Chapter 616: The Register

They came ashore before dawn in a cove two miles north of Carrow, where the cliffs dropped to a crescent of black shingle and nobody had any reason to look.

Brynn knew the place the way Vane knew the drains under Oakhaven. She brought the trader in without a lantern, and they waded the last stretch with their packs over their heads. By the time the sky greyed, the boat was hidden under a lip of rock and they were sitting in a fisherman’s hut that smelled of tar and old nets, being turned into people nobody would look at twice.

It went badly for most of them.

"It’s a very large hood," Ashe said.

"It’s the largest hood in Carrow," Brynn said. "I borrowed it from a man who sells eels. Don’t take it off."

The hood hid the horns as long as Ashe kept her head down, and Ashe did not know how to keep her head down. Every few seconds her chin came up on its own, the hood slid back an inch, and a curve of obsidian appeared in the lamplight. Isole reached over and tugged it forward for the fourth time without a word.

Valerica was worse. Brynn had given her a fishwife’s coat and a headscarf, and she wore them both like court dress. She stood as though someone might paint her.

"Slouch," Nyx suggested.

"I am slouching."

"You’re standing like a duchess who’s been asked to slouch."

"That," said Valerica, "is the most a Sol can do."

Vane was the only one who fitted. He had pulled on a stained wool jacket and a cap and was sitting on an upturned crate with his elbows on his knees, and he looked, as Nyx put it, like a man who had been born owing money in a town exactly like this one. He did not mind. It was true. Valerica studied him for a moment, then reached over and turned his collar down on one side so that it sat crooked.

"There," she said. "Now you look like you owe money and you’ve stopped caring."

"I’ve been that too."

"I know." She let her hand stay on his collar a moment longer than it needed to. "It suits you better than the uniform did."

Mara watched all of this with polite incomprehension and then asked Brynn how many people lived in Carrow, and how many of them were children, and whether the market was on the same day every week.

The plan was simple, because Valerica said simple plans were the only kind that survived a town. Vane would go into Carrow with Brynn and Mara and look. Nobody would do anything. The others would wait in the hut, and Nyx would keep the Dreamscape laid so thin across the town that no one could feel it, listening for anything that sounded like a child being moved.

Carrow ran down a slope to its harbor: grey stone houses, red tile roofs, a market square by the water, a chapel with a squat bell tower. On an ordinary morning, Brynn said, the square would be full of fish and gossip.

This morning it was full of people standing in a line.

They stood in silence, families mostly, a parent and a child or two, stretching from the chapel steps almost to the harbor wall. At the head of the line was a canvas awning, and under the awning was a trestle table, and at the table sat a clerk in grey with a ledger open in front of him. Beside him, laid on a square of velvet, was a slim silver rod.

Two Household agents stood at either end of the table in their long dark coats. Out on the water, the black ship rode at anchor with its sails furled, close enough that Vane could see a third figure on its deck, watching the square.

The Usurper ran on the nearest agent without being asked.

[Target Analysis: Unknown]

[Rank: 6, Mid Expert]

[Authority: Ironward, Grade B]

[Danger: Moderate]

The other read the same. The figure on the ship was harder to make out across the water, but the shape came through.

[Rank: 6, High Expert]

Vane let the readings go and kept his face slack and bored, the face of a man waiting for something that had nothing to do with him.

They watched the line move.

It worked the same way every time. A mother brought a child to the table. The clerk asked for a name and wrote it down. He picked up the rod and touched its tip to the inside of the child’s wrist, so lightly it might have been a blessing. Most of the time nothing happened, the rod stayed dull, and the mother’s shoulders fell half an inch with relief. She led the child away and the next family stepped forward.

Twice, while Vane watched, the rod lit.

The first time it glowed a faint, steady blue, and the girl it was touching, perhaps ten years old, flinched back as if it had burned her. The clerk did not look up. He drew a line through the name he had just written, wrote a number beside it, and nodded to the agent on his left. The agent took the girl by the shoulder, gently, almost kindly, and walked her toward the harbor steps. Her mother made no sound at all. She stood at the table with her hands open in front of her, and then the man behind her in line touched her elbow, and she moved aside so the line could keep going.

Mara’s hand found Vane’s sleeve and held on.

She did not say anything. She did not need to. He had seen the look on her face once before, on a street in Oakhaven, the night two captains came looking for a girl.

"Tobi," Brynn murmured. She was looking at a fish stall on the corner of the square, where an old man with a scarred face was gutting mackerel and very carefully not looking at the table. "That’s Pell. He’ll know."

She bought three fish she did not want, and while Pell wrapped them he talked without moving his lips, the way people talk in towns where the walls listen.

The other boat had come back four nights ago, he said. Tobi Rusk had brought it in on the night tide, the way they always did, and the Household had been waiting on the mole. They had known exactly which boat to wait for. Tobi was on the black ship now, in irons. So were the children.

"How many?" Brynn asked.

"All of them." Pell handed her the parcel. "Seven."

Vane looked out at the black ship riding at anchor in the grey morning light.

Beside him, Mara had gone very still. She was not looking at the ship. She was looking at the clerk’s ledger, which lay open on the table thirty paces away. Vane could not have read a single line of it at that distance. Mara had spent her childhood reading things upside down across tables she was not supposed to be near.

"The last page," she whispered. "Before today."

"What about it?"

"Two hundred and twelve. Two hundred and thirteen. All the way to two hundred and eighteen." Her fingers tightened on his sleeve. "Seven numbers. Same night. Same handwriting." She swallowed. "The letter said two hundred and eleven. These are new."

The clerk turned a page. The rod touched another wrist and stayed dark. Out on the water, the figure on the black ship’s deck turned and went below.

Vane kept his face slack, and his hands in his pockets, and his voice low.

"Tonight," he said.