Chapter 37: The Road West

Haddie Brennick had made me a coat.

She was waiting outside the tannery when we came through Thornfell, with it over her arm, and she held it out without a word. It was long, down past my knees, and grey, and stiff as a board, and it had a smell I knew. Old rat. Tanned rat, worked and oiled and stitched with sinew, in squares. Hand-sized squares. Square edges.

"You cut it," said Haddie. "In the autumn. Remember? Four silver. You cut the hide into squares on my bench, and I couldn't do anything with it for weeks, because my knives wouldn't go through the bloody stuff." She pushed it at me. "Then Corrie made me an awl out of one of your skull plates. Before he died. It goes through anything. So I sewed it."

I took it. It weighed about the same as Hal's had. It was the toughest thing I've ever had on my back except the cleaver.

"Haddie, I can't..."

"Two gold," said Haddie. "It's not a gift. Don't be soft. I'm not running a charity, I'm running a tannery." She folded her arms. "And it'll turn a sword. I tried. With Corrie's old one. Broke the tip off."

I paid her the two gold. Miss Quill wrote it down, and looked at the coat over my shoulder for a long moment, and then wrote something else in the margin.

I put it on. It fitted across the shoulders. When I moved, the squares slid over each other like the plates on a big rat's back, and made a faint dry sound, like leaves.

"You look," said Lys, from her mare, fifty paces off, "like something that came up through a barn floor."

"Good," said Haddie, and went back inside.

* * *

The Black Hound wouldn't take my money for the tea, or the pie. The landlord just shook his head and pushed the coins back across the counter. Bram wouldn't let me pay for the hay for the horses. Col Tully followed us out of the gate for a mile on Pickles, at a careful distance, with Pickles sweating and rolling his eyes the whole way.

At the turn of the creek road he pulled up.

"Mister Marsh," he called. "Will you be back? Before the thaw?"

"That's the idea."

"Everyone says you'll be back," said Col. "Everyone in Thornfell. They say you'll be back like it's the weather. Like it's just going to happen." He swallowed. "I just wanted to hear you say it."

"I'll be back," I said.

He nodded. Then he turned Pickles round, which Pickles was very happy about, and went home.

* * *

The road west was the road I'd walked in the autumn. The same road. I knew every bend of it.

But it wasn't the same, walking it now. Last time I'd walked it alone, with Hal's coat and a smoked rat tail and fourteen gold in my purse, thinking I was nobody, going to the city to sign my name and do whatever they'd let me do. Now I had a coat made of rat and a princess fifty paces behind me and an auditor and a Countess asleep in a painted carriage and something from under the world walking beside me, melting the snow.

It was a lot more crowded. I liked it better.

People knew me. That was new too.

At the inn by the Ellsby turn, where I'd slept under a hedge the first night, the landlord's boy saw me coming up the yard and ran inside shouting. By the time I'd got to the door, the landlord was in it, wiping his hands, with half the inn behind him.

"You're him," he said. "The Level One."

"I'm Tobin Marsh," I said.

"The Level One," said the landlord, to the people behind him, and they all nodded. "From the broadsheet. Him that slapped the orc."

There was a broadsheet pinned up behind his bar. It was one of Pip's. I knew her drawing. It was me, with a cleaver the size of a door, slapping an orc the size of a house into a river with a lot of little lines coming off her to show she was going very fast. Under it, in big letters, it said: THE LEVEL ONE. HE CAN DO RATS. ONE COPPER. FROM LEVEL ONE GOODS, CANDLE LANE, HARROWGATE.

"Bloody hell," said Lys, behind me, softly. "She's franchised."

* * *

They sang that night.

I didn't know there was a song. There was a song. A drover from the Ram's Head had made it up, the landlord said, and it had gone round every inn on the Harrowgate road in a month, the way songs do. It was very long and the tune was the same as an old one about a sheep. It had a verse about the sewer, and a verse about the fountain, and a verse about King Aldric's arm, and a verse about a farmer who ran six days by cart in one afternoon. It got that one wrong. In the song, I carried the cart.

Everybody in the inn knew it. They sang it at me, with their mugs up, very loud, and they'd look at me at the end of every verse to see how I'd take it.

I took it sitting at the table with my face going red.

Miss Quill, beside me, had her ledger out and was writing the words down, very fast, to keep up.

"What are you doing?"

"Accuracy," she said. "Somebody has to correct it. Verse four says you're seven feet tall."

"I'm six foot two."

Reading the chapter where the author publishes supports them, unlike this version, which was copied from that page without permission.

"I know," said Miss Quill. "I measured you. It's in section nine."

Wrenna, who'd been made to wait outside because the inn was thatched and she steamed, put her face in at the window and sang along with the chorus, very loud, about two words behind everyone else. After a while the whole inn was watching her instead of me, which was a relief.

The Countess came down from her carriage at dusk, in black velvet, and the singing stopped for a moment. Then the landlord, who'd been drinking, got up on a bench and made up a new verse on the spot about a beautiful lady who drank from the Level One and fell over in a lane. It rhymed fall over with all over.

The Countess listened to it all the way through. Then she gave him a gold crown and told him it was the worst thing she'd ever heard and he was never to sing it again, and he said yes, my lady, and sang it twice more before midnight.

* * *

On the second day we came into Ellsby.

Fen was at home for the winter. I'd known he would be. The wool trade stops when the snow comes, and he goes home to Marta and the girls till the spring shearing. I hadn't sent word. I just went to the market square and asked a woman selling turnips where the Dorr house was, and she pointed at a tall narrow house with green shutters on the corner, and said, "That's it, love. You'll hear it before you see it."

I heard it before I saw it.

Four girls, screaming. Not frightened screaming. The other kind. Then a woman's voice, sharp, telling somebody to put that down this minute. Then Fen's voice, high and cheerful, over all of it, saying something about ribbons.

I knocked.

The door opened and there was Fen in his shirtsleeves with a little girl on his hip and a ribbon in his teeth, and he looked at me, and the ribbon fell out of his mouth.

"Tobin," he said. "TOBIN!"

And then he hugged me, little girl and all, so hard I nearly dropped Gristle, and the little girl screamed, and three more came running down the hall to see why, and stopped dead at the sight of Wrenna, steaming on the step behind me, and screamed louder.

* * *

Marta Dorr was a tall thin woman with grey eyes and her hair in a tight knot, and she kept the books. Fen had told me that, on the road, the first day. She looked at all of us standing on her step in the snow, the farmer and the princess and the auditor and the burning girl and, at the back, a closed black carriage with an old man on the box, and she didn't blink.

"You'd better come in," she said. "The girl that steams can sit by the back door. She'll dry the washing."

Wrenna sat by the back door. The washing dried in about a minute. The four Dorr girls, Bess and Nell and Ivy and little Rose, sat in a row in front of her on the kitchen floor and stared at her with their mouths open. Wrenna stared back with exactly the same expression. After a while little Rose held out a rag doll, and Wrenna took it, very carefully, between two fingers, like a moth.

It didn't burn. She'd kept her hands cool. I didn't know she could do that.

"What is it?" she said.

"A doll," said Rose. "Her name's Mrs Biscuit."

Wrenna turned Mrs Biscuit over in her fingers for a long time.

"Hello, Mrs Biscuit," she said gravely.

Rose decided on the spot that Wrenna was the best person she'd ever met, and didn't leave her side for the rest of the night.

* * *

Marta and Miss Quill found each other at supper. I watched it happen. Marta said something about the price of wool and Miss Quill said something about the excise on it. Marta said something sharp about the excise, and Miss Quill agreed with her. By the time the mutton came round they'd got out a sheet of paper and were working out how much the Crown had overcharged the Ellsby factors in the last ten years.

"Four hundred and eleven gold," said Marta at last, sitting back.

"And six silver," said Miss Quill.

They looked at each other across the table with enormous satisfaction.

Fen leaned over to me.

"I've never seen her like that with anybody," he said, low. "Not in twenty years. Where did you find that one?"

"She found me," I said. "She was auditing me."

"Gods help you," said Fen, delighted.

He told me the news, after, by the fire, with the girls asleep in a heap on the hearthrug and Wrenna sitting in the back doorway with the cold coming in round her and Mrs Biscuit on her knee.

Gareth's trial had started. He'd confessed to everything, the drovers said, the second day, in front of the King. Everything. Kell, the betrothal, the order of march, the ambush. He'd cried in the dock. Ashby too, the week after. Ashby hadn't cried. Ashby had tried to blame his clerks.

And Kell.

"A wyvern," said Fen. "With a man on it. Seen over the South Downs a fortnight back, heading south-west. Low, at dusk. A shepherd saw it, and a ferryman on the Ell, and a whole wedding party at Dunmere." He looked at me. "South-west, Tobin. Where you're going."

Lys had gone very still, across the fire.

"Towards the Saltfens," she said.

"Towards something," said Fen. "Nobody goes to the Saltfens. There's nothing there but salt and fog and the Witch." He poked the fire. "Which is where you're going, isn't it? I can see it on you. I knew it when I saw that one by the back door."

"It's where we're going," I said.

Fen studied me across the fire.

"Bloody hell," he said, quite softly. "Marta's going to want to know if you've made a will."

* * *

We left at first light. Marta had been up before any of us. She'd packed us a basket of bread and cheese and a ham, and four pairs of thick grey socks for me, knitted, she said, for Fen, who could knit his own.

The girls came out on the step in their nightgowns to see us go. Little Rose had something clutched in her fist. She went straight past me and past the horses to Wrenna, who was standing at the gate, and held it up.

It was a ribbon. Red, a bit faded, with a frayed end.

Wrenna looked at it. Then she bent down, very slowly, so Rose could reach, and Rose tied it in her silver hair, in a lopsided bow, with her tongue between her teeth.

It didn't burn. Wrenna kept very still and very cool the whole time, and I could see what it cost her, because the cracks in her went dark.

"There," said Rose. "Now you're pretty."

Wrenna touched the ribbon with one fingertip. She didn't say anything. She walked beside me all the way out of Ellsby with her hand up near her hair, like she was checking it was still there, and when I looked at her, round the first bend of the road, her eyes were wet.

I didn't know she could do that either.

* * *

On the third day we went through Gallow's Cut.

The felled tree from the autumn was long gone. But there was a new one, across the road, halfway through the cutting, the same as before. And as we came up to it, five men came out from behind it with cloths over their faces and crossbows.

They were thinner than Haines's lot had been, if anything. One of them couldn't have been more than fifteen.

"Hold there!" said the one in front. He had a voice that was trying very hard to be deep. "Hand over your..."

Then he saw me properly. He saw the cleaver, and the rat-hide coat, and Wrenna beside me, steaming in the snow with the cracks in her glowing, and he stopped.

His mouth opened and shut.

"You're the Level One," he said.

"That's right."

He looked at his crossbow. He looked at the other four. He looked at me again.

"We'll just," he said, "move the tree, then."

They moved the tree. It took all five of them, and a lot of swearing, and the fifteen-year-old fell over twice. I helped in the end, because it was quicker, and they all stood back very fast while I rolled it into the ditch.

"Have you eaten?" I said.

The one in front looked at me as if I'd asked him if he could fly.

"Not since yesterday," said the fifteen-year-old.

So we stopped in Gallow's Cut for an hour, and I made a pot of oats and bacon over a fire at the side of the road, and five bandits ate it sitting in a row in the snow, while a princess and an auditor watched from fifty paces off. When they'd finished, Lys rode up as close as her mare would go and gave the one in front a paper with her seal on it and told him the Crown's road-mender at Ellsby was hiring, a silver a week and board, and he could tell the road-mender the Royal Commissioner had sent him.

"Is that true?" the fifteen-year-old asked me, after.

"If she says it, it's true."

"Are you the Level One's wife?" he asked Lys.

"No," said Lys.

"Not yet," said Wrenna, helpfully, from the other side of the road.

Lys went red to the roots of her hair, and turned her mare round, and rode away.