Chapter 29 Resealed

Audit of T. Marsh. Note 29. I have read the marks on the walls of the shaft. They are not writing. They are a tally. Somebody has been counting down there for a very long time. H.Q.

Gristle went into the lock like a key into a door it was made for.

It was made for it. I could feel that the moment the blade touched the stone. The notch in the black glass was exactly its shape, blade and handle and the round hole for hanging. It slid in up to the handle and stopped, and the humming that had been coming off it all day went down into the floor and spread out, through the black stone, round the rim, like a ripple going out across a trough.

The red light coming up out of the hole flickered.

Then it came back, brighter. Something down there pushed. The whole barn floor heaved under my feet like the deck of a boat. The roof beams groaned. Somewhere outside, Duchess's empty stall went over with a crash.

"Turn it!" Wrenna's voice came up out of the hole, from a long way down. "Turn it, turn it, TURN it!"

I put both hands on the handle and turned.

It turned about a finger's width, and stopped. Like a key in a rusted lock. I leaned on it. It didn't move. I leaned harder, harder than I'd ever leaned on anything, with my feet braced on the black stone and the cords standing out in my arms, and it didn't move.

Something down below laughed. It wasn't Wrenna.

* * *

"Tobin."

It was Lys. She'd come into the barn behind me with her hand up, and there was a ward round us both, gold and green, over the hole and the lock and me. Thin, and getting thinner. She was white to the lips.

"I can hold this," she said. "For a bit. Not long. What's wrong?"

"It won't turn."

"Why not?"

"I don't know."

Out through the barn doors, in the frosty yard, the screamy ones were coming. A whole flock of them, white and thin, drifting up out of the cracks in the ground round the barn, the way water comes up through a flooded paddock. Brakka was out there with her axe going round her head, roaring. The Countess was beside her, quick as a black cat, the two of them back to back in the barn doorway, and the warband in a ring round them, and Rusk and the guards behind with torches. The screamy ones were screaming. You could see men's legs going. You could see Brakka not letting hers.

"The marks!"

That was Miss Quill.

She'd come in behind Lys, under the ward. She was on her knees at the edge, beside me, with a torch in one hand, leaning out over the drop. The torchlight was on the wall of the shaft, just below the lip. On the carvings. The cleavers, cut deep in the black glass, over and over, all the way down. And beside every one, the two short lines.

"They're a tally," she said. "Look. Look at them. Every cleaver has two marks beside it. Every one. All the way down." She turned round to me, and her face was lit up red from below, and her eyes were enormous. "It's not decoration. It's an instruction. It's two. It's always two. What do you do after? Every time? What did your father do?"

I stared at her.

"Stamp," I said. "Twice."

"Then stamp!"

* * *

I let go of the handle and stood up on the black glass beside the lock, and I stamped. Twice. Hard. The way Dad did. The way I'd done after every big rat since I was ten.

The barn rang like a bell.

I felt it go down through my feet into the stone, the same way Gristle's humming had gone down. Down the shaft, round and round the root stairs, past all those carved cleavers and all those little marks. Down to the bottom.

Then I took hold of the handle again, and turned it.

It turned.

All the way. Smooth as a well-oiled latch. A quarter turn, and a click, deep under the floor, that I felt in my teeth.

The red light coming up the shaft went out like a lamp in a draught.

* * *

For a moment there was no sound at all.

Then something came up the shaft very, very fast, out of the dark, up the root stairs, and launched itself over the rim like a fish jumping a weir, and landed on the barn floor beside me on all fours.

Wrenna stood up. She was glowing faintly in the dark, red in all her cracks. She was grinning.

"Close," she said. "That was CLOSE. It nearly had my foot." She looked down the hole. "Look. Look at it."

I looked.

The hole was closing. Not falling in. Growing over. The black glass at the lip was spreading inwards, from every side at once, the way ice grows across a still pond on a cold night. Slowly at first. Then faster. It met in the middle with a soft, high, singing sound. And then there was no hole. Just a round black glassy patch in the middle of the barn floor, as smooth as a mirror, with Gristle standing up out of the lock at one edge of it.

Very faintly, from somewhere a long way under it, something knocked.

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Three times. Slow. Then it stopped.

Wrenna put her foot on the black glass, and pressed, and listened. Then she took her foot off.

"It'll hold," she said. "While the ground's cold. While it's winter. The lock's turned, and the cold holds it turned, like ice holds a gate shut." She looked at me, and her grin went a bit crooked. "But it was never meant to be like this. It was meant to be locked forever. Your family used to know how. Somewhere along the way, somebody forgot. And now it's a winter lock, and when the ground thaws in spring, it'll open again. Unless somebody turns it properly." She shrugged. "I don't know how. I'm from the other side. I only know how to knock."

"How long?"

"Till the thaw," said Wrenna. "Spring. Then it opens. Unless."

* * *

Outside, the screamy ones had stopped screaming.

They'd gone thin, then thinner, and then they'd come apart like mist in the morning, all of them, all at once, the moment the lock turned. Brakka stood in the barn doorway with her axe hanging from one hand, breathing like a bellows, looking at the empty frosty yard. The Countess stood beside her. Neither of them said anything for a long time.

Then Brakka put her arm round the Countess's shoulders and pulled her in, hard, so the Countess's feet came off the ground.

"Dead thing," she said. "You fight very well."

"Green thing," said the Countess, from somewhere in Brakka's armpit. "Put me down."

Brakka didn't. The Countess didn't make her.

Lys let the ward go. It went out in a little shower of gold sparks, and she sat down hard on the barn floor where she was, and put her head between her knees. Miss Quill went and sat beside her and put an arm round her, and Lys leaned into her and didn't move.

I took hold of Gristle's handle and pulled it out of the lock.

I held my breath when I did it. But the black glass stayed shut. The lock stayed turned. It was cold under my hand, the floor, cold as frost. Wrenna was right. It would hold, till spring.

I slung Gristle on my back. It was quiet. For the first time all day, it had stopped humming. It just felt like a cleaver. Heavier than a kitchen knife, lighter than an axe.

Wrenna was looking at me with her head on one side.

"You're not going back down?" I said.

"Can't." She shrugged. "I came out through the lock while it was turning. I'm bound to it now. To the lock and to the key." She nodded at the cleaver on my back. "Where Gristle goes, I go. Not too far. A mile or two." She grinned. "Besides. You owe me a rematch."

The others had gathered round by then. Brakka, and the Countess, and Rusk with a torch, and Miss Quill helping Lys to her feet. They were all staring at Wrenna. Wrenna was studying them right back, with great interest, one after another, the way a child looks at a shelf of sweets.

"Fuck me," said Rusk, quite softly, and lowered the torch.

Miss Quill was staring at her with her eyes narrowed. I knew that look. She was using her skill. Then she took a sharp breath, and put a hand to her nose, and it came away red.

"Unknown," she said, thickly. "Unknown. Unknown. All the way down. It's just the word unknown. Over and over."

"Hello," said Wrenna, and waved.

"What," said the Countess, very precisely, "is that?"

"That's Wrenna," I said. "She was in the hole."

"She knocked," said Wrenna helpfully. "Three times. Seventeen years."

Brakka stepped forward. She looked Wrenna up and down. Wrenna was a hand taller than her, which I don't think had ever happened to Brakka before. They stood nose to nose.

"Are you strong?" said Brakka.

"Very," said Wrenna.

"Stronger than me?"

Wrenna considered it. "Yes," she said. "But not as strong as him."

"Nobody is," said Brakka.

"I nearly am," said Wrenna, and grinned.

Brakka grinned back. It wasn't a friendly grin. Neither was Wrenna's. Behind them, Lys and Miss Quill and the Countess looked at each other, and something passed between the three of them that I didn't catch, and didn't like the look of.

"We'll need to discuss this," said Lys.

"Later," said Miss Quill.

"Much later," said the Countess.

* * *

The sun came up a couple of hours later.

I went out into the yard to meet it. Everyone was asleep, or near enough. Lys and Miss Quill against the barn wall under one of the guards' cloaks. Brakka flat on her back in the home paddock with the warband round her like a litter of puppies. Rusk on a cart, snoring. Gareth tied up in the smokehouse, where Brakka had put him, with Grosh sitting on the step outside. The Countess had gone into the house as soon as the sky went grey, down into Dad's root cellar, saying she'd be up at dusk and that if anyone opened the cellar door before then she'd have their throat out, which I believed.

Wrenna was sitting on the barn roof, on the ridge, with her knees drawn up, watching the east. She'd never seen a sunrise, she said.

It was very cold.

The light came up over the Greywild, grey and then gold, and it came across the back paddocks and the home paddock and the yard. Everything it touched was white. Every blade of grass, every rut in the track, the fallen boards of the barn doors, all of it, white and crisp and glittering. The air smelled of iron. When I breathed out, it hung in front of my face.

Mum's apple tree was black at the edges of its leaves, where the cold had got them overnight. The way it always is, the first morning.

"Tobin," said Wrenna, from the roof. Her voice had gone very quiet. "Is it always like this? Up here?"

"The frost? Once a year. The first one."

"No. That." She pointed at the sun, coming up gold over the trees. "Does that happen every day?"

"Every morning."

She was quiet for a bit, which wasn't like her. When I looked up, she had both arms round her knees, and the cracks in her were glowing very bright, and she was watching the sun come up like it might stop if she looked away.

First frost.

* * *

I heard someone come up behind me. The frost crunched under her feet.

It was Miss Quill. She'd got the guard's cloak round her shoulders. Her nose was pink with the cold and her hair was coming down and she had a smudge of something black across one cheek. She stood beside me and looked out at it all. The white paddocks. The black-edged tree. The breath hanging in the air.

She didn't say anything for a long time.

"White on the paddocks before sunrise," she said at last. Very quietly. Like she was reading it off a page. "Crunchy underfoot. The apple tree goes black at the edges, overnight, like it's been burned. And the air smells of iron."

I looked at her.

"You wrote that down," I said.

"In the margin." She was still looking at the paddocks. "Where nobody would look."

"Is it how you thought?"

"It's pretty," she said. "You were right." Her voice wobbled. "If you're not worried about it."

"Are you worried about it?"

"I'm worried about everything," said Hesper Quill, and laughed, a short shaky laugh, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. "It's what I'm for."

I didn't say anything. I put my arm round her, the way she'd put hers round Lys. She leaned into my side under the cloak, and we stood there and watched the frost go gold.

* * *

Lys found us there. She came across the yard with her own cloak pulled tight and her face still grey with tiredness, and her brown leather purse in her hand, the one with the royal crest.

"Mister Marsh," she said.

"Lys."

"It's first frost."

"I know."

"The tax is due today." She held out the purse. "A hundred and twenty gold. For the commission. The commission was to find out who was buying the frontier crystals. I've found out." She put it in my hand. "You earned every one."

I didn't argue with her. I'd learned that much. I got the brown ledger out of my pocket, where I'd kept it all this time, and Miss Quill took it off me without being asked and did the sum in her head in about a heartbeat.

"Seventy-nine," she said. "And a hundred and twenty." She stopped.

"A hundred and ninety-nine," said Lys.

The three of us looked at each other.

Behind us, out in the home paddock, Brakka sat up. She'd been listening. She shouted something in her own tongue, and Grosh got up off the smokehouse step and came over across the frosty grass, slowly, with great dignity, holding out his hand.

In it, there was one gold crown.

"From the drovers' book," said Grosh. "At the Ram's Head. I put one silver on the Level One, the first week. At very long odds." He put it in my palm. "Brakka says, a warlord's husband does not go to the tax office one short."

I closed my hand on it.

Two hundred gold.

"Right," I said. "Let's go into Thornfell and pay it."