Chapter 600 - 599: Wind on Crust

Chapter 600: Chapter 599: Wind on Crust

Location:The Millford road — south of Seven Peaks

Date/Time:TC1858.03.07 – TC1858.03.10

Reins froze to a glove by the second hour out, and after that Edric Fairley couldn’t have said which hand was holding them.

He rode fourth in the line, behind Hob Lomax’s pot. The pot was strapped to the back of Hob’s saddle with two lengths of cord and a third for luck, and it knocked against the cantle at every step, a dull iron note that carried a long way in the cold. Nobody had told Hob to bring it. Nobody had told him not to, either, and by the first hour it had become a thing you stopped hearing, like your own breath.

Ahead of Hob rode Tamsin Kemp with her shield slung on her back, the old crest a shadow under the paint. Ahead of her, Sera Vahn, alone at the front, her right arm bound to her chest and the reins gathered in her left. Behind Edric came Maude Quarry, and behind Maude, last, Ambrose Wick, riding half turned in the saddle so that he could see the road they’d come down.

That was the order she’d given. She hadn’t explained it. She’d said the order at the north gate in the dark before first light, and they’d mounted in it, and nobody had asked.

The road went down off the mountain in long folds. Below the last of the pines the snow lay unbroken on both sides of it as far as he could see, crusted and white and blue in the hollows, and the sun came up over the eastern ridges and lay along it so bright that he rode with his eyes half shut. It was a clear day. That was good. Everybody on the mountain knew the dark was when they came.

+++

They stopped the first night in a hollow below the road where a stand of firs broke the wind. Sera Vahn chose it. She rode down into it and studied the ground and rode out again and around the edge of it, slowly, once, and came back and said, "Here."

Then she sat her mount while they did the rest, because she couldn’t do any of it.

Edric had expected that to be awkward. It wasn’t. She watched, and when something was wrong she said so, once, and somebody fixed it. Maude Quarry went along the line of mounts, checking every girth before anybody else had thought of girths, working each strap with her thumb and saying nothing. Tamsin Kemp cleared the snow for the fire with the edge of her shield. Ambrose Wick took the mounts down to the stream under the firs and broke the ice for them with his heel.

Hob Lomax unstrapped the pot.

"What’s in it?" Tamsin asked.

"Nothing yet." Hob was a heavy, slow man with a gray-shot beard cut short and a voice that sounded as if it had been left out overnight. "That’s the point of a pot. You put things in it."

"What things?"

"Whatever there is. Not that." He took the strip of dried meat out of her hand before she could drop it in. "That goes in last. You put it in first, and it’s boots by the time the rest is soft."

"I’ve eaten it boiled from the start for two years and more."

"I know," Hob said. "I’ve watched you."

Tamsin laughed, a short surprised bark, and gave up the meat.

When the pot was on, and the light was going, Sera Vahn got down. She did it badly, one-handed, and Maude was at the mount’s head holding it before she was halfway, without being asked, and stepped back as soon as both boots were on the ground.

"Five," Sera Vahn said.

They stood up from the fire, and stood it, around the fire instead of a door: Tamsin front, Maude a pace behind her, Hob to the side, Edric at the back of them where he could see over their heads, and Ambrose Wick outermost, facing away into the firs and the dark under them. Sera Vahn stood outside all of it, where she could see every one of them.

It felt foolish. There was nothing there. Edric stood at the head and watched the dark beyond Tamsin’s shoulder and felt the cold come up through his boots, and then it stopped feeling foolish and just felt like standing.

They changed it every two hours through the night. Sera Vahn didn’t sleep that he saw.

+++

In the morning Ambrose Wick was sitting by the dead fire with Sera Vahn’s strap across his knee.

She’d taken it off to dress. Edric saw it because he was awake first, as he usually was; he’d been awake since before the last change, lying with his eyes open in the dark listening to Maude breathe. Ambrose had a needle and a hank of waxed thread from somewhere inside his coat, and he was working at the keeper that held the buckle tongue, which had started to pull out of the leather at one end.

"It’d have gone by tonight," he said, when he saw Edric watching. "The new ones always pull there. They cut the slot too close to the edge."

"Did she ask you?"

"No." He drew the thread through and bit it off. "It’s harness. I don’t wait to be asked about harness."

Sera Vahn came back from the stream with her hair wet at the edges and her right arm held against her. Ambrose held the strap up without a word, and she looked at the new stitching and then at him, and took it.

"Thank you," she said.

Ambrose nodded and went to see to the mounts.

+++

The second day was brighter than the first.

The road had come down out of the folds onto open country, long level fields walled in dry stone with the snow lying over them in a crust that took the light and gave it back hard. There was no wind. There was nobody else on the road. The only sounds were the mounts and the pot.

Sera Vahn had told him to watch the fields, so he watched the fields.

It was a little past midday, with the sun as high as it was going to get and their shadows short and blue under them, when he saw the snow move.

It was on the left, in the field beyond the wall, perhaps a hundred paces out. A low line. As if something under the crust had lifted it a hand’s width as it went along and let it down again behind, so that the surface rose in a long soft ridge that ran, and ran, and kept running, and never broke.

It was keeping pace with them.

Edric watched it. He watched it for the length of ten breaths, and then twenty. It went along at exactly the speed they were going, a hundred paces out, parallel to the road, and the crust above it glittered as it rose and settled, and there was no sound at all.

Edric had heard about the line in the snow. The Halbrook man who’d ridden in had told it in the kitchen before Mira got hold of him, and the kitchen had told the camp by dark: a line from the gate, and Fenn Jarrow calling it, and calling it again, and then it took him. Everybody in the camp had heard it by morning.

At the gate, Edric thought. At night. At a holding with a stone barn and a boy in it, where they’d come twice before.

This was a field in the middle of nowhere at noon, with the sun on it, and wind did things to crust that looked like anything you liked. He’d seen crust ripple on the slopes above the camp in a wind you couldn’t feel on your face. It went in lines. It looked like this.

They didn’t come in daylight. Everybody knew that.

He kept watching it. Then the field dipped into a fold behind a stand of thorn, and the line went down into the fold, and it didn’t come up the other side.

Edric watched the far side of the fold until it fell behind them. Nothing came up.

He didn’t call it. He told himself that if it came up again he would call it, and it didn’t come up again, and by the time they’d ridden another kilometer he had nearly stopped thinking about it, and by the time the light began to go he had told himself the word for it so many times that he believed it.

Wind.

+++

That night they stopped in the lee of a ruined sheepfold whose walls still stood to shoulder height on three sides. Hob made the stew and saved the meat for last. Tamsin talked, mostly to Maude, who didn’t answer, which Tamsin didn’t seem to mind.

"I was at Stonefall in the second month," Tamsin said, to the fire generally. "On the rotation. After." She turned her bowl in her hands. "Your sheet was still on the hut door when we got there, Commander. The one with the two names at the top. Nobody’d taken it down."

Across the fire, Sera Vahn didn’t answer at once.

"I left it up," she said.

"I know. I read it every morning. I’d go out to the bank to stand my turn, and I’d read it on the way past. Every morning for three weeks." Tamsin drank from the bowl. "I don’t know why. I knew what it said by the second day."

Nobody said anything. The fire cracked.

Edric found he was holding his own bowl very still.

He got up when the five changed and stood his two hours at the head, and the dark beyond Tamsin’s shoulder was the same dark as last night, and he could not stop seeing the field at noon. The line rising and settling. Going exactly as fast as they went. Going down into the fold and not coming up the other side.

When Hob took the head from him, he went around the fire to where Sera Vahn sat with her back against the old wall and her eyes open.

"Commander."

Sera Vahn waited.

"There was a line in the snow," he said. "Today. Past midday. In the field on the left, about a hundred paces out. It ran alongside us, as fast as we were going, a long stretch. Then it went down into a fold and didn’t come out."

She didn’t move.

"I didn’t call it," Edric said. "I thought it was wind. I thought, it’s daylight." He made himself go on. "It wasn’t wind. Wind goes over a fold. It doesn’t go down into it."

Sera Vahn held his gaze. He couldn’t read anything in her face. The fire was behind him, and her face was lit by it, and it didn’t change.

"How long did you watch it?"

"Twenty breaths. More."

"And then it went down."

"Yes."

"In daylight."

"It was noon."

She was quiet. Then she said, "Who told you they don’t come in daylight?"

He opened his mouth to answer, and found he didn’t have anybody to say.

"Nobody," he said.

"No," she said. "Everybody knows it, and nobody told you." She shifted her strapped arm against her chest. "I knew it too. I’d have told you the same if you’d asked me this morning."

Edric waited for the rest of it. There wasn’t any.

"Tomorrow you ride last," she said. "Behind Ambrose. Facing back, the way he does, and out at the fields, both sides. Ambrose comes up to fourth."

"Then nobody’s watching ahead."

"I’m watching ahead," Sera Vahn said. "With one hand on the reins and nothing in the other. You’re watching what you saw today, because you’re the one who’s seen it." She paused. "Write it down for me in the morning, when it’s light. What you saw, and how long, and where it went. Not what you thought it was. You’ve already told me what you thought."

"Yes, Commander."

"Go and sleep."

He went. He lay down by the wall in his coat with his eyes open, and listened to Maude breathing, and to the fire, and to Hob at the head shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and did not sleep.

+++

He rode the third day backward.

It was harder than it sounded. He sat sideways in the saddle with one leg cocked over and turned at the waist, with the mount following Ambrose’s on its own, and he watched the fields go away behind them. Left, and then right, and then left again. By noon his back had set in that shape, and every time he turned it caught.

The snow lay on the fields exactly as it had lain the day before. White. Unbroken. The sun on it.

Edric watched it the whole day. Nothing moved on it at all.

That was worse. He had not thought it would be, but it was. A line he could have pointed to. This was nothing, for kilometer after kilometer, with every hollow and fold and every stand of thorn able to hide anything at all. He found himself counting the folds. He stopped himself. He started again.

In the afternoon he wrote it down, as she’d asked, sitting sideways in the saddle with the board across his knee and his gloves off and his fingers going white. Second day. Past midday. Left side of the road, field beyond the wall, a hundred paces out. A line in the snow, raised, moving at our pace, parallel to the road. Watched about twenty breaths. Went down into a fold behind thorn. Did not come up the far side. Not called.

He folded it and gave it to Ambrose to pass forward.

Sera Vahn read it without stopping her mount. She didn’t look back at him. It went into her coat.

+++

They came over the last rise on the fourth day, a little after noon, with the sun already leaning west.

Edric was still facing backward and didn’t see it first. He heard Tamsin say, "There," quietly, and Hob’s pot stop knocking as Hob reined in, and he turned in the saddle, his back catching, and looked down the road.

The holding lay below them in a shallow bowl of white fields. A house with smoke going straight up from the chimney. A byre. A woodpile. And the barn, long and gray and built of stone, with its door on the yard side.

The road wall ran along toward the gate and then stopped. Where it should have gone on there was a long gap, a stretch of trodden snow and broken ground and a few stones lying where they’d been dropped, and then, past the gap, the wall again, low and whole.

There were people in the yard. Small at that distance. Two at the barn door. Somebody crossing toward the house with a bucket.

Sera Vahn sat her mount at the top of the rise, looking down at it, and didn’t start forward.

Edric turned back to the fields. Left. Right. The snow lay on them white and unbroken in the slanting light, all the way to the far walls.

Behind him he heard her give the word, and the line began to move again, down toward the gate, the pot knocking.

He kept his eyes on the fields until they were through it.