Chapter 75: Edric Vale

I went down to the end of the harbor wall at ten o'clock with two cups of tea from Tamar's wife's kitchen and stood a little way off from the bucket.

Edric Vale didn't look up. He was sitting where he always sits, at the very end of the wall, on the upturned bucket, with his hat tipped forward and his line in the water. The line was perfectly still. It's been perfectly still for three winters.

"May I sit down?" I said.

"It's a wall," said Edric. "It's not mine."

"It's your end of it."

He looked up at that, from under the brim of the hat. He's old now. I don't know how old exactly. Older than my father. His hair's mostly gone, and what's left is white, and his face is the brown of a man who's spent more time on walls than under roofs. But his eyes are the same gray as Tamar's, and they're very sharp.

"Tamar sent you," he said.

"Tamar told me to ask you properly."

"Did he." Edric looked at the tea in my hands. "Is one of those for me?"

"If you want it. You can say no."

He took it. He held it in both hands, the way old soldiers do, to warm them, and didn't drink it. Then he nodded at the stones beside the bucket.

"Sit," he said. "And ask."

* * *

So I sat down on the wet stones of the harbor wall beside Edric Vale and told him all of it.

The coin. The closed hand and the mirror. For your roads. Velden's bridge and Tirrowmarch's horse and the widows in Amberlay. The petition list going down the coast with the grain ships. The merchant with salt-burned hands who smelled of grain and knew things that only the Council knew.

He listened without moving. His line didn't move either. Out past the end of the wall, the gulls were working the water over the outer shoals, and the grain lighters were going back and forth between the deep-water anchorage and the quay, slow and low and heavy.

When I'd finished, he was quiet for a long time.

"And Tamar told you," he said at last, "that I'd know what it looks like."

"He said you'd been bought once."

"Yes," said Edric. "I was."

He drank some of the tea, finally. Then he set the cup down on the stone by his boot.

"Your father knows I was Harwick's captain," he said. "Everybody in Westmere knows that. I served Harwick for eleven years. I held the keys to the cells under the Hold for eight of them. I stood guard over people whose only crime was a mark on their skin. When your father came down the servants' passage with five people and a lantern, I was the oldest man in the guardroom." He looked at the water. "What your father doesn't know is what Harwick paid me for it. I've never told him. I've never told anybody but my wife, and she's been dead nine years." He picked up his line and looked at it, and put it down again. "Tamar guessed. He's clever, my boy. Cleverer than me."

"You don't have to tell me," I said.

"No," said Edric. "But I'm going to. Because it's the same thing. I knew it when you said for your roads. It's exactly the same thing." He turned on the bucket to look at me. "Do you want to know what it costs to buy a good man, Garrick Grey?"

"Yes."

"Nothing," said Edric. "That's the trouble. Nothing at all."

* * *

He told it plainly. The way he writes his accounts. One thing after another, in order, with nothing left out and nothing dressed up.

"I was a sergeant in the old Westmere watch," he said. "Before Harwick. Before the war came this far west. I had a wife and two children and a house down by the rope-walk with a roof that leaked over the children's bed. I wasn't anything. I was a good sergeant. That's all."

"And then Harwick came."

"And then Harwick came." Edric nodded. "He took Westmere the way that kind of man takes things. Quietly. With papers. The old lord died, and there was a cousin, and the cousin sold, and then one morning there was a yellow hawk over the Hold gate and a new man counting the grain. Nobody fought. There wasn't anything to fight. It was all legal."

He looked at the water.

"The first thing Harwick sent me was a sack of flour."

I didn't say anything.

"It was the bad winter. The one when the barley failed. My wife was making soup out of fish heads and pretending she wasn't hungry so the children could have the bread. And one morning there's a sack of flour on my doorstep. Good white flour. No note." Edric's mouth moved. "I knew who it was from. Everybody knew. Harwick sent flour to every man in the watch that winter. And I thought, well, that's decent of him. The old lord never did that."

"The next thing was a roof. Harwick's men came and mended the roof over the children's bed. I didn't ask them. They just came. Then there was a better post, up at the Hold instead of on the quay. Then a doctor, when my wife had the fever. A real doctor, from Orselle, with a leather bag." He turned the cup around on the stone. "And none of it was ever asked for. And none of it was ever paid for. And Harwick never once said what he wanted."

"Like the gold."

"Like the gold." He nodded. "You don't feel bought, Garrick. That's what nobody tells you. You don't feel like a bad man. You feel grateful. Every morning. And grateful is a door that only opens one way."

* * *

"The asking came in the third year," said Edric.

A grain lighter went past the end of the wall. One of Dunmore's men on the stern lifted a hand to Edric. Edric lifted his back.

"Harwick sent for me. Up to the Hold. To his own room. He gave me a glass of wine, which he'd never done, and asked about my family, which he'd never done, and then he said he'd like me to take the cells." Edric's voice didn't change at all. "Captain of the cells. More money. A house up in the high town, with a garden. And he said there'd be some people coming in, now and then. People who'd been making trouble. People with marks." He looked at his right hand, resting on his knee. "He said they'd be safer in the cells than out in the town, where people were frightened of them. He said he needed a decent man down there. Someone who'd see they were treated properly."

"And you said yes."

"I said yes." Edric looked at me. "Of course I said yes. He'd fed my children. He'd mended my roof. He'd saved my wife's life. And what he was asking was so small. Just keep the keys. Just make sure they're treated decently. Somebody's got to do it. Better me than somebody cruel." He shook his head slowly. "That's the second asking. It's never do something wicked. It's always somebody's got to do it, and better you than someone worse."

He was quiet for a moment.

"And then he said one more thing. At the door. When I was leaving. He said, And Captain? Your girl. The little one. I hear she's got a mark too. On her hand." Edric's hand on his knee closed. "We'd hate for anybody to see it. Wouldn't we."

The gulls cried over the shoals.

"Sorrel was twelve," said Edric. "She had a silver mark in the middle of her right palm. Like a little wave. Her grandmother had had one. It used to go warm when she was near running water. She'd hold it out over the harbor and laugh." He opened his hand and looked at it. "I went home that night and told her to wear a glove. Always. Even in the house. Even in bed. And never, ever to open her hand in front of anybody." He closed it again. "I told her it was to keep her safe."

"It was," I said.

"It was to keep me safe," said Edric. "It was so nobody would look at the captain of the cells and ask why his own daughter was out in the town with a mark on her hand while other people's daughters were down in his cells for the same thing." He looked at the water. "She wore that glove for eight years. She learned to do everything left-handed. And every night, when I came home from the cells, I'd see her sitting by the fire with her right hand in her lap in that glove, closed up tight, like she was holding something she wasn't allowed to have."

* * *

I didn't say anything for a while. Neither did he.

Then I asked the other half. The half Tamar had sent me for.

"What turned you back?"

Edric almost smiled.

"Not what you'd think," he said. "Not a sword. Not lightning. Your father didn't do anything to me at all. That was the thing." He picked up his cup again. "He came down the servants' passage with Mary and Melody and your mother and a couple of others, and we were six men in the guardroom with swords, and he stood in the door and looked at us. And he said, You may leave. Or you may help us release the prisoners. I will not force you to do either."

He turned the cup in his hands.

"Eleven years," he said. "Harwick never once gave me a choice. He never had to. Every gift was a choice he'd already made for me. And here was this young man with storm in his eyes and five people at his back who could have taken the keys off my belt without trying, and he stood in the door and said I could leave." Edric shook his head. "I didn't know what to do with it. I drew my sword. I think I drew it just to have something to do with my hands. Melody drew hers so fast I never saw it move."

"And then you put it down."

"And then I put it down." He looked at the water. "And then a boy called Peter, one of the prisoners, sixteen, with his eye swollen shut, said to your father, They gave us water when they could. About me. About my men." He was quiet for a moment. "And I stood there and understood that that was the best thing anybody was ever going to be able to say about me. He gave them water when he could. After eleven years." He put the cup down. "I took the key off my belt and gave it to your father. And I said the only thing I could think of."

"I would like to see my daughter stop hiding her hand," I said.

Edric looked at me sharply.

"My father tells it," I said. "Every few years. He never says your name. He just says, the captain."

Edric looked at the water for a long time.

"Does he," he said.

* * *

"So that's the answer," he said at last. "To your question. What turns a bought man back." He held up one finger, the way Rysa does. "Somebody gives him a choice he didn't buy." Two fingers. "Somebody tells him the truth about what he's been doing, without hating him for it." He put his hand down. "And you do it before the worst of the asking. Not after. After, he's too ashamed to turn. He'll keep going just so he doesn't have to look at it."

"Is that why you put the grain keys with the clerk?" I said. "When you became steward. Two people for the sealed reserves. Every order written down."

Edric looked at me with real surprise.

"It's in the charter," I said. "Mary has a copy."

"Of course she does." He shook his head. "Yes. That's why. I knew exactly how I'd been bought. I knew it could happen again. To me, or to whoever came after. So I made the office so a decent man could sit in it without having to trust himself." He picked up his line. "You can't make a man who can't be bought, Garrick. Nobody can. You can only make a place where it's harder. And where somebody asks him, every so often, whether he's all right."

* * *

I told him about the merchant again then. The salt-burned hands. The smell of grain. He said he'd come up from the coast. Off the grain ships.

"Who gets the petition list?" I said. "When it comes to Westmere?"

Edric didn't even have to think.

"The pursers," he said. "Every grain ship has a purser, and every purser gets a fair copy of the Council list when he signs for his cargo. So the river towns know what's been asked and what's waiting. That was my idea too, twenty years ago." He made a face. "I thought it was a good one."

"It was a good one."

"It was." He looked out at the anchorage. "Eleven ships on the coast run. Eleven pursers. I know all of them. I signed their papers for twenty years before Tamar." He narrowed his eyes. "And salt-burned hands... most pursers have soft hands. They count. They don't haul. There's only one who came up from the deck. Worked his way up from a deckhand."

"Who?"

Edric didn't answer right away. He reeled in his line, slowly, all the way, and looked at the bare hook, which has never had bait on it in three winters, and set the rod down across his knees.

"Bram Halloran," he said. "Purser on the Gray Heron. She's at the anchorage now." He nodded at a broad-beamed grain ship riding low out beyond the lighters. "He's got a little girl with a wasting cough. Two years now. I sent him to Evelyn's infirmary myself, last spring. He came back and said they'd done what they could and it was in her chest and it was going to be slow." Edric looked at the ship. "And then, in the autumn, he stopped asking me for advances on his wages. And bought a house in the high town. With a garden."

He was quiet.

"I thought he'd had some luck," he said. "I was glad for him."

* * *

I stood up.

Edric caught my sleeve.

He's an old man. His grip isn't what it was. But he held on, and I stopped.

"Don't," he said.

"I'm not going to hurt him."

"I know you're not. You're Uriah's boy." He let go of my sleeve. "But you're also a god, and Seraphina's husband, and Carol's brother, and you've got a coin in your pocket from the emperor of Kethra. If you go out to that ship, he'll see all of that come up the side, and he'll be so frightened and so ashamed he'll tell you anything you want. And then he'll go home to his house in the high town and never look at himself again." He picked up the rod. "That's not turning a man. That's catching him."

"Then what?"

"Let me," said Edric.

I looked at him.

"I signed his papers for twenty years," said Edric. "I've known him since he was a deckhand. I know what a sack of flour on the doorstep feels like." He stood up, slowly, with one hand on the wall. "I'll ask him to come and sit on the wall with me this evening. That's all. And I'll tell him what I just told you. All of it. The flour and the roof and the doctor and the glove." He looked at me. "And then I'll give him a choice he didn't buy."

"And if he says no?"

"Then he says no," said Edric. "And we'll know. And you can do it your way." He picked up his bucket. "But I don't think he will. I don't think anybody's asked him in a year whether he's all right."

* * *

I waited in Tamar's kitchen.

I couldn't watch. Edric asked me not to. So I sat at the table while Tamar's wife made fish stew and told me about her hens, and Tamar sat across from me with his watch book open, writing Holding every quarter hour out of habit, and none of us talked about the harbor wall.

At sunset, through the kitchen window, I saw two men sitting on the end of it. One on an upturned bucket. One on the wet stones beside him. They were there for a long time.

When it was nearly dark, the one on the stones put his face in his hands.

The one on the bucket put an arm around his shoulders and left it there.

* * *

Edric came up to the kitchen an hour later, by himself, and sat down at the table and let Tamar's wife put a bowl of stew in front of him, and ate all of it before he said anything.

"He'll come to Greykeep tomorrow," he said. "Through the gate. Of his own choosing. He asked me to come with him, and I said I would." He wiped his mouth. "He'll tell your father all of it."

"What did he tell you?" said Tamar.

"Enough." Edric put his spoon down. "A man in a counting house in Orselle. Kethran, but he speaks like a river-town merchant. He paid for the girl's medicine first. The good kind, from over the sea, that Evelyn hasn't got. It's working, Bram says. She's better." He was quiet a moment. "Then the house. Then, in the autumn, a small thing. Just a copy of the Council list, every season. It's public anyway. Everybody gets it. What's the harm?" He looked at his empty bowl. "Then the chests. He carried three of them himself. Belleren, Velden, Tirrowmarch. Someone else carried Amberlay's."

"Who?" said Tamar.

"He doesn't know. Another man off another ship." Edric looked at me. "There's more than one, Garrick. Bram thinks there are four or five of them on this coast. All bought the same way. All grateful." He stood up. "And there's one more thing."

"What?"

"Three years ago," said Edric, "when Bram was still a deckhand, there was another deckhand on the Heron with him. A quiet man. Left the ship at Orselle one spring and never came back aboard. Bram says that man used to carry a little black bottle in his coat. Very cold to the touch." Edric picked up his hat. "Bram always wondered what was in it."

* * *

I folded home late. Seraphina was waiting up in our sitting room with the coin on the windowsill and little Uriah asleep on her shoulder.

I told her.

She listened to all of it, and when I'd finished, she looked at the coin on the sill for a long time.

"His daughter," she said. "Sorrel. What happened to her?"

I'd asked Edric that, on the wall, before I left.

"She's Westmere's harbor pilot," I said. "She takes the ships in over the shoals. She stands in the bow with her right hand open and holds it out over the water, and it goes warm where the channel runs." I looked at the coin. "No glove. She's never worn one since."

Seraphina was quiet.

Then she reached over and turned the coin face-down on the sill. Closed hand up.

"Good," she said.

* * *

Mary wrote it the next morning, after Edric Vale and Bram Halloran came through the Westmere arch and the Castellan said "Edric Vale. Yes. You may," and then, after a pause, "Bram Halloran. Yes. You may," and Bram Halloran stopped in the middle of the lower hall and cried, because he hadn't expected it to let him in.

Edric Vale. What it took to buy him: flour, a roof, a doctor. Nothing asked. Then one small thing: keep the keys. And keep the girl's glove on.

What turned him back: a choice he didn't buy. The truth, without hating him for it. Before the worst of the asking.

Bram Halloran, purser of the Gray Heron. Bought the same way, by a counting house in Orselle. Turned on the harbor wall by Edric. Four or five more on the coast.

A deckhand on the Heron, three years ago, carried a cold black bottle. Left the ship at Orselle.

And under it, at Edric's request, because he'd asked Mary for the pen, which no one outside the family had ever done but Tamar:

Sorrel's hand is open. E.V.