Chapter 595 - 594: No Line to Strike

Chapter 595: Chapter 594: No Line to Strike

Location:Seven Peaks — the Medicine Hall; the Hall; Thorne’s room

Date/Time:TC1858.02.28

The tea had been on the stove since the fourth hour, and it tasted like it.

Raven got half the cup down before she understood what it was doing to her mouth. Black, bitter enough to fur her tongue, with a burnt edge at the back where the pot had boiled dry at least once and been topped up without anybody scouring it. She drank the rest anyway. It was hot, and the Medicine Hall at first light was cold enough that her breath showed between the cots.

Sera Vahn sat on the bench by the stove with her strapped arm across her and her good hand resting on a folded sheet on her knee. She hadn’t offered the sheet. She’d offered the tea.

"You didn’t send for me," Raven said.

"No."

"I heard the bell. Two strokes." She’d lain in the dark and counted them and waited for boots on her stair, and none had come, and somewhere toward morning she’d let herself decide that meant nothing had. "The kitchen knew before I did. I came down past the ovens and two of the girls stopped talking."

"It was ten days old when it came through the gate." Sera Vahn kept her eyes on the stove door. "Waking you wouldn’t have made it any younger. I wanted to have read it enough times to know what I was handing you."

"That isn’t yours to decide."

"No. It was the fourth hour, and I was the one awake." She held the sheet out at last. "There. Decide."

Raven took it.

She knew the hand before she had it unfolded. Small, close, every line ending exactly where it ended, with nothing trailed after it. She’d had that hand on her desk for years, in reports that told her what had happened and never once what anybody felt about it. Naida’s. And under it, signed in a broader, heavier stroke, Speaker Kael-Ren, and the eighteenth.

The eighteenth. Her own letter to Mei had gone up the north road on the ninth with Thorne’s Stonefall copy. If the road had been kind, it had reached Windbreak about the day this was signed. The two had probably passed within a morning of each other, going opposite ways, and neither one had known anything about the other.

Names headed the sheet. She counted them the way she counted every name that came up that road.

"Three," she said.

She was already moving on, already writing it in her head where she kept the running count, three, Windbreak, the bore, when Sera Vahn spoke.

"Two."

Raven looked up.

"Read it down," Sera Vahn said. "Then tell me."

+++

She read it down.

The lane first. One of them stretched along the planking between the two fives, taking the full width of it, not fighting. The tent five coming to cross, and their front swept off into the soft ground and dragged out with a broken knee, and no way by it at either end.

The pit branch. Jessa calling the head. Mei, front and side. Killed at the joint.

Raven’s eyes stopped on the name and went past it, and came back.

Mei. Plain, the way Naida wrote everybody, no rank, no word in front of it. Here she was in Naida’s hand, front and side, a line on a sheet like anybody else’s.

She made herself go on.

The third one. It had come from beyond the pit, over open flats with no board under it anywhere, sunk to the shoulders and not slowed by it. Jessa had driven the iron into it, hot, behind the head, and the head had turned and taken her. Mei had finished it at the joint.

Raven bit down on the inside of her cheek.

It wasn’t a decision. Her jaw did it, hard, and kept on until her mouth filled warm and coppery under the bitterness of the tea, and she swallowed it, and swallowed again, and read the line a second time with the taste of it sitting at the back of her throat.

The deck. The deck five leaving it together to kill the one in the lane, and nobody left behind them on the boards. Orrin, sample line, taken off the edge into the soft ground beyond the boards by something nobody saw. Silas holding on. Silas’s shoulder.

That was all of it. Nobody else stood a post anywhere in it, or held a rope, or called anything.

Two. Jessa and Orrin.

At the top, the first name sat above them, in the same hand and the same size, and it didn’t appear again anywhere on the sheet.

"I’ve had it since the fourth hour," Sera Vahn said. "Read it, I don’t know, eleven times. That name’s in nothing under it. It isn’t a post. It isn’t a body. It’s at the top and that’s the only place it is."

"Then what is it?"

"I don’t know." Sera Vahn shifted on the bench, and the strapped arm shifted with her, and her mouth went thin until it settled. "And I’m not going to sit in a cold room making something up about it so I feel like I know. She wrote it. It’s hers."

Raven’s eyes went back to the name. Somebody’s. A woman’s, by the sound of it. Naida never set a word on a page she didn’t mean to be there.

"I counted the top and stopped," Raven said. "I’d have had three in the count by noon and sent it down every road we’ve got."

"I know. I did the same, the first time through."

"You didn’t say it out loud."

"No," Sera Vahn agreed. "I had the stove to myself."

+++

Kairos came in with the cold on his coat while she was reading the bottom line.

He’d been up. She could tell by the way he walked, carefully, the way he did when he’d spent the night sitting in a chair he didn’t like. He looked at Sera Vahn, and at Raven, and at the sheet, and didn’t ask what was on it. He picked up the cup from beside her on the bench and smelled it.

"This is not tea. This is a punishment that has been administered to some leaves."

"It’s been on since the fourth hour," Sera Vahn said.

"I can tell. It has opinions." He set the cup down out of Raven’s reach and stood behind her, close, and put his hand on the back of her neck under her hair, and left it there. His hand was cold from the yard, and she tipped her head back against it anyway.

She read the line aloud for him, quietly, because it was the one Naida had added, and because it would have to be read aloud to the Hall before the morning was out and she wanted to know how it sounded first.

"They crossed the flats. The planks are not the edge of anything now."

Kairos didn’t answer. His thumb moved once against the side of her neck.

"You have blood on your lip," he said.

She wiped it with the back of her wrist. It came away a thin smear of pink. He looked at it, and then at her face, and his blue eyes, in the gray light from the windows, stayed on her.

Kairos didn’t ask. He picked the cup up again and drank off the dregs himself, and made a face like a man swallowing a nail, and set it down empty.

+++

The Hall was fuller than the hour called for.

They’d come in ones and twos since the bell, the way they came now whenever a rider got in after dark. Corps mostly, and kitchen people, and a few of the older children who were supposed to be at lessons and had stopped in the doorway. The hearth had been built up. It threw heat across the first third of the floor and gave up after that, and the far end, by the Wall, was cold enough that people stood there in their coats with their hands under their arms. The place smelled of woodsmoke and wet wool and chalk dust and, faintly, of bread from the ovens, which hadn’t stopped because a rider had come in.

Raven read it to them from the end of the long table. All of it. The lane, the branch, the deck. She read Mei’s name in the same voice she read everybody’s, and it cost her something, and she didn’t let it show.

At the top she read every name at the head, the first one too, as it was written.

"Two dead," she said, when she’d finished. "Jessa and Orrin. They’re the two in the account. The first name I don’t know. It’s not in anything under it, and I’m not going to tell you what it means, because I can’t."

Nobody said anything. Then a Corps woman near the hearth, tall, with a spear across her shoulders and a fresh binding of cord around a split in the shaft, asked, "Where do they go?"

Raven turned to her.

"On the Wall," the woman said. "Jessa and Orrin."

Raven had the chalk in her hand already. She hadn’t noticed picking it up. She walked down the Hall to the cold end, and people moved out of her way without being asked, and she stood in front of the Wall with the chalk.

The roll took most of it, in Sera Vahn’s tent order, every name the same size, beside the long list that had started at ninety-one. The dead were where they’d stood, ruled through and dated. Linnet Fallow. Peder Rushton. Kelder Lowry. Edda Sowden, with her reason beside her. Bram Corliss. Innes Garrow, and the same word again beside him, written ten days ago by Sera Vahn’s left hand.

She looked for a place. She read down every column of the roll as though somewhere in it there’d be a gap she’d forgotten, a line already waiting, and there wasn’t. It was the roll. It was the Corps, in the order Sera Vahn counted them every morning. Jessa had never slept in one of those tents. Orrin had never stood in that count. There was no line anywhere on the mountain they could be struck from, because they had never been written on it to begin with.

Raven stood there with the chalk.

"They weren’t ever on it," Sera Vahn said behind her. Not loud.

"I know."

"If you write them in to strike them out, it’s a lie with a line through it."

"I know that too." Raven turned the chalk over in her fingers. It left white on them. "I don’t know where they go," she told the woman with the mended spear. "That’s the honest answer. They’re Windbreak’s, and Windbreak will have its own way with them. I don’t know what it does with its dead, and I’m not going to invent a place for them here so that we feel better about having one."

The woman held her eye, then nodded once, as if that was an answer she could carry.

Raven gave the chalk back to the ledge with the others.

+++

Fenn Jarrow had been standing near the door the whole time with his dead hand inside his coat. When Raven came back up the Hall, he stepped into her way.

"I’m going back down," he said.

"Mira says—"

"It won’t come back. I know." He didn’t take the hand out. "That sheet. They all went to help with the one lying in the lane, and nobody stayed on the deck, and that’s when the man went. Halbrook’s got seven. You can’t stand two fives out of seven. Somebody goes off to help, and there’s a door behind him with nobody in it."

"You can’t hold a spear."

"No. But I can stand behind the ones who can and say what’s coming. That’s what the fifth does, isn’t it? Faces out and says it." His face was very set. "That’s half a fifth, anyway."

"Then I’ll be the other half."

It was a big gray-bearded man by the hearth, who had been warming his hands and hadn’t spoken. He came across the floor without hurry.

"Ulric Dunnet," he said, to Raven, because she would want the name. "I was at the forge yard till the frost stopped work there. There’s nothing I’m doing here a boy couldn’t do."

The woman with the mended spear had already come away from the hearth. "Brisk Alder. I’m going."

"Your shaft’s split," Ulric Dunnet said.

"It’s bound. It’ll go three days. I’ll get another at the holding off whoever’s not using theirs." She looked at Raven. "Nobody’s sending us. You don’t have to say anything."

There was a third. Raven saw him make up his mind, a young man with ink on the side of his right hand who’d been standing against a pillar with his arms folded the way people stood when they didn’t want to be looked at. He unfolded them.

"Ovid Crowe." He swallowed. "I can write a fair hand, and I can count. If they’ve lost the one who wrote things, somebody ought to be there who can do it."

"Bett Mowbray writes their returns," Raven told him.

"Then I’ll carry her ink." He went a little red. "I didn’t mean to say she couldn’t."

Raven took in the four of them. Seven at the door, three more, and Fenn. Ten who could hold. Two fives again. And one standing behind them who couldn’t hold anything, saying what was coming.

She had wanted, for the last ten days, to send people down that road. She’d wanted it every morning since Fenn’s sheet. She had not done it because she’d been waiting to have something to send with them, some line that would make it worth the three days, and nothing had come, and she’d let the waiting look like judgment. She had known for ten nights that Halbrook stood at seven, and she’d spent them making up her mind what to tell it.

"First light," she said. "From the north gate. I’m writing your names down before you go. Anyone who goes, goes on the return by name. That hasn’t changed."

"It’s on the Wall," Ovid Crowe said. "We’ve all read it."

"Then you know I mean it."

+++

Thorne had the sheet by mid-morning and his door shut.

Raven found him there in the afternoon, with the lamp lit against the short gray light and the three copies drying in a row along the edge of his desk, weighted at the corners with whatever he’d had to hand: an ink bottle, a whetstone, a cup gone cold. The room smelled of ink and lamp oil and the wax he used on his boots. He’d copied it the way he copied everything, steady and unhurried, every line of Naida’s laid down in the same place on his page as on hers.

"Ferrow’s Rest," he said, touching the first. "Stonefall. The Millford road."

"The Millford one goes with the four from the Hall, at first light. Exactly as she wrote it."

He nodded. Then he hesitated, which he almost never did. "The first name."

"Everything." Raven picked up the Millford copy and turned it to the head. The three names, in Thorne’s hand now instead of Naida’s, the first one where it belonged. "If I knew what it was for I’d tell them. I don’t. It goes the way she wrote it, and anyone who reads it can wonder, same as us."

"And nothing under it."

"No."

He’d already left the space at the foot blank, she saw. He’d known.

She wrote the return separately, on its own sheet, because nothing of the mountain’s was going under Naida’s. Fenn Jarrow. Ulric Dunnet. Brisk Alder. Ovid Crowe. To the Halbrook holding, the Millford road, from the north gate. She wrote the date. She didn’t write why. They’d said why themselves, in the Hall, and it was theirs.

Thorne read it upside down from across the desk.

"Four," he said.

"Ten at the door when they get there. And Fenn."

"Three days." He looked at the window, where the light was already starting to go. "They’ll be on the road while whatever Windbreak sends next is on its road. Again."

"Yes." She folded the return around the copy and tied it.

+++

The Hall was empty by the time the lamps were trimmed.

She’d meant to go up. She’d meant to eat, too, and somewhere in the afternoon she’d forgotten again, and the ovens were cold now, and it didn’t seem worth waking anybody for. The hearth had burned down to a bed of red. The cold had come back up the floor from the far end, the way it did every night, and found her feet through her boots.

Naida’s sheet lay unfolded on the long table in front of her, the original, back from Thorne, under the one lamp she’d left lit.

She read the head of it again.

Three names. One she didn’t know, and then Jessa, and then Orrin. Naida had written the first one there and meant it. Somebody at Windbreak would read that line and know at once what it was, and nobody at Seven Peaks could, and that was simply where things stood tonight.

Raven sat with it. Her cheek still hurt on the inside where she’d bitten it. She could feel the ridge of it with her tongue.

Then, because there was nobody in the Hall to hear her and because it seemed wrong to have read it out once to a crowded Hall and never again to nobody, she said them. All three, in order, the way they were written. The unfamiliar one first, carefully, getting the sound of it right. Then Jessa. Then Orrin.

Her voice didn’t carry far. The Hall was too big and too cold, and it went out across the flags and was gone before it reached the Wall.

She folded the sheet along Naida’s creases, and blew out the lamp, and sat on in the dark with her hand on it.