Chapter 34: Night Watch

Elodie Vane had watched over a great many things in a hundred and eighty years, and never once over a grave.

She stood at the barn door at the Strand place with her cloak pulled round her and looked at the four of them under the pear tree. Square and straight in the snow, with their new markers. Martha. Jem. Will. Davy Orme. The ground on top of them was still dark where it had been turned, and already the snow was settling on it, very gently, filling in the spade marks.

He had dug them himself, mostly. The orcs had helped. She'd watched from the trees, before dusk, under her hood, where the light couldn't reach. She had watched him dig each one square and deep, not hurrying, the way you'd dig a foundation for a house you meant to live in. For strangers. For a hired man whose name nobody had known.

Elodie had buried no one. Not her mother, not her sisters, not the man who had made her. Not anyone. In the year of the Grey Fever, when she was twenty-nine and still breathing, the carts had come round the streets of Harrowgate every morning, and the dead had gone on them, and nobody had dug anything square. There'd been no time. There'd been too many. And then, a month after the last cart, she had stopped breathing herself, in a cellar under the old Vane house, with a stranger's mouth at her throat. After that she'd had a great deal of time and nobody left to spend it on.

The colour had lasted a while, after that. Eighty years, near enough. She'd had balls and lovers and quarrels and a war, and a maid called Annette who'd come to her at sixteen and stayed till she was sixty-one, and who had brushed Elodie's hair every evening for forty-five years and talked the whole time about nothing. Annette had died in her sleep, in the room next to Elodie's, on a Tuesday in spring. Elodie had paid for a fine funeral and not gone to it. She had stood at the window of the Vane house instead, watching the carriages leave, and somewhere in that week the colour had started to go out of things, and she had not noticed until it was gone.

She had not had a maid since. She had Pellam, who did not talk about nothing, and did not brush her hair.

She looked at the four graves and could not work out why her eyes were stinging.

The snow on them was grey. Of course it was grey. Everything was grey again. The colour had been going out of the world for a fortnight now, a little each night. The snow, the trees, the dull yellow of the clamped crystals behind her. Her own hand, held up in front of her face. All the colour of old ash, the way it had been for a hundred years before a farmer in a fog-wet lane asked her if she was all right.

She had not asked him for more. Not once. Not since the window at Mrs Ostry's.

She had told him she was not hungry. She had been lying, and he had known she was lying, and he had let her.

* * *

Hesper Quill came out a little before midnight with two cups.

She came across the snow from the burned house in her two coats and her scarf, carefully, holding the cups out in front of her so as not to spill them, and stopped at the barn door and held one out. It steamed in the cold.

"Tea," she said. "I know you can't. I thought you might like to hold it. It's warm."

Elodie looked at the cup. Then she took it, in both gloved hands, and held it. It was warm. She could feel it through the leather.

"Thank you," she said, a little stiffly.

They stood there side by side in the doorway, the auditor and the Countess, looking at the graves. Hesper drank her tea. Elodie held hers.

"You haven't eaten," said Hesper, after a while. "In a fortnight. Pellam told me. He's worried. He wouldn't say so, but he told me the exact number of trays, which for Pellam is weeping in the street."

"Are you auditing me now as well, Miss Quill?"

"I audit everything," said Hesper. "I can't help it. It's a condition." She looked into her cup. "He'd give it to you. You know that. If you asked. He'd give it to you and not want anything for it."

"Yes," said Elodie. "That's the difficulty."

"No," said Hesper. "That's just him." She finished her tea. "The difficulty is you. You think if you take it freely, you'll owe him. And you don't know how to owe anybody anything. You've had a hundred and eighty years of paying for everything so you'd never have to." She turned the empty cup round in her hands. "I know, because I'm the same. Except with arithmetic."

Elodie stared at her.

Hesper Quill went a little pink, but she didn't look away.

"Goodnight, Countess," she said. "Keep the tea. It'll stay warm a bit longer."

She went back across the snow to the burned house. Elodie stayed where she was with the cup in her hands until it went cold, and she didn't put it down.

* * *

He came out a bit after two, when the moon had gone down behind the ridge and the cold had got serious.

She heard him before she saw him. Big man, quiet feet, the snow squeaking under his boots. He came round the corner of the burned house with a blanket round his shoulders where Hal's coat used to be, and the cleaver on his back, and stood beside her at the barn door. He kept quiet, the way he did, and let her have the silence. He looked at the graves too.

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"Couldn't sleep," he said.

"You never can, after you've buried someone," said Elodie. "Or so I'm told."

He glanced at her. She kept her eyes on the pear tree.

"The orcs snore," he said.

"Like bullocks," Elodie agreed. "In a barrel."

He laughed, very quietly. They stood there. Behind them in the barn, the crystals ticked faintly in the cold, the way a cooling stove ticks after supper.

"You're hungry," he said.

"I am not."

"Countess."

"I am not hungry," said Elodie, "I have never been hungry, I am a Countess of the Third Ring, I do not get hungry, I dine."

"Then you haven't dined in a fortnight," he said. "I've been watching too. You don't eat what Pellam brings down. You've gone grey round the eyes again. Same as in the lane."

She didn't say anything. She couldn't, quite.

He held out his arm. Not his neck. His wrist. He pushed the blanket back and turned his hand over, palm up, the way you'd hold out your hand for a horse to smell. The inside of his wrist was pale in the dark.

"Not for money," he said. "We said that. Because you're hungry. That's all."

Elodie looked at his wrist for a long time.

"If I do," she said, very low, "it will be like the lane. I'll be useless for a night. Somebody else will have to watch."

"Brakka can watch. She's awake. She's pretending not to be."

From the warband's tent, twenty yards off, came a deep, unconvincing snore.

"And you are sure," said Elodie.

"I'm sure."

"You will tell me to stop. If I take too much. You will tell me and I will stop."

"I will," he said. "And you will."

She believed him. That was the frightening part. She had never in her life believed anyone who said that, and she believed him, completely, standing in the snow at two in the morning beside a barn with a monster under it.

She took his wrist in both her hands.

* * *

She didn't bite. Not the way she had in the lane, quick and greedy, like a girl snatching a cake. She held his wrist and bent her head and found the place with her lips first, where the pulse was, slow and steady as a farm clock. She stayed there a moment, just feeling it. She hadn't been close enough to anything living to feel a pulse with her mouth, without hurrying, for a hundred and fifty years. It was very warm. Everything about him was warm.

He didn't flinch. He stood there with the blanket half off his shoulder and let her.

Then she bit, very gently, and drank.

One swallow. That was all she meant to take. One.

The world came back.

Not slowly, the way it had faded. All at once, like a shutter thrown open on a summer morning. The snow went blue. Not grey, not white, blue, the pale cold blue of a duck's egg, with violet in the shadows under the pear tree. The trees went black and green and brown. The sky over the Greywild was a deep soft purple with stars in it, stars she could see the colours of, white and gold and one faint red one low in the east. The crystals in the barn behind her flared a sick, ugly yellow, and she hated it, and she was glad she could hate it.

His hand was brown from the sun, with a white scar across the palm. His hair was brown with red in it she'd never seen. His eyes were brown. Ordinary, patient, farmer's brown. Looking down at her, worried.

She took her mouth away. Two swallows. She'd taken two. She hadn't meant to.

"That's enough," he said, at the same moment. Quietly. Not afraid.

"I know," said Elodie. "I know. I stopped."

She stood there holding his wrist with both hands. The two small marks on it had already closed. She was crying. She could feel it on her face, hot, and she could see it, if she looked down, falling onto his sleeve, and it was red, a deep clear red, and she could see that it was red.

"Countess," he said. "You all right?"

"No," said Elodie. "Yes. I don't know." She laughed, and it came out broken. "I'm not here on business, Tobin. I've never once been here on business. Not at the window. Not at the fountain. Not in the forest. Not now." She looked up at him. "I'm older than this kingdom's last four kings and I've followed a farmer two days north through the snow to stand outside a barn and watch over a dead woman's grave, because he dug it, and I wanted to see him dig it. That's not business. I don't know what that is. I haven't had a word for it in a very long time."

He didn't say anything for a moment.

"I know," he said. "I knew in the forest. When you tied that man to a tree."

"Then why didn't you say?"

"It wasn't mine to say," he said. "It was yours."

Elodie looked at him. Then she went up on her toes, the way she had in the lane in the fog, and this time she didn't bite. She kissed him. Once, briefly, on the mouth. His mouth was warm. She could taste the cold on it, and woodsmoke, and something under that, like bread and lightning.

She stepped back.

He looked a bit stunned. She found she enjoyed that very much.

"Oh," he said. "Right. Is that... are you..."

"Yes," said Elodie. "I am. Don't make me say it twice. I've said more tonight than I've said in a century, and some of it was to an auditor."

She let go of his wrist.

"Go back to bed," she said. "Before I do anything else I'll have to pretend I didn't do."

"Countess..."

"Elodie," she said. "When there's no one listening. Go to bed, Tobin."

He went. He went slowly, and he looked back once from the corner of the burned house, and she pretended she didn't see.

From the tent, Brakka's snore stopped, and started again, a bit too loud.

* * *

She saw the light on the ridge about an hour before dawn.

She would never have seen it, before. It was very small, and very far, up on the black line of the ridge above the valley, where the Greywild came down to meet the moor. A tiny point of dirty yellow. The same yellow as the crystals in the barn. In the grey world she'd lived in for a hundred years, it would have been just another smudge of nothing.

In this one, it stuck out like a wasp on a white cloth.

It moved.

Elodie went.

She went up the valley side through the trees, faster than anything that breathes, with the snow not even creaking under her, and came out on the ridge behind it. It was a bat. Or it had been a bat once, before someone made it bigger, the size of a dog, leathery and blind, hanging upside down from a dead branch with its wings folded round itself. Round its neck there was a small iron collar. In the collar, a crystal, glowing.

Its head was turned towards the valley. Towards the barn. Towards the tent where the warband snored and the one half-roofed room of the burned house where Tobin Marsh was lying awake, she had no doubt at all, staring at the ceiling.

Watching.

"You little shit," said Elodie, softly, and took the bat off its branch by the neck before it could unfold, and broke the collar with her thumb. The crystal went grey. The bat went limp. It hadn't been a bat for a long time, she thought. It had been a pair of eyes on a leash.

She looked east along the ridge, towards the Greywild. Somewhere out there, a tall thin man with a tower on his ring had been watching through those eyes. Watching them dig. Watching her kiss a farmer at a barn door in the snow.

She hoped he had enjoyed it. She hoped he had seen her face.

She prised the dead crystal out of the broken collar and put it in her glove for Hesper, who would want to weigh it and write it down. Then she dropped the bat into the snow and went back down to the barn. She stood her watch till the sky went grey, and then gold, with every colour of it burning into her eyes until they ran. And when Wrenna came round the barn to sit on the fallen gate and watch the sunrise, the way she did every morning, Elodie Vane stood beside her under her hood in the shadow of the barn door, and watched it too.

It was the first one she'd seen in colour in a hundred years. It was the first one she'd stayed up for in longer than that.

She didn't go in until it hurt.