Chapter 157: — "Home"

It rained on the fourth day, exactly as he had said it would, and they arrived on the fifth.

The road climbed for the last eleven miles.

That was the thing about the approach — it climbed, and it kept climbing, and it did it in a way that had been decided rather than dictated by the ground. Somebody had looked at a hill four hundred years ago and had said no, further round, so that they have to come at it the long way and look at it the whole time.

It worked.

It had gone on working for four hundred years.

Black stone.

That was the first thing you saw and it was meant to be. Not grey, not slate — black, wet from the rain, going up out of a hillside in a way that made it unclear at a distance where the hill stopped and the walls began.

Towers, but not many. Four. Placed with the specific restraint of people who could have afforded eleven and had decided that four said more.

Terraces below. Water moving down through them in channels cut in the same stone, and lamps already lit at the fifth hour of the afternoon because the light in that valley went early and always had.

No banners.

That was the other thing. Nothing hung from anything. Not one flag, not one crest, not a single colour on the whole face of it — because a place that needs to tell you whose it is has a problem, and this place had never had that problem.

The wagon came up the last turn and the gates were already open.

They had known for two days.

The man came down the step himself and did not wait for anyone to put a hand out.

He stood in the rain and looked at it — the terraces, the water, the four towers, the lamps — with an expression that was not homecoming and not triumph and not anything a person watching could have named.

Then somebody was in front of him.

Older. Grey coat, good cut, no insignia. The kind of man who has spent forty years being the one who meets things at gates.

He bowed.

Not deeply. The bow of a man who has known somebody since they were extremely small.

“You’re wet.”

“It rained.”

“You said it would.”

“I said it four days ago.”

“You did,” said the older man. “The kitchens have been arguing about it since. Two of them had money on it.”

“Who won.”

“Nobody. They’d both bet on you being right and neither would take the other’s terms.”

There was a pause.

“His majesty is waiting,” said the older man.

“How long has he been waiting.”

“Since the second day.”

“That’s absurd.”

“It is,” the older man agreed, “and I’ve said so, and I’ve been thanked for saying so, and nothing whatever has changed as a result.”

He looked past him at the wagon.

“And the other one?”

“In the wagon.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

The older man’s face did something small and did not commit to it.

“Five days,” he said.

“Five and a half.”

“That’s a long time to—”

“Yes,” said the man.

Two of the household came forward.

They did it properly. They had been told, they had been told the day before as well, and they came up either side of the step with the unhurried competence of people who moved delicate things for a living.

One of them put a hand on the frame.

“Sir — if I can just take that side—”

“No.”

“It’s only that the step’s—”

“No,” he said.

It was not loud.

That was what the older man would remember afterward and would think about for a considerable time. It was not loud at all. It did not need to be.

It went across the yard in the rain and every single person in it stopped what they were doing — the two at the step, the man at the horses, a boy with a lamp forty feet away who had not been part of any of this — and stood absolutely still, the way people do when a sound has told them something about a person they had not previously known.

The two at the step took a full pace back.

“Sir—”

“Nobody touches it.”

“We were only—”

“Nobody touches it,” he said. “Not you. Not him. Not any of you, not on the step, not on the stair, not at any point between this yard and that door, and if I find that somebody has, I will want to know which one, and I will find out which one, and it will be a very long afternoon for everybody.”

Silence in the rain.

“Say yes.”

“…Yes, sir.”

“Say it properly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good,” he said, entirely pleasantly, as though none of the preceding eleven seconds had occurred at all.

He went back up into the wagon himself.

They heard him moving in there. Not fast. He was in there for some time — longer than it should have taken, considerably longer, and the older man stood in the rain and listened to a man in a wagon doing something slowly and carefully and did not let himself think about what.

Then he came out.

With it over his shoulder.

He carried it the way you carry a thing that is heavier than it looks and less stable than it should be — one arm under, one hand flat at the back, the whole of it high on the shoulder so the weight sat on bone rather than muscle.

Wrapped, still. Head to foot.

Nothing showing.

He had, at some point in the wagon, re-tucked the fold at the top. The older man noticed that and noticed that he noticed it and put it away somewhere.

“Sir. Let me at least—”

“You can open doors.”

“…Sir.”

“You can open doors,” he said, “and you can walk in front of me, and you can tell people to get out of the way before I reach them rather than when I reach them. That’s the whole of what you can do, and it’s a great deal, and I’d be grateful for it.”

The older man bowed again.

Slightly deeper this time.

“This way, my lord,” he said.

They went up through the terraces in the rain.

Water in the channels either side, going down past them the whole way, which was the effect the place had been built for and which almost nobody who arrived there was ever in a state to appreciate.

Lamps in brackets. Every fifteen feet. Lit at the fifth hour.

Doors opened ahead of him and closed behind him and nobody in that entire household laid a finger on anything, and the ones who had been in the yard told the ones who had not, quietly, within the hour, and by supper the whole of the lower house knew and the whole of the upper house knew by the following morning.

At the top of the third stair the older man said, without turning round:

“He’ll ask.”

“Yes.”

“He’ll ask straight away. He’s had two days and he isn’t good at two days.”

“I know.”

“And what would you like me to—”

“Tell him I’ll be an hour.”

The older man stopped on the step.

“…An hour.”

“An hour.”

“He’s been waiting since the second day—”

“Then he’ll manage an hour,” said the man, “and he’ll manage it better than I’ll manage being hurried, and you can tell him I said that, and you can tell him I said it exactly like this.”

He went past.

The older man stood on the stair in the lamplight and watched him go up with something on his shoulder wrapped head to foot, and did not follow.

Then he went down to find the king.

Four hundred miles south-west, at the same hour, in the rain, Kael Arden was standing in a yard at Marrow Cross with a piece of paper in his hand that a stable boy had just been extremely reluctant to give him.

It was a name.

It was not her name.

It was the name a person had written in the ledger for the eastbound coach at fourth bell on the night of the ninth, in a hand that was not hers, six lines above where hers should have been.

And he was looking at it.

And he was not moving at all.

The boy was still standing there.

“Sir—”

“How long has that ledger been under the counter.”

“Since the ninth, sir. That’s where the old ones go.”

“And nobody’s looked at it.”

“Nobody’s asked, sir.” The boy shifted. “The gentleman from the crossing wrote. Twice. Asking about a woman. And the answer was no woman got off here, sir, and that was true, and Mr Hesk answered it truthful.”

“Mr Hesk answered a question about a woman getting off.”

“…Yes, sir.”

“Nobody asked him who got on.”

The boy’s face changed.

“No, sir,” he said.

Kael looked at the page.

One name. Written in a hand that leaned the wrong way, in ink that had been thicker than the entries above and below it — a pen that had been dipped fresh for that one line and then not used again.

He looked at the entries either side of it.

Both in the same clerk’s hand. Both in the same thinner ink.

Somebody wrote in that book themselves.

Somebody leaned over a counter in the dark at fourth bell and put a name in a ledger in their own hand and nobody stopped them, because nobody stops a man who looks like he’s allowed.

“Was there a bird,” said Kael.

The boy blinked.

“…Sir?”

“A cage. A bird in a cage.”

And the boy said, “Oh — yes, sir. There was. He asked me to hold it while he wrote.”