Chapter 226: The Cost Mounts

Iselle found it.

She did Carol's hair every morning now. She'd started on the Shrike, the first day out of Holme, because Carol couldn't plait with one arm in a sling and wouldn't let anybody else try, and Iselle had simply sat down behind her on the thwart without asking and taken up the comb. Carol had let her. I don't think anybody had touched Carol's hair but Mother since we were six.

So on Sunday morning, in the gray before sunrise, at the top of Skerrick, by the fire, Iselle was sitting behind my sister with the comb, and she stopped.

I was across the fire. I saw her stop.

"Carol," said Iselle. Very carefully. The way she says things in our language when she wants to be sure of every word. "How many did you have yesterday?"

"How many what?"

Iselle didn't answer. She lifted a lock of my sister's hair from above her left temple and held it out, so I could see, in the firelight.

It wasn't one strand anymore.

It was a streak. As wide as my finger. Running back from her temple into the dark like frost running along a windowpane. Silver. Bright. Not gray, not white. The same silver as the one strand had been. The same silver as the no in my palm.

"Oh," said Carol, when she found it with her fingers. And then, quite steadily: "Well. That's more than one."

* * *

Iselle counted them. She did it the way Caitlin would have, one at a time, lifting each with the end of the comb, her lips moving in Kethran.

"Nineteen," she said.

Across the fire, Ossery put down his stick.

He'd been sitting on the broken wall again, where he'd sat every morning, only now he didn't sit facing the headland with that blank asking look. Now he sat with his back to the sea and his face toward the land, watching the little silver lights along the coast road go pale as the sky came up. He'd been watching them all night. He'd been counting.

"Nineteen," said Ossery.

Nobody said anything.

"Nineteen of my stones woke in the night," he said. His voice had gone very quiet. The water-over-stones sound had gone out of it. "Under the floors. On their own. I watched every one come up." He looked at Carol. "And every time one came up, I felt it pull. Here." He touched his own chest. "On what you put in me. On the seed. I thought it was only me it pulled on." He shut his eyes. "It isn't. Is it."

"Ossery," said Carol.

"The root's still in you," said Ossery. "Isn't it. It grew into me. But it's still yours. It's still in you, under your breastbone, the way it was for twenty years. And every stone that wakes on its own reaches back down it for something to wake on. And there's only the one thing at the bottom."

Carol looked at him. Then she looked at me.

"Yes," she said. "I can feel it. Since about midnight. Like a thread being pulled out of a sweater. A little at a time." She put her good hand flat on her chest. "Nineteen pulls. I counted too. I didn't want to wake anybody."

* * *

I want to tell what I felt then, honestly, because I've promised myself I'd tell this whole thing honestly.

I felt cold. Not the way Carol's cold. The way you feel when you're walking on a frozen pond in the dark and you hear the ice make a sound under you.

Because there weren't nineteen stones. There were seven thousand.

"Give it back," said Ossery.

He'd stood up. He stood on the top of Skerrick in his road-colored coat with the glints in it and held out both his hands to her, palms up, as if she could just reach into them and take it.

"Give it back," he said. "Take it out of me. I don't want it. Not like this. Not if it's coming out of you. I was all right. I was—"

"You were fading," said Carol. "You couldn't remember where you were."

"I've been forgotten before. I'm good at it. I was forgotten for a hundred years under a shrine floor." His voice cracked. "I'm a god of crossroads, Carol Grey. I've stood at the corner and watched ten thousand people go past me and never thank me and never come back. I don't need to be anything. Not if what it costs is you going white from the top down."

"It's nineteen hairs," said Carol.

"Tonight it'll be fifty. Tomorrow a hundred." He turned to me. "Garrick. Tell her."

* * *

Carol stood up too.

She had to put her good hand on Iselle's shoulder to do it, which she hates. But she stood. And she looked at Ossery with that look she has, the one she gets from Father, the one she's had since she was small, when Roderic broke her doll's arm and wanted to apologize and she wasn't ready to let him.

"No," she said.

"Carol—"

"No. You asked me what it cost. I told you. I didn't hide it." She lifted her chin. "It's my seed. It's my root. It's my hair. And I've been carrying this one piece of a god around under my breastbone for twenty years, keeping it safe, and I've never once used it for anything, and now I have, and it works. Nineteen of your stones woke up on their own in the night because there's a ford in you now. Nineteen people somewhere out there who'll be lost one day and ask, and get an answer." She was shaking, a little. "I'm not taking it back. You can't give back a gift. That's not how it works. Ask anybody. Ask Father."

Ossery looked at her. And then, slowly, he put his hands down.

"Then I'll stop them," he said. "I'll hold them down. I'll lie on my own stones and keep them shut."

"You will not," said Carol.

They both turned to me.

And I understood they were waiting for me to say which.

* * *

I didn't say which. Not then. I couldn't. I sat down by the fire, and I looked at us.

That's the honest part.

I looked at all of us, sitting around Brisa's fire on top of a rock in the sea, fifteen miles from the gold tower, eleven days after we'd come ashore at Lanth. And for the first time since the serpent road, I counted. Not stones. Us.

Ignatius, by the fire, with his big hands open on his knees, not burning. He hadn't lit a flame since Lanth. Not one. Not for the stew, not for the cold, not even for a pipe. When I asked him why, at Fellsend, he'd said: I'm keeping it. I hadn't asked him what for. I didn't need to. He was keeping every scrap of his fire for the moment he got within reach of her, and he'd gone gray under his beard doing it.

Io, beside him, with her hands in her lap. Her knuckles were raw. She'd stitched my arm without healing it because Brisa said no gods, and then she'd stitched a rebel's cut hand, and a boy's split lip, and set an old man's finger, and lanced a boil on a goat, all with a needle and thread and no healing at all, the way a village wife does. Her fingers were covered in pinpricks. She hadn't complained once. She'd said, It's good for me. I'd forgotten what it costs them.

Kessavel, at the edge of the firelight, with the stub of pencil Tibby had given him and the account book Brisa had given him, writing. He'd been writing since Friday. He'd stopped sleeping. Every page had a column, Caitlin's way: a face, a street, a year. Three hundred and twelve so far. Not names; he didn't have their names. That was the point. A man with a scar through his eyebrow, Tanner's Row, the spring of the white year. A girl with red hair, nine or ten, the fish steps, two winters ago. Every line he wrote, I could see him remember it. The face going still. The voice going out of it. His own hand doing it. He wrote them all down anyway, and his hand shook, and he didn't stop.

Lexander, standing at the gap in the wall, watching the city. He'd stood there every night since Friday. He'd stood there for the forty-one houses. I don't think he'd slept more than an hour at a time since Holme. His one eye was red.

Selvane, with her lamp in her lap. The oil was nearly gone. It was harbor-oil, the fish-oil the faithful give her, and there were no harbors on Skerrick. She'd been burning it low to make it last. Her light was the size of a thumbnail.

Loki, lying on his back on a sail with his hands behind his head, apparently asleep, not asleep. He'd told the priest at Ammet one lie and the priest at the Throat another and nobody since. He said it was making him itch. I think he meant it. I think a god of lies who's been telling the truth for eleven days is a thing that costs something, too.

Roderic, who'd been sick eleven times and would have been sick eleven more to stand on Iselle's left.

Me. With eleven stitches in my right arm that wouldn't heal on this shore, and a headache that hadn't gone since I'd put out a fold fifteen miles long and pulled it back. My folds pushing back harder every day. Both eyes, though. Both hands.

And Carol. With nineteen silver hairs.

That's when I understood it. Not all at once. Slowly, the way you understand you've been walking uphill for a long time.

We'd spent what we brought. The food, the fair weather, the luck. Now we were spending what we were.

* * *

Liddy's word came at noon.

It came the way it always comes, in a sheet. Brisa's woman on the laundry boats had folded a slip of paper into the hem of a pillowslip from the priests' wing, and the pillowslip had gone out to the bleaching grounds at Kell Ford with the morning wash, and a boy from Skerrick, rowing past Kell Ford with a net out, had been passed a bundle of rags over the side by a girl rinsing linen in the shallows. Brisa unrolled the slip by the fire. It was in Liddy's hand, which is careful and square, because she learned it late.

Brisa read it in Kethran, and then Iselle read it again in ours.

Saturday, sunrise. In the gold room at breakfast He stood up from the table. The girl who takes the tray says He has not stood up at table in all the years she has carried trays. He stood with His hand on His chest and said nothing for as long as it takes to boil an egg. Then He sat down and finished His breakfast.

At noon the Hand of Roads was sent for. That is the priest who keeps the shrines on the highways. He was in the gold room an hour.

At dusk, carts went out of the Road Gate. Twelve. With braziers on them and lead in pigs. They are going to every crossroads shrine within a day's walk of the city. They are going to lift the floors, and pour lead into the place under them, and lay the floors again. So that nothing under them can ever be turned again.

The first carts went to the Kell Ford road. They will be at Kell Ford tomorrow night.

And under that, smaller, as if she'd added it after:

When He stood up at the table, the girl who takes the tray says the Lady of the Flame laughed. Out loud. Once. He looked at her. She didn't stop.

* * *

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Carol said, "She laughed."

"She felt it," said Ignatius. It was the first thing he'd said all morning. His voice was like coals settling. "When you planted it. Same as him. Only she knew what it was." He was looking at the fire he wasn't lighting. "She'd know that. A seed going in. She's been growing one herself for a year."

Carol put her hand up to her silver streak and held it.

"He felt it," she said. "And he had his breakfast. And then he sent for lead."

"Lead." Ossery's voice was very small. "Lead in the place under the floor. Not the stone. Under the stone. He's not going to turn them back over." He shut his eyes. "He's going to pour lead over their faces. So they can't ever be turned. So they can't ever be read. So nobody can ever ask them anything again."

"And if they do," said Selvane slowly. "If he leads them over. Every stone within a day of the city."

"Then they can't wake," said Ossery. "Then they can't pull." He looked at Carol. "Then it stops."

I saw him understand it at the same moment I did. I saw it go across his face.

"Then let him," said Ossery.

* * *

"No," said Carol.

"It'd stop it. It'd stop it pulling on you—"

"It'd stop you." Carol's voice was flat and cold, the frost in it, Father's voice. "It'd stop you, Ossery. Not just the stones. You'd go faint again. You'd go back to sitting on a wall asking where you are. And every person between here and the city who ever gets lost would ask a floor full of lead, and get nothing. And he'd sit in his gold room and have his breakfast." She was shaking now, properly. "I didn't give you a ford so he could pour lead on it."

"Then what?" said Ossery. He was nearly shouting. I'd never heard him raise his voice. "Then what, Carol Grey? You go white? You go white from the top down, one hair for every stone, until there's seven thousand of them and nothing left of you but a girl made of frost? Is that what you want me to stand at the corner and watch?"

They both turned to me again.

And this time I knew.

* * *

"Ossery," I said. "What woke you?"

He stopped. He looked at me.

"Carol's seed," he said.

"No. The seed grew. It grew the rest of you. But it didn't wake you. It needed a second voice. Remember?" I stood up. "What woke you was somebody standing at your corner and saying, I'm lost. Where am I?"

Ossery said nothing.

"Those nineteen stones," I said. "They woke up on their own. In the night. Under the floors. Nobody asked them anything. Nobody stood over them. There was nobody lost. So they woke up the only way they could. By reaching down the root for something to wake on." I looked at Carol. "And there's only one thing at the bottom of the root."

Carol was looking at me now. Hard. The way she looks at me across a chessboard when she's seen where I'm going before I've finished moving.

"But if somebody stands over a stone," I said, "and asks it. Out loud. I'm lost. Somebody who means it." I turned back to Ossery. "Then it doesn't need to reach down the root. Does it. It's got its own second voice. It wakes on that. It wakes on somebody needing it." I took a breath. "That's what you're for. Not her. Them."

Ossery stared at me.

And slowly, the glints came back into his coat. Like water in ruts, catching the light.

"It might," he said. "It might. I don't know. Nobody's ever—" He stopped. "Nobody's ever asked."

"Then we'll find out," I said. "Before the lead gets there."

* * *

Brisa Thale had been sitting on the other side of the fire all this time with her splicing in her lap and her sea-ice eyes going from one of us to the other, saying nothing. Now she put the splicing down.

"No gods," she said.

"I know."

"I mean it, boy. I said it on the shingle at Kittering and I meant it. You don't fold. You don't fly. You don't burn anything. You don't stand over my people being a god at them." She looked at Ossery. "Not even him."

"I know," I said. "That's the point. It can't be a god. If a god asks, it's just another god pulling on another god. It has to be somebody who's actually lost." I looked around the fire. Past the Company. At the rest of Skerrick. At the sixty. At the women back from the kitchens, the men back from the oars, the list-runners, the woman with the forearms at the well. "It has to be them."

Brisa looked at me for a long time.

"You want my people," she said, "to walk out tonight, in pairs, to every crossroads shrine between here and the city that a cart full of priests and lead is headed for. Get there first. Go into a shrine that's got His hand on the door. Lift the floor. And kneel down on the stone, and tell it they're lost."

"Yes."

"In the dark. With the priests on the road."

"Yes."

"And you'll do what, while they're out there doing that?"

"Go with them," I said. "On foot. Like crew. To the one the carts get to first." I looked at the stitches on my arm. "Kell Ford."

* * *

Brisa didn't answer me. She got up, and went to the well, where the woman with the forearms was hauling a bucket.

They talked for a while in Kethran, low, the way women talk at a well. I couldn't follow it. Iselle could. She sat very still beside Carol with the comb in her lap, listening.

Then the woman with the forearms let go of the bucket rope, and it ran back down into the rock with a long rattle, and she came across the top of Skerrick to the fire.

Her name was Annis Penner. I hadn't known it. Nobody had told me, and I hadn't asked, and I'm ashamed of that too. Jem Penner's mother. The woman who'd spat at Iselle's feet and then brought her stew.

She stood over me with her big arms folded.

"Lost," she said, in Kethran. Iselle said it after her in ours, very softly. "He wants somebody lost."

"Yes," I said.

"I've been lost two years," said Annis Penner. "Since the spring list from Coln. Since they took my boy to the oars. I lie down at night and I don't know where I am. I wake up and I don't know which way to go." She looked at me. "I don't need to pretend, rain-god's brother. I'll go."

Then she looked past me. At Carol. At the silver streak above her temple, catching the noon light.

"For her," said Annis Penner. "Not for him. Not for any god. For a girl who gave something away and is going white for it." She unfolded her arms. "Somebody ought to carry some of that."

* * *

By dusk there were fifty-two.

Fifty-two of the sixty. The other eight were too old or too small or had to keep the fires and the goats, and they argued about it anyway. Brisa sorted them in pairs by the well, by the last of the light, the way she does everything, without raising her voice. Two to every shrine. One who knew the lanes, and one who'd been lost.

That was the rule. That was the only rule. Brisa made it, and nobody argued with it. One of every pair has to mean it.

There was no shortage. Everybody on Skerrick had lost somebody.

Ossery told them where. He sat on the wall with his stick, and as each pair came to him he told them, in the steady new voice: Gull's Cross, where the salt road meets the coast road, four miles south, the shrine with the broken step. Tanner's Turn, up the river lane past the ford, the second right, the one with the yew. Old Ammet Road, the milestone with the crack through the fist. He knew every one now. Every stone in a day's walk. He told them which side of the floor the stone was under and how heavy the flag was.

And to each pair, at the end, he said the same thing.

"Ask it like you'd ask a stranger," he said. "Not like you'd pray. Don't kneel to it if you don't want to. Just say you're lost, and ask where you are." He paused. "And when it tells you, say thank you. Nobody ever does."

Carol sat beside him the whole time. She didn't say anything. She held his hand.

* * *

We went to Kell Ford on foot, Annis Penner and me.

Twelve miles. Down the headland lane to the river, over Ossery's ford at the bottom, then south along the near bank. Not the reed path. Ossery said keep the reed path for later. The open bank, in the dark, with the river on our left and the gorse on our right and the smell of the bleaching grounds coming up the wind long before we got there: lye and wet linen and wood-smoke.

I didn't fold. Not once. Not a foot of it. My right arm ached and my head ached and I walked twelve miles in the dark beside a big silent woman with forearms like a baker's, and I didn't fold, because I'd said I wouldn't.

At ten past nine I stopped on the riverbank and took out the coal and sent three and ten.

The city was a glow on the south sky, three miles off now, close enough that I could see the gold tower as a separate thing. The red light came up in the top of it. Steady. Long.

I didn't hold up my hand. I still couldn't. Not since the forty-one houses.

But Annis Penner, standing beside me in the dark, took a candle stub out of her apron pocket and a twist of tinder and lit it, there on the open riverbank with priests on the road, and held it up toward the tower.

"So she knows we heard," she said.

And then she blew it out, and we went on.

* * *

The cart was already at Kell Ford cross when we got there.

The cross is at the top of the bleaching grounds, where the river road meets the lane that comes down from the Kell Ford hills. There's a milestone with an iron fist on it and a shrine on the corner, a black door, a rusted hand. And in the road beside it, the cart. A big flat cart with a brazier on the back, glowing orange, and a crucible in the brazier, and two pigs of lead beside it on the boards.

Two priests. A big one, older, working the bellows. And a young one, holding the lamp. The shrine door was standing open. The floor flag in the middle was already up, leaning against the wall. I could see it from the lane. And beside it, on the shrine floor, face down, the stone.

The young one was holding the lamp over it. The old one was reaching for the ladle.

I didn't run. I didn't fold. I walked down the lane in the open, in the light of the brazier, with my stitched arm and my road-dirty coat, and I went in through the black door past the old priest before he'd straightened up, and I stepped onto the stone.

Both feet. On the face-down stone, in the hole in the shrine floor, where the lead was going to go.

And I stood there.

* * *

"Get off," said the old priest. In Kethran. Then louder. "Get off that."

I didn't get off it.

He came at me with the ladle. It was empty, but iron, and heavy. I could have folded him to the other side of the river. I could have folded the cart, the brazier, the lead, the whole cross, the bleaching grounds, every sheet in them. My left hand was warm, and the silver in it was awake.

I didn't. I stood on the stone and let him come.

He stopped with the ladle up. I don't know why. Maybe because I didn't move. Maybe because I was looking at him. People in Kethra aren't looked at much, I think. Not straight.

"Whose are you?" he said. The shrine question.

"Lost," I said. In Kethran. Tibby had taught me that one too.

And behind me, Annis Penner came in through the black door, past both of them, and knelt down in the dirt beside the hole in the floor, by my feet, and put her two big hands flat on the edge of the stone.

She didn't pray. She did what Ossery said.

"I'm lost," said Annis Penner. In Kethran. Very plainly, like asking at a market. "I've been lost two years. Since the spring list from Coln. I don't know where I am."

And then she said: "Where am I?"

* * *

Under my boots, through the soles, something went warm.

Not like Carol's cold. Not like the pull Ossery had talked about, reaching down a root. Like a stone in the sun. Like a step you've sat on all afternoon. It came up through my feet, and I stepped off, and stood back against the shrine wall, and looked down.

The stone was face down. It didn't matter. Around its edges, all along the line where it met the dirt, light was coming up. Silver. Steady. Like moonlight on water running over stones.

And Annis Penner, kneeling, with her hands on it, bent her head and listened.

I don't know what it said to her. I couldn't hear it. I don't think it was meant for me. But she listened for a long time. And then she sat back on her heels in the dirt, and put her big hands over her face, and stayed like that.

When she took them away, she said, in Kethran, to nobody, to the stone: "Thank you."

Then she said it in ours. She must have heard Iselle say it. "Thank you."

* * *

The young priest had dropped the lamp.

It hadn't gone out. It lay on its side on the shrine floor, burning, and he was standing over it, and he was looking at the silver light coming up around the stone.

He wasn't more than eighteen. He had a thin face and big ears and his robe was too long for him, the way robes are when they're handed down. Somebody's boy, once. Carol had said that, about the priest at Ammet. Somebody's boy, once.

"Brother," said the old priest. "The lamp."

The young one didn't pick it up.

He was staring at the stone. His mouth was moving. I don't think he knew it was. And then he said something, very low, in Kethran, so low I nearly didn't catch it.

Annis Penner did. She turned her head and looked at him.

"What did he say?" I whispered.

She didn't answer me. She answered him. In Kethran, gently, the way you'd answer a child. And then she said it for me, in ours, slowly, so I'd understand.

"He said, I don't know where I am either," said Annis Penner.

The silver light around the stone flickered. Then it brightened.

* * *

The old priest went for the lamp. I thought he was going to use it, throw it, fire the shrine. He didn't. He picked it up and set it right and stood there holding it, and he looked at the young one, and at the stone, and at Annis kneeling by it, and at me standing against the wall with my stitched arm.

He didn't say anything for a long time.

Then he went out, and climbed up on the cart, and put the lid on the brazier, and picked up the reins.

"Brother," he said, from the cart. Not angry. Tired. "Come on."

The young priest looked at the stone one more time. Then he went out through the black door, and he didn't get up on the cart. He took off the hand-me-down robe, very slowly, and folded it, and laid it on the cart's tailboard, and then he walked away up the hill lane in his shirt, into the dark, toward the Kell Ford hills.

The old priest watched him go. Then he clicked to the horse and turned the cart in the road and drove it back toward the city with its lead still in the pigs.

I let him go. I'd said I would. Nobody kills anybody. Nobody gets folded.

Annis Penner got up off her knees, and dusted off her apron, and looked up the hill lane where the boy had gone.

"He'll want bread," she said.

* * *

We got back to Skerrick at dawn. I'd carried nothing and walked twenty-four miles and I could hardly see.

They were coming in all night. Pair after pair, up the two hundred and twelve steps, wet to the knees, with mud on their hands from lifting floors. Brisa was at the top of the stair with a tally stick, notching it. Some of them were crying. Most of them were laughing. One old man from the oars came up the last step and lay down flat on his back on the rock and said, in Kethran, it told me where I was, over and over, until his wife came and sat beside him.

A hundred and forty stones. Turned, or asked, or both. In one night. By fifty-two people who'd been lost.

The carts had got to eleven before them. Eleven floors full of lead. Ossery felt every one go; he said it was like teeth. He'd sat on the wall with his stick all night and held Carol's hand and flinched eleven times.

And a hundred and forty times, he said, he'd felt somebody ask.

"Not pull," he said. His voice had the water back in it. "Ask. Every one. It came up on its own. It didn't go down the root once."

I looked at Carol.

She was asleep against his shoulder on the wall, with her bad arm in its sling and Selvane's shawl over her. Iselle was sitting on her other side, awake, with the comb in her hand.

"How many?" I said.

Iselle lifted the lock above Carol's temple, gently, so as not to wake her, and counted. Her lips moved.

"Twenty-two," she said. "Three more since you left. Before midnight. Before they started asking." She let the lock fall. "Nothing since."

Twenty-two silver hairs. It wouldn't go back. I knew it wouldn't. Carol knew it too.

But it had stopped.

Out along the coast road, and up the river lanes, and inland as far as I could see in the gray, the little silver lights were going pale with the sunrise. There were a great many of them now.

* * *

Brisa came and stood beside me at the gap in the wall with her notched tally stick.

"No gods," she said.

"No gods."

"You stood on it," she said. "I heard. Annis told me. You stood on a stone in front of a priest with a ladle, and you didn't fold him, and you didn't fly, and you didn't burn him." She turned the tally stick over in her hands. "You just stood there."

"It's what we're for," I said. "I told my brother that. Somebody told me first." I was too tired to remember who. "You stand in front of things."

Brisa Thale looked at the tally stick for a long time.

"A hundred and forty," she said. "My people. In one night. Not a god among them." She put the stick in her belt. "I've been doing this twenty years. I've never got a hundred and forty of anything back in one night."

She looked at Carol, asleep on the wall.

"Your sister bought that," she said. "Twenty-two hairs' worth. And then my people bought the rest." She turned away toward the fire. "That's how it ought to be. That's crew."

* * *

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

Sel's twenty-first tree. She planted it at the top of the orchard, on its own, a little way off from the others. She says it's for somebody who's a long way off and doing something hard and she didn't want it crowded.

Breakfast: Evelyn came down late. She'd been at the window since before dawn. She said her hand had been on his back all night, the way it always is, and at about two in the morning it went warm. Not hot. Warm, like a stone in the sun. She said he was standing on something. She said she could feel him standing very still and not doing anything, and that she'd never in his life felt him want so much to do something and not do it.

Uriah said: that's twice this week.

Then he went to the map room with Davren's new page, the one with the silver lights. He was there all morning. When Mirelle went in at noon he had pinned every one of Davren's silver lights on the big map of the far shore with Caitlin's pins, and they weren't scattered anymore. They made lines. Roads. A web of roads, all coming out from the coast and going inland, toward the gold. He stood looking at it with his arms folded. Davren had marked eleven places where lights had gone out in the night. Uriah put a black pin in each of the eleven. Mirelle says he said: they poured lead on a god's face. Then he said: I'd like the names of the priests who did that. Evelyn said: Uriah. He said: I'd like the names. That's all. Just the names. For now.

He didn't say anything else all afternoon.

The boy: under the kitchen table at teatime, playing with Fenrir, who will lie under any table the boy is under. Helena said, where's Uriah gone? The boy put his head out and said his new word. It was: Found.

9:10 p.m. at the stone. Three and three. Benjamin answered. Three and ten from the nearer bearing, but no long light. Hers, long. The field of tiny lights around his bearing, more than last night. And Davren's silver lights: a great many. He has stopped counting them one by one and started counting them by the road.

Five days since midwinter.

And under that, in a hand that is neat and quick and slanted a little forward, a healer's hand, the hand of someone who writes notes at bedsides in bad light and has to read them in the morning:

Evelyn Grey. I'd like it noted that everything costs. I've told people that my whole life, at bedsides, before I start, because they have a right to know the price. I'd like it noted that nobody told my daughter the price before she started, and she started anyway, and she knew. I'd like it noted that I raised two children who pay on purpose. I'd like it noted that tonight, with my hand on my son's back, I am not proud of that. I'm frightened of it. I'll be proud of it in the morning. I always am.