Chapter 39: Margins

Hesper Quill had kept her own ledger since she was fifteen, and in all that time she had never once written anything in the margins.

Margins were for corrections. That was what her father had taught her, at the kitchen table, before the lord and the trial and the cough. You kept the columns clean. If you made a mistake, you didn't scratch it out. You drew one neat line through it and wrote the correction in the margin, small, with the date, so anybody who came after could see exactly what you'd got wrong and when. A good ledger, her father said, was an honest record of every mistake you'd ever made.

For fourteen years her margins had been nearly empty.

Now, on the road south and west out of Harrowgate, on the eighty-ninth day before the thaw, she sat on her patient brown cob and turned the pages of the brown ledger, and the margins were full.

White on the paddocks before sunrise. Crunchy underfoot.

Three copper.

He asked Maud.

Paid a tavern keeper for his nerves.

Recorded. Strand place.

Not a competition.

She closed the ledger and put it back in her saddlebag and sat there with the reins in her two fists while the cob plodded on through the slush. She looked at the back of him, fifty paces ahead, walking, in his ridiculous coat made of rat. Steady. Never hurrying. Wrenna beside him, steaming, with the red ribbon in her hair.

She had a terrible feeling that the margins were not corrections.

* * *

The country changed as they went south.

The first week it was the South Downs, long bare hills with sheep on them and nothing else, and a wind that came over the tops and went straight through two coats. Then the hills flattened. The roads got worse. The villages got smaller and further apart and poorer, with reed roofs instead of thatch, and the people in them had a way of looking at strangers that Hesper recognised from the Weir. Not unfriendly. Just not expecting anything good.

Then the reeds started.

They came in at the edges of the road first, brown and dead and higher than a man on a horse, rattling in the wind. Then they were on both sides. Then the road was a raised causeway of packed earth through miles of them, and the air began to smell of something sharp and clean and cold, and Hesper licked her lips and tasted salt.

"Saltfens," said Lys, riding beside her. "Getting close."

"We're nine days from Hollowmere," said Hesper. "By the map."

"The map has a sea serpent on it."

"The map," said Hesper, "is the best I could find, and I've been using it for nine days, and it's been right about everything but the serpent."

Lys smiled. She'd been smiling more, the last week.

On the tenth day, Pellam stopped the black carriage in the middle of the causeway at noon, which he had never done, and climbed down off the box, and walked forward to where Hesper and Lys were riding, and pointed south with one gloved finger.

Far off, over the reeds, at the edge of the grey sky, something was flying. Very small at that distance. Grey. Long tailed, with wide leathery wings that beat slowly, the way a heron's do. It was going south and west, low, the same way they were.

Nobody said anything. They watched it until it went into the haze and was gone.

"I thought Miss Quill should write it down," said Pellam. "Madam is asleep. She will want to know the time."

Hesper wrote it down. Day ten. Noon. Wyvern, south-west, low. Then she sat looking at the line for a while.

Kell was ahead of them. Still ahead. And going exactly where they were going. Beside her, Lys had gone white about the mouth, still watching the haze where it had been. Hesper had noticed. She noticed everything about Lys these days, which was a new problem, and she'd written that in the margin too, and then she'd sat and stared at it.

* * *

They talked about it on the eleventh night. They'd been not talking about it for weeks, and on the eleventh night, in a reed-cutter's hut with the wind howling outside and Tobin asleep by the fire and Wrenna sitting in the doorway glowing, Lys said, very quietly, "Hesper."

"Yes."

"I need to tell you something. And I need you to not do arithmetic about it until I've finished."

Hesper put her pen down.

"I'm in love with him," said Lys.

The fire cracked. In the corner, Tobin slept on, on his side, with Gristle by his hand. He snored very quietly. He always had.

"I know," said Hesper.

"How long have you known?"

"Since the campfire. When you licked your fingers." Hesper looked at the fire. "I didn't know until you told me just now. But I knew."

Lys was quiet for a long while. Outside, the wind dropped for a moment, and in the quiet you could hear the reeds rattling all the way to the horizon.

"You are too," she said.

It wasn't a question. Hesper didn't pretend it was.

NovelPhoenix is the author's publication home for this chapter; it was copied here without permission, and reading there supports their work.

"Yes," she said.

"And Elodie."

"Elodie kissed him at a barn door in the snow, in front of a dead woman's grave, and then watched a sunrise until her eyes bled. Yes. Elodie."

"And Brakka's married to him."

"Under orc law. By her own choice. And she'll be standing in his barn door right now with an axe, keeping his house, because he asked her to." Hesper laughed, a little, despite herself. "And Wrenna wants a rematch, which as far as I can tell is the same thing in her language."

Lys put her face in her hands.

"This is ridiculous," she said, through them.

"It's very ridiculous."

"I'm a princess."

"I'm an auditor."

"He's a farmer."

"He's past the end of the count," said Hesper. "He's past the end of everything. Nobody's ever been where he is." She picked up her pen and turned it in her fingers. "And he doesn't know. Not about any of us. Not properly. He thinks Elodie's lonely and Brakka's loyal and Wrenna wants a fight and you're his friend and I'm the woman who does his sums."

"You are the woman who does his sums."

"I know," said Hesper. "I like it." She looked at Lys. "Do you know what he said to me once, on Mrs Ostry's landing? He'd just been bitten by a vampire in an alley. He came up the stairs at three in the morning with blood on his collar and said a lady had bitten him, and she'd had a big night, and he'd taken her home." She swallowed. "And all I could think, sitting there on the stairs in my dressing gown, was, I'd have taken her home too. If I'd been him. I'd have been exactly that stupid and exactly that kind. And I've never been either in my life."

Lys took her hands away from her face.

"I don't want to fight you for him," she said. "I don't want to fight anyone. I've had enough of people fighting over me like a parcel. I'm not doing it to someone else."

"No," said Hesper. "Neither am I."

"Then what do we do?"

Hesper thought about it. She thought about it the way she thought about everything, properly, the way he did.

"We count it later," she said. "When there's a later. After the ice. After the keys. After Kell." She opened the ledger to a fresh page at the back, and drew a single line down the middle of it, and wrote at the top, very small, LATER. "And until then, we don't do arithmetic about it. We just do the job."

Lys looked at the page for a long time.

Then she reached over and took Hesper's pen out of her hand and wrote, under LATER, in her own sharp quick writing: Agreed. L.

* * *

The cob went through the ice on the fourteenth day.

They'd come down off the causeway to cross a river. It was frozen from bank to bank, white and solid, and the reed-cutters in the last village had said it would hold a cart. Tobin had gone over first, alone, with Wrenna waiting on the bank so she wouldn't melt it, and the ice had held under him without a creak. Then Lys's mare, which went across dancing and sideways because it could still smell him on the far bank. Then the pack pony.

Then the brown cob, with Hesper on it.

She heard the crack before she felt it. A sound like a whip. Then the world tilted, and the cob screamed, and the white ice in front of its forelegs opened up into black water, and they went in.

The cold was the worst thing she had ever felt.

It wasn't like cold. It was like being hit, all over, at once, with something enormous. It went in through her coats and her skin and straight into her bones, and her breath went out of her in one huge gasp, and she couldn't get it back. Her chest had locked. She couldn't breathe in. She was in black water up to her neck, with the cob thrashing beside her, and her hands had already stopped working, and the edge of the ice was right there and she couldn't make her fingers close on it.

She heard someone shouting her name.

Not Miss Quill. Her name.

Then he was there.

He'd come back across the ice at a run. She heard it breaking behind him with every step, crack crack crack, a line of black water following him across the river like a seam being torn. He didn't slow down. He came to the edge of the hole and went flat on his front on the ice, and reached down into the water with one arm, and took her by the collar of her coats, and lifted her out.

Just lifted her. Straight up, out of the river, like a kitten out of a bucket. She came out of the water streaming, and he set her down on the ice beside him, and the ice groaned under them both.

Then he reached down with his other arm, without letting go of her, and got the cob by the bridle and the mane, and lifted that out too.

The cob came up out of the river onto the ice on its side, all four legs going, and lay there blowing. It was a big horse. It was the size of a horse. He'd lifted it out of a river with one hand, lying on his stomach on breaking ice.

It looked at him from where it lay, wide-eyed and shaking.

It didn't run.

It was the first horse Hesper had ever seen not run from him.

* * *

She didn't remember much of the next hour. She remembered being carried. She remembered a fire, very big, and her wet coats being peeled off her by Lys, swearing in a steady furious undertone that Hesper hadn't known princesses knew. "Fucking river. Fucking map. Fucking reed-cutters and their fucking cart." She remembered blankets. She remembered shaking so hard her teeth sounded like hail on a roof.

She remembered Wrenna.

Wrenna sat down beside her on the reed floor of the hut they'd found, without being asked, and took both of Hesper's dead white hands in her own. Wrenna's hands were hot. Not burning. She'd made them exactly hot enough. Hesper could see the effort of it in the cracks in her arms, going bright and dark, bright and dark, like breathing.

"I'm unknown," said Wrenna. "You said. When you looked at me with your eyes. Unknown, unknown, all the way down."

"Yes," said Hesper, through her teeth.

"Is that bad?"

"I don't know," said Hesper. "I've never not known anything before."

Wrenna grinned.

"Good," she said. "Then I'm the first thing." And she held Hesper's hands, and kept them exactly hot enough, until the feeling came back into them, which hurt worse than the river.

* * *

The Countess came in from the river after midnight, when the hut was quiet. She knelt beside Hesper in the firelight and held out a folded strip of white cloth.

It was the petticoat. The strips Hesper had torn to bind her hands at the Strand place. Washed, and pressed, and folded very small.

"Pellam laundered them," said the Countess. "I thought you might want them back." She looked at Hesper's red swollen fingers. "Though I see you've found a better use for your hands than lending me your underthings."

"Your hands," said Hesper. "Are they..."

The Countess held them up. They were pale and smooth again, nearly. A faint shine on the backs, like old scars.

"Healed," she said. "Mostly. They'll mark. I don't mind. I've never had a scar I chose before." She put the folded strips in Hesper's lap and stood up. "Get warm, Miss Quill. I'd hate to have to dig a grave square. I've watched it done, and it looks exhausting."

She went back out to the river.

He sat with her after, when the others were asleep. Lys by the fire. Wrenna in the doorway. The Countess outside on the frozen river, which she had decided to take personally, walking up and down it in the dark testing it with her heel.

He said nothing at first. He just sat beside her on the reed floor with his back against the wall, close enough that she could feel how warm he was, which was very warm, warmer than the fire.

"You called me Hesper," she said at last. "On the ice. And at the Strand place."

"Did I?"

"Twice now."

He thought about it.

"It just came out," he said. "Sorry. I'll go back to Miss Quill."

"Don't," said Hesper.

He looked at her.

"Don't go back," she said. "Please. It's taken me fourteen years to have anyone call me by my name who isn't paid to." She looked down at her hands, which were still red and swollen and aching. "Later," she said. "There are some things I'll want to say to you. Later. After the ice. After the keys. Lys and I have agreed." She managed a smile. "We've written it down."

He didn't ask what. He didn't push. He just nodded, the way he did when somebody told him something that mattered and he wanted them to know he'd heard it.

"Later, then," he said. "Hesper."

She leaned her head on his shoulder, the way she had at the campfire, and closed her eyes.

In the brown ledger in her saddlebag, at the back, on the page that said LATER, there was a line down the middle and two names at the bottom of it. And in the margin of the page before, an hour ago, by the fire, with her aching hands, she'd written one line in the smallest writing she had: he lifted the horse too.

She didn't cross it out. It wasn't a mistake.