Chapter 220: Earned

Selvane came back from the boat at nine in the morning with a sack over her shoulder and her face set very carefully, the way you set a broken bone.

It was an old sack. Canvas, gone gray and soft with salt, mended in a dozen places with a dozen different threads. She put it down on the shingle in front of us and didn't open it.

"She kept everything," she said. "Every letter I ever carried for her, the ones she couldn't deliver. Every harbor I ever slept in, in a list, in her hand, with the date. A wick I'd worn down to nothing and thrown away in Corlis. She picked it up." She sat down beside the sack. "Twenty years. She never once told me she was keeping any of it. She just did."

"Did she say why?" said Carol.

"I asked," said Selvane. "She said: somebody has to remember you were here. You weren't going to." She looked down at her hands. "And then she said: now go away, I've got a fight to plan, and I don't plan fights with gods in the room."

"Are we allowed to help plan it?" said Lexander.

"No," said Selvane. "But Ketty's allowed to tell us what the plan is. And Ketty says we're allowed to tell her if it's stupid." She almost smiled. "Brisa said that was a concession."

* * *

The plan wasn't stupid.

Ketty Gell came down the shingle at ten with the tall young man, whose name was Corrin, and drew it in the sand with the butt of her crossbow while the rest of us crouched around her.

The shore road comes up from the south along the bottom of the cliffs, she said, with the beach on one side and the rock on the other. A mile south of Kittering there's a place called the Throat, where the cliff comes out in a great shoulder almost to the high-tide line and the road goes around it in a narrow cutting no wider than a cart. Fifty yards of it. Rock on the landward side, forty feet up. A drop to the beach on the other. The patrol would come through the Throat in a column, two by two, because they'd have no choice. The priest would be in the middle, with his lamp. He'd be on the mule. Priests always ride.

"Nets," said Ketty. "Kittering's got two hundred years of nets in the lofts that nobody's used since the boats stopped going out past the moles. Big ones. Herring nets. We drag them up the back of the shoulder in the night and lay them along the top of the cutting, and when the column's in, we drop them. Front and back first, so they can't run. Then the middle."

"And then?" said Lexander.

"Then they're twenty boys in a net," said Ketty. "And we take their spears off them while they're tangled up. And nobody dies." She looked at me. "That's the sum. Brisa did it at four this morning. She does all her sums at four in the morning."

Lexander was looking at the lines in the sand. He'd gone very still, the way he goes over his king's table.

"The priest," he said.

"What about him?"

"He'll raise the lamp," said Lexander. "The moment the first net falls. Before the middle one comes down. And then every boy in that column will be bound to look at whoever it shines on, and remember them. Forever." He looked up. "Whoever's on the top of that cliff with a net, if the lamp finds them, they're on the next list. And the one after. And every one after that, for the rest of their lives."

Ketty didn't say anything.

"Brisa's thought of that," said Corrin, flatly. It was the first thing he'd said all morning.

"I'm sure she has," said Lexander. "What did she decide?"

Corrin looked at Ketty. Ketty looked at the sand.

"She'll be the one on the middle net," said Ketty at last. "So if the lamp finds anyone, it finds her." She jabbed the crossbow butt into the sand. "She's been on every list on this coast for twenty years anyway. She says one more won't notice."

* * *

I looked at the lines in the sand for a long time.

I could see it. I could see all of it. I could see exactly how easy it would be. The fog in my right hand, curled around the coal, cool and quiet and waiting. One breath of it, let out into the Throat at the right moment, and no lamp on earth could find anyone on that cliff. Fellsend's fog had hidden a harbor from the sea for a thousand years. It had hidden ten of us from a priest at Hallow Cross. It would hide a dozen fishermen with nets.

It would be so easy.

And Brisa Thale had stood on that beach last night with her crossbow pointed at the ground and said: no gods. Not doing things. I don't want to win because somebody's mother is a goddess.

I closed my right hand over the fog.

"Garrick," said Carol quietly. She knew. She always knows.

"I know," I said.

"You could just offer."

"I know." I didn't open my hand. "She said no. Before I asked. She said it on purpose, so she'd never have to hear me ask." I looked at Carol. "And she's right. If we fog the Throat, then the first time anybody on this coast stood up in a hundred years, they won because of a god's fog. And every person on that cliff knows it. And every boy in that net knows it. And the next time, they'll wait for the fog."

"And if the lamp finds her?"

"Then it finds her," I said. "And we'll find a way to take it off her after. The way we took the collar off Kessavel." I swallowed. "But we don't get to take her choice off her first. Not to save her. Not for anything."

Carol looked at me for a long moment.

"Idiot," she said. But she said it the way she does when she means yes.

* * *

It was Loki who solved the lamp.

He'd been lying on the shingle the whole time with his hands behind his head, apparently asleep, the way he does when he's listening hardest. Now he sat up.

"She said heads," he said. "Didn't she? Fight like people. With your hands and your heads."

"She did," said Ketty warily.

"Then I'd like to use mine. No tricks. No gods. Nothing I couldn't do if I'd been born a cobbler's son in Lanth." He looked at Ketty. "When does a priest raise his lamp?"

Ketty frowned. "When something happens. When someone says mine at the door. When there's something to be seen."

"And when does he not raise it?"

Ketty opened her mouth. Shut it.

"When he's busy," said Loki. "When he's arguing. When he's already looking at something else and doesn't want to stop." He smiled, very slightly. "Every priest I've ever met, on either shore, in a thousand years, will stop whatever he's doing to win an argument about paperwork. I'd stake my coat on it." He looked at Ketty. "I want a carter's smock. And a mule. And a piece of paper with writing on it. Any writing. And I want to meet that patrol on the road, half a mile south of the Throat, coming the other way."

* * *

So that's what we did.

I'll tell it plainly, because Brisa would want it told plainly. And because I want it remembered that nobody in it did anything a person couldn't do.

At half past two on Sunday afternoon the patrol came up the shore road from the south. Twenty boys in gray coats, two by two, with spears on their shoulders, and the gray priest in the middle of them on a brown mule, with his lamp hanging lit from the saddle-bow. I watched them come from the top of the shoulder above the Throat, lying flat in the heather beside Corrin, with a herring net bunched under my right hand and its edge weighted with stones. My left hand lay white and useless in the heather beside me. It could hold the net down. That was all.

Half a mile south of the Throat, a carter's cart came around the bend toward them.

Loki was driving it. In a brown smock that was too short for him, and a hat pulled down, and a borrowed mule called Bess who didn't like him. He drove straight up the middle of the road until the head of the column had to stop or walk into her, and then he stood up on the bench, waving a piece of paper.

I couldn't hear what he said. I didn't need to. I've known Loki all my life. I saw him lean down from the bench toward the priest on his mule, with the paper held out and his whole body bent into the shape of a small, put-upon, absolutely furious clerk who has been sent out on a Sunday afternoon with the wrong list and is not going to be blamed for it.

The priest took the paper.

He looked at it. He looked at Loki. He said something sharp. Loki said something sharper and jabbed at the paper with his finger. The priest's face went red. He leaned down from his mule and jabbed at it too.

It was the list for Lanth. The real one. Brisa had taken it off the list cart three tenth days ago and kept it, because she keeps everything. It had nothing to do with Kittering at all. And the priest, a man who had spent his whole life with papers and names and lists, could not stand that it was wrong.

They argued for six minutes. Ketty counted.

And then the priest, still arguing, still holding the paper in one hand and jabbing at it with the other, kicked his mule on up the road toward the Throat with Loki's cart rattling along beside him, the two of them shouting at each other in Kethran over the top of the boys' heads, and the whole patrol following along behind in its column, two by two, because nobody had told it to do anything else.

Into the cutting.

The priest didn't look up once. He was looking at the paper.

* * *

Brisa dropped the first net.

She did it herself, from the front of the shoulder, with Ketty beside her. I didn't see her stand up. Nobody did. One moment the head of the column was walking into the north end of the Throat, and the next there was a herring net forty feet wide coming down on them out of the sky like a great brown sail, weighted at every corner with stones, and the first six boys in the column went down under it in a heap of arms and spears and cursing.

Corrin and I dropped the back.

I'd never dropped a net in my life. Corrin had, a thousand times. He took the weight of it and I just let go when he said, and it went down over the tail of the column the way it was meant to, and the last six boys went down under it, tangled. Somebody screamed. Not hurt. Frightened.

And the priest looked up.

I saw him do it. I was right above him. He was still on the mule, in the middle of the cutting, with eight boys around him who hadn't been netted yet, and the paper in one hand, and he dropped the paper and reached for the lamp at his saddle-bow.

He got it. He lifted it. He held it up over his head, and his mouth opened, and I knew he was about to say the word that makes everyone look.

And Loki, sitting on the bench of the cart beside him in a carter's smock, reached out quite casually and knocked the lamp out of his hand.

Not with any power. With his elbow. The way you'd knock a cup off a table by accident in a crowded kitchen. The lamp flew out of the priest's hand and hit the rock wall of the cutting and smashed, and the oil went up in a little sheet of ordinary yellow flame on the stones and burned for a moment and went out.

"Oh dear," said Loki, in shore-speech, loudly. "Clumsy of me."

The priest stared at him.

And Brisa Thale dropped the middle net.

* * *

It wasn't clean. I want that remembered too. Brisa would want it remembered.

The middle net came down over the priest and the mule and six of the eight boys, but it missed the last two, and they were quick. One of them got his spear down and slashed at the net and got halfway out. The other one looked up at the cliff, saw us, saw me, standing up now on the edge of the shoulder because I'd forgotten to stay down, and threw his spear.

He was fifteen. I learned that later. His name was Sander. He'd never thrown a spear at anybody in his life. It was a terrible throw.

It was still a spear, and I was still forty feet up a cliff in front of it, and I'd been folding for so long that for half a breath I reached for the fold without thinking, to step out of its way.

I didn't. I don't know why. Adriana's silver, maybe, cold in my white hand. Say no on top of it. Or Brisa's voice on the beach. Fight like people.

So I did what a person does. I put up my arm.

The spear went through the sleeve of my coat and along the outside of my right forearm, just below the elbow, and kept going, and clattered on the rocks behind me. It didn't go in. It went along. It opened my arm from elbow to wrist like a knife going down a fish.

I sat down in the heather quite suddenly.

There was a great deal of blood. More than I'd thought there would be. It ran down over my right hand and over the coal, and the coal hissed, and the fog in my palm went pink.

"Garrick!"

That was Carol. From somewhere below. I heard her start to climb.

"I'm all right," I said. To nobody. I wasn't sure I was. But I could still feel all my fingers, and the coal was still lit, and the boy who'd thrown it was standing in the road below me with his hands empty and his mouth open and an expression on his face of absolute horror.

Not at me. At himself.

* * *

The rest of it took about four minutes.

Brisa's people came down off the shoulder on ropes with their crossbows on their backs and their knives out. Not to stab. To cut spear-straps, and belts, and the cords the boys carried their water bottles on. Ketty Gell took the spear off the boy who'd half-cut his way out of the middle net by stepping on its shaft and holding out her hand for it until he gave it to her. Corrin went down the rope beside me and landed in the road in front of Sander, the boy who'd thrown, and Sander put his hands up, and Corrin looked at him for a long time and then just took him by the shoulder and sat him down on the edge of the road.

Lexander came up the shore road from the south, where he'd been waiting with Roderic in case any of them ran. None of them had. He stood at the south end of the Throat with his one eye going over everything, and said three words in Kethran, very quietly, in the voice of a man who has commanded armies, and every boy still standing sat down.

Io came down the cliff after Carol. Her feet were smoking. She'd kept them off the heather the whole way up, because Brisa had said no gods, and she'd held it in so hard her feet had blistered from the inside. She didn't mention it. She went straight past the boys and the nets and up the rocks to me and knelt down in the heather and took my arm in both her hands.

And didn't heal it.

I saw her want to. I saw the fire come up into her hands, gold, the way it does, the way it did when she burned my palm and healed it again, at home, and left me a ring to hold her daughter up to the light. She held it there. And then she put it out. On purpose. I watched her do it.

"Needle," said Io, without looking around. "Somebody give me a needle and thread. And a clean cloth. And something strong to wash it with."

Ketty Gell, who had come up behind her, looked at Io for a long moment. Then she took a flask out of her coat and handed it over, and a fisherman's sail-needle and a hank of waxed thread out of her pocket.

"That'll hurt," said Ketty.

"I know," said Io. "He'll live." She looked at me. "This is going to hurt, darling."

"I know," I said.

It did. A great deal. She put eleven stitches in my arm on top of that cliff with a sail-needle and waxed thread, the way a fisherman's wife would, and Carol held my head against her shoulder with her good hand and said Idiot into my hair, over and over, about thirty times. It helped, a little.

When Io had tied off the last stitch, she sat back on her heels and looked at it. And then she looked down the cliff at the Throat, at the nets, at twenty boys sitting in the road, and at Brisa Thale, who was standing in the middle of them with her crossbow on her back, looking up at us.

"There," said Io, to nobody in particular. Her voice was shaking. "Done like people."

* * *

They didn't kill anybody.

Twenty boys and a priest, and a cut arm, and a broken lamp, and Lanth's list in the dust in the middle of the road. That was the whole of it. Brisa Thale stood in the middle of the Throat afterward with her hands on her hips and looked at it all for a long time, the way I think she must look at a sum that has come out right.

Then she looked at the boys.

They were sitting in two rows along the cutting, where Lexander had told them to sit, with their hands in their laps and their spears in a pile on the cart. Gray coats too big for them. Thin necks. Some of them were crying. Some of them were trying very hard not to. The boy who'd thrown the spear at me was sitting on his own at the end, with Corrin standing beside him, staring at his hands.

"Well," said Brisa. "Now I've got twenty boys. What am I supposed to do with twenty boys?"

Nobody answered.

They couldn't go back. That was the trouble. Iselle explained it to me later, while Io was cleaning my arm again. A patrol that comes back without its six names, without its lamp, without its priest, comes back as twenty boys who failed. And the city doesn't keep boys who failed. It sends them to the oars.

"Ask them," I said.

Brisa looked up at me. I'd come down the cliff by then, slowly, on Carol's arm. My right arm was tied up against my chest in Ketty's scarf. It hurt more than anything has hurt since the cabbages.

"Ask them what?"

"Their names," I said. "Ask them their names."

Brisa looked at me for a long time. Then at the boys. Then back at me.

"Nobody's asked them," I said. "Ever, I should think. Not one of them. They've been told what they are since they were born. His." I swallowed. "Ask them. Before you decide anything. Ask them who they are. And then ask them what they want."

* * *

She didn't do it.

Kessavel did.

He'd been at the north end of the Throat the whole time, by the first net, with his empty gray hands at his sides. He hadn't done anything in the fight. Brisa had said no gods, and he'd done nothing at all; he'd just stood there, and every boy in the patrol had seen him, and not one of them had come within ten yards of him.

He walked down the cutting now. Slowly. Between the two rows of boys. They shrank away from him as he passed, every one, the way the line at Ammet had shrunk from the priest's lamp. One of them started to put his fingers to his mouth.

Kessavel stopped at the end, in front of the boy who'd thrown the spear. And crouched down, so that his face was level with the boy's.

"I wrote the question," he said. In shore-speech, so that everyone could hear. "The one they ask you at the door. Whose are you. I wrote it. A long time ago. I made it short so you'd stop hearing it." He was quiet. "I'm telling you that so you know it isn't true. It's just words. A gray man wrote them. He was wrong."

The boy stared at him.

"I'm not going to ask you whose you are," said Kessavel. "I'm going to ask you something else. You can say no." His voice was very gentle. "What's your name?"

The boy's mouth worked.

It took a long time. Long enough that I thought he wouldn't. Long enough for the tide to come in once on the beach below the cutting and go out again. Fifteen years old, in a gray coat too big for him, with his hands shaking in his lap, and nobody in his whole life had ever asked him that.

"Sander," he said.

It came out cracked. Like Kenna's. Like Hew's. Like a hinge.

"Sander," said Kessavel. "Of where?"

"Coln Head." The boy swallowed. "My mam keeps hens."

"Hello, Sander of Coln Head, whose mam keeps hens," said Kessavel. "I'm Kessavel. I used to be the worst person in the world. A little girl in Lanth says I'm just gray now." He held out his empty gray hand. Not to take anything. Just held it out, open, the way Iselle holds hers. "I'm sorry you had to throw a spear today. You're not very good at it. That's a good thing."

And Sander of Coln Head, fifteen, who had thrown a spear at a god an hour ago, looked at the gray hand for a long time. And then, very slowly, put his own in it.

* * *

After that it went down the row.

Not quickly. Kessavel went to every one of them. Crouched down in front of every one. And asked. And every one of them, one after another, all the way up the cutting, said a name.

Ludo. Of Fellsend. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.Pask.Willem, of the long plain. My gran's got the wheat.Hallen. I don't know where. I was in the city since I was four.Toby.Dace, of Kittering. Of Kittering. My aunt lives on the north mole, she puts a candle out— He stopped, and went white, and Ketty Gell put her hand on his head.

Twenty names. Brisa stood at the end of the cutting and listened to every one.

When it was done, she was quiet for a long time.

"They can't go back," she said at last. Not to me. To the boys. "You know that. If you go back to the city without your names and your priest and your lamp, they'll put you on the oars."

Nobody said anything.

"So I'm going to ask you," said Brisa Thale, and her voice sounded as if it hurt her, as if it had been shut in a cupboard a very long time and was having to come out into the light. "What do you want?"

They didn't know. Of course they didn't. Nobody had ever asked them. They sat in their two rows in the cutting and looked at each other, and at her, and at Kessavel, and at me with my arm tied up against my chest, and didn't know.

And then Sander of Coln Head said, very quietly, "I want to go home and help my mam with the hens."

And Brisa Thale said, "Then you'll have to wait a bit. Till it's safe. But you can come with me till then, and I'll see you get there." She looked down the row. "Any of you. All of you. Or none. You can say no."

Not one of them said no.

* * *

She came and found me at dusk, on the shingle below the Throat, where Io had made me sit with my back against a rock and was not letting me get up.

She stood over me with her crossbow on her back and her hands in her coat pockets and looked at my arm for a long time.

"You could have stepped out of the way," she said. "Couldn't you? That spear. You do that thing. The stepping. Selvane told me." She looked at me. "You could have been somewhere else before it got there."

"Yes," I said.

"Why didn't you?"

"You said no gods," I said. "You said fight like people. People get hit by spears."

Brisa Thale looked at me for a long time.

"I've known gods all my life," she said. "Ours. His. I've never known one that would take a spear to keep a promise to me." She was quiet. "I didn't even ask for the promise. I just said it. On a beach. To get rid of you."

"I know," I said. "That's why it counted."

She stood there a while longer, with the sea coming in behind her on the stones. I thought she was going to go. Then she took one hand out of her pocket and held it out to me.

Not to shake. To give. There was something in it.

A key. A big old iron one, the kind that opens a sea-door.

"The Shrike," said Brisa Thale. "My boat. She's in the north cave under the mole. She'll take twelve, if they don't mind being wet." She held it out. "I'll not carry gods. I've said so. I meant it." Her sea-ice eyes held mine. "But I'll carry crew. And crew have to earn their place. And you've earned yours." She dropped the key into my left hand, my white one, which couldn't close on it. "So's your sister. And the fire-woman, with her burnt feet. And the clumsy carter." She jerked her chin up the beach toward Kessavel, who was sitting on the shingle with Sander of Coln Head, showing him Tegen's shell. "And him. God help me. Him too."

I looked at the key in my white hand.

"Where are we going?" I said.

"Where you were always going," said Brisa. "The city. But not on foot. And not on the road." Something moved in her face again, at the place where a smile would go. "By sea. Down the coast. At night. Under the cliffs, the way the harbor-folk go. Ketty takes the boys up into the hills, where nobody counts anybody. The Shrike takes you. A goddess with a lamp, and a lot of very wet gods who have promised me not to do anything." She turned to go. "We leave tomorrow night. Get some sleep. You look terrible."

"Brisa," I said.

She stopped.

"Thank you."

She didn't turn around.

"Don't thank me," said Brisa Thale. "Be useful."

* * *

From Mary's book. Tuesday. Mary's hand, small and steady:

Sel's fifteenth tree. Grandpa hung the gate on the orchard. It has no latch. It just swings.

Sunday, half past two in the afternoon: Uriah stood up in the nook all at once and put his hand on his right arm, below the elbow, and said: something's happened to him. Evelyn went white. Uriah stood there for a long time with his hand on his arm. Then he said: no. He's all right. Somebody's stitching it. He sat down again. Then he said: he didn't step out of the way. Then he said: good lad. Then he put his face in his hands and stayed like that until Helena brought him tea.

9:10 p.m. Sunday at the stone. Three and three. Mirelle lit the lamp. Benjamin answered. Then three and ten from the nearer bearing. Then the long light, but shorter. A minute. Davren says it was wavering. Like someone holding it up with the wrong hand.

Monday: the boy wouldn't let anyone hold his right arm. He held it himself, against his chest, all day, the way you hold something that hurts. He's never seen anyone do that. Evelyn sat with him in the garden. Fenrir lay across both their feet.

One day to midwinter.

And under that, in a hand that slants hard forward, quick and black and impatient, the letters pressed so deep the pen has torn the paper twice, with a raven's feather pressed flat between the pages where the entry ends:

Thora. I'd like it noted that I took the boy up on the roof on Monday afternoon because he asked to go, by pointing, and that he stood at the parapet holding his right arm against his chest and looked south for an hour and didn't cry once. I'd like it noted that my raven sat on his shoulder the whole time and didn't peck him, which she has never done for anyone. I'd like it noted that just before we came down, he said a new word. He said Brave. Nobody taught him that one either. I'd like it noted that I don't know who he was saying it about, and I don't think it matters, and I've decided it was all of them.