Chapter 579 - 578: Including the Guesses

Chapter 579: Chapter 578: Including the Guesses

Location:The Millford Road — The Halbrook Holding; The Stone Barn

Date/Time:TC1857.12.21 – TC1857.12.23

Wet dog and woodsmoke and the cold coming in under the door, and Nissa Halbrook knew before she was properly awake that Sedge had been out in the yard again and had come back in through the gap in the byre wall that she had meant to mend in the autumn and had not.

She lay still and listened for him. He was at the foot of Joss’s bed, where he always ended up, and he was not settling.

That was new.

Sedge settled. Sedge was the dog who went in the water for nothing and came out and shook himself over whoever was nearest and went to sleep on their feet. He had settled every night of his life except the night at the turn of the year when the yard filled up and Pitch went out into it before anybody had moved, and she had not thought about that night on purpose for most of a year and found that her body had been thinking about it for her the whole time.

She got up.

***

The knock came before she had her boots on.

Not a hard knock. Three, measured, the way you knock on a door when you want the person inside to know you are not in a hurry and not a stranger to doors. She stood in the dark of the kitchen with her boots in her hand and the fire gone to embers and did not move.

"Nissa Halbrook," a man’s voice said, through the wood. "Anvil Corps. From Seven Peaks. We’re outside, there’s eight of us, and nobody sent us, and I’m going to say that again because it matters. Nobody sent us. We came."

She opened the door.

He was a big man with a Federation accent and snow on his shoulders, and his left arm held a little stiffly, and there were seven more behind him in the yard in pairs, in a line, not coming any closer to the house than the gate. None of them had a lamp.

"There were tracks on the road east of Millford," he told her. "Two days ago. Our people saw them coming back from the ford and brought the sheet in, and the sheet says four at least, heading this way. We have knowledge of it and the Compact says whoever has knowledge goes toward it, so we came toward it." He did not step in. "That’s all the reason there is. I’d like to tell you our names before anything else."

"Why?"

"Because we put them on returns now." He said it flatly. "Because a woman in the north walked behind one of ours for three weeks and didn’t know what to cut on the bark, and our commander wrote all of us on a wall after, and we decided we’d say them at the door. So nobody has to ask afterward."

Nissa stood in her own doorway with her boots in her hand and listened to eight people say their names, one after another, from the gate, in the dark.

She said each one back. It seemed the only decent thing.

Eight names in the dark, in the snow, from a gate, and not one of them was a name she had ever heard before, and by the eighth she had stopped feeling foolish about repeating them and started feeling that it was the only sensible thing anybody had done at that gate since the autumn.

***

She put them in the barn because the barn was stone and because she had been in it once already with the whole road packed around her, and she knew where the walls were in the dark.

Joss did not wake.

She carried him out in his blankets with Sedge pressed against her legs the whole way, and put him down on the straw in the corner with the stone at his back, and he turned over once and put his thumb near his mouth without putting it in, which he had stopped doing at four and did now only when he was very deeply asleep, and did not wake.

She looked at him for a moment longer than she meant to.

He had slept through it last winter too. Two soldiers had told Lin Yue that, separately, in the same flat voice. It was in a record somewhere at Seven Peaks, and it was in her copy, because she had asked for everything.

The Corps man was standing in the doorway, looking at the boy.

"He sleeps through," Nissa offered.

"I read that." He did not come any closer. "It’s in the first column. Nobody’s written anything next to it."

"I know. I’ve got a copy."

He looked at her then, properly, for the first time.

"You’re the one with the condition. The one that’s in the minutes. Everything, including the guesses."

"Yes."

"Then I’ll owe you one before morning," he answered, "and I’d rather you knew now that I’ll owe it, so you’re not waiting to find out whether I’ll pay."

The neighbor came over the field at the third hour, because she had seen the Corps come up the road and had seen the lamps at the Halbrook house go dark, and she knew what that meant because she had been in that stone barn once already, with everybody else.

She was sixty and she had two fingers on her right hand where there had been five, and she had the same hay knife she had carried then, and she did not ask whether she could come in. She came in, and sat on an upturned bucket against the wall with the knife across her knees, and nodded once at Nissa and once at the sleeping boy and did not say a word.

Nissa did not ask her to go home. It would have been like asking the wall to.

She sat down beside her in the straw and went through the eight names in her head, in the order they had been said at the gate, and found that she had all of them, and was obscurely glad of it in a way she could not have explained to anybody.

***

They came at the fifth hour, on the roadside, four of them, and Sedge heard them before anybody.

He did not bark. That was the thing Nissa remembered afterward. Sedge barked at everything — birds, the wind, his own tail — and he did not bark. He stood in the doorway with every hair on his back standing up and made a sound in his chest she had never heard him make, low and continuous, and did not go out.

"Good dog," the Corps man told him, very low, and stepped past him into the yard.

She saw it through the gap in the barn door where the plank had warped. That was on the autumn list as well.

Two fours. They stood in the yard in the snow in two lines, and each line was four deep, and she understood about halfway through why there were four and not three, because she had read the sheet that said why — it was in her copy — and she had not understood it on paper and understood it now.

Three animals came at the first four and the fourth stood off at the gate.

Two of them went for the front man together from two sides. He went down. It happened so fast she could not have said what hit him.

The man behind him stepped in.

That was all. He stepped in. One pace, shield up, into exactly the place the front had been, and took the arms, and held — and the woman at the back of the four, the one watching the head, did not move. She did not so much as shift her weight. She stood exactly where she was and watched the head of the thing and said one word, and the side went in behind the plate, and it was over.

And the fourth animal, the one at the gate, the one that had been standing off doing nothing, looked at the four in the yard with no eyes, side-on, for about as long as it takes to breathe in and out.

Then it turned and went back up the road.

It did not come in. There was no gap to come into.

Nissa did not understand, then, why that was the thing that made her hands start shaking when nothing else had. She worked it out later, in the cart going to Millford to have the old woman’s knife returned to her family. It had looked at the four the way she looked at a sum on a slate when it came out wrong — not angry, not afraid. Checking. And then it had gone to write the answer down somewhere she would never see.

***

It took about four minutes, and the second four killed the other two, and Nissa stood behind the warped plank with her hand on Sedge’s back and did not look away from any of it, because she had asked for everything and she had decided a long time ago that asking for everything meant watching it too.

Two dead.

The front man of the first four, who had said his name at her gate an hour and a half earlier, fourth in the line, in a Federation accent softer than the others. And an old woman from the next holding along, who had lost three fingers to one of these in the first month of the year and had come across the field in the dark when she saw the lamps go out, with the same hay knife, because she was sixty and she had decided she was not going to hide in a barn twice.

She had got to the second four’s flank before anybody saw her. She had gone in low. She had done it right.

Nobody had told her there was no flank any more. It was on a sheet. She could not read.

***

He found her at the barn door at first light.

Joss was still asleep. He had not moved from the corner. Sedge was lying across his feet now, finally, the way he always did, and had not taken his eyes off the door since the fourth animal went up the road.

"You’re owed a guess."

"Yes."

He sat down on the upturned trough outside the door, because he had clearly been on his feet for two days, and put his hands on his knees.

"This isn’t written anywhere," he began. "It’s not in any column. The boy who keeps the record at Seven Peaks has been told he’s not allowed to write it and he’s agreed, and so has everybody else who’s worked it out, and I’d like you to hear that first so you know what you’re being handed."

"Go on."

"The animals in the north don’t have the crust on them. The crust’s the thing they grow when they expect her. They don’t grow it in the north because she’s said, in writing, to everybody, that she won’t go north unless she’s asked twice." He kept nothing back. "So the guess is that they read what we publish and build for what it says. That’s one guess."

"And the other."

He looked at her.

"The other is that the first time they came down this road, they came the day your boy was screened. And he slept through it. And they came again last night, and there’s no reason on earth for four of them to come to a farm on the Millford road in midwinter that I can see, and he slept through it again." He stopped. "I don’t know if they came for him. Nobody does. The two things might be nothing to do with each other. But you asked for the guesses, and that’s the one I’d not want to be the only person carrying."

Nissa stood in the barn door for a long time.

"That’s not a no."

"No. It isn’t."

"That’s what she said. Raven. In the first month. I asked her the same thing, and she said she didn’t know, and I said that’s not a no, and she said it isn’t." Nissa put her hand on the doorframe. "It’s the same answer."

"It’s the same answer with two data points instead of one." He stood up, slowly. "I’ll be putting the second one in the first column. The date and the fact that he slept. Nothing next to it. You’ll get your copy."

"And the guess?"

"The guess goes to you and nowhere else." He looked at the barn, at the boy asleep in the corner with the dog on his feet. "That’s what the condition’s for, I think. The column stays empty so nobody plans around a thing they can’t prove. But somebody’s still entitled to hear it said. And it turns out that’s you."

***

She woke Joss an hour later because the Corps were leaving and she wanted him to see them go.

He sat up in the straw and looked at the yard, at the two covered shapes by the gate, at the eight — seven — people in the snow getting ready to walk, at the dog, and then at her.

"Did something come?"

"Yes."

"Did I sleep?"

"You slept."

He thought about that with all of his small, serious face.

"Again," he said.

"That’s twice," Nissa answered.

"Is it in the book?"

"It will be. The first column. He said so." She nodded at the big man with the Federation accent, who had heard and had stopped. "The date and that you slept. Nothing else."

Joss looked at the man for a long moment, and the man looked back at him and did not come any closer.

"Thank you for saying your names," Joss said. "Mama told me you did. At the door." He paused. "Sedge didn’t bark."

"No," the man agreed. "He didn’t. He’s a good dog."

"He’s stupid," Joss said. Then, carefully, the way a child repeats a thing he has decided is true: "Most of the brave ones are."

The Corps man did not know where that came from. Nissa did. She had been standing in a stove-warm room in the first month when a woman with purple eyes crouched down in front of her son without touching him and said it, and he had carried it for a year, and he had just handed it to a stranger in a yard as if it were his own.

The man looked at the dog lying across the boy’s feet, and at the old woman’s hay knife on the ground by the gate where somebody had set it down carefully, and at the covered shape of his own front man, who had said his name at this door an hour and a half before he died.

"Yes," he said. "They are."

Then he turned, and led them back up the road.