Chapter 631: Thirteen

They came down the river road a little after noon on the second, in two farm carts borrowed from somewhere upriver, with Anastasia’s twelve guards riding beside them and Anastasia herself at the front on a horse that looked as tired as she did.

Half of Holloway was waiting at the mile-stone. Nobody had told them to. Word had simply gone round the town the way word does, and by mid-morning the road was lined from the stone to the first houses, and the children from the convoy were sitting on the wall in a long row, swinging their heels, because Father Cray had told them the others were coming and none of them would go indoors until they saw.

Vane stood at the mile-stone with Mara beside him.

He saw Isole before he saw anything else. She was sitting on the tailboard of the first cart in her grey healer’s cloak with the hood down, and a small boy was asleep against her shoulder, and she was holding him there with one hand without seeming to notice she was doing it. Her face was tired and very pale, and for once she was not hiding any of it.

The carts stopped. The crowd did not move for a moment. Then a man near the front said, "Lio?" in a cracked voice, and a boy of nine sat up in the second cart and screamed, "That’s my dog!" and the whole road came apart.

Isole did not get down at once. She waited until the boy on her shoulder had been lifted off by a woman who was crying too hard to speak, and until the carts were mostly empty, and then she climbed down slowly and walked over to Vane, and stopped in front of him, and looked at him.

She looked for quite a long time. He could feel her doing it, the way he always could: not the eyes but the other thing, Samsara moving through him gently, light and dark together, checking the places where he was hurt and then the places underneath those.

Her eyebrows went up a quarter of an inch.

"Oh," she said.

"Yes."

"You were stupid."

"A bit."

"You were extremely stupid, and it worked, and now you’re a Master, and I wasn’t there." She took his hand, turned it over, and pressed her thumb hard into the center of his palm. "Your left shoulder is cracked. Two ribs. Your channels look like someone rearranged the furniture in them while you were asleep." She pressed harder. "Did anyone even look at you?"

"Valerica wrapped Ashe’s arm."

"That isn’t what I asked."

"No one looked at him," said Ashe, coming up behind them. "We were busy telling him he’s insufferable now."

"He sat on the wall all evening looking noble," Valerica added. "We assumed it was load-bearing."

"He is insufferable now," Nyx agreed, from where she was sitting on the mile-stone with her chin in her hands. "He keeps standing in doorways. Like he owns the door."

"I don’t stand in doorways."

"You’re standing in one right now," Nyx said. "Metaphorically."

Isole’s mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. She stepped in, put her forehead against his chest for one long breath, and then stepped back and was a healer again.

"Shirt off," she said. "Here. Now. I don’t care who’s watching."

Mara looked up at her. "Can I watch?"

"You can hold my satchel," Isole said, and handed it to her. Mara took it in both arms with tremendous seriousness, as though it were the iron box all over again.

Anastasia found him an hour later, sitting on the chapel steps with his shoulder strapped and his shirt back on, watching the children. They had taken over the square. Somebody had found a ball. The thirteen from Greywater were still in their white linen shifts with borrowed coats on top, and they had stopped being careful sometime in the last hour, and were shrieking.

She sat down beside him without asking. She had taken her riding gloves off and was turning them over in her hands.

"Your healer," she said, "is the most frightening person I have ever met. And I grew up with my father."

"What happened?"

Anastasia told him. She told it plainly, without decoration, the seal and the hall and the silver floor going black ring by ring, and the High Saintess walking out with her hands folded and never once looking back at her daughter.

"She didn’t say anything at all to her," Anastasia said. "Not a word. Isole talked to her the whole way down about the children’s dosages." She was quiet for a moment. "I think that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen."

Vane watched Isole across the square. She was kneeling on the cobbles beside Edda Marsh, retying a bandage on the girl’s candle-burned finger, and laughing at something Edda had said.

"Yes," he said.

Anastasia turned her gloves over again.

"There’s something else," she said. "There were fourteen beds."

He nodded.

"Edda told us on the way down. She said the fourteenth was a boy from the hills called Corin. The rods sang for him." She took a folded paper from inside her coat and handed it to him. "A rider came for him the night before the floor was finished. I found this in the warden’s office."

It was a single line on Household paper, in a hand Vane had already learned to recognize because it looked as if it had been printed.

Corin. Transferred. By my hand. O.

"Transferred where?" Vane said.

"It doesn’t say. It doesn’t say anything else at all." Anastasia looked out at the square, at the ball bouncing off the chapel wall and thirteen children running after it. "Ormond rode west yesterday. I asked my guards. Not toward the capital. West, toward the sea."

Vane folded the paper very carefully along its creases and held it in his hand.

Across the square, Mara had sat down on the edge of the fountain with Isole’s satchel still in her arms and her own ledger open on top of it. She was going along the row of children with her eyes, one at a time, moving her lips. He knew what she was doing. She was counting. Then she stopped and looked down at the page and wrote something, and sat looking at it for a long time.

He did not need to ask what. Thirteen had come home. One had not.

"I have to go back," Anastasia said. "Tomorrow. Someone has to tell my father what happened here before Ormond’s version reaches him, and he won’t read Ormond’s version anyway, so it might as well be mine." She pulled her gloves back on, finger by finger. "And you have more than two hundred children in a town the Household knows the name of."

"So," said the Princess of the Empire, standing up and brushing off her skirts. "What are you going to do with them?"