Chapter 611: Seven Stitches

Location: The Millford road — the Halbrook holding; the barn; the path to the byre

Date/Time: TC1858.03.14

Buckets were the worst of it. Tamsin Kemp had carried shields, spears, a man with a broken leg half a day down a mountain road, and none of it was as bad as two wooden buckets of snowmelt on a frozen morning, because the rope bails cut into the fingers through any glove ever made and you could not put them down to shake your hands out. Not on the path. You did not put anything down on the path.

“Ready?” Ambrose Wick asked behind her.

“No. Go on, then.”

Tamsin heard him not laugh. He had a way of not laughing that was as good as anybody else’s laughing, and she had worked it out on the road down from the mountain, on the second night, when she’d told him the long story about the Federation quartermaster and the forty left boots, and he’d let her get to the end of it and then said, “Forty,” and gone back to his stitching.

Behind them the barn door was open. Nissa Halbrook was in it with her split hands wrapped in rag, and Bett beside her, and Sera Vahn a step back in the shadow with her strapped arm, where the whole yard lay in front of her. Up on the roof ridge, astride it with the rope around his middle, Edric Fairley had been calling nothing since first light, once every little while, in a voice that had gone to a croak the day before and not come back.

“Nothing,” Edric called.

Tamsin stepped out onto the first flag.

+++

The rule was Bett’s, and it was a good rule, and Tamsin had said so out loud the first time she heard it, because in her experience people who made good rules liked to be told. One carried. One walked behind and watched the carrier’s feet. You walked fast, and you did not run, because a running woman with two buckets went down, and a woman who went down went down off the stone.

Fifteen flags from the barn door to the ladder. Tamsin knew every one of them by now. The third had a corner chipped off. The sixth rocked if you came onto it from the left. One of them in the middle had been Hob’s, the one he’d dropped three paces short, and she did not know which, because she had not asked and nobody had said, and she stepped on all of them the same.

Behind her, Ambrose said, “Fourth,” as she came onto the fourth, and “Fifth,” on the fifth. He’d started that on the first trip without telling anybody why. Tamsin thought it was so that if she ever stopped hearing it she would know to stop.

The bails bit. The water slopped against the staves. Out across the yard the snow lay gray and frozen, the house shut up, the woodpile, the road wall with its gap where the stone had come out, the strip of bare snow at the far end of the path and the ladder lying across it to the byre door. The cows had heard the buckets. They were lowing.

“Sixth.”

On the sixth she came in from the right, and it did not rock.

“Seventh.”

“Nothing,” Edric called, from the roof.

“Eighth.”

Tamsin was on the eighth with her weight going forward onto the ninth when Ambrose said, in a different voice, “Stop.”

She stopped. The water went on going for a breath without her and slopped over the lip of the left bucket onto her boot.

“Don’t move your feet,” Ambrose said. “Look at the tenth. The far edge.”

The tenth flag lay two paces ahead, past the ninth, gray, rimed at its edges, the same as it had been yesterday. Then its far edge was not the same. It was a finger higher than its near edge. She would not have seen it if he hadn’t said. She saw it now, and while she watched it went up another finger, the whole stone tilting slowly toward her like the lid of a box somebody was lifting from inside to look out.

“Back,” Ambrose said. “Slow. Onto mine.”

He was on the seventh, behind her. She took one step back, the buckets swinging, and felt her heel find the edge of his flag and then the rest of her foot, and then she was standing on the seventh with him, close enough that her shoulder was against his chest.

“Nothing,” Edric called. Then, in another voice: “Tenth—”

The tenth went up on end.

It went up the way a door goes up in a gale, all at once after the slow part, and stood on its near edge, and fell over backward onto the snow beyond with a sound Tamsin felt in her teeth. Where it had been there was a hole, and in the hole there was the black wet front of something, and two long jointed limbs came up out of it and lay across the ninth flag, reaching, and closed on the place where Tamsin’s feet had been a breath before. They closed on nothing. They lay there.

“Stone.” That was Sera Vahn, in the door. She did not shout. She didn’t need to; the whole yard had gone quiet. “Stay on the stone. Both of you. Don’t come back yet.”

Don’t come back yet. Tamsin did not understand it, and then she did. Between the seventh and the barn door were six flags, and under any one of them there might be another.

The flag they were standing on moved.

+++

It was not much. A hair. The kind of thing you’d put down to your own knees if you had been standing for a long time, which she had not. Then it moved again, under her right foot first and then under Ambrose’s left, the near edge, the edge toward the barn, coming up.

It was the eighth, not the seventh. That was the part Tamsin kept coming back to, after. She had been standing on the eighth when Ambrose said stop, and she had stepped back onto the seventh, and it was the seventh that was coming up under them, from the barn side, from behind, from the way they had come.

“It’s under us,” Tamsin said.

“I know.” Ambrose’s voice was right in her ear. He sounded the way he sounded when he was threading a needle. “Get on the eighth.”

“The eighth’s next to the hole.”

“The eighth’s not moving. Go on. Take the buckets.”

Tamsin did not take the buckets. She dropped them. They went over on the seventh and the water ran out across the stone and off its edge into the snow, and she stepped forward onto the eighth with her empty hands out for balance, and turned.

The seventh was tilting. Its barn-side edge had come up a hand’s width, then two, and Ambrose was on it, and he did what she would not have thought of if she’d stood there a year. He did not step off. He went down on both knees on the rising edge and put all his weight on it, the whole lean length of him, and pushed down.

The stone stopped.

It stopped at a hand and a half, and hung, with Ambrose kneeling on its high side and the thing under it pushing up and Ambrose pushing down. Tamsin heard it under there. A scraping, a grinding, like a spade on gravel. Between the low edge of the seventh and the snow, a gap opened, the width of a forearm, and out of it, slowly, came the end of a limb, feeling along the underside of the stone toward the edge where Ambrose’s knees were.

Ambrose saw it. Tamsin saw him see it. He did not get up.

“Come on,” he said, not to her. Through his teeth. “Come on, then.”

The limb came out a little further, reaching up over the edge of the stone for him, and he lifted his weight off the stone all at once.

The seventh came up with the thing under it, fast now, the push it had been giving all going into the stone at once, and the high edge rose under Ambrose’s knees, and he let it rise and then came down on it again with everything he had, both knees and both fists and all his weight, the way you’d drive a stake.

The stone went down.

It went down on the limb. Tamsin heard the limb go. It was not a crack. It was a sound like a green branch bent until it splits along its length, and under the stone the grinding stopped, and something down there pulled back hard enough that the whole flag jumped under Ambrose and settled. The gap at its low edge closed. On the snow, half out from under the stone, lay a length of limb the size of a man’s forearm, gray-black and edged along one side, and it was not moving.

Ambrose was on his hands and knees on the seventh with his head down, breathing.

“Ambrose,” Tamsin said. “Get up. Come here.”

Ambrose lifted his head. His eyes went past her to the eighth, the ninth, the hole where the tenth had been. The two limbs that had lain across the ninth were gone. The hole was empty and black.

“Where’s the other one?” he asked.

Tamsin looked at the hole. She looked at the ninth. She looked at the eighth, under her own feet, and it lay still and gray and rimed.

“Nothing,” Edric called, from the roof, and his voice cracked in the middle of the word. “I can’t see it. There’s nothing to see.”

Ambrose got one foot under him. He put his hand on the stone to push himself up, and his hand was near the edge of the seventh, the side toward the house, where nobody had been looking, where the snow came right up to the stone and lay smooth and gray and flat.

The snow there opened.

It did not heave or ridge. It opened, the way water opens, and the limbs came up out of it, both of them, and closed on Ambrose’s arm and shoulder at the edge of the stone, and pulled.

He went sideways off the seventh. Tamsin saw his face as he went. His eyes were not on the limbs or on her. They were on the barn door, where a fifth’s eyes go, on what was behind them.

Tamsin went down on her belly on the eighth with her arm out. Her fingers touched his coat. Then there was a voice behind her she had never heard raised before, Bett Mowbray’s, so loud it hurt:

“Tamsin. Stay on the stone.”

She stayed on the stone.

The snow closed over Ambrose Wick as it had opened, smooth, and lay gray in the morning light, a pace from the seventh flag, as if nobody had ever been on it.

+++

They did not go out again. Bett would not let anybody, and nobody asked.

Tamsin lay on the eighth until her breath came back. Then she got up on her knees and looked at the seventh, which sat crooked now, a finger proud on the barn side, the limb end still lying half out from under its low edge. She looked at the buckets on their sides. Past them lay the bare snow at the end of the path and the ladder across it, and the byre door, and she could hear the cows still lowing for the water that had run off into the yard.

Then she walked back. Flag by flag. Nobody said the numbers for her.

At the door, Bett took her by the front of the coat and pulled her over the threshold and held onto her a little longer than she needed to, and then let go and turned away to the wall.

Up on the roof, Edric was saying something. He’d stopped calling. He was just talking, too quietly for anybody on the ground to hear.

“Get him down,” Sera Vahn said to Ivo, and Ivo went up into the loft.

Brisk Alder walked out on the path to the seventh flag at a fast walk, Innes Garrow’s spear in her hands, with Maude walking behind her watching her feet, because that was the rule and it was still the rule. She did not step off the seventh. She knelt on it and reached down with the point of the spear and worked the length of the limb out from under the low edge, and flicked it up onto the stone, and brought it back on the flat of the spear blade like a loaf on a peel.

Crowe laid a rag on the barn floor, and Brisk Alder set it down there.

It was the end of a forelimb, broken off at a joint. The inner edge was ground flat and hard, about a little finger wide, smooth as a whetstone, and the joint at the broken end was packed solid with earth and grit. Where it had split there was something inside that was not quite white and not quite gray and that nobody wanted to look at for long.

“Write it,” Bett said to Crowe. Her voice had gone back to the one she used at the gate. “What it is. Where it came from. That he did it.”

“I don’t know what it’s for,” Crowe said. “The edge.”

“Then don’t write what it’s for. Write what it is.”

Crowe wrote. Tamsin stood and watched him and didn’t read it.

They had come in the night. That was what Edric kept saying when they had him down off the roof and sitting by Hob’s pot with a cup in his hands; he didn’t drink. They had come in the dark when nobody could see a ridge, and then they had gone still under the flags, and lain there all morning, under the path, and waited for somebody to walk on it. There wasn’t anything to see. There wasn’t anything to see. Sera Vahn crouched in front of him and listened to him say it four times and did not tell him to stop, and on the fifth time she said, “No. There wasn’t,” and he stopped.

“The cows,” Nissa said, later, to nobody.

“Not today,” Bett said.

“They’ll—”

“Not today.”

Nissa didn’t argue. She sat down on the floor by the door with Joss in her lap, though he was big for it, and Sedge across her feet, and listened to the cows.

+++

At dusk the door fives went out to their places along the wall, backs to the stone, as they did every dusk. At the end of the line, where a fifth stood facing out, there was a space the width of one man that nobody stepped into.

Sera Vahn came to the doorway to watch them go out. Her right arm was in its strap, and the light from the lamp inside fell on it.

Tamsin looked at the strap.

It was the new one, the stiffer one Mira had put on her before they left the mountain. On the first morning on the road the keeper on it had been pulling loose, the little loop that held the end of the strap flat, and Ambrose had sat by the dead fire with her strap across his knee and stitched it down again before anybody asked him, close and small and even, waxed thread. With harness, he’d said, he never waited to be asked. Tamsin had counted the stitches later, riding behind her, because it was something to count. Seven.

The keeper was still there. Seven stitches. It would hold till the strap wore out.

Sera Vahn saw her looking. She looked down at the strap herself, and then out at the wall, at the end of the line, at the space there, the width of one man.

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