Chapter 156: — "Ours"

The wagon did eleven miles that day and the man inside it did not once look out of the window.

There was a great deal of window to look out of. That was the sort of wagon it was — the kind that has to be built to a commission, because nobody keeps one standing in a yard waiting for a buyer. Four wheels shod in something quieter than iron. A floor that did not move when the road did.

Inside it was warm.

Lamps in gimbals, so the flame stayed level whatever the road was doing. A low table fixed down, and a rug across it that had not come from this country or any adjacent one. A brazier vented through the roof, which is an absurd thing to build into a wagon, and which somebody had built into this one anyway.

And along one wall, a bench long enough for a person to lie on without folding.

A person was lying on it.

Wrapped. Head to foot, in something heavy and dark, tucked under at the sides the way you tuck a thing you don’t want shifting on a road.

Nothing showed.

Not a hand. Not a strand of hair. Not the shape of a face under the fold at the top — because the fold at the top had been arranged, deliberately, by somebody who had taken his time over it and had gone back and adjusted it twice.

It was breathing.

That was the only thing that could be said about it with any confidence at all: that somewhere under the wool, the shape rose and fell. Slowly. At a rate that suggested something a good deal deeper than sleep.

“Eleven miles,” said the man.

He said it pleasantly. He said everything pleasantly.

“That’s poor. I’d like it to be better and it won’t be, because the road east of here is what it is and there’s no fixing it in a fortnight.”

He poured something into a cup. Drank about half. Set it down on the fixed table, where it did not slide.

“Four days,” he said. “Perhaps five.”

He looked at the roof.

“Five. It’ll rain.”

He crossed the wagon.

He did not hurry. There was nowhere in the wagon to hurry to.

“Five days is nothing,” he said, to the bench. “After all this. Five days is — I’ve done considerably longer. I’ve done years. I’ve done them well, and I never once complained about it anywhere it could be heard, and I’d like that noticed eventually.”

He sat down on the edge of the bench.

“Not by them,” he said. “By you.”

The wrapped shape did not move.

“They didn’t know,” he said.

His voice went down a little. Not softer. Down.

“That’s the part I want understood, when there’s time for it. Not one of them knew. They had you in front of them for years — cheerfully, every day — and they looked straight past it, every single one, and I stood there and watched them do it and said nothing at all.”

He put his hand on the blanket. Flat, at about the height of a shoulder.

“Do you know what that costs?”

The lamps swung and levelled.

“Nobody does,” he said. “That’s the point of it. If it had cost visibly it wouldn’t have worked.”

“And now it’s five days,” he said, “and then you’re mine.”

He let that sit.

“Properly. Not the way it’s been. Not borrowed. Not handed round among people who had no idea what they were holding and who put it down the moment something else came into the room.”

His hand moved. Down, and back. Once.

The way you smooth a thing that does not need smoothing.

“We’ll be one,” he said. “That’s the word. There isn’t a better one — I’ve looked, and there isn’t, and I’ve had a long time to look.”

Again. Down, and back.

“And nobody separates that,” he said. “Nobody at all. Not one of them—”

He stopped.

Then made a sound. Once. Short, from the chest, with nothing in it that resembled humour.

“Not even that one,” he said.

And laughed.

The laugh went on about four seconds.

Then stopped, all at once, the way a door stops.

He sat very still with his hand where it was and did not move it and did not say anything else for a long while. The wagon went on underneath them. The lamps hung level. Outside, the light started going the colour it goes before rain.

His hand did not come away.

Some time later he stood, and went to the shutter at the front, and opened it about four inches.

Cold came in.

He whistled.

It was not a note. It was three sounds, low, in a particular order — the second shorter than it ought to have been, the third falling off at the end, stopping a half-beat before a person would expect it to. It did not sound like a call for anything.

It sounded like the end of a sentence in a language nobody spoke.

Nothing happened for eleven seconds.

Then something came down out of a grey sky and put itself on his forearm.

It was an eagle, more or less.

Nothing that would be named as one in that country, or the next, or the four beyond it. Larger through the body than the wings accounted for. The wrong colour entirely — a dark that turned into some other colour when the light moved across it, and pale barring underneath in a pattern that did not repeat anywhere along its length.

It weighed almost nothing. He did not brace for it.

Its eyes were not a hawk’s eyes.

It settled. It did not mantle. It did not bate. It did not open its wings at all.

And it did not look at the wrapped shape on the bench. Not once. Not even the flick that every bird alive gives a new shape in a small space.

He held out his other hand.

The bird put something into it.

He read it at the shutter with the wind coming in, and it took him about four seconds.

Then he said, “Mm,” and dropped it into the brazier, where it went up without smoking — which is not a thing paper does.

He stood there a moment longer.

“They’re being thorough,” he said.

The bird said nothing, being a bird.

“I’d have been disappointed if they weren’t.”

He fed it something off the table. It took it without moving its feet.

Then he closed the shutter, and the wagon went dark by four inches, and he went back and sat down on the edge of the bench.

Somewhere south, in a stable yard at fifth bell, Kael Arden was holding a saddle.

“Put it down.”

“No.”

“Kael.”

“I’ve done nine stops on that road twice. I’m doing Marrow itself, and then the coast road.”

“And after that?”

“I’ll find something.”

Rowan did not move out of the doorway.

“Six days,” he said. “You’ve slept nine hours in six days. You’ve been through nine posting houses and got nothing and you’re proposing to ride four days to a town you have already written to.”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

“Because a letter gets you an answer from a man who’s been asked a question by post,” said Kael. “Standing in front of him gets you the thing he didn’t think was worth writing down.”

Rowan looked at him a long moment.

Then stood out of the doorway.

“Take the grey,” he said. “The bay’s finished and you haven’t noticed.”

He came back four days later with nothing.

Daren was at the house.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Daren said: “Her mother’s stopped asking.”

“…What?”

“Every morning for six days. Has anyone heard.” He was turning bread over in his hands and not eating it. “This morning she didn’t. She said good morning, and asked about the weather, and went upstairs.”

Kael sat down.

“That’s not—”

“I know what it’s not.”

“Daren—”

“I’m saying,” said Daren, “that I have watched a woman stop asking a question in nine days, and I’ve decided I’m not going to be the next one, and I’d like that stated in advance so you don’t have to keep an eye on me.”

Tax came in through the window past midnight.

He landed on the back of a chair, which he never did.

“North’s finished.”

“You said that four days ago.”

“I said he didn’t go north. Now I’ve done the rest.” He shifted his feet. “Eleven miles a day, four days out. Every road, every ditch, every place a man carrying a bag could have turned off. There’s nothing. He was never there.”

“So.”

“So east is a coach road watched by four hundred people a day,” said Tax. “West is the sea. South is where we’re sitting.”

The room went quiet.

“East,” said Kael.

“East.”

“Same road as her.”

“Same road as her,” said Tax, “and I’d like somebody else to say the next part, because I’ve carried it north and back and I’m tired.”

Nobody said it.

After a while Tax said it himself, flatly, to the chair.

“An hour ahead,” he said. “Not behind.”

Kael did not sleep.

He lay on his back with the ceiling four feet away and took the day apart and laid it out and looked at each piece, which was the thing he had done every night for a year.

Nine stops.

Two letters, same runner, same day.

A coach fare paid to the end of a line she didn’t ride.

A man who left north and was never on the north road.

And at some point past three, in the dark, with no warning at all:

She’s better than all of us.

That’s the thing nobody’s said. She’s spent six years being deliberately impossible to find in a country made of rock, sixty-seven times, and she was best in her year by the third.

If Aina didn’t want to be found, we would not find her.

He lay there.

So either she’s not being found because she doesn’t want to be —

— or she isn’t the one deciding.

He put his hand over his eyes and did not move it for a long time.