Barley left on a Tuesday.
Goodman Brandt came for her himself, with Hollis, in the cold hour after milking. He brought seven silver in a leather purse and did not try to bargain, though Barley was eleven years old and had a split hoof that needed trimming every month. He counted the coins into Tomas's good hand one at a time, on the gatepost, and when he was done he said, "She's a good horse, Tomas," and Tomas said, "She is," and that was all either of them said.
Hollis led her out of the barn.
Adrian had thought he was ready for it. He had said goodbye to Barley in the dark the night before, with his face in her rough warm neck, while she blew at his pockets for apples. He had been sure that he was done. And then Hollis led her out into the grey yard, and she stopped at the gate and turned her big head and looked back at the barn, and whickered, once, the way she did every evening when Tomas came to fill her rack, and Adrian had to go around the side of the house very quickly and stand there for a while.
When he came back, Hollis was waiting by the gate with the lead rope in his fist and a face like thunder.
"I'll brush her every day," Hollis said. "And I'll do her hoof. I watched your da do it. I know how."
"I know you will."
"And when you come back, you can come and see her. Any time. You don't have to ask." Hollis's jaw worked. "And if you want her back, when you're rich, you can buy her back. For seven silver. Not a copper more. I'll make Da promise."
"Hollis-"
"I'm not crying," said Hollis Brandt. "It's cold. My eyes water in the cold." He shoved the lead rope into his other hand, and grabbed Adrian by the back of the neck, and pulled him in, hard, so their foreheads knocked together, the way the Tull twins did when they were being brothers. Then he let go and walked off down the lane with Barley clopping behind him, and did not look back once.
❖ ❖ ❖
The money was laid out on the kitchen table that night, in rows, the way Mara laid out seeds.
Nine silver, from the clay jar under the hearthstone. Three silver in copper, from Tomas's mowing - thirty small brown coins, which Elsie had been allowed to count and had counted four times. Seven silver, from Goodman Brandt.
Nineteen.
"Thirty-five silver and six copper," said Mara quietly. "Less nineteen."
Nobody said the rest of it out loud. They didn't need to. Even Elsie could do that sum.
"And the wagon," said Tomas. "Two places on the wool carter's wagon, east, as far as the Veyrholt road. That's six copper each, and our food. And the candidate's fee at the Guildhall. Brother Fennick says two silver. And a bed for the boy, in the city, for the winter." He rubbed his face with his good hand. "That's five silver we don't have, before we give a single copper to Hobb."
Adrian looked at the three rows of coins. He did his own sums in the dark of his head, and they came out the same way everyone's did.
"I don't need a bed," he said. "I can sleep anywhere. I can work for a bed."
"You're twelve," said his mother.
"I've slept in the barn."
"The barn is ours." Tomas's voice was hard. "In a city you don't know, full of people you don't know, with that man's friends in every room? You'll have a bed with a door that locks, if I have to sell the goats and the table and the roof off this house to get it."
Elsie, who had been lying on the hearth with her chin in her hands, sat up.
"You could sell my bed," she said. "The one with curtains. He hasn't bought it yet. So you can have the money back."
Nobody laughed. Mara reached down and pulled Elsie into her lap, very tightly, and held her there.
❖ ❖ ❖
Jory Keel came the next morning, and he put fifteen silver on the table.
He came in the grey dawn, and he did not knock. He walked into the kitchen with his dogs at his heels and his longbow on his shoulder and the mud of two days' walking on his boots, and he reached into his leather jerkin and took out a fat purse with the seal of the Crown's treasury at Westmarch stamped on it in red wax, and he dropped it on the table in front of Tomas with a heavy, clinking thump.
Tomas stared at it.
"Bounty," said Jory. "Hollowbeast. Wolf. Paid in Westmarch yesterday noon, on the Inquisitor's paper." He wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Fifteen silver. Didn't count it. Clerk did. Clerk's a thief, so it might be fourteen."
"Jory," said Tomas. "That's yours."
"Isn't."
"Your name's on the paper."
"Isn't my kill." The old hunter's colorless eyes went to Adrian, standing at the hearth, and stayed there a long moment, and came back. "Never took money for another man's kill. Not going to start at sixty-three."
"I won't take it," said Tomas. His voice shook. "I can't. You've already lied to the Inquisition for us. You walked two days to Westmarch-"
"Walked two days for my own pleasure. Needed boots." Jory lifted one foot. The boot was the same boot he had worn for as long as Adrian could remember, patched at the toe with leather from a different animal. "Didn't find any." He looked at Tomas steadily. "Call it payment for a lantern, then. Boy broke yours. On my wolf. Lanterns are dear."
Tomas Vale looked at the old hunter for a long time. His face was working.
Then he put his good hand flat on the purse, and closed his eyes, and nodded.
Jory grunted. He turned to go. At the door, he stopped, and without turning around, said:
"Boy. Walk with me a bit."
❖ ❖ ❖
They walked to the edge of Ashwood.
Jory did not say anything the whole way. He walked the way he always walked, silent, weight on the outside of the foot, eyes three paces ahead. And after a while Adrian realized that he was walking the same way, beside him, and that Jory had noticed, and was not saying anything about it.
At the edge of the trees, where the barley stubble ended and the first old ash trunks began, Jory stopped.
"Your mother's sending you to a city," he said.
"Veyrholt. For the Guild."
"Never been to a city. Went to Westmarch once, to be married. Didn't like it." Jory spat. "Too many people walking heel-first. Sounds like a herd of cows." He was quiet. "Cities are woods, though. Same as this. Just the trees are people. You watch the ground ahead. Not your feet. Your feet'll find their own way."
"I remember."
"Aye. You remember everything. I've seen." Jory's colorless eyes came to him. "Saw you in the field, after. On your knees. Hands gone grey. And that ash, laid out in the shape of the beast, like a shadow on a wall." He did not blink. "Seen a lot of things killed. Forty years. Seen Hollowbeasts shot and burned and speared and drowned. Never once seen one come apart."
Adrian said nothing.
"I'm not asking what you did," said Jory Keel. "Don't want to know. Old man. Want to die in my bed." He looked out at the wood. "But I'll tell you one thing, and you listen, because it's the only thing I know that's worth a copper." He turned his head. "Whatever you did to that wolf. Don't do it in a city."
"Why?"
"Because in a wood, when something comes apart, only the crows see." Jory hitched his longbow higher on his shoulder. "In a city, everybody's a crow."
He walked into Ashwood without saying goodbye, and his dogs went with him, and within ten steps Adrian could not hear him at all.
❖ ❖ ❖
The rest of the week went very fast and very slowly at the same time.
Mara sewed. She sat up every night by the fire with a candle and her needle, and she sewed a pocket into the inside of Adrian's good jacket, under the arm, where no one would ever look, and put the Crown writ inside it, folded in oilcloth. She sewed a second pocket into the waist of his trousers for coins. She let down the sleeves of his shirts, which were too short, and made two new ones from an old dress of her own. And she talked while she sewed, in a low even voice, not looking up, the way she had taught him letters.
"You'll be enrolled at the Guildhall. They'll ask your Trait. You'll say Null, and they'll write it, and they'll look at you the way the village looked at you after the Sounding. Let them." A stitch. "You'll choose a Profession to be a candidate for. Choose something small. Hunter, maybe. Not smith, not scholar, nothing that makes them wonder how a farm boy thinks he'll manage it. Something you could have learned from Jory." A stitch. "Keep your hands still. Keep your eyes on people's faces, not the air in front of them. If a man in a blue stole is in the room, leave it. If you hear a bell, of any kind, leave the street." A stitch. "And if you see a black coat, Adrian. Any black coat. You walk heel first."
"Yes, Mother."
"And you write to me. Every week. Brother Fennick will read your letters to me if I'm ever not able to." She bit off a thread. "In common script. About the weather and the food and how cold your room is. And nothing else. Ever."
"Yes, Mother."
She looked up then. Her face in the candlelight was very thin.
"I walked north for two months," she said, "with nothing but a pilgrim's cloak. And I was nineteen." Her voice did not waver. "You're twelve, and you're taking your father, and you have a coat with pockets, and a writ, and a law older than the Canon." She looked back down at her needle. "You will be fine."
It was the first time in his life Adrian had ever known his mother to lie to him, and he loved her for it more than he could say.
❖ ❖ ❖
On the fifth day, a letter came from Veyrholt.
It came with the wool carter, who was also the post, and who stopped at the Plough every tenth day on his way east and his way back. He brought a letter for the Colls from Mira, which Goodwife Coll read aloud to half the village at the well, and cried over.
And he brought a second letter, much shorter, folded into a neat square, and addressed in a small, precise hand to Adrian Vale, Harrowfield, with thanks for the chalk.
Adrian had not given Mira any chalk. All my chalk had been the second line of her packing list.
The seal had been broken and pressed back down. Somebody had read it. The wards' letters are read, Mira had said. By the Sisters. Anything that isn't praising the Luminant gets cut out with a knife.
There were no holes in this one. It was very short, and very dull, and written in perfect common Temple script.
Dear Adrian, I pray every morning and every night. Sister Ottilie says I have fine hands. Every day we practice heat in the forge. Hollis must be very strong now. Tell him I said so. Everyone here is kind to me. Rain has not stopped since I came. Every blessing, Mira Coll
Adrian read it at the kitchen table. He read it a second time the ordinary way, and felt nothing but a small ache at how unlike Mira it sounded. Then he put his finger at the top of the left margin and ran it down, one line at a time, the way they had in the chapel loft.
I. S. E. H. E. R. E.
He frowned. ISE HERE. It was almost something. It was so nearly something that it was worse than nothing.
Mira did not make mistakes with her letters. Not ever.
He turned the paper toward the window, where the light was better, and looked at the top of it. Above Dear Adrian, so neatly that you could hardly see it, the paper had been sliced straight across its whole width. A thin strip had been taken out - exactly the height of one line of Mira's small, precise writing - and the two edges had been pasted back together with a little flour and water.
One line gone. The very first one.
Adrian sat very still.
He did not know what that line had said. It might have been anything. Something about the dormitory, or the Sisters, or a building the wards were not supposed to write home about. Whatever it was, a Sister in Veyrholt had read it and taken a knife to it. And whatever it was, it had begun with a letter that came before I-S-E.
There was only one letter it could be, in a letter from Mira Coll to Adrian Vale.
L.
LISE HERE.
❖ ❖ ❖
❖ ❖ ❖
He did not tell his mother. He did not tell his father. He folded Mira's letter very small and put it into the hidden pocket under the arm of his good jacket, beside the Crown writ, and that night, lying in the loft, he opened the grey window.
She's alive, he thought. Lise Fenwick. Mira saw her. In Veyrholt.
[Or she saw someone she thought was Lise.]
[A line was cut. You do not know what the line said.]
He thought about that, and knew it was true, and did not care.
I'm going to Veyrholt, he told the window.
[Yes.]
The day after tomorrow.
[Yes.]
And I'm going to find out.
[Adrian.]
[You said you wanted two things.]
[You are about to go looking for the second one.]
[While the first one stays here.]
Adrian lay in the dark and listened to the house. The hearth stones ticking. Elsie's cold feet. His father's breathing through the wall, catching on a snore. His mother's needle, still going, down by the fire, stitching a pocket in the dark.
I know, he thought.