Banners of Iron and Ash: The Hollowed Road

The first crow lifted from the bloated carcass as Seraphine Voss's horse shouldered through the last of the alder scrub. The bird's wingbeat sounded wrong, too slow, as though even the carrion feeders had grown sluggish in the stagnant air of the Black Mire. Behind her, Talia Renn reined in hard, the mare's hooves sinking into black water with a sound like a hand pressing into wet leather.

"Hold here," Seraphine said.

The smell reached them a moment later. Copper and bile and the sweeter rot of things left open to the rain. The road itself, if it could still be called a road, was a scar of churned mud cutting through the marsh, and along that scar, the convoy lay scattered like bones after a feast.

Forty wagons. She had counted them on the manifest handed to her by the quartermaster at Greymount, forty heavy carts laden with winter grain, salt pork, and the iron fittings promised to the garrison at Vyre. Now twenty-three of them sat axle-deep in muck, their canvas covers torn open, their cargoes spilled into the mire. Barrels had rolled into the drainage ditches. Sacks of grain had burst and turned the water to a pale, floating gruel. Wagon tongues pointed at the sky at broken angles, and through the wreckage moved a slow, deliberate procession of crows, each one stepping with the patience of a thing that knew it had all the time left in the world.

Talia made a small sound. Not a word. Just the soft, involuntary tightening of breath through the throat that Seraphine had learned to recognize as the younger woman's first warning. She had served with Talia Renn for two years, through the long retreat from Ashenmere and the bitter fortnight at Coldspur, and she had never once heard Talia scream. The silence was worse.

Seraphine swung down from the saddle. Her boots struck the mud and held, sucking at the leather as she stepped forward. The mud was warm. That was the first wrong thing. The Black Mire never warmed, not even in late summer; the peat beneath it held the cold of deep wells, and Seraphine had felt that chill through the soles of her boots on every patrol she had ever ridden along this stretch. Today, the muck released a faint, sour heat against her ankles, as though something beneath the surface had only just stopped burning.

"The oxen first," she said, without turning. "We see to the oxen."

"I can see them from here," Talia answered. Her voice was flat, controlled, the way it always became when the body beneath the voice was anything but. "Seraphine. They're not dead."

Seraphine followed the direction of Talia's gaze and stopped.

The first team lay in a heap near the lead wagon, ten animals tangled in their yokes, the wooden frames still binding them together. The smallest of them, a dun ox with a white blaze down its face, lifted its head as Seraphine approached. The motion was slow, tremulous, the motion of a thing that has forgotten how to move. Its ribs rose and fell in shallow, irregular surges, and its tongue, a grey and purple thing, lolled from the side of its mouth. Its eyes were open. They were dry. They looked at her with an understanding that no ox should possess, and then they closed, and the animal's head fell back into the mire with a sound like a wet hand striking a table.

There was no blood on the beast. None on its flanks, none on its neck, none pooling in the hollows of its eye sockets. The hide, where it should have been slick with the mess of butchering, was dry and loose, and when Seraphine crouched and pressed two fingers against the dun ox's flank, the skin gave way beneath her hand with no resistance at all. As though there was nothing under it. As though the muscle and the fat and the slow red river of any living thing had been pulled out through a hole too small to see.

She stood. Her fingers were clean. She stared at them for a moment, then wiped them down the front of her riding coat, and turned toward the trees.

The road was bordered on both sides by alder and black willow, their roots standing above the water in knotted ridges. Into those trees, the drivers had been hung.

Talia came up beside her then, the mare's reins looped twice around her wrist, her free hand resting on the pommel of her short sword but not drawing it. She stopped three paces from the nearest tree and did not move closer. Her lips pressed into a thin line. The colour had gone from beneath the brown of her skin, leaving it the colour of old ash.

"Black iron," she said. Her voice had found its footing now, each word measured, deliberate. "The spikes are black iron. Forged, not cast. Look at the shoulders of them. Someone worked those on an anvil."

Seraphine looked. Talia was right. Each spike was a hand's breadth long, the head flattened and square, the shank tapering to a cruel point, and along the shank, where the light caught the dull surface, she could see the faint, regular hammer marks of a smith who had taken pride in the work. They had been driven through the shoulders of the drivers, one spike through each man, pinning him to the trunk of the tree by the meat and the bone of his upper body. The men hung a few inches from the bark, their boots dangling, their fingers still curled around the straps of the reins they had been holding when it happened. Their faces were turned toward the road, mouths open, eyes open, but the eyes were the worst part. Each pair was the same: wide, dry, and empty, and turned inward upon some sight that had nothing to do with the trees or the road or the crows.

There were nine drivers in the row she could see, and the spikes were warm. She did not need to touch them to know. She could see the faintest curl of vapour rising from the iron where the rain had begun to fall, thin grey threads that unwound into nothing against the dark of the bark. Talia reached out and pressed the back of her hand to the nearest spike and snatched it away as though she had touched a cooking pot.

"Still hot," she said. "This was done yesterday. Maybe the day before. The iron hasn't even started to rust."

Seraphine walked the line. Nine men, nine trees, nine black spikes. Beneath the second man, a leather satchel had fallen from the wagon's seat and burst open, spilling letters and a small, leather-bound ledger onto the wet ground. She crouched and turned the ledger over with the toe of her boot. The cover was stamped with the seal of the Greymount quartermaster, and the first page, when she bent to read it through the rain, was a manifest of the convoy's cargo, the dates of departure, and the names of the men assigned to drive the wagons. She found the name she wanted on the third line. Ared Merrin. Driver, lead team. Forty-two winters. A small, careful cross had been inked beside his name, the mark of a man who could not write.

He hung three trees down from where she stood, his head fallen forward onto his chest, the cross marked into his skin by the angle of the spike. She did not look at his face.

"How long does it take," Talia asked from behind her, "to drain a full team of oxen without spilling a drop."

"All night," Seraphine answered. "With a knife and a basin. Less, if you know what you're doing. Much less."

"And the drivers."

"The drivers were still breathing when it started. You can see it in the way they hang. They fought. Some of them. Look at the bark beneath their boots. They've been kicking, and they've been kicking hard. But once the iron went in, they went still. And they never closed their mouths."

Talia turned away and walked three steps into the shallows, where the water came up over the toes of her boots. She stood there with her back to the road and her shoulders set, and Seraphine knew she was counting her breaths the way she had taught her to do at Coldspur, when the snow had come in so thick they had lost sight of their own outriders and the cold had begun to find the gaps in their cloaks.

The rain grew heavier. It struck the surface of the mire in a fine, steady hiss that almost, but not quite, covered the sound that came next.

Hoofbeats. From the south, moving at a canter, and with them, the creak of saddle leather and the quiet, deliberate rhythm of a rider who was not hurrying. Seraphine turned, her hand dropping to the hilt of her sword, and from the screen of alders, a figure came out into the road.

He rode a grey horse so pale it was almost white, and the rain darkened its coat to the colour of old pewter as it walked through the shallows toward them. The man on its back wore no helm, no surcoat, no visible badge of any company or order. His cloak was the colour of woodsmoke, and beneath it, the armour he wore had been blackened so many times, in so many fires, that the original metal was impossible to determine. The visor of his helm was up, and in the grey light of the marsh, his face was a study in shadows and angles, the skin pulled tight across the bones of his cheeks, the eyes the colour of a hearth that has been banked for the night.

Seraphine knew him. She had seen him twice before, once at the council in Ashenmere when the lords had been arguing over who would take the Black Mire road in winter, and once at the edge of a field after a battle whose name she had been told never to speak. He had said nothing at the council. He had said nothing after the battle. Both times, his presence had changed the shape of the room without a single word being spoken, and both times, he had left before anyone could ask his name.

He had a name now, of course. Everyone had given him one.

The Ash Knight, they called him, because of the cloak, and because of the soot that seemed to follow him from one place to the next, and because of the reports, carried in the mouths of men who had seen him fight, that said he burned. That he burned and did not stop.

He drew rein a dozen paces from where Seraphine stood, and the grey horse stopped and lowered its head to drink from the mire as though nothing in the world were wrong.

"Captain Voss," he said. His voice was low, unhurried, the words spoken as though each one had been chosen from a longer list and was the only acceptable one. "You received my message, then."

"I received a scrap of parchment with three words on it," Seraphine answered. "I did not receive a name. I did not receive an explanation. I did not receive anything that told me why I should leave my post at Greymount to ride a hundred miles into a swamp on the word of a man I have seen speak twice in his life and neither time to me."

"You came," he said.

There was no triumph in it. No challenge. He said it the way a man might say it is raining, or the bread is gone, or the fire has gone out. A fact, observed and offered back.

"I came because nine men are nailed to trees and my quartermaster is going to want a name for the report I have to write him by morning. I did not come for you."

He inclined his head. A small, measured motion, no more than a finger's breadth. "Then we may work together after all." He swung down from the saddle, and his boots struck the mud with the same quiet weight hers had, and the grey horse, released, walked on down the road to the nearest patch of dry ground and began to crop at the thin grass at the verge.

He did not look at the wagons. He did not look at the oxen. He looked, with a steadiness that was almost tender, at the row of drivers pinned to the trees, and the rain ran down the planes of his face and gathered in the hollows beneath his cheekbones.

"They are still warm," he said.

"They are still warm."

The Ash Knight said it without turning. He stood three paces from the nearest tree, where a driver hung with his wrists crossed above his head, two black iron nails driven through the meat of each forearm, his head dropped forward so the rain ran off the crown of his bare skull and down the bridge of his broken nose. The shirt had been opened. Across the man's chest, in a hand that was neither hurried nor unsteady, someone had carved a series of small marks. Seraphine could not read them from where she stood. She did not try to.

She had seen the like before. Once, near Greymount, on the eastern scree, a goatherd had come down with a similar arrangement of wounds and a face as calm as poured milk. He had lived three more days and never spoken.

The rain came down in long, near-vertical lines, beading on the grey horse's flank where it had returned to its place behind her, and drumming softly on the canvas tops of the two wagons. The oxen had not moved. They stood with their heads low and their breath making small grey jets that the rain erased as fast as they formed. Somewhere down the road, a crow called, and another answered, and the silence between the calls was so clean it had a shape.

Seraphine kept her hand on the pommel. She did not dismount. "When did you find them?"

"Dawn." He still had not turned. "I have been here since dawn."

"You sent the message at midday."

"I sent the message when I knew you would receive it in time to ride."

She looked at him. The rain had darkened the grey of his cloak until it was almost black, and the water ran off the brim of his helm in a continuous sheet that hid the lower half of his face when he stood in profile. The sword at his back, hilt rising above his left shoulder, had not been drawn. He had not drawn it. She had been counting minutes since she came round the bend, and the sword had not been drawn, and the men in the trees had been left as they were, and the wagons had not been searched.

"You have done nothing," she said. It was not a question.

"I have done nothing," he agreed. "I wished to see what would arrive."

"What would arrive."

"Yes." Now he turned. The rain sheeted off the helm and for an instant the underside of the brim was in shadow, and then the light shifted, and she saw his mouth, and the mouth was not the mouth of a man who wished to be understood. It was the mouth of a man who wished to be left alone with what he had found. "And what has arrived, Seraphine Voss, is you."

"My name is not Voss to you."

"Your name is what it is. I have not been permitted the luxury of choosing what to call things. I have only been permitted the choice of whether to look at them."

He stepped to the side then, away from the tree, and his boot struck something in the mud and he did not look down at it, and Seraphine saw that it was a hand. A left hand, severed at the wrist, the fingers still curled, the cuff of a wool sleeve still wrapped about the stump. The hand had been placed there. Not dropped. Placed, the way one places a pin in a cushion, or a knife on a table, or a coin in a dead man's mouth.

She felt her stomach move, low and sour, and she set her weight in the stirrups and breathed through it. She had eaten at first light, and what she had eaten was salt pork and a heel of bread that had been hard enough to knock against a wall without breaking, and her mouth was dry now and her tongue tasted of iron.

She looked at the row of trees. There were nine of them. She had counted on the way in, while the rain was still light. Nine men. Nine pairs of arms. Eighteen nails. She could hear the small sounds the bodies made when the wind moved them, the creak of the wrists in the nails, the wet click of a shoulder against bark. She had not heard those sounds before, but she would hear them again, she knew, the next time she lay awake in the dark, and the time after that, and the time after that.

"Rider," the Ash Knight said.

She did not hear what he had heard, and then she did, and then it was already too late to do anything about it.

A bowstring, somewhere up the road behind her. Not the clean sound of a hunting bow drawn by a man who has had time to choose his mark. A flatter sound, a thicker sound, the sound of something built for range and not for elegance, the sound of a string that has been kept wet. Then a second string, off to her left, and a third ahead, near the bend she had come round, and the grey horse beneath her threw up its head and took a hard step sideways and the bit rang against its teeth.

"DOWN," a woman shouted from somewhere that was not anywhere Seraphine could place, and a hand seized the back of her cloak and hauled, and she came out of the saddle sideways with the cloak half over her head and her sword still in her hand and her right knee caught the pommel as she went and the pommel took the skin off the kneecap in a long bright stripe and she hit the mud on her shoulder with the force of a woman who had been pulled and not fallen, and the javelin came through the space where her throat had been a quarter of a breath before, and the barbed head of it passed close enough to the grey horse's neck that the horse felt the wind of it and screamed, a high, torn sound, and bolted down the road with the empty stirrups swinging.

The javelin drove itself into the trunk of the third tree, a hand's breadth above the right shoulder of the man nailed there, and quivered. The barbs at its head caught the bark and held. Rain dripped from the shaft.

Talia Renn had already let go of the cloak. Talia Renn was on her feet, a short sword in her right hand and a buckler on her left arm that had not been there a moment ago, or that had been and Seraphine had not seen it, and her face was set in the particular expression of a woman who has done what she has practised doing and is now in the part of the practice where the practice becomes the thing.

"Into the ditch," Talia Renn said. "Now. With me."

Seraphine did not argue. There was no time to argue. A second javelin came over the wagons and struck the road behind her and skidded sideways and buried its point in the mud, and a third came from the trees on the left and cracked against a wheel of the foremost wagon and the shaft snapped in two and the broken half spun away into the rain. She got her feet under her. The mud was deep and cold and the cold came up through the sole of her boot and into the arch of her foot and stayed there.

The Ash Knight had not moved. He stood in the open between the road and the trees, and his cloak hung straight down in the rain, and his hand was not on the hilt of the sword at his back. The first bowman stood up from behind a log at the edge of the road, a small figure in a hooded coat of undyed wool, and loosed again, and the arrow took the Ash Knight in the left side of the chest, and the Ash Knight looked down at the shaft that was now standing out of him, and he did not fall, and Seraphine had no time to look at him again because Talia Renn had her by the wrist and was pulling her toward the ditch.

The ditch was at the edge of the road, on the side away from the trees, a drainage cut two feet deep and half full of black water that had a skin of ice on it that cracked under Talia Renn's boot and did not yield. Talia Renn went down into it in a single step and the water took her to the calf and she did not flinch. She turned and reached up and Seraphine took her hand and went down after her, and the cold of the water was so immediate and so complete that for an instant she could not feel her feet, and then she could, and the feeling that came back was not feeling but a kind of bright, insistent wrongness, as though her feet had been replaced by something that wanted to be told what to do.

Two more arrows came over. One stuck in the far bank of the ditch and stood up out of the mud, quivering. The other passed between them and was gone.

"Hold there," Talia Renn said. "Do not lift your head. Do not lift your head, Seraphine Voss."

"How do you know my name."

"I know your name. Hold there."

"I did not ask you to follow me."

"You did not. Be quiet now."

Another arrow, and this one struck the near lip of the ditch and the point came through the soil two inches from Seraphine's left ear and she felt the displaced air of it on the side of her face, and she put her shoulder against the cold bank and made herself as small as she could make herself, which was not very small, because the sword in her hand was long and her shoulders were what they were.

Talia Renn had gone still beside her. The buckler was up, the short sword was low, and her breathing was even, and the rain ran off the brim of the cap she wore and into the collar of her coat, and she did not seem to mind it. She was perhaps Seraphine's age, perhaps a little younger, perhaps a little older. Her face had the kind of weathering that came from years outdoors and not from years indoors worrying about the outdoors, and her eyes, when Seraphine caught them, were a very pale grey, almost the grey of the ice on the ditch water.

"Three," Talia Renn said softly. "I count three shooters. There may be more. There is a man on the road behind the wagons with something longer, a crossbow perhaps. The Ash Knight is still standing. I do not know what to do with the Ash Knight. We go south along the ditch. The ditch deepens. We come up at the stone bridge or we do not come up. Ready?"

"Ready," Seraphine said, and the word tasted of iron, and she put her left hand on the bank and Talia Renn took her by the collar of the coat, not ungently, and they began to move along the ditch, crouched low, the water at their calves, the ice breaking ahead of them in a long ragged line.

The ditch bent southward and the water rose to their knees and the cold of it came through the leather of Seraphine's boots and into the bones of her feet, and she could feel each toe as a separate small hurt, and she kept moving because Talia Renn kept moving, and Talia Renn kept moving because she had decided to move, and there was nothing more to it than that.

The bank on their right had grown higher. Talia Renn stopped them once and put her mouth close to Seraphine's ear.

"The stone bridge is a hundred paces ahead, perhaps less. I will go first. When I stand, you stand. We go across the road in the open and we go into the field on the far side. There are no trees. There is no cover. It is the worst of it. We will be visible for perhaps thirty heartbeats. Do not run. Running invites the arrow. Walk. Do not look at the bowman. Do not look at the wagons. Walk as though we are women who have been walking all morning and have somewhere to be. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Good. My hand will be at your back. I will tell you when."

Talia Renn's hand settled against the small of Seraphine's spine, just above the belt, and the weight of it was strangely steadying, the way a wall is steadying when one leans against it without intending to. Seraphine set her teeth and counted the paces in her head the way she had been taught to count them, in the long room with the high windows, and the counting was a kind of prayer, and the prayer was a kind of weapon, and she was glad of both.

They came up out of the ditch at the stone bridge. The bridge was very old. The stones were uneven and the moss between them was the colour of a bruise. Talia Renn stood first and Seraphine stood after her, and the road opened out before them, a pale ribbon of mud and gravel with the two wagons still burning faintly at its far end, and the smoke from them lay low along the ground because there was no wind to lift it, and the smoke tasted of wet wood and of something sharper, of oil perhaps, of a thing on fire that should not have been on fire.

They walked. Seraphine did not look at the bowman. She did not look at the wagons. She looked at Talia Renn's shoulder, at the damp wool of the coat, at the place where the strap of the buckler crossed the back, and she walked at the pace that Talia Renn set, and the pace was the pace of a woman with somewhere to be, and Seraphine matched it step for step, and her sword hand was at her side, and the sword tip dragged a little in the mud, and she let it, because a sword tip in the mud was better than a sword tip in the air when one was trying to be invisible.

A man on the far side of the wagons, the one Talia Renn had called a foreman, was shouting something at another man, and the shouting was a string of words Seraphine could not quite make out, and then a crossbow bolt came out of the trees to the north and took the shouting man in the upper arm and he went down onto one knee and the bolt stood out from him like a quill from a writing desk, and the man with him scrambled sideways into a ditch of his own, and the two archers in the wood loosed again, and the bolts went into the wagons, and a horse screamed, and the screaming was the worst sound Seraphine had ever heard, worse than the wound she had given the man on the road, worse than the sound of her own breathing.

"Keep walking," Talia Renn said, and her hand pressed a little firmer against Seraphine's back.

They were off the road and into the field. The field was of winter wheat, or what was left of it, the stalks flattened by the rain and pale as thread, and the mud beneath them was the kind of mud that wanted boots, that sucked at the heel and held on. Talia Renn did not stop. She set a line across the field toward a low stone wall perhaps two hundred paces away, and Seraphine followed, and behind them the fighting went on, and ahead of them there was nothing at all, and the nothing felt like a gift, like an open hand.

At the wall Talia Renn let them sit, and Seraphine sat, and the sword across her knees was heavier than it had been an hour ago, or perhaps she was simply more aware of it now. The stone was cold through her wet trousers. The sky above them was the colour of pewter, and the light had that flat, drained quality that came in the hour before the proper dark, and her hands, when she looked at them, were shaking in a way she could not stop, and the shaking was not fear exactly, or not only fear, it was the body catching up with what the body had done, and the body had a great deal of catching up to do.

Talia Renn sat with her back against the stone and her short sword across her thighs, and she was watching the road behind them through a gap in the wall, and her face was perfectly calm, and her breathing was perfectly even, and Seraphine wanted very much to ask her how she did that, and did not ask her, because she suspected the answer would be something she did not want to hear.

"You did well," Talia Renn said, after a time. "The man in the road. You did not hesitate. That is rarer than you think."

"I did hesitate," Seraphine said, and was surprised to hear her own voice, which sounded like the voice of a stranger, which sounded like the voice of someone who had been out in the cold for a long time. "I hesitated for a long time. I am still hesitating."

"Yes," Talia Renn said. "That is also the right answer."

From the road there came another shout, and then a horn, low and long, the kind of horn that meant something had changed, and Talia Renn tilted her head to listen to it the way one tilts the head to listen to a bird, and her pale eyes narrowed a little, and she said, "That is a retreat horn. The archers are pulling back. I do not know why. It is not the kind of fight that ends with a retreat."

"What does it end with?" Seraphine asked.

"I do not know," Talia Renn said. "I have not seen a fight end this way before."

They sat and listened to the horn sound again, and then a third time, and then there was only the rain and the small sounds of a field at evening, the drip from the stalks, the distant complaint of a crow, and from the road, faintly, the sound of voices, but not the voices of men fighting, the voices of men doing something else, something quieter, something that involved lifting and carrying and a great deal of caution.

"I think," Talia Renn said, "that we are going to walk back to the road now, and we are going to be very careful, and we are going to see what is there."

"All right," Seraphine said, and stood, and her legs did not want to stand, and she stood anyway, and Talia Renn stood too, and they went back the way they had come, across the flat field with its pale stalks, and the mud took their boots again, and the rain took their cloaks again, and the road opened up before them, and the road was a different road now.

The two wagons had stopped burning. The horses had been cut loose and were gone into the field to the south, and only one of them was still standing, a grey mare with a cut along her shoulder that wept down into her foreleg, and she was cropping at the wet wheat with the patience of an animal that did not understand what had happened to her. The foreman was sitting on the ground with his back against a wagon wheel and his wounded arm bound up in a strip of someone's shirt, and he was white in the face and very still. The two archers from the wood were coming out of the trees, and they were carrying the body of their companion between them, and the companion was the man with the bad knee, and the bad knee had been the end of him, and the rain was falling on his open eyes.

But it was the figure on the far ridge that stopped them both, and the figure on the far ridge was a man, or something that had the shape of a man, and the shape of him was the shape of ash-gray armor, and the armor was old, older than anything Seraphine had ever seen worn on a living body, and the armor was pitted and scarred in a way that spoke of years and of a great many roads, and on his back was a longbow, unstrung, held in the crook of one arm, and the longbow was the length of a tall woman laid on the ground, and his hand rested on it, and he was very still.

He was watching. He was watching the road, and the wagons, and the men who moved among the wagons, and Seraphine felt the watching the way one feels a hand laid on the back of the neck, with the small hairs rising, with the skin remembering something the mind had not yet agreed to. Talia Renn had gone rigid beside her.

"That is the Ash Knight," Talia Renn said, very quietly. "Do not move. Do not speak. Do not look away from him."

The Ash Knight on the ridge did not move either. The rain fell on his armor and the armor did not seem to notice. After a long moment he lifted the longbow from his shoulder and held it across his body in both hands, and the gesture was the gesture of a man presenting a thing for inspection, or the gesture of a man laying down a thing he had decided not to use, and Seraphine could not tell which it was, and the not knowing made her hands tighter on the sword.

One of the archers from the wood had seen him. The archer had stopped walking and was staring up at the ridge with his mouth open, and the body of his companion sagged between him and the other archer, and neither of them moved to take the weight, and the weight was the dead weight of a man with a bad knee and no more roads left in him. The Ash Knight looked down at the archer, and the archer looked up at the Ash Knight, and the distance between them was perhaps three hundred paces, and the rain crossed the distance without trouble, and the moment went on and on.

Then the Ash Knight lowered the longbow to his side, slowly, the way one lowers a thing one has been thinking about, and the lowering was a decision, and the decision was not to loose, and Seraphine understood that the Ash Knight had been one arrow away from the archer and had chosen the arrow's other life, and the other life was this one, the one where the archer went on breathing, and the Ash Knight turned without hurry and walked into the grey of the ridge behind him, and the grey took him, and he was gone.

"Was that him?" Seraphine asked, and her voice was not her own.

"Yes," Talia Renn said.

"He could have killed him."

"Yes."

"Why did he not?"

Talia Renn did not answer for a long time. The archer on the road had come back to himself and was weeping without sound, and the other archer was trying to take the body from him, and the foreman by the wagon wheel was asking for water in a voice that had gone very small, and the grey mare cropped at the wheat, and the rain fell on all of them equally.

"I do not know," Talia Renn said at last. "I have seen him three times. I have never seen him loose. I have never been able to ask. I do not think he is a man who is asked."

The light was going out of the day. The ridge was a line of darker grey against a paler grey, and the Ash Knight was not on it, and the not being on it was a presence of its own, the way an empty chair is a presence. Talia Renn turned from the ridge and looked at Seraphine, and her face was drawn and tired and her pale eyes were very bright.

"We will go to the stone bridge," she said. "We will go into the wood. We will not speak of the ridge. The men who saw him will not speak of the ridge. It is the custom. It is the only custom I know of that is older than the road."

"All right," Seraphine said.

They turned from the road, and the road fell away behind them, and the rain followed them into the wood, and the wood was very dark, and somewhere in the dark, far off or near, a longbow made no sound at all, and a man in ash-gray armor walked on, and the rain fell on his shoulders, and the shoulders did not seem to mind it, and Seraphine walked on too, with the sword in her hand and the taste of iron in her mouth, and the evening came down over them both, and did not end.