The wool carter's name was Orrin Pike, and he had exactly two opinions about passengers: they were heavier than wool, and they talked more.
"Boy sits on the back," he said, looking at Adrian in the grey dawn outside the Crooked Plough. "Man with the bad leg sits up front with me, because I'm not having him fall off and sue me. Nobody sings. Nobody asks how far it is. It's four days. It was four days yesterday and it'll be four days tomorrow." He spat into the mud. "Six copper each, paid now. I don't do credit. Credit's how my brother lost his cart."
Tomas counted twelve coppers into his palm. Orrin Pike bit one of them, for no reason Adrian could see, and put them in a pouch that hung inside his shirt, and climbed up onto the seat of a wagon piled so high with bales of raw grey fleece that it looked like a small, lopsided cloud.
It was not yet light. It was cold enough that Adrian's breath smoked. And the whole village of Harrowfield had come out into the square to watch him go.
He had not expected that. He had expected his mother and Elsie. Perhaps Hollis. He had not expected Goodwife Marsh in her nightcap with a honey cake wrapped in a cloth, or the Tull twins, still half asleep, poking each other, or Goodman Dunn and both his sons, or Old Hatty standing in the door of the Plough with her arms folded and a cold pie in a basket at her feet. He had not expected Jory Keel, at the very edge of the square, leaning on his longbow with his dogs pressed against his knees, not coming any closer.
"Hatty says you're to have the pie," said Bet Marsh, pushing the honey cake into his arms. "And that's from me. It's got plums in. Don't eat it all on the first day." She looked at him, and her mouth wobbled, and she said very fast, "I'm sorry I said what I said on the hill. About the Abyss. About who." And then she went back to her husband and hid her face in his shoulder.
Adrian did not know what to say. So he said, "Thank you, Goodwife," and she nodded without looking up.
❖ ❖ ❖
Elsie did not cry.
She stood beside their mother in her too-big shawl with her fists jammed into the pockets of her coat, and she glared at the wool wagon as if it had done something unforgivable. She glared at Orrin Pike. She glared at the fleece. When Adrian came to say goodbye to her, she glared at him too.
"You didn't buy it," she said.
"The bed?"
"The bed with curtains. Or the dog." Her chin was jutting so hard it was trembling. "You shook on it. In the meadow."
"I know."
"So you have to come back. Because you owe me." She pulled one fist out of her pocket and shoved it at him. "Here."
It was a button.
It was a large, flat, dark brown button made of horn, with four holes, and a chip out of one edge. Adrian knew it at once. It had been on Elsie's coat - this coat, the one she was wearing - the top button, the one under her chin. She had found it in the road outside the chapel when she was four, and made their mother sew it on, and called it her lucky button, and had once bitten Oswin Tull for trying to pull it off.
There was a loose thread hanging from the top of her coat, where it had been.
"It's lucky," Elsie said fiercely. "It's the luckiest thing in the whole valley. It got me through the wolf. So you have it now." Her face was red. "And you have to bring it back. It's only a lend."
Adrian closed his fingers over the button. It was warm from her hand.
He did not trust his voice. So he got down on his knees in the mud of the square, in front of the whole village, and put his arms around his little sister, and she let him, for a long time, and did not say a word, and did not cry.
When he let go, his mother was kneeling beside them both. She took the button out of his hand, and took a needle from the collar of her dress, and a length of blue thread from her pocket - the blue thread - and sewed Elsie's lucky button onto the inside of his jacket, over his heart, beside the hidden pocket with the writ. She did it very fast and very neatly, the way she did everything, and bit off the thread with her teeth.
"There," said Mara. "Now it can't fall off."
She kissed his forehead. She did not say anything else. She did not need to.
❖ ❖ ❖
Orrin Pike clucked to his two shaggy brown horses, and the wool wagon lurched into motion.
Adrian sat on the back with his legs hanging down over the tailboard and his bundle in his lap and Hatty's pie and Bet Marsh's honey cake beside him, and watched Harrowfield go.
It went slowly. The square first, with all the faces in it. Hollis, waving his cap over his head like a flag. The Tull twins. Brother Fennick, who had come out after all, leaning on his stick in the door of his cottage, lifting one shaking hand. Tam Fenwick's workshop, with its door standing open for the first time in a year, and a thin thread of smoke coming out of the chimney. The chapel, with its single bell and its round window. The mill wheel, creaking. Then the eastern lane, and the Colls' orchard, and the long bend by the river, and then the last thing he saw was his mother, standing in the middle of the road with Elsie beside her, not waving, not moving, just standing there with her hands clasped in front of her the way she had stood by the chapel wall on the day of the Sounding.
Then the road turned behind the mill, and they were gone.
Adrian sat on the back of the wool wagon and stared at the empty road. The grey window hung faintly at the edge of his sight. It did not write anything.
At the very edge of the last field, by the Ashwood road, a lean brown figure with a longbow was standing on top of a stone wall, perfectly still, watching the wagon pass. Jory Keel lifted one hand, once. Then he turned and walked away into the trees.
❖ ❖ ❖
The squires caught up with them a mile past the ford.
Adrian heard the horses first. Two of them, coming at a trot from behind. He tensed - he could not help it - and the grey window flickered, and then did not go dark, and did not write anything. Just two horses.
They came up alongside the wagon, one on each side. On the left, the tall fair squire with the long face and the watchful mouth. Dace. And on the right, in his white surcoat over grey, with his steel cap on his head and his short sword at his hip, sitting very straight on a Temple grey, was Rowan.
"Squire Dace," said Rowan to Orrin Pike, in his careful squire's voice. "Squire Vale. Of the Harrowfield detachment, Grey Watch. Riding to the Westmarch chapter house on Temple business. We'll share your road as far as the Westmarch fork."
"I don't take passengers on horseback," said Orrin Pike. "Horseback's free."
"Understood, goodman."
"And nobody sings."
"Understood."
And that was all. Rowan did not look at the back of the wagon. He did not look at his father, sitting up front beside the carter with his bad leg stretched out on the footboard. He rode on the right-hand side of the wool wagon with his eyes on the road ahead, and on the left-hand side Squire Dace rode with his eyes on Rowan.
For a long time, nobody said anything at all.
Adrian watched them. He could not help watching them. He watched Dace, because it seemed important to know what Dace looked like, and what he did, and how he sat on a horse. Dace rode well. He rode like someone who had ridden since he was small, loose in the hips, not bouncing. His boots were very good - soft brown leather, better than the Watch issued. He was humming. Very quietly, under his breath, almost without seeming to know he was doing it. It was a hymn Adrian knew from chapel, the Hymn of the Seven Lights, and Dace hummed it flat on the fourth line every time, the same wrong note, where it should have gone up and went down instead.
Adrian filed it away with the other things.
❖ ❖ ❖
After the first mile, Rowan began to talk to their father.
He did not talk to Adrian. He talked, in his careful squire's voice, to Tomas Vale, about ordinary things. About the road. About the price of wool. About the river, and how high it was, and whether the pike would be biting in the deep pool under the alders this late in the year.
"Doubt it," said Tomas. "Too cold. They go down deep."
"Pity," said Rowan. "I'd have liked to have one more go before the frost. Last time I was there, somebody knocked all our poles in the water."
"Somebody," said Tomas.
"Somebody who swung first."
"Somebody," said Adrian, from the back of the wagon, "who got pushed first."
Rowan did not turn his head. But the corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, under the rim of his steel cap. And on the other side of the wagon, Squire Dace stopped humming for a moment, and looked from one Vale to the other, and then started humming again.
"I heard," said Rowan, still to their father, "that the deep pool's got a new pike in it. A big one. Moved in from downstream. Very clever. Very patient. It's been lying under the bank all autumn, just watching, waiting for something to swim past." He paused. "And I heard it's not the only one. I heard there's another one, just like it, in every pool from here to the city."
Tomas was quiet for a moment.
"Big pools in the city," he said at last.
"Very big," said Rowan. "Lots of places for a pike to lie."
Adrian sat on the back of the wagon and listened to his brother talking about fish, and understood every word.
❖ ❖ ❖
At the third mile, Rowan asked their father how the knee was holding up, and Tomas said it was fine, and Rowan said he didn't believe him, and Tomas said he was a squire of the Temple and ought to have more faith. Dace laughed at that - a short, surprised, genuine laugh - and then looked annoyed with himself.
At the fifth mile, Rowan mentioned, very casually, that the Watch-Sergeant at the Westmarch chapter house had a famous temper, and that the last squire to go before a board of review there under Article Nine had been sent home without his white in under an hour.
"Ah," said Tomas quietly.
"I'm not worried," said Rowan, in a voice that said he was very worried. "I only stood in a lane. On my watch. As ordered."
At the sixth mile, they passed the old boundary stone of the barony, and Rowan was quiet for a long time.
At the seventh mile, Adrian said, without really meaning to, "Rowan. The scar."
Dace's head turned.
Rowan's did not. But his hands went still on the reins.
"On your ribs," Adrian said. "The long one. Mother saw it. When we came back from the river."
For a while there was only the creak of the wagon, and the clop of four sets of hooves, and the wind in the bare hedges.
"Patrol," said Rowan. "In the hills past Westmarch. In the spring." His voice was very flat. "It's healed."
"What happened?"
"Ask me in Veyrholt," said Rowan.
He did not say anything else. And on the other side of the wagon, Squire Dace had stopped humming, and was not looking at Rowan anymore. He was looking at the road ahead, with a very careful, very empty face, and Adrian - who had spent two months learning what careful, empty faces meant - watched him and thought: He knows. Whatever it was. He was there.
❖ ❖ ❖
The Westmarch fork came at the eighth mile, just as Rowan had said, at a place where an old wayside shrine of the Luminant stood at the crossing of the roads - a pillar of grey stone with a round hole cut through the top of it, so that the sky showed through like a pale coin.
Orrin Pike did not stop. He did not slow down. He turned his two shaggy horses onto the left-hand road, the east road, the Veyrholt road, and the wool wagon lurched round the turn.
The two squires reined in at the shrine.
"Goodman Pike," said Dace. "Our thanks for the road." He touched his steel cap. Then he turned his horse's head toward Westmarch and waited.
Rowan did not move.
He sat on his Temple grey beside the shrine, very straight, and for the first time in eight miles he turned his head and looked at the back of the wool wagon. At his brother, sitting on the tailboard with his bundle in his lap and a pie beside him and a button sewn inside his jacket.
Adrian looked back.
The wagon was moving. The distance between them was growing. Ten feet. Twenty. Adrian could see Rowan's face very clearly under the rim of the steel cap, and it was not the careful, empty squire's face. It was just Rowan's face. It looked seventeen. It looked younger than that.
Rowan lifted his right hand from the reins. He laid it flat against his chest, over his heart. And he tapped it there, with two fingers. Three times.
Adrian's throat closed.
It was the signal. The one from the apple orchard, when Rowan was twelve and Adrian was seven and they had used to play at being scouts in the Colls' trees. One tap: I see you. Two taps: Stay hidden. Three taps meant only one thing. They had made it up the summer Adrian fell out of the big pear tree and broke his wrist and Rowan carried him home, crying, the whole way.
Three taps meant: I'm coming back for you.
Adrian put his hand flat on his own chest, over the lump of Elsie's button, and tapped it back. Three times.
Then the road dipped behind a hedge, and the shrine was gone, and the two white figures on their grey horses were gone, and there was nothing behind the wool wagon but the empty road and the pale morning sky.
❖ ❖ ❖
Adrian sat on the tailboard for a long time without moving.
Up front, his father did not turn around. After a while Tomas said to Orrin Pike, in a gruff voice, "Long road," and Orrin Pike said, "Four days," and Tomas said, "Aye," and they did not speak again for an hour.
Adrian unwrapped Bet Marsh's honey cake, and did not eat it.
The grey window hung at the edge of his sight.
[He will be all right.]
You don't know that, Adrian thought. You said. Men who lie for love become very good at it. Or they break.
[Yes.]
[He did not lie today.]
[He only talked about fish.]
Adrian almost laughed. His eyes were stinging in the cold.
The other squire, he thought. Dace. He knows about the scar. He was there, wherever it happened. I saw his face.
[Yes. I saw it too.]
[He hums the fourth line of the Seven Lights wrong.]
Adrian blinked.
You noticed that?
[You noticed it.]
[I only remember what you notice.]
He sat on the back of the wool wagon with a honey cake in his lap and Harrowfield eight miles behind him, and turned that over for a long time, as the road unrolled east through the bare, cold, silent country toward a city he had never seen.