Chapter 621: Twenty Blankets

Location: The Hessen fork — the Temple’s old grain shed

Date: 3 Emberwane 9943 AZI, Temperday

Realm: Lower Realm

The camphor had got onto Amaya’s tongue by noon, and nothing she did would get it off.

It came off the man on the step. He sat with his bad leg out straight in front of him and the other bent, a cloth open on his knee, and every time he shifted, the liniment on his thigh came up off the gray wool and into the cold, and she tasted it. Camphor, sharp enough to sting, and something green and bitter under it. She’d washed her mouth twice with her own tongue. It hadn’t helped.

He’d unwrapped bread, a heel of cheese, and a pickled onion that he’d looked at and wrapped up again. He ate slowly. When he’d done half the bread, he broke a crust off the end and held it out low, on his flat palm, as you’d hold a thing out to a horse.

“Here,” he said.

Amaya stayed where she was, on the lid of the water butt at the corner of the shed, with her tail round her feet.

It didn’t seem to trouble him. He set the crust down on the step beside him and went back to his cheese.

The shed sat in the angle of the fork with its back to the hedge. Old ash boards gone silver. A slate roof, mossed on the north pitch. One door on iron hinges, and a lock on it about the size of her present head. The east road came down out of the hills from Ostrey, rutted deep by every cart that had ever used it, and a stone’s throw past the shed it split. The left arm went off toward Hessen between a hedge and a ditch. The right arm went on east, and somewhere along it was a gate in a hedge made to look like no gate, and a fold between two shoulders of gray rock where she’d once counted children by their smells. There was nobody in that fold now. Amaya didn’t let herself look that way for long.

Three nights she’d been on that roof. A barn cat on a grain-shed roof who didn’t hunt was a thing somebody might look at twice, so she’d hunted, and every mouse since Restday had tasted of the Temple’s barley going musty at the bottom of a bin nobody emptied. Four days pressed flat into the shape of something small.

You are a cat, Takara had said, on three legs, at the bottom of the slip in the dark before Restday, with his bad shoulder strapped to his chest in somebody’s linen and his mane lying flatter than she’d ever seen it. You touch nothing. Whatever comes to that door, you let it come, and you let it go. And you come home with all of it.

She’d asked him why the shed. She always asked. He’d told her that a woman in a tent at North Kessig had been told there were twenty children in it until Temperday, and that if anything came to the door, it came because that woman had been told. That was all he’d given her. She’d wanted the rest so badly her tail had lashed, and he’d looked at her tail until it stopped.

It was Temperday. Something had come.

+++

It had come at first light, and the liniment had come before it.

She’d named it on the ridge before she’d seen anything at all. Liniment. Then the wheels, then the shapes. A covered wagon behind two brown horses, and a carter on the bench sucking a pipe that had gone cold. Pipe. Two riders behind, in eastern-road gray, plain coats, a staff across each saddle. The front one sat his horse heavily. A big face. A hand that kept going to his left thigh and pressing there. The other was younger and leaner and smelled of last night’s onions and of not having slept. Onions.

They stopped at the corner of the hedge, a long stone’s throw short of the shed, and Liniment got down off his horse the way you’d get down a ladder you didn’t trust. He stood with his weight on his right leg and looked at the shed.

“And if there’s men on it?” Onions asked, holding both horses and not liking it.

“Then we’ve seen.” Liniment shifted his weight. “We look. We go back. We tell her what we saw.”

His eyes went along the roof and stopped on her.

“There’s your guard,” he said.

Onions laughed, too loudly, and the horses threw their heads. Liniment didn’t laugh. He watched the cat on the ridge a moment longer, and she watched him back with her ears forward like any cat on any roof in the world, and then he looked away down the Hessen road.

By full light there was nothing to see, and the three of them had seen it. No smoke. No dung by the door. No cart tracks but the old ones under the frost, and no prints on the frost but the small round ones of a cat.

“Nobody’s slept in there,” Liniment said.

“You can’t know that from here.” Onions sounded as if he’d like very much to be told he was right.

“Twenty children make a mess before breakfast.” Liniment took a ring of keys off his belt, four of them, iron, and walked down the rut toward the door. The bad leg didn’t bend all the way.

When he’d got the lock open and dragged the door back across its own groove, she was at his heels. It’s what a barn cat does. A door opens; a cat goes through it first.

“In you come, then,” he said, without looking down.

Inside, the light came through the boards in stripes, gray and thin, and the dust stood in every stripe. Three bins along the back wall under their oiled sacking. A broken measure in the corner. On the wall by the door, a tally chalked in long rows, the last row unfinished, the chalk gone soft and gray with years. The mice went up the bins in a soft rush and were gone.

He stood just inside and looked at the floor.

Amaya looked at it with him. His own boots, there and there, where he’d stepped in. The mice’s trails, fine as stitching, running from bin to bin. Her own four prints beside his left heel. Under all of it, a skin of dust nobody had broken in a long time. No small feet. Not a child’s heel, not a dragged bundle, not a place where twenty children had sat down against a wall to wait.

Down he went onto one knee, slowly, with a hiss through his teeth when the thigh took it, and put his palm flat on the dust and left it there.

“Nobody,” he said. He said it to the floor.

Long enough passed that a mouse came back down the near bin to see what was happening. Then he pushed himself up on the edge of the bin and went out, and Amaya went out after him.

Onions was off his horse and halfway down the rut. “Well?”

“Ride to Hessen. Tell her there’s nobody here.”

“She’ll ask how you know.”

“Tell her I looked at the floor.” He wiped his palm down his coat and left a gray print on the gray. “Tell her there never was anybody.”

Onions opened his mouth, closed it, and went back for his horse, and he was gone up the Hessen road at a canter before the carter had finished knocking his pipe out on the wheel.

+++

The carter had whistled the same four notes all morning, up and down, over and over, until Amaya could have whistled them herself if she’d had the mouth for it. Round about noon, he stopped.

“Who’s paying for the day?” he asked.

“She is,” Liniment said.

“And the load? Do I take it back?”

“You wait.”

“Rot.” He said it without much feeling. “I’ve a barrow of turnips at home won’t lift themselves.” He pulled his hat down over his face and folded his arms, and before the man on the step had finished his cheese, he was snoring.

The load.

Amaya came down off the water butt and crossed the frozen rut to the wagon. She went up the near hind wheel, spoke to spoke, onto the tailboard, and put her head under the canvas where it sagged.

Wool. New wool, undyed, cream-colored, folded and stacked so close to her nose she could have pushed her whiskers into it. And on the wool, soap. Lavender.

That soap, she knew. The woman in white on the Ostrey cart had been washed in it, good lavender from somewhere outside the Lower Realm. Amaya had sat on a churchyard wall and smelled it come down the street toward eleven children and their mothers. Here it was again, in the folds of blankets nobody had slept under yet.

She counted the folds. Twenty. She counted them again, because you always count twice, and it was still twenty, and her claws had come out into the tailboard before she noticed, and she put them away.

When she backed out from under the canvas, the man on the step was watching her. He didn’t say anything about it. Down the wheel she went, across the rut, and onto the frozen ground a tail’s length from the step, where she sat and looked at the crust.

Amaya had smelled wrong things before. The woman on the Ostrey cart had smelled of almost nothing, washed down to the grain. The building at the back of the fold had smelled of nothing at all, and the jar on the bench in the workshop had smelled the same. She’d stood at the foot of the workshop wall and laid eleven children’s scents into Takara’s nose and Suki’s, and she still held every one of them. She knew what wrong smelled like.

This man smelled of everything. That was what she couldn’t get past. Woodsmoke off a house hearth, not a campfire. Tallow soap with rosemary in it, the kind somebody makes at home in a kettle and cuts into bars on the table. Horse, thirty years of it, worn so deep into the seams of his coat it would never come out. The liniment. Ink, a little, on his right forefinger. And on the left shoulder of the gray coat, faint, a child’s hair. Somebody small had been carried on that shoulder, and more than once.

He’d come at first light with twenty blankets for twenty children he’d been told were in a shed.

Amaya tried to make him smell wrong. Sitting on the frozen ground beside his crust, she tried as hard as she’d ever tried at anything, and he didn’t.

“Odd eyes on you,” he said. He’d leaned forward to look. “One of each. You’re a lucky one, then, or so my mother used to say.” He nudged the crust an inch toward her with one finger. “Fat on their barley, I’d guess. Don’t tell anybody I sat down.”

She didn’t eat the crust. Nor did she go away from it.

The sun went over without warming anything. Twice Liniment got up and walked to the corner of the hedge and stood looking east, along the right arm of the fork, toward the hills, and twice he came back and sat down again with his hand on his thigh.

It was the middle of the afternoon when she heard the hooves on the Hessen road. One horse, pushed. Onions came round the bend with his hat gone and the horse blowing white, and he pulled up so short the carter woke and swore.

“What did she say?” Liniment asked.

“She says wait till dark.”

Liniment looked at the road east for a long time.

“Did she say anything else?”

“She asked was the lock still on it when you came.” Onions slid down off the horse and stood holding the reins with both hands. “I said I didn’t know. I said you had the key.”

“It was on.”

“That’s what I thought. I told her I thought it was.”

Liniment nodded. “Then we wait till dark,” he said, and sat down on the step again, beside the crust.

Amaya went back up to the roof. Till dark. Somebody in Hessen still thought, or still hoped, that twenty children might come along that road before the day was out, and wanted three men and a wagon of blankets standing ready when they did.

+++

The cold came up out of the ground as the light went. It came through the slates and into her belly and through her paws, and the stubble behind the shed went from gold to gray to nothing, and the ruts filled with frost again from the bottom up.

Nothing came. Not a cart, not a walker, not a dog. The carter lit a lantern and hung it on the wagon’s hook, and the light made a small yellow room in the dark with the three men standing in it and the shed at its edge.

“It’s dark,” Onions said.

Liniment didn’t answer. At the tail of the wagon, he lifted the canvas and stood with one hand on the top blanket. Then he took it off the stack and held it against his chest for a moment, the lavender coming off it into the cold, and he walked down the rut with it and into the shed.

Amaya watched through the gap at the edge of the slates. He laid the blanket over the lip of the nearest bin and stood looking at it. Then he came out and dragged the door shut across its groove and turned the key in the lock.

“You’re leaving one?” the carter asked.

Liniment hung the keys back on his belt.

“Back to Hessen,” he said, and put his good foot in the stirrup and hauled himself up.

The wagon turned in the fork with a lot of backing and swearing, and the lantern swung, and then it was a yellow light going away up the Hessen road between the hedge and the ditch, with two gray shapes riding behind it. Amaya lay on the ridge with her head into the wind and followed the liniment with her nose until she couldn’t find it anymore, and then she waited a while longer, because you don’t trust the first time you can’t find a thing.

When the field was as dark as the sky, she came down off the roof on the hedge side. Behind the shed, where there was nobody on any road in any direction, she let the barn cat go.

It went out of her the way a held breath goes. Her own shape came back into the dark: her own length, her own weight on the frozen stubble, the smell of her own coat, the static lifting along her spine after four days pressed flat. She shook herself from her ears to the end of her tail, and the camphor was still on her tongue.

The shed stood black against the slightly less black of the sky. Locked. Inside it, a Temple blanket lay over the lip of a bin, where the mice would find it before morning.

She turned for home and ran.