadn't known it until then.

Miss Quill came down the steps. She had the satchel in her arms still, and her face was white, and her coat was torn at the shoulder where the man had pulled at it.

"They have the ledger," she said. "The original."

"I know."

"They didn't get the copy." She put her hand flat on her own coat, on the side, over the lining. "Either copy."

I looked at her. She looked back at me. She was shaking, all over. She didn't seem to know it.

"Thornfell's two days south of here," I said. I said it out loud, I think, to see how it sounded. "Harrowgate's four days west."

"Yes."

"The farm's kept on and off for seventeen years with a plank over it," I said. "It'll keep a little longer."

Miss Quill didn't say anything.

I slung the cleaver. I went and helped Rusk get the wounded off the wharf, and then I helped Grosh carry Thuk up to the chapel, and then I went and found Brakka, who'd stopped roaring and was sitting on a mooring post with her axe propped beside her, and sat down next to her.

"We go west," I said.

"We go west," said Brakka. "And then I kill him."

"Not yet," I said.

She looked at me with her yellow eyes for a long time.

"Not yet," she agreed.