Chapter 612: Two Hundred and Four

The boat was a coastal ketch, built to work a day’s sail from shore and come home before dark. Someone had taken it across the Abyss anyway.

It had grounded itself against the north mole, too damaged to steer into a berth. The mainsail hung in two pieces. The hull listed to port, and below the waterline on that side, four long gouges ran from bow almost to stern, parallel and evenly spaced, each deep enough to lose a hand in.

Vane stood on the mole and looked at them for longer than he meant to.

Nothing on this coast left marks like that. Whatever had dragged its claws along the hull had done it in passing, the way a cat runs a paw along a table leg, and the ketch had survived only because it was too small to be worth stopping for.

"Vane." Isole’s voice came up from the deck, low and urgent. "I need hands."

He went down.

There were five people aboard. Four of them were children.

They sat in a row against the cabin wall under a single blanket, and none of them made a sound. The eldest might have been twelve. The youngest was perhaps eight, a boy with a shaved head and both arms wrapped around his knees. All four watched the harbor workers on the mole with total attention and no hope at all.

The fifth person was a woman of about forty, lying on the deck with her back against the mast and her left arm strapped across her chest with a strip of sailcloth. Her skin had the salt-cracked look of someone who had been at sea too long on too little water. Isole knelt beside her with both halves of Samsara running quietly in her hands, the light from one and the grey from the other moving over the broken arm.

"Fever," Isole said. "The bone’s been set badly once already. She did it herself, I think."

"I did," the woman said. Her voice was a rasp. "Didn’t have a lot of volunteers."

"What’s your name?" Vane asked.

She looked him over before answering. He knew that look from Oakhaven: someone deciding how much of the truth he could be trusted with.

"Brynn," she said finally. "Brynn Talow. Out of Carrow, on the western coast. I fish, mostly." A dry, painful noise that might have been a laugh. "Lately, mostly not."

Behind Vane, Mara had come aboard.

He heard her stop. He turned, and saw what she was looking at.

Each of the four children wore a cord around their neck, and on each cord hung a flat tin tag no larger than a coin. Someone had stamped them by hand. There were no names on them. There were only numbers.

Mara crouched in front of the youngest boy, slowly, the way she had learned to approach frightened things in the Dark Worlds. She did not touch him. She tilted her head to read his tag.

"Two hundred and four," she said aloud.

Then she stopped, and did not read the others.

Vane felt something cold move in his chest. Under it, much older, he felt something hot.

"Who gave them those?" he asked.

"Household," Brynn said.

The word landed on the deck and sat there.

"Dark coats," she went on. "No medals, no colors. They come into a town with a magistrate’s writ under the pedigree statute, the old one. You know the one."

Everyone born low knew the one. A commoner who woke with an Authority strong enough to matter was to be secured or liquidated before the Palaces or the East could recruit them. Vane had lived beside those words his whole life before Valerica ever read them to him from a bureau report in Oakhaven. Two captains of the Third Division had once come into Oakhaven to carry them out on a twelve-year-old girl.

That girl was crouched on the deck in front of him now, very still, looking at a number on a string.

"The Empire’s been enforcing that statute for three hundred years," Brynn said. "Somebody’s child wakes up with frost on their hands, or a shadow that does something it shouldn’t, and the next week there’s a quiet funeral and nobody says why. It’s ugly, but everyone knows the shape of it." She shifted against the mast and winced. "Since spring, the shape changed. They stopped killing them."

"They take them," Nyx said from the rail. Vane had not heard her come aboard.

"Alive," Brynn said. "Every one. They tag them, they write them in a book, and they put them on wagons going inland. Nobody knows where. Nobody who asks gets an answer." She looked at the four children under the blanket. "So some of us started moving them the other way, out across the water. East. Your Sovereigns never cared much about pedigree. And the statute doesn’t reach this side of the Abyss."

"How many have you moved?" Valerica asked. She stood on the mole above them with her arms folded, her voice clipped the way it got when she was angry and didn’t want anyone to know.

"Me? This is my third run." Brynn’s eyes closed for a moment. "There’s a network. Fishermen, a few ferry captains, a priest in Holloway who keeps a list. Two boats left Carrow together this time. Eleven children between them."

Mara looked up.

"There are four here," she said.

Nobody answered her.

"So there were seven," Mara said, "on the other boat."

"The other boat turned back," Brynn said. "Fourth night out. The thing that did that"—she lifted her chin toward the port side, toward the gouges below the waterline—"came up between us in the dark. It didn’t attack. I don’t think it even noticed us. It was just going somewhere, and we were in the water it was going through." Her jaw worked. "When it passed, the other boat was heading west again. I don’t know if they made it home. I don’t know if home is better."

The youngest boy had begun to cry, the way children cry once they have learned that being noticed is dangerous: without a sound.

Isole finished with Brynn’s arm and moved to him, sitting down on the deck beside him without ceremony. After a moment he leaned into her side, and she let him.

Ashe had come down from the mole and stood beside Vane. She had not said a word since they arrived. He could feel the Warlord in her the way he felt weather coming, a low pressure building under her stillness.

"Carrow," Ashe said at last. "How far west?"

"The Western provinces," Brynn said. "The old ones. Where the Unbound happened, if you believe the history books." She studied the five of them: the horned woman, the noble with the gravity bending faintly around her boots, the healer, the girl at the rail with eyes like a split opal, and the young man with the spear on his back and the slum still in his voice. Her mouth tightened, as if she had recognized something she would rather not have.

"You’re the ones from the graduation," she said. "Everyone in the west heard about the graduation."

"Yes," said Valerica.

"Then you know crossing west is a bad idea."

"We know," Vane said.

Mara stood up. She reached out and, very carefully, turned the youngest boy’s tag face-down against his shirt, so that the number was hidden. Then she looked at Vane.

"Seven," she said.

It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t answer it like one.