Chapter 630: Vane, of Oakhaven

For a long moment nobody on the river road moved.

Then Ormond turned his head on the wet stone, found the nearest of his riders, and said in a perfectly ordinary voice, "Stand down."

The rider stared at him.

"You heard me." Ormond looked back up at Vane, at the spear-point still resting against his throat. "I was beaten in front of witnesses, on a public road, by a single man. There is no form in which my men continue this." He let out a slow breath. "I would be grateful if you’d move that."

Vane moved it.

Ormond did not get up at once. He lay where he was with his hand pressed to his shoulder, looking at the sky, while sixteen riders sheathed their blades one by one and the mist burned slowly off the Marrin.

Mara was still standing on the footboard of the second wagon, holding the iron box against her chest with both arms. The clerk sat in the mud beside the wheel where Brynn had left him, and did not try to take it back.

The box was locked. Mara held it out to Vane without a word, and Null Point found the seam in the lock the way it had found the seam in Tobi’s irons, and the lid came up.

The ledger inside was black leather, newer than Father Cray’s book and twice as thick. Mara opened it on the wagon’s tailboard and turned the pages slowly. Columns of numbers. Dates. Towns. Beside some of the numbers, a small neat circle. Not one name anywhere.

Father Cray had come down the road from the mile-stone. He stood at her elbow with his hat in his hands, breathing hard, and looked at the page.

"That’s all it is," he said quietly. "All this time."

"Yes," said Mara.

She looked up and found Ashe, who was sitting on the edge of the wall with Valerica wrapping her forearm in strips torn off somebody’s coat. Ashe’s horns had gone, but the heat had not quite left her hands.

"Can I borrow a fire?" Mara asked.

Ashe looked at the ledger, and then at Mara, and climbed down off the wall without a word.

They did it in the middle of the road, where everyone could see. Mara tore the pages out a handful at a time and laid them on the stone, and Ashe touched them one by one, and they curled up and went black. It took a long time. Nobody tried to hurry it. When the last page had burned, Mara crouched over the ash and stirred it with a stick until there was nothing left that could be read.

Then she stood up, took her own ledger out from inside her coat, and held it against her chest.

"His list is gone," she said, to nobody in particular. "Mine stays."

Ormond had got to his feet. He stood a little way off, watching.

"That was a register of the Crown," he said.

"Was," said Valerica, without looking up from Ashe’s arm.

The children came out of the wagons slowly at first, and then all at once.

Father Cray stood on the tailboard with Mara’s ledger open in his hands and began to read the names aloud, one after another, in the voice he used at funerals. At every name a child climbed down out of the canvas and stood blinking in the road, and up at the mile-stone the people of Holloway, who had stood there all through the fight without anyone telling them to, began to come down the road in ones and twos, and then at a run.

"Tomas Weir," Father Cray read. "Twelve."

The cooper reached him first. Danny reached him second, and hit him so hard around the middle that both boys went over into the dust together.

Vane walked down the column to the last wagon. The bars were warded the same way the irons on the black ship had been, and they came apart the same way. Marta Rusk climbed down first and stood on the road with the tin tag still around her neck, looking at Brynn, who was standing there with her sling gone and her bad arm held tight against her ribs.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"You took your sling off," Marta said finally.

"Yes."

"Idiot girl." Marta pulled her in with one arm, very carefully, and held on.

Pell climbed down last. He took the tag from around his neck, looked at it, and handed it to Mara as he passed, as though giving her the change from a fish.

"For your book," he said.

Ormond’s riders had brought his horse. He stood beside it with one hand on the saddle, and when Vane came back up the road he did not mount.

"This will be reported," he said. "In full."

"I know."

"Holloway will answer for it. And Carrow. They’ll send someone who doesn’t care about form at all."

"No," Vane said. "They won’t."

He turned around and faced the road, the wagons, the children in the dust, the thirty people from Holloway who had become a hundred while nobody was counting. He raised his voice, not much. He did not need to. It carried a long way over the water.

"This wasn’t Holloway," he said. "It wasn’t Carrow. It wasn’t anyone who lives in this valley. It was me." He looked back at Ormond. "Vane, of Oakhaven. Write it down that way. Spell it right."

Ormond studied him for a long time. Then, for the first time, he smiled. It was small, and tired, and it did not look like something he had planned.

"They’ll come for you," he said. "Instead of them."

"That’s the idea."

"And the next valley?"

"I’ll be there too."

Ormond nodded slowly, as if a sum had come out the way he had expected and he did not much like the answer. Then he swung up into the saddle, turned the grey horse west, and rode away along the river without looking back. His riders followed him in pairs. Nobody watched them go.

The note from Greywater came at dusk, carried by one of Anastasia’s guards on a horse that had been ridden very hard. It was a single folded page, in Isole’s small exact hand.

Thirteen. All walking. Floor is dead. Mother has gone home. We bring them down tomorrow. Edda asks whether the boats are still running at Carrow. Tell Brynn. Tell him I hope he wasn’t stupid. I.

Brynn laughed until she cried, and then just cried, and Marta held her.

Valerica read the note twice and handed it to Vane without comment, and then leaned her whole weight against his side and said, "I hated all of that properly. Thank you for asking."

"I didn’t ask."

"I’m aware," she said, and closed her eyes.

Ashe sat down on his other side with her bandaged arm in her lap.

"So," she said. "Master."

"Apparently."

"Hm." She considered him. "It’ll go to your head."

"Already has," said Nyx, from where she lay flat on the road with her head on his boot. "I can see it from here."

Mara sat on the wall above them with her ledger open on her knees and Pell’s tin tag beside her. She was not listening to any of them. She was writing something at the bottom of the last page, slowly, with great care.

Vane leaned back to look.

Holloway, the first. Everyone went home.