Chapter 250: Rumours of the Watcher [BONUS]

"He froze the river," the carter said, spreading his hands over the table. "The whole Riven. Froze it solid, from one side to the other, so the people could walk across on the ice."

He had been telling the story for three nights in a row, and every night it got a little longer.

The tavern was called the Split Oak. It stood at a crossroads half a day south of Cavel, and in winter it was the only warm place for twenty miles in any direction. Tonight it was full. Drovers, a pair of tinkers, three soldiers in faded Gannon blue, and a widow from the next village who came in every evening for one cup of cider and stayed for three.

"The Riven’s three hundred feet deep," said the innkeeper, wiping a mug. "A river that deep doesn’t freeze in a breath."

"It did for him."

One of the soldiers put down his drink.

"He didn’t freeze the river," he said.

The room turned to look at him. He was a young man with a bandaged hand and a Third Legion badge on his collar.

"I was on the south bank," he said. "I saw it. He didn’t freeze the river. He held the end of the bridge. Alone. There were Roamers coming at him by the hundred, and every time they reached him, they stopped. They just stopped and went white. And the cold came off him like a winter morning. You could feel it from across the gorge."

The carter looked annoyed.

"That’s what I said. Cold."

"It isn’t the same thing," the soldier said quietly. Then he picked up his drink again and would not say any more.

? ? ?

In the washing yard behind the second inn at Merrowford, the laundresses had their own version.

"He held the Black Star," said the eldest of them, scrubbing a shirt against the board. "My sister’s husband carts grain for the Wall. He says everyone up there knew it. The young lord could look at a man and see straight through him. What he’d had for breakfast. What he was afraid of. When he’d die."

"If he could see so much," said the girl beside her, "why didn’t he see the Wall was going to fall?"

The old woman wrung out the shirt.

"He did see it. That’s the whole point. He saw it a year early. He wrote it down and sent it to the capital."

"And?"

"And nobody read it." She slapped the wet shirt onto the line. "That’s how it always goes, isn’t it? The one man who can see, and nobody listens to him."

The girl thought about that while she worked.

"Is he really dead?" she asked at last.

Nobody answered her.

? ? ?

On the Serpentine, the ferryman at the Aldern crossing told it the way ferrymen tell everything, slowly, while the boat crept across the grey water.

"Fell into the Riven," he said. "Off the end of the bridge, when the old mage brought the sky down on it. Three hundred feet. Nothing could live through that."

A fisherwife sat in the stern with a basket of eels on her knees.

"They never found him," she said.

"They never found anything. It’s the Riven."

"My cousin was there," the fisherwife said. "On the south bank. She says a man came out of nowhere just before the stone fell. Picked the young lord up like a sack of flour. And then they were both gone."

The ferryman pushed his pole into the riverbed.

"Your cousin also says she saw a fish with a man’s face in the Serpentine last summer."

"That was a real fish."

"So she says."

The boat bumped against the far bank. The passengers climbed out, and the ferryman went back for more. He told the story again on the next crossing. This time, he left out the part about the fall. He found that the people listened better when he wasn’t sure.

? ? ?

In a counting house in Caelmar, two grain merchants sat over a ledger and discussed the price of cores.

"It’s the only good news from the north," said the first. He was a heavy man in a fur collar. "The fool who doubled the price of Wall cores is dead. Once the Crown sorts out who holds the contracts now, we’ll have them back at the old rate by summer."

The second merchant was thinner and older. He did not look up from the numbers.

"Strange thing," he said.

"What is?"

"The Wall never paid a debt on time in forty years. I’ve held their grain notes since I was a clerk." He turned a page. "The year that young man took his seat, they paid every one of them. Early."

The first merchant shrugged.

"Doesn’t matter now. The Crown says it was rebels. Some revolutionary dog opened a gate."

"Mm," said the second merchant.

He closed the ledger. He did not say anything else. But that evening, on his way home, he stopped at the temple of Vessa and lit a candle. When the priest asked who it was for, he said he wasn’t sure.

? ? ?

Far to the east, in a barracks at Velmont, soldiers who had lost a city sat around a fire and talked about the man who had saved eight thousand people.

They were not kind about it.

"Eight thousand," said a sergeant with a scarred lip. "They walked out of the north, the whole lot of them, with two Gannon legions holding their hands. And where was the Fifth Legion when Orsini needed it? Gone north. Gone to save the Duke’s son."

"It wasn’t her fault," someone said. "The girl. She went for her brother."

"I don’t care whose fault it was. My brother was on the lake wall at Orsini." The sergeant stared into the fire. "Nobody walked him anywhere."

No one argued with him.

Later, when most of them had gone to sleep, a young soldier asked the man next to him whether the stories were true. Whether one man had really held a bridge alone, with a whole horde in front of him.

The older soldier thought about it for a long time.

"I don’t know," he said. "But I hope so. It’d be nice to think somebody somewhere won something this year."

? ? ?

In every town, the story was different.

He was a seer. He was a giant. He had killed ten thousand Roamers with one sword. He had died. He had not died. He had been carried off by a ghost, or a mage, or the god Vessa himself.

In all the versions that spread across the continent that winter, from the northern taverns to the eastern camps, there was not one that mentioned a dragon.

And on a frozen road far to the south, the only man who could have told them walked slowly north, counting his steps, with a grey-haired stranger beside him and an iron box on the stranger’s back. He did not tell anyone anything at all.

? ? ?

Thank you for the magic castle, @Stingdragon ~