Chapter 599 - 598: Asked

Chapter 599: Chapter 598: Asked

Location:Seven Peaks — the Medicine Hall; the north gate yard; the Hall; Thorne’s room; the north camp

Date/Time:TC1858.03.06

Mira pulled the strap through the buckle, and the tongue clicked into the third hole and stopped there.

"Breathe in," she said.

Sera Vahn breathed in. The strap held her right arm across her chest, as it had for six weeks, and the bone under it ached, a dull ache like a tooth, which was better than the other kind and which she had stopped mentioning around the fourth week because Mira wrote down everything she mentioned.

"It’s knitting," Mira said. "Crooked. You know that."

"I know."

"Another two weeks in this before you lift anything heavier than a cup. Two weeks after that before you’d want to fall on it." Mira let go of the strap and stood back. "I’m telling you because you’re going to ask."

"I wasn’t going to ask."

"You were going to ask Thorne, and he was going to come and ask me, and I’d rather save him the stair."

Sera Vahn almost answered that. Then the north gate bell went, two strokes; neither of them hurried, carrying across the yard and in through the high windows of the Hall as it carried everywhere on the mountain, and both of them stopped and listened, and Mira’s face changed, as everybody’s did now when the bell went in daylight with nothing due.

Sera Vahn had her coat on one-handed before the second stroke had finished.

+++

The rider was a Halbrook man. She knew him before he was off the mount, by the way he sat: crooked, with his left arm bound across his body in a sling made of what had been somebody’s shirt, and his face gray with three days of road. He was on her roll. He was near the end of the west half of the tent line, a quiet man who had gone down the Millford road at midwinter with the first of them and had stayed there since.

The rider got down on the right side, carefully, and stood holding the saddle with his good hand until his legs remembered him.

"Commander."

"Sit down first."

"I’ve been sitting three days." He fished inside his coat with the good hand and brought out a fold of paper and held it out to her. "Bett said to give it to you. Not the mountain. You."

She took it. The hand on the outside was not Bett’s. It was a young hand, careful, leaning a little; the letters formed the way somebody forms them who has copied a great many things and wants this one to be read.

Raven had come across the yard from the Hall. She stood a pace off, and didn’t reach for the sheet, and waited.

Sera Vahn opened it.

Fenn Jarrow.

Ulric Dunnet.

Sera Vahn read them and went on reading, down to the last line. Four. None killed.

She held it out to Raven without looking at her, and Raven took it, and Sera Vahn turned back to the rider.

"Fenn," she said. "Tell me."

"He was behind the fives. At the door. Facing out, the way he’d come back to do." The rider’s voice was steady and very tired. "The snow lifted along a line from the gate. He saw it before any of us. He called it. Ground. Then again. Then it took him."

"Twice."

"Yes."

Sera Vahn nodded. Behind her, she could hear Raven reading, the paper moving, and then not moving.

"No bite," Raven said. Her voice was very even. "It says that and nothing else. What did it do instead?"

"Kept us off the door with its arms," the rider said. "Stood there, looking. Then it went down."

Raven didn’t say anything else. Sera Vahn turned her head. Raven had the sheet in her left hand and in her right a stub of chalk she must have been carrying from the Hall, and as Sera Vahn watched, her fingers closed on it, and closed, and the chalk broke in two with a small dry snap, and the halves fell on the frozen yard.

Raven looked down at them as if somebody else had dropped them. She didn’t pick them up.

Sera Vahn didn’t ask. She turned back to the rider and said, "Kitchen. Then Mira. Then sleep. In that order," and he went.

+++

Sera Vahn struck him from the Wall at noon.

The Hall had filled without anybody calling it: Corps from the camp, kitchen people with their sleeves still rolled. Her end of the Wall was cold.

Fenn Jarrow’s name was in the west half of the roll where she’d written it in the eleventh month, in tent order, the same size as everybody’s, with nothing next to it. She found it without looking for it.

She drew the line through it left-handed. It came out not quite straight, the way all her lines had come out since Stonefall, and she’d stopped minding that. She wrote the date at the end of the line.

Then she wrote, beside it, smaller: Called it twice.

Somebody behind her let out a breath. Nobody spoke.

She left the chalk on the ledge and stood looking at the line for the space of one breath, because a line through a name deserved one, and then she turned around.

"Halbrook’s at eight," she said to the Hall. "Eight and a man with one arm who rode three days to tell us so. They’ve no voice behind the door now. They’ve a floor that held and three paces bare at the door end, where they took the stones up to cover the hole they came through." She waited. "The sheet’s with Thorne. He’ll copy it. Anybody who wants to read it can."

That was all she said. She didn’t say the rest of it there.

+++

Thorne had the sheet spread on his desk under the lamp, copying, and he glanced up when they came in and then went on.

Raven didn’t sit. She went to the shelf behind him where Thorne kept the returns that went out under her name, and found the one she wanted without looking long, and laid it on the corner of the desk. Sera Vahn knew what it was. She’d seen it written: four names, To the Halbrook holding, the Millford road, from the north gate, the date, and no reason.

Raven took a pen from the tray. She drew a line through Fenn Jarrow and wrote the date after it. Then she drew a line through Ulric Dunnet, and dated that too. Her hand was steady. Both lines were straight.

"He wasn’t Corps," Raven said. "He’s not on your Wall."

"No."

"He was a smith’s hand at the forge yard. He said there was nothing he did here that a boy couldn’t." Her eyes stayed on the two struck names, and the two that weren’t. "I wrote that down. Not that. I wrote his name. That was the only place he went on."

"Then that’s where he comes off," Sera Vahn said.

Raven laid the pen back in the tray.

"I’m going down," Sera Vahn said.

Thorne’s pen stopped.

Raven turned around. "No."

"With a five. Tomorrow at first light. Three days."

"No." Raven’s voice was quite level. "You’ve got a collarbone that Mira says is two weeks from holding a cup. There’s no spear you can hold. No shield either."

"Fenn couldn’t hold either."

"Fenn is on your Wall."

Sera Vahn let that sit, because it was true and because Raven had needed to say it.

"Kira Desh went north with one arm," Raven said. "She went because of a thing she’d said to me on a terrace. I’m not losing a commander with one arm to the same road twice in a winter."

"It’s not the same road."

"You know what I mean."

"I know what you mean." Sera Vahn kept her own voice down, because Thorne was there, and because there was no need for it to go up. "You can’t stop me."

Raven held her eye.

"You didn’t sign us," Sera Vahn said. "We never signed anything. I said that to Thorne in the twelfth month, when the half-sheets went out, and he wrote it down because he writes everything down, and it went into the count, and the count went to Windbreak and was read into the record before three governments. We’re not bound by her hand. That’s in their record now." She waited. "You can’t send us, and you can’t stop us going. That’s what not signing means. It was always going to mean this one day."

"Then I’ll send a ten from the mountain. People who did sign. They can—"

"Who? Everybody on this mountain who can stand a post is already standing one." Sera Vahn shook her head. "And you’d be sending them. That’s the other thing. You’d be the one who put them on that road, and when their names came back, you’d carry it the way you’re carrying those two." She nodded at the return on the desk. "I’m not asking you to carry mine. I’m telling you I’m going."

The room was quiet. Thorne had not moved. The lamp burned.

Raven stood with her back to the shelf and her hands at her sides, and Sera Vahn watched her look for the next thing to say and not find it. She had seen Raven wrong before, more than once this winter, about a collarbone and about a rule, and every time Raven had found the place where she was wrong and stood in it and said so.

"Who?" Raven asked at last.

"I don’t know yet. I’m not going to pick them."

"How are you going to—"

"I’m going to go and stand in the camp," Sera Vahn said, "and see who gets up."

+++

The north camp at dusk smelled of smoke and wet canvas and the bean pot, which was the same as it had smelled every dusk for two and a half years.

She didn’t make an announcement. She walked the tent line from the east end, the way she did every morning, and stopped at the fire in the middle where most of them were, and said it once, plainly.

"Halbrook’s at eight. Fenn Jarrow’s dead and so’s the smith who went with him. I’m going down at first light. I want four, and a fifth who’ll face the other way." She paused. "I’m not asking anybody. I’m saying what I’m doing."

Then she stood there, by the fire, with her arm strapped across her and her left hand at her side, and waited.

The first one up was Tamsin Kemp. She was a broad, short woman with a shield she’d painted over twice so that the old Federation crest showed through as a shadow, and she’d gone down on the Stonefall rotation in the second month. She stood up from the bench with her bowl still in her hand and said, "Front," and sat down again and went on eating, as if that settled it.

Three more stood after her, one at a time, and said their places, and she had their names in tent order before anybody else had moved. Then she waited for the fifth.

It took longer. The fire popped. Somebody shifted on a bench. Then a man near the tent end got up, a lean dark man called Ambrose Wick, who had come over in the second year and mended the camp’s harness and kept to himself.

"I’ll face the other way," he said. "I’d like it written that I asked."

Sera Vahn held his eye.

"It’ll be written," she said.

He nodded and sat back down. Nobody else stood. Nobody needed to.

Raven was at the edge of the light.

Sera Vahn didn’t know how long she’d been there. She stood by the last tent of the east line in her coat, with her hands in her pockets, where the firelight reached the canvas and gave out. She hadn’t come to the fire. If anybody on the benches had seen her, they had turned back to it.

Raven had been there for Ambrose Wick, at least. Sera Vahn had seen her eyes go to him when he stood, and stay on him while he said it, and stay after he’d sat down. They went along the benches then, to Tamsin Kemp with her bowl, and to each of the three after her, one at a time, and stopped on each.

Raven took one hand out of her pocket and held it at her side, open, with nothing in it. Then she put it back.

She didn’t come forward, or say anything. When Sera Vahn looked for her again, the place by the tent was trodden snow, and the canvas, and the edge of the light.

Along the benches she had the five of them, in tent order, the way she had everybody. None of them said anything more. They’d all seen the Wall.

+++

Mira came to her tent after full dark with the lamp and a roll of new strapping.

"I’m not signing you fit," Mira said, before she’d got the flap closed behind her.

"I didn’t ask you to."

"I know. I want it on the record." Mira knelt and set the lamp down and unrolled the strapping on her knee. "Take the old one off. It’s stretched. If you’re going to ride three days on that bone, you’re going to ride it strapped properly, and I’m not having anybody at Halbrook say I sent you down like that."

Sera Vahn undid the buckle one-handed. It took her three tries. Mira didn’t help.

The new strap was stiffer and smelled of the store. Mira wound it, tight, around and across, and drew it through the buckle and set the tongue in the fourth hole, one tighter than the morning, and settled back.

"Breathe," she said.

Sera Vahn breathed. It hurt, a little more than before, and held.

"Two weeks," Mira said. "I’ll write that you knew."

Mira took the lamp and went, and let the flap fall shut behind her, and Sera Vahn heard her boots go away along the frozen tent line toward the Medicine Hall.

Sera Vahn sat in the dark with the strap tight across her chest. Then she lit her own lamp, the small one, and got out the board she wrote the camp’s returns on, and a clean sheet, and wrote it left-handed, slowly, the way she’d learned to since the twenty-fifth of the first month.

Tamsin Kemp. Maude Quarry. Hob Lomax. Edric Fairley. Ambrose Wick.

She read the fifth name over, and wrote beside it, smaller: asked.

To the Halbrook holding, the Millford road, from the north gate. The date.

Then, under the five, in the same hand and no smaller, her own name.

She held the pen over the space beside it. Then she wrote asked there too, and blew on the ink until it would not smear, and folded the sheet, and put it inside her coat against the strap, and lay down in her clothes to wait for the light.