Steward Hobb took twenty-nine silver on the gatepost, and wrote a receipt for it in his round, careful hand, and did not look happy about any of it.
"Twenty-nine," he said, blotting the ink with his sleeve. "Against thirty-five and six. That leaves six silver and six copper owing." He looked at Tomas. "And the plough-horse gone, which was the security on the last loan."
"You've got the silver instead of the horse," said Tomas. "You'd rather have silver."
"I'd rather have silver," Hobb agreed miserably. He folded the receipt. He folded it again. He stood by the gate turning it in his soft fingers, and Adrian watched him the way he had learned to watch - feet and back and breath - and saw the steward's shoulders tighten and loosen, tighten and loosen, like a man arguing with himself.
"His Lordship said first frost," Hobb said finally. "His Lordship didn't say what to do if a family paid most of it. His Lordship doesn't generally get told when families pay most of it. Most families don't." He cleared his throat. "I'm going to write in the book that the Vale account is in good standing, with a balance carried to the spring quarter, at the usual interest. And if His Lordship asks why, I'm going to say it was on account of the Hollowbeast, and the harvest, and the poor feeling in the barony just now." He handed Tomas the receipt. "And if His Lordship doesn't ask, I'm not going to say anything at all."
Tomas looked at the receipt. Then he looked at the steward.
"Thank you, Aldous," he said.
"Don't." Hobb climbed onto his bay gelding with some difficulty. "It's seven silver in spring, with the interest. Seven, Tomas. And your knee's no better, and your horse is gone, and your boy's off to the city." He gathered the reins. "I've done you no favors. I've only put the rope a bit further down the road."
He rode away. The silver studs on his bridle glinted in the cold sun.
"Five silver left," said Mara quietly, behind them. "For the wagon, and the fee, and a bed."
"It's enough," said Tomas.
It was not enough. But it was something, and it was more than they'd had a week ago, and nobody said otherwise.
❖ ❖ ❖
Brother Fennick sent for Adrian that afternoon.
Not to the chapel. The new Brother from Westmarch had the chapel now - a thin, earnest young man called Brother Wendel, who had rung the noon bell at eleven three days in a row and had put his foot through the rotten step of the pulpit. Fennick had moved his things to the cottage behind the chapel where he had always slept, and it was there that Adrian found him, sitting in a sagging chair by a smoky fire, with the enormous brown volume of the Laws of the Crown open across his knees and a magnifying glass the size of a saucer in his hand.
"Volume the Fourth," the old priest said, without looking up. "Of Mills, Weirs, and the Rights of Fishing. Fascinating. Did you know that any man who can prove his grandfather fished a pool may fish it forever, even if the lord of the land forbids it?" He lowered the glass. "Your father's rock pool. The deep one under the alders. I think I could make a case."
"Brother, you sent for me."
"I did." Fennick closed the book with a thump that sent up a cloud of dust. "Sit. There's a stool. Mind the cat."
There was no cat. There was a small grey heap of knitting on the stool that might, in bad light and to old eyes, have been a cat. Adrian moved it carefully and sat.
Fennick reached into the drawer of the little table beside him and took out two things.
The first was a letter. It was sealed with plain brown wax, pressed with the old priest's thumb, and addressed on the outside in his shaky hand: To the Clerk of Candidates, the Guildhall of Profession, Veyrholt.
"A letter of passage," said Fennick. "Saying that I witnessed your declaration, and that you are who you say you are, and that you've come to the Guildhall of your own will and not been sent by anyone to make trouble." He handed it over. "Clerks like letters. It makes them feel important. A clerk who feels important is a clerk who puts your name at the top of the roll instead of the bottom."
"Thank you, Brother."
"The second thing," said Fennick, "is more complicated."
It was a piece of paper, folded in four. When Adrian opened it, it was a map.
It was not a good map. The old priest had drawn it himself, in brown ink, with a hand that shook so badly that every line wavered like the edge of a river. But it was a map of a city. There was a long, wandering line that must be a river, and a rough ring that must be walls, and a scattering of little boxes with words beside them in tiny common script. Guildhall. Athenaeum. Temple. Bridge of Bells. Fish Market.
And outside the ring of the walls, to the south, beyond a cluster of boxes labelled Tanneries - Do Not Go Downwind, there was a single box on its own, in a place that the shaky brown line had marked as marsh, and next to it Fennick had drawn a small, careful cross, and written a name.
Brannoc Hale.
"I was a Brother in Veyrholt," said Fennick, "for twenty years. Until thirty years ago, when they sent me here. I was assistant to the chaplain of the Guildhall." He looked into the smoky fire. "Brannoc Hale was a Hunter. Silver rank. The best in the city, some said. Big man, loud, drank too much and laughed too much and never once, in all the years I knew him, missed a shot he meant to make." A pause. "He'd be past sixty now, if he's alive. He was hardly more than thirty then. He was alive four years ago; I had a letter from the chaplain who took my place. He said Brannoc was living in a shack by the south marsh. He said he'd lost an arm."
"Why?" said Adrian. "Why are you giving me his name?"
Fennick was quiet for a long moment.
"The last spring I was there," he said, "there was a Hollow opened in the Veyrholt Underways. Under the city. Just a small one. A handful of people touched by it. Some children." He turned his magnifying glass over in his fingers. "The Inquisition came, of course. And they went through the lower city, house by house, with their iron compasses, finding everyone who'd been touched. And they found a little girl hiding in a Hunter's lodge, near the river. The Hunter who lived there had taken her in. He'd found her in the tunnels that winter, and carried her out, and kept her. And she had grey in her fingers."
Adrian's hands, under their fading stain, went very still.
"The Inquisitor told him to hand her over," said Fennick. "For purification. It was the law. It is the law." The old priest's voice was very soft. "And Brannoc Hale said no."
"What happened?"
"What do you think happened? They took her anyway. They had twenty men. He had a bow and a temper." Fennick sighed. "He broke a Grey Watch sergeant's jaw. The Guild stripped him of his license that same week, on the Temple's complaint, and it was only because he'd saved half the lower city from Hollowbeasts over twenty years that he wasn't hanged. He lost everything. His rank, his lodge, his friends. I heard he lost the arm later, drunk, in a fight with something in the marsh." He looked at Adrian. "But he said no. To an Inquisitor. With the law on her side, and twenty men. For a child that wasn't even his."
The fire hissed.
"That's rarer than you'd think, Adrian," said Brother Fennick. "In sixty years, I've met a great many good people. Kind people. Brave people. I've met very, very few who said no when it would cost them everything." He smiled faintly. "Your mother. Your father, at his gate. Now I suppose me, at last. And Brannoc Hale."
Adrian looked down at the little cross on the shaky map.
"Will he help me?"
"Almost certainly not." Fennick chuckled. "He'll tell you to go away. He'll probably throw something. He hated the Temple before they ruined him, and he hates it more now, and I don't imagine he's grown any fonder of children who come knocking with letters from priests." He leaned forward in his sagging chair. "So don't bring him a letter from a priest. Don't bring him anything. Just go and stand outside his door. And when he says no, ask again."
"And if he keeps saying no?"
"Then you'll have learned something about asking," said the old priest. "Which is more than most boys learn in a lifetime."
❖ ❖ ❖
On the way back from Fennick's cottage, Adrian went past the horse trough in the square, and Tam Fenwick was sitting on the edge of it.
He was always sitting on the edge of it. He had been sitting there, it seemed to Adrian, for a year. The village had stopped seeing him the way you stop seeing a gatepost.
Adrian had not decided to stop. He stopped.
Tam looked up. His eyes were red, but not as red as they had been at the Plough. There was less of the sour smell. His beard had been trimmed - badly, with a knife, but trimmed.
"Vale boy," he said. "Heard you're off. To the city."
"Tomorrow. At dawn."
"Heard you stood in front of that Truthbearer. And she couldn't see a thing." Tam's mouth moved. It was not a smile. "Heard your da stood in his gate with a fork. And Bet Marsh came out with a rolling pin." He looked at his hands. "I wasn't there. I was asleep in Hatty's stable. Drunk." His voice cracked. "Nobody stood in my gate. For my girl. Not even me."
Adrian did not know what to say. So he said the thing he had decided, lying in the loft, that he would not say.
"Goodman Fenwick. I'm going to Veyrholt. I'm going to look for her."
Tam went very still.
"I don't know anything," Adrian said quickly. "I don't know where she is. I don't know if - I don't know anything. But I'll be in the city. And I'll look. I promise."
For a long moment, Tam Fenwick did not say anything at all. He looked at Adrian with his ruined red eyes, and his cooper's hands began to shake on the edge of the trough.
Then he reached inside his shirt and pulled something out over his head. It was a leather cord, dark with sweat and age. On it hung a single wooden bead, round and smooth and pale, carved from a piece of ash, with a tiny L cut into one side.
"Made two," said Tam hoarsely. "When she was small. One for her, one for me. She wore hers every day." He held it out. "She had it on. When they put her in the carriage." His hand shook so badly the bead swung. "If you find her. If you ever. You show her that. She'll know you came from me. She'll know I didn't-" He stopped. "She'll know."
Adrian took the cord. The bead was warm from Tam's skin. He put it over his own head and tucked it inside his shirt, beside Mira's letter.
"I'll look," he said again.
Tam Fenwick nodded. He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. Then he stood up from the edge of the horse trough, for the first time in a year, and walked across the square to his old closed-up workshop, and stood in front of the door for a long time. And as Adrian turned up the western lane, he heard, behind him, very faintly, the sound of a rusted bolt being drawn back.
❖ ❖ ❖
That night was the last supper.
Nobody called it that. Mara made mutton stew with the last of Goodman Dunn's sheep, and barley bread, and there was a honey cake that Bet Marsh had left on the step without knocking. Elsie ate three pieces and was sick and did not care. Tomas told the story of the time Rowan fell out of the apple tree and landed on the pig. He told it badly, and laughed in the wrong places, and everyone laughed anyway.
Rowan was not there. Rowan was still confined to the chapel loft, pending his review, and Harl had refused Mara's request to let him come to supper. But at the end of the meal, when Mara was clearing the bowls, there was a scratch at the window, and when Adrian opened it, there was nobody there. Only a folded scrap of prayer-book paper on the sill, weighted down with a pebble.
Riding to Westmarch tomorrow. For the board. Dace escorting. Dawn. Same road as the wool wagon for eight miles. Look for me.
Adrian read it twice and gave it to his mother, and she read it and gave it to his father, who could not read, and she read it to him aloud, and Tomas's face did something complicated and then smoothed out.
"Eight miles," said Tomas. "That's a good long way."
❖ ❖ ❖
When the fire was banked and Elsie was asleep, Mara called Adrian to the hearth and gave him one more thing.
It was a small coil of blue thread. The same blue she tied her herbs with, the same blue she had learned from the Sisters of the Sounding.
"For your shirts," his mother said. "When the buttons come off. They always come off." She closed his fingers over it. "And if you ever meet a woman in Veyrholt who ties her herbs in blue thread, you don't tell her your name. And you don't tell her mine."
"Yes, Mother."
She held his hand a moment longer. She did not say anything else. She did not need to.
❖ ❖ ❖
He lay awake in the loft for the last time with his jacket rolled under his head, so he could feel the stiff shapes of the writ and Mira's letter and Fennick's map through the cloth, and Lise Fenwick's wooden bead against his chest.
The grey window opened without being asked.
[Dissonance: 0]
It was the first time it had said zero since the barley field. Adrian looked at the number for a long time. Under the last faint shadow of the walnut stain, his hands were only hands.
Brother Fennick says Brannoc Hale will say no, he told the window.
[Probably.]
He says I should ask again.
[Yes.]
What if Brannoc won't teach me? What if nobody will? I've got no Trait. No money. No letter from anybody important. I've only got you.
The window was quiet for a moment.
[You have more than that.]
[You have your father's swing, and your own.]
[You have Jory's feet.]
[You have a law older than the Canon, a letter from a priest, a map, a thread, and a bead.]
[You have a mother who reads the King's script and a brother who stood in a lane.]
[You have a friend who hides messages in dull letters.]
[And you have eight miles of road tomorrow with your brother on it.]
A pause.
[That is not nothing.]
Adrian lay in the dark and listened to the house for the last time. The hearth stones ticking. Elsie's cold feet. His father's breathing through the thin wall. His mother, not sleeping either, standing by the banked fire in the dark, the way she had stood on the morning of the Sounding. As though she needed the warmth.
[Nothing will be given,] the grey window wrote, very faint.
And then, beneath it, a line he had not seen since the first night in the barn.
[Everything may be learned.]
[Go and learn it.]