Chapter 36: Who Stays

Everybody knew about the kiss by breakfast.

I don't know how. Well. I know how. Brakka had been lying in the warband's tent at the Strand place with her eyes shut, snoring loudly and not asleep, and Brakka had never kept anything to herself in her life. She'd told Grosh. Grosh had told the warband. The warband had told Duchess, who didn't care, and by the time we got home there wasn't a creature on the farm that didn't know, including the chooks.

Nobody said anything at supper. That was what made it bad. Lys read her letters and Miss Quill did the ledger and the warband ate in their shifts, and every so often one of them would look at me, and then at the cellar door, and then very quickly at their porridge.

On the second morning, Wrenna put her head in at the back door and said, quite loudly, "Is it true you kissed the dead one?"

Miss Quill dropped her pen.

"She kissed me," I said.

"Does that count?"

"I don't know."

Wrenna thought about it. "Is it like a rematch?" she said. "Does it go in the book?"

"No," said Miss Quill and Lys at the same time.

* * *

The real argument, though, was about who went south.

It took two nights at the kitchen table. Morwen's letter lay in the middle of it, held flat with the salt cellar. Bring the cleaver. Bring the rift-girl. Bring whoever can count. Come before the ice breaks on Hollowmere.

The cleaver was easy. The cleaver went with me. And Wrenna went where the cleaver went. She couldn't get more than a mile or two from it without, as she put it, feeling like somebody had her by the hair. So that was me and Wrenna.

Whoever can count was harder, because two of them could.

"It means me," said Miss Quill.

"It means both of us," said Lys.

"You're the Royal Commissioner for the Frontier. The frontier is here."

"The frontier," said Lys, "is everywhere Kell has a muzzle on a hole in the ground. Six of them, along five hundred miles of forest. And the only person in the kingdom who can tell us how to turn them is at the far end of it." She tapped the letter. "And when we get the keys back from Kell, which we will, somebody is going to have to be able to say, in the King's name, that they're ours. That's me."

Miss Quill looked at her for a long moment over her spectacles, which she'd started wearing at night for the ledger.

"That's a very good argument," she said.

"I know."

"I was going to make it."

"I know," said Lys. "I watched you get your mouth ready."

The Countess, by the fire, made a small noise that might have been a laugh.

"And I'm coming," she said, without looking up from her book. Her hands were still wrapped in Miss Quill's petticoat, but she could hold a book now. "Somebody has to watch at night. And I've met the woman. She'll remember me. People usually do."

"Because of the eels," I said.

"Because of my dress," said the Countess. "It was very good. The eels were incidental."

* * *

Which left Brakka.

She'd been sitting on the floor by the door through all of it, because she didn't fit at the table, with her axe propped against the wall and her big arms folded. She hadn't said anything. When everyone else had stopped talking, she stood up.

"I come," she said. "Naturally. I sleep where my husband sleeps."

Nobody said anything.

I'd known this was coming. I'd been thinking about it the whole way back from the Strand place. Lying awake in the dark. Looking at the barn.

"Brakka," I said. "Can I talk to you outside?"

* * *

We went out into the yard. It was cold and clear, and the stars were out over the Greywild, and Wrenna was a dull red glow on the barn roof. Brakka stood beside me with her breath smoking and waited.

"I need someone to stay," I said.

She didn't say anything.

"Last time I took the cleaver off this farm, the barn opened. Seven people died in Thornfell. Corrie. Old Pryor. Nettie Hollow." I looked at the barn. "Wrenna says it's turned now. She says the cold's holding it. She's probably right. But probably's not good enough, not for Thornfell, not for Mag, not for Elsie and the little Fulbrights. If something comes up through that glass while I'm five hundred miles away, there has to be someone here who can stand in that barn door and not let it out."

Brakka's face had gone very still.

"You're the only one," I said. "The only one I'd trust with it. You and your lot. Nobody else could hold it. I've seen you hold a barn door. Up north. Nothing got past you."

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"You want me," said Brakka slowly, "to guard your home."

"I want you to guard my home."

She looked at the barn. She looked at the house, with the lamp in the kitchen window. She looked at Mum's apple tree, black against the stars, and the little rise under it where Dad was.

"On the Steppe," she said, after a long time, "a warlord's home is her tent. Her fire. Her herds. It is the most sacred thing. You do not give it to someone to guard unless you would give them your throat." She turned and looked at me. Her yellow eyes were very bright in the dark. "Nobody has ever given me their home, husband. Nobody. In my whole life. They give me enemies. They give me walls to break. They give me heads to bring back. Nobody gives me a home to keep."

"Will you keep it?"

Brakka didn't answer straight away. She put her hand on my shoulder, the way she had in the lane at Coldwater, and squeezed, hard enough that I felt it in my bones.

"I will keep it," she said. "If anything comes out of that hole, I will kill it. If the tower man sends his beasts, I will kill them. If the fucking golden knight comes, I will kill him too, and this time you will not be here to say not yet." She grinned, tusks and all. "And when you come back, there will be a fence. A good fence. With the posts the right distance."

"Grosh'll help with that."

"Grosh," said Brakka, "will measure."

* * *

She told the warband in the morning. I didn't understand the words, but I understood what happened. They stood in a ring in the frosty yard, all eight of them, and listened, and when she'd finished, they knelt. All of them. In the frost. Grosh last, with his bandaged hand.

Then Brakka walked across the yard to the barn, and stood in the doorway, and planted her axe head-down on the threshold, and stood there.

She was still standing there an hour later when I went out to see to Duchess.

"You don't have to start now," I said.

"I am practising," said Brakka.

* * *

The night before we left, Miss Quill and I did the money.

She'd done it already, of course. She'd done it three times. But she said I should see it, since it was mine, and she laid it out on the kitchen table in columns. A hundred and ninety-nine gold, near enough, in the tin under the hearthstone. Inns on the Harrowgate road. Feed for four horses and a pony. A ferry at Ellsby. Tolls on the King's road south, which she'd looked up. Food, for five, for five weeks, and back. Boots, because mine wouldn't last five hundred miles of winter. A new coat, because I didn't have one.

"Forty gold," she said, and wrote it in a box. "To be safe. Fifty, if anything breaks."

"Things usually break," I said.

"I've noticed." She wrote fifty in the box instead, very neatly, and crossed out the forty. "That leaves a hundred and forty-nine in the tin, for the farm and the household. Mag holds the key. Brakka holds the barn."

"And the pretty rocks?"

"Stay in the sack," said Miss Quill. "On the chook-shed door. Exactly where they've been for seventeen years." She looked at me over her spectacles. "Nobody in their right mind would look for forty fortunes propping open a door for thirty-one hens. Your family's security arrangements are insane, and they've worked perfectly for three hundred years. I'm not going to improve on them."

I counted out fifty gold into a leather purse, and she wrote it down.

Then she put her pen down, and sat looking at the ledger for a while.

"Recorded," she said, quietly, to the page.

"What is?"

"Nothing." She closed the ledger. "Something at the Strand place. In the margin." She didn't look at me. "It's all right, Tobin. I'm not cross. I'm not anything. I'm just keeping accurate records."

I didn't know what to say to that. So I didn't say anything. She picked up the lamp and went to bed, and stopped in the doorway of Dad's room, and said, without turning round:

"She's been very lonely for a very long time. So have I. It's not a competition." And shut the door.

* * *

Wrenna went to say goodbye to Duchess on the last morning.

I don't know why. She'd never shown any interest in Duchess before. But she climbed down off the barn roof at dawn and went across the frosty home paddock to where Duchess was standing by the fence, and stood in front of her, and bent down so they were nose to nose.

Duchess looked at her. Wrenna looked at Duchess. Steam came off Wrenna in the cold, and Duchess's breath came out in two white plumes, and neither of them moved for a long time.

Then Duchess turned round, deliberately, and showed her the other end.

Wrenna came back across the paddock with an enormous grin on her face.

"She doesn't like me," she said. "She doesn't like you either. She doesn't like anybody. I love her."

"Everyone does," I said. "She hates it."

* * *

Mag came up on the last day to see us off. She'd heard. Everybody had heard.

She brought Elsie with her, and Elsie took one look at Duchess and went straight to her and started scratching her behind the ears, and Duchess leaned on her like a cat and ignored me completely. Elsie was going to stay at Marsh Hold for the winter, Mag said, and help, and mind the cow and the chooks. Brakka could mind the barn. Mag would come up every day and mind all of them, and if anybody had a bloody problem with that arrangement they could take it up with her.

Nobody did.

She sat on the back step with me, in the cold, with her pipe.

"The Witch," she said.

"Morwen."

"I asked Bram. He's got a book. Old one, his granddad's." She puffed. "Says she's three hundred and some. Says she drowned a whole army once, in the Saltfens, in the time of some king nobody remembers. Opened the sea and let it in. Says she turned a bishop into a heron for asking her to tea." She took the pipe out of her mouth and looked at it. "Says she's never once in three hundred years answered a letter."

"She answered yours."

"She did," said Mag. "So you be polite. And you take her a bottle." She reached into her coat and brought out a long dark green bottle, with wax over the cork. "This one. The Countess's man says it's the oldest of the twelve. Older than the Countess, near enough."

"Mag, that's yours."

"It was mine," said Mag, "and I've had one swallow out of it, and that's all I need to know it's wasted on an old woman with a pipe. Give it to the Witch. Tell her it's from Mag Penhallow of Thornfell, who wrote her the letter. Tell her I said thank you for coming the first two times." She pushed it into my hands. "Your father would have wanted it said."

I put it in my pack, wrapped in my spare shirt.

"Thanks, Mag."

"Don't thank me. Come home." She knocked her pipe out on the step. "And bring me a new coat. Since you lost Hal's."

* * *

We left five days after the heron, an hour after sunrise.

Me in front, on foot, with Gristle on my back, the way it always had to be. Wrenna beside me, steaming. Then, fifty paces back, Lys on her grey mare and Miss Quill on a sturdy brown cob that Bram had found her, which was patient and slow and didn't like anybody much but had decided it didn't mind her. Then a pack pony with the gear. And Pellam, of all people, driving a small closed black carriage with the windows painted over and the Countess inside it, asleep in the dark till dusk.

"I go where Madam goes," Pellam had said, when I'd asked him if he was sure. "Madam has never yet been anywhere I could not follow. I do not intend to start with a marsh."

The warband lined the track down to the creek ford. Eight of them, standing in a row, with their weapons held across their chests. As I came past each one, they bowed their heads.

Brakka was at the barn door with her axe planted on the threshold. She didn't come down to the gate. She didn't wave. She just stood there, filling the doorway, with the morning light on her and her braids full of frost, and watched me go.

Grosh walked with me as far as the ford, at a distance, the way the horses did. At the water he stopped.

"Husband of Brakka," he said. "She will not say this. So I say it." He held up his bandaged hand, the three fingers left on it. "Come back. She says she is fine. She is not fine. She has not stayed behind while someone else went, not once, since she was fifteen. She does not know how."

"I'll come back, Grosh."

"Good," said Grosh. "Or she will come and get you, and the fence will not be finished, and it will be my fault."

At the ford I looked back. She hadn't moved.

I raised my hand. After a long moment, she raised hers.

Then I turned south and west, towards the Ellsby road, and the long way round to the end of the kingdom.

Behind me, I heard Miss Quill say to Lys, quietly, "Ninety-seven days."

"I know," said Lys. "I can count too."