The black mare picked her way through the cinders of the Ashenmere gate, and Maren Voss did not look up at the walls.
She had seen them weeping before. In Thornwall, in the year the river turned to milk. In Caer Dunmore, where the stones had groaned and split down the middle as something beneath them tried to breathe. Every town had its own way of going rotten, and Maren had learned that the wise traveler kept her eyes on the road and her hand on the short blade beneath her cloak, and let the architecture mourn for itself.
The cinders crunched under hooves like the burnt knuckles of a roast. Somewhere above, a crow coughed, and the sound rolled down the broken stones into the street below, where it sat among the silence and would not leave.
"Papers."
The gatekeeper had been a soldier once. You could tell by the way he held the spear, too high, and the way his eyes sat too far back in his skull, like a man who had learned to watch for ambushes in his sleep. His cheekbones were sharp enough to cut the light that came slanting through the gap in the wall. A leather patch covered his left ear, and the stitching had been done with a sailmaker's needle, neat and indifferent.
Maren pulled the folded writ from the inner pocket of her riding coat, the one she had oiled against the marsh damp. She held it out between two fingers and let the wind take the corner of it, the way a cardsharp lets a card flutter. The gatekeeper did not reach for it. He squinted at the seal.
"Magistrate's mark," he said, as if he were tasting the words.
"Magistrate's mark," Maren agreed.
"Where's your escort?"
"I fired him." Maren tucked the writ away. "He drank the lamp oil."
The gatekeeper's mouth did something that might, in a different man, have been a smile. He stepped back from the spear's rest and jerked his chin toward the street beyond. The mare, who had been waiting with the patience of old soldiers, walked through without being asked.
Inside Ashenmere, the smell was the first thing.
Not the rot of food, not the sweet dark perfume of a body two weeks gone. It was the smell of old stone giving up its hold on itself. The smell of mortar turning back into sand, of wooden beams going soft in their joints, of copper statues losing the fight against the salt air. Maren had been a soldier, and she had been a magistrate, and she had been a number of other things she did not name in company, and she had smelled that smell only twice before in her life. Both times, the town had been dead within the month.
She did not let the mare see her hand tighten on the rein.
The street ran straight toward a low hill, and at the crest of the hill, the palace sat like a clenched fist. Its windows were dark. Above the central tower, something that might once have been a banner hung at an angle, unmoving in the windless air, and its color was the color of a bruise three days along. A thin line of smoke rose from one of the eastern chimneys, then stopped, as if the fire beneath it had been told to be quiet.
"Ho, magistrate."
The voice came from a doorway on the left, half hidden behind a stacked pile of herring barrels that no one had bothered to move. The speaker was a boy, or near enough. Fourteen, perhaps. Fifteen, if he had been hungry. He wore a leather apron that had been made for a much wider man, and the strings had been knotted twice at the small of his back. He had a smear of something dark across his jaw, and his eyes were the quick, bright eyes of a creature that has learned to read the weather of grown-up faces.
"Ho yourself," Maren said. She did not slow the mare.
"You'll be wanting the Hanging Mayor," the boy said, falling into step alongside the horse as if he had been born there. "Everybody wants the Hanging Mayor. He's up at the palace. He's been up at the palace for two weeks. He won't come down. They've tried. They sent Sister Mael up the back stair with a basket of figs and she came back down without the basket and without the figs, and she wouldn't say what she'd seen, only that the Lord Mayor was very tired and needed to be left alone with his meditations."
Maren glanced down at him. "And who are you?"
"Wren," the boy said. "Wren Holt. I work the tavern at the corner of the Cripplegate, the one with the green shutters that aren't green anymore. The magistrate wants me to say I'm the owner's nephew, but I'm not. I'm the boy who clears the tables and the boy who gets sent out when there's a stranger at the gate, because the owner says I'm quick on my feet and can't be trusted with anything that pours."
"You talk a great deal," Maren said.
"I talk the exact amount," Wren said, without offense. "If I talked less, you'd think I was hiding something. If I talked more, you'd think I was simple. This way you think I'm an idiot, and an idiot is just what a magistrate needs when she's riding into a town that smells like a week-old eel."
Maren did not smile. She considered it, the way a woman considers stepping onto ice she has tested with a stick. Then she set her jaw and kept her eyes on the road.
"Walk with me, then," she said. "And tell me about the king."
Wren's face changed. It was a small change, the sort of change a boy of fourteen can make without anyone being the wiser, but Maren had been a soldier and she had watched faces across smoky campfires, and she saw the way the lightness went out of his mouth and the watchfulness came into his eyes.
"The king," Wren said, and the word came out as if it had been wrapped in something cold.
"The king," Maren said. "I've heard. Fourteen days without a blink."
"Thirteen," Wren said. "Fourteen tomorrow, if the count is right. The count is right. The Hanging Mayor has a man on the chapel bell who rings it at dawn and dusk, and another man who watches the king's face from the bell tower across the way with a spyglass he borrowed from a ship captain, and he writes down every time those eyelids move, which is never, except once, on the third day, when the king's left eye twitched, and the man with the spyglass wrote that down too, and the Hanging Mayor read it out at the town meeting and the town meeting didn't speak for an hour."
They had reached the corner of a square. A fountain stood in the middle of it, dry, and around the rim of the basin someone had laid a wreath of withered lavender that was already going to dust. Across the square, the palace gates stood open, and a line of soldiers in the city's colors leaned against the pillars with the air of men who had been leaning for some time.
"The king sits in the high chair," Wren said, slowing, as the mare slowed. "He's been in the high chair since the morning of the eleventh of Hask. The crown is on his head. The scepter is in his hand. The robes are on his shoulders, and the robes are the robes of state, the heavy red ones with the ermine at the collar, and the ermine is going gray at the tips because it hasn't been brushed. His face hasn't moved. His mouth is closed. His chest goes up and down the smallest amount, the smallest amount you can imagine, the amount a man makes when he's sleeping so light that even his own breath might wake him, only he isn't sleeping, magistrate, he isn't sleeping, he is sitting in that chair and he is doing nothing, and the nothing is louder than the bell."
Maren reined the mare to a stop. From this angle she could see, through the palace's open doors, a slice of the high hall: a floor of black and white tiles, a tapestry on the far wall with a hunting scene, and at the very edge of her vision, something that might have been the base of a chair, and the corner of a robe.
She did not look at it for more than a moment. She had learned, in the years after the army, that some things, once you had looked at them, would not let you go.
"And the walls," she said, because a woman had to start somewhere.
"The walls," Wren said, and his voice dropped. "The walls are weeping, magistrate. They started the night the king stopped blinking. The first tear came out of the left eye of the carved saint above the south postern, and the priest who saw it thought it was oil, the way some of the old statues weep oil, you know, and he went up to wipe it with his sleeve, and when he touched it his sleeve came away black, and the black smelled like the inside of a coffin, and he dropped his candle and the candle went out, and he ran down the stairs and he hasn't been back to the chapel since."
Wren swallowed. He did not look up at the palace. He looked at the dry fountain, and at the wreath, and at his own shoes.
"The next morning," he said, "there was weeping from the stones around the kitchen yard. The cook said it was the damp, because the cook was a practical woman. The cook is not a practical woman now. The cook has gone to her sister's in the hills. The cook's sister is not happy about this, but the cook is not happy about anything, so they are even."
Maren sat for a moment without speaking. The mare stamped once, shifted, and was still.
"The Hanging Mayor," she said, at last.
Wren nodded. "He's not the mayor, really. He's the man the mayor was before the king stopped blinking, and after the mayor went into the palace and didn't come out, the townsfolk didn't know what else to call him, so they called him the Hanging Mayor, because there he was, hanging about, with no job and no way to do it. He tried to give the job back, but the king wasn't taking applications. So the Hanging Mayor hangs. He stands at the foot of the palace steps every morning at the third bell, and he reads out the day's business, and then he goes and does what he can, which is mostly walking from one end of the city to the other and trying to keep people from setting fire to each other's houses, because the people of Ashenmere, magistrate, have always been a people who set fire to each other's houses, but never before over a king who wouldn't blink."
"And Brother Ulth," Maren said, because she had been to other towns like this one, and there was always a Brother Ulth.
Wren looked at her sharply. "You know Brother Ulth?"
"I know the type of Brother Ulth," Maren said, which was not the same thing, and was the truth.
"He's at the chapel of Hollowmere, the one on the far side of the marsh. He's been there for thirty years. He knows the names of every soul in this city, and the names of every soul who's left it, and the names of a number of souls who are still here but have stopped answering to them. If you want the inside of this thing, magistrate, you go to Brother Ulth. But you go careful. Brother Ulth is not a man who likes to be asked. Brother Ulth is a man who likes to be the one who tells."
Maren swung down from the saddle. The cobblestones were slick under her boots, though it had not rained. When she looked down, she saw that the slickness was the same black as the ichor on the south postern, and that it ran in a thin line along the crack between two stones, and that the line led, as far as she could see in either direction, toward the palace.
She did not say anything about that. She untied the leather bag from behind the cantle and slung it across her shoulder, and she took the mare by the bridle, and she turned to Wren.
"You can go back to your tavern," she said.
Wren looked at her. He looked at the palace. He looked at his own shoes again.
"The Hanging Mayor," he said, "is going to ask you to do something. They're all going to ask you to do something. They have a list. They have had a list since the third day. The list has gotten longer. The Hanging Mayor adds to it every time he goes to the bell tower to speak to the man with the spyglass. If you want to know what's on the list, I can tell you what's on the list, because I work the tavern and the tavern is where the Hanging Mayor drinks when he can be persuaded to drink, and the tavern is where the men with the list come to argue about the list, and they argue loud, because they have all been arguing loud since the king sat down, and no one has told them to argue quiet, because the man who tells them what to do is the man in the high chair, and the man in the high chair is not telling anyone anything."
Maren looked at the boy for a long moment. He was not, she decided, a simpleton. He was a boy who had found the one shape his life could take, and he was holding to it with both hands.
"Walk with me to the palace steps," she said, "and then you can go back to your tavern."
"I can walk with you past the palace steps," Wren said, "if the walking doesn't take me out of my way, which it doesn't, because my way is wherever there is something to see, and the magistrate walking into the palace of a king who won't blink is something to see."
They walked. The line of soldiers straightened as Maren approached, but none of them barred the way. One of them, an older man with a gray mustache and a scar that ran from the corner of his eye to the corner of his jaw, looked at the leather bag on her shoulder, and then at the short blade beneath her cloak, and then at her face, and he stepped aside without a word.
At the foot of the steps, a man was waiting. He was not a large man. He was not a small man. He had the look of a man who had been measured for importance and found somewhere in the middle, and who had made his peace with the measurement. He wore the chain of office around his neck, and the chain was too heavy for him, and the weight of it had bent his shoulders forward a little, so that he stood, as men often stand who carry a thing they did not ask to carry, with his chin tucked into his chest and his eyes lifted to make up for it.
"Magistrate Voss," he said. His voice was the voice of a man who had read out lists to empty squares. "I am the Hanging Mayor. I have been expecting you, in the way that a man who has run out of other options expects anything. I have a room prepared for you in the east wing, away from the high hall, because the high hall is not a place I would ask a guest to sleep, and I have a list, and I have a bell, and I have a man with a spyglass, and I have, if I am honest, magistrate, very little else."
Maren looked at the palace doors. Beyond them, she could see the black and white floor, and the tapestry, and, yes, at the very end of the long perspective, the high chair, and the figure in it, very still, very upright, with the crown on his head and the scepter in his hand, and the thin line of smoke from the eastern chimney had stopped, and the air in the doorway smelled of old stone and lamp oil and something else, something that had no name, something that was the smell of a thing that had been waiting for a long time and had finally grown tired of waiting.
She looked back at the Hanging Mayor.
"Tell me about the list," she said.
The list was seven names long, written in three different hands, the oldest of which had bled brown across the paper where the ink had been thinned by rain or tears or some older fluid Maren did not name in her own thoughts. The Hanging Mayor laid it on the table between them, weighted at the corners with river stones, and he smoothed it with a hand that shook in a way he did not try to hide.
"Seven," he said. "One a season since the autumn reckoning. Traders, mostly. Two from the salt road. One from the peat cutters' guild. One a child. One a man who came back from the war and could not stop walking."
He tapped the paper.
"The child is the one that broke my nerve, magistrate. The child was eight, and she had been to my kitchen for bread the morning of the day she vanished, and I had given her the bread myself, and she had curtsied, and her mother had thanked me, and by evening she was not anywhere, and her shoes were by the river, and the river was not sorry."
Maren did not touch the list. She looked at it the way she had been taught to look at evidence: as a shape, a rhythm, a hunger with a pattern. Seven. Four seasons and three. The peat cutter in the winter. The salt trader in the late spring. The child in the high summer, the worst month, the month when the marsh gave back what it took and pretended it had never taken anything.
"The marsh," she said.
The Hanging Mayor's shoulders rose a fraction of an inch.
"The marsh," he agreed.
Brother Ulth did not look up from his candle. He had taken a small book from his robe, a chapbook bound in pale leather, and he was reading it with the of a man who had decided that what was happening in the room was less important than what was written on the page before him. His lips moved. His finger traced a line. Once, without raising his head, he spoke.
"The marsh does not take," he said. "The marsh receives what is offered. There is a difference. The marsh is, in its own way, more honest than we are."
"Brother," the Hanging Mayor said, and there was a warning in it.
Brother Ulth turned a page.
"I am only noting the distinction, mayor. The magistrate will want to make her own. She has that look."
Maren had that look. She had carried it for nine years. She set her pack on the floor beside the chair, and the chair creaked under the weight of her, and she did not sit down, because she had learned that standing in a room told you more about the room than sitting in it did. The chair was older than the mayor. The chair had held heavier things.
"Walk me through the child," she said. "From the bread to the shoes."
The Hanging Mayor walked her through the child. He did it well. He had done it before, to himself, in the long hours of the night, and the telling had the worn smoothness of a thing told often. The child had come at dawn. The child had gone by the southern path, the path that runs above the river and below the cemetery wall. The mother had last seen her at the bend where the willows lean over the water. The shoes had been found at dusk by the man who walks the river with a hook. There had been no cry. There had been no struggle. The reeds had not been broken. The mud had not been disturbed except by the small, even prints of a girl walking at her own pace.
"She walked into the marsh," the Hanging Mayor said, "the way a person walks into a room they have been to before. She was not taken. She went."
He sat down, finally, in the chair opposite hers, and the chair took him the way old chairs take tired men.
"That is the part that woke me in the night, magistrate. Not that she is gone. That she went."
Brother Ulth closed his chapbook with a small, soft sound, like a door shut out of courtesy.
"And the others," Maren said. "The same."
"Not the same. The salt traders were taken in pairs, on the road, with no witnesses. The peat cutter was found, partly. The veteran was found at all, which was the trouble, because he had been dead three days before anyone thought to look for him, and he was sitting in a chair in his own kitchen, and the chair was at the table, and the table was set for two."
Maren's hand, the left one, the one she did not trust, curled at her side.
"For two."
"For the person he had been waiting for. He had set a place. The bread was stale. The wine was still in the bottle."
The room smelled of stone and tallow and the slow rot of authority. The Child of Faces, in the high chair at the end of the hall, did not move. The scepter was steady in the small hand. The smoke from the chimney did not resume. Maren could feel, as she had felt since she crossed the causeway, the attention of the place, the weight of the child's gaze across three hundred feet of black and white floor, patient, ungainly, certain of her own welcome.
She did not look at the child. Not yet.
"Who takes the contracts," she said, "for the marsh road?"
The Hanging Mayor blinked.
"The marsh road, magistrate, is not contracted. The marsh road is suffered."
"Then who suffers it. Who walks it. Who knows it."
He looked at her as if she had asked him the name of a thing he had been careful not to name.
"There is a woman," he said, slowly, "in the Dog's Tongue. She has a room above the kitchen, and the room smells of soap and smoke, and she keeps a blind man with her, a cartographer, a man who draws maps he has never seen. She takes coin the town does not mint. She pays in kind. I do not know her name. I have never asked. Asking, in this town, is a thing one learns not to do."
Maren picked up her pack.
"Take me to her."
The Hanging Mayor did not move.
"Magistrate."
"Mayor."
"The Dog's Tongue is not a place I go. I am the Hanging Mayor. I hang things. I do not drink in taverns. If I am seen in the Dog's Tongue, the town will read it as a sign, and the town reads everything as a sign, and the town has been reading signs wrong since before I was born."
"Then give me a boy," Maren said. "Give me a boy who knows the alleys."
The Hanging Mayor looked at the door.
"Sera," he said, very quietly, and Sera Quill stepped out of the shadow by the curtain as if she had been waiting there since the town was founded, which, in her own way, she had. She was small. She was dark. She had the look of a person who has been through a fire and come out the other side and not bothered to brush the ash from her coat.
"Mayor."
"The magistrate needs the boy. Find him."
Sera Quill looked at Maren. Maren looked at Sera Quill. Between them, in the space of a breath, a bargain was struck that neither of them would have put into words.
"The boy is at the Dog's Tongue," Sera said. "The boy is always at the Dog's Tongue. The boy has nowhere else to be, which is why the boy is where he is."
She turned and walked out, and her boots made no sound on the black and white floor, and the floor did not echo her, and the child in the high chair, far down the hall, turned the crowned head a quarter inch to follow her out.
Maren felt that turn like a hand laid flat against the back of her neck.
"Brother Ulth," she said, without turning. "Stay with the child."
Brother Ulth looked up from his chapbook, and for the first time since she had entered the room, his eyes met hers, and they were the eyes of a man who had been a soldier once and had put the soldier away in a drawer and had found, to his surprise, that the drawer would not stay shut.
"Magistrate," he said.
"Do not let her out of your sight."
"I have not let her out of my sight, magistrate, since before you were born."
Maren went out the way she had come in, through the tall doors, into the square, into the cold, into the thin rain that had begun again at some point in the last hour and had not bothered to announce itself. The square was emptier than it had been. The bells in the broken steeple had stopped, as bells do, because there was no one left to ring them. The smell of the marsh was closer, salt and rot and the green black water that moved under the causeway like a slow pulse.
Sera Quill was waiting at the corner.
"Follow me," she said. "Do not speak to anyone. Do not look at anyone. If anyone looks at you, look at the ground. The town is thin-skinned since the child came. The town was thin-skinned before, but it has forgotten how to pretend otherwise."
Maren followed.
The Dog's Tongue was a tavern in the way a wound is a mouth. It had a sign, and the sign had a dog on it, and the dog had no tongue, and the lack of the tongue had been painted over twice and had come back both times, because the painter had been drunk and had not understood that a thing painted over in a town like this came back the way a name spoken in a whisper came back. The door was low. The door was green. The door opened onto a smell of boiled cabbage and old beer and the particular human musk of a room where too many people had slept too close together and had not, in the memory of anyone living, opened a window.
Sera Quill went in first. Maren went in second.
The room was long and low and lit by a single tallow candle on a brass stand in the middle of a table that had been cleared of cups and pushed against the wall to make a space. In the space, on a stool, sat a woman in a hood, and the hood was dark, and the face inside the hood was not a face but a suggestion of a face, the way a bank of fog is a suggestion of a hill. Beside her, on a lower stool, sat a man who was blind in a way Maren recognized at once, because she had seen it in the marsh, the blindness that comes not from the eye but from the place behind the eye where the world is drawn. His hands were folded in his lap. His fingers were stained at the tips with graphite and ink. He did not look up. He did not need to.
The woman in the hood turned toward the door.
"You are the magistrate," she said. Her voice was a rasp, a coastal rasp, the kind of voice that has lived a long time beside the sea and has taken on the salt. "You smell of the road and the marshal's office and the palace, and underneath, which you cannot wash out, you smell of the marsh. Sit down. I have work for you, if you have the stomach for it."
Maren did not sit down.
"What is the work."
The woman lifted a hand from under the hood, and the hand was thin and the nails were cut short and there was a silver ring on the second finger, and the ring had no stone, and the absence of the stone was louder than any stone would have been.
"There is a man," she said, "who draws maps of the Scablands. He has drawn them for thirty years, by touch, by the word of those who have walked them, by the memory of the air above them. He has never seen the Scablands. He has never seen anything. He has drawn what he has been told, and what he has been told is not enough, and what is not enough has begun to be wrong, and what is wrong is taking people, magistrate, one a season, into the place the maps do not show."
She laid her other hand on the blind man's shoulder.
"His name is Arvid. He is my brother. He was not always blind. He was blinded, in the war, by a thing that was not a weapon. He has been drawing since. He is the only one who knows the shape of the Scablands as the Scablands are, not as the town would have them. He is the only one who can be sent. He cannot be sent alone. He will not come back alone. He will not come back at all if the road is not read for him by someone who has read roads."
Maren looked at the blind man. Arvid did not look back. Arvid, she understood, was not in the room. Arvid was in the map he was drawing behind his folded hands, the map he would draw for the rest of his life and never see.
"The Hollowmere Archive," Maren said.
The woman inclined her head.
"The Hollowmere Archive is the only place that will take him. The Hollowmere Archive is the only place that knows what the Scablands are. The Hollowmere Archive will read him the page he cannot write for himself. He must be there by the autumn equinox. The equinox is nine days off. The road is the road I cannot offer you a picture of. I can offer you the coin."
She drew from under her hood a small leather purse, and she set it on the table, and the purse clinked the way old coin clinks, the heavy, dull sound of pre-Collapse silver, the sound of a thing that had not been minted in living memory and that bought, when it bought at all, things no one could name.
"Eighteen pieces," she said. "Pre-Collapse. The weight of the marshal's chain and a little over. Enough to bury you, if you do not come back. Enough to live on, if you do."
Maren looked at the purse. She looked at the blind man. She looked at the woman in the hood, and the woman in the hood was looking at her with eyes that were not eyes but were something older, something that had lived under the chapel of Hollowmere for a long time and had learned, in the dark, to see by other means.
"Why me," Maren said.
"Because you failed a girl once," the woman said, "and you have not stopped walking since, and the walking has made you the kind of person who reads roads the way other people read faces. Because you carry her with you. Because the marsh knows you. Because I have asked the marsh."
The room was very quiet. The candle on the brass stand did not flicker. The blind man breathed.
Maren picked up the purse. The silver was heavy. The silver was old. The silver was the weight of a thing that had to be earned twice.
"I will need a guide," she said. "I will need a tracker. I will need a boy who knows the marsh and a man who can read a scent. I will need four days of clear weather, which I will not get. I will need the truth from you, which I will not get either. I will take the contract. Do not lie to me again."
The woman inclined her head.
"I have not lied to you, magistrate. I have only not yet told you the rest."
The moon came up over the marsh like a wound opening. Maren stood at the edge of the camp, watching the tents breathe in the wind, watching the shapes of men move between the cook-fires. Behind her, the tent she shared with the other three women of her little company was dark. She did not go in. She stood, and she watched, and she thought about her sister, who had been nineteen when the bells of Veris had rung out and the redcoats had come and the killing had begun. She thought about the bells. She thought about the cathedral at Veris, which had burned. She thought about a man she had loved, who had been a soldier in that regiment, who had fired on the crowd, who had come to her afterward with his hands shaking and said, I did not know, I did not know, I did not know, and whom she had never seen again. She thought about the bells. The bells had not rung for her sister. The bells had rung for the queen. The bells had rung for the new order. The bells had not rung for the dead.
A soft step behind her. She did not turn.
"You should sleep, magistrate." It was Cale the Hound, his voice low and rough with the burr of the western reaches, where the wind came off the moors and the people learned to speak against it. His hound, Skarrow, sat at his heel, a long grey shape with eyes that caught the moonlight like coins.
"I will sleep when there is something to sleep for," she said.
"There is the morning," Cale said. "That is something."
She almost smiled. Almost. "The morning has not always been a friend to me."
"No," he said. "But it has been a friend to me, often enough. And I will be there, at the morning. That is what I am for. I am for the morning, and the track, and the thing that does not want to be found."
She looked at him then. In the moonlight his face was all planes and shadows, a rough man's face, a man who had followed spoor through the bogs and the heaths and the stony places where the old gods had left their bones. He was not handsome. He was not kind, exactly. But there was a steadiness in him, the steadiness of a man who had made a trade of moving through the world without being moved by it, and she found that steadiness, in that hour, more comforting than she wanted to admit.
"You are a good man, Cale," she said.
"No," he said. "I am a useful man. That is different."
"It is," she said. "And I will take it."
He nodded. Skarrow leaned against his leg. The wind moved through the marsh, and the smell of it came to her: cold water, peat, the faint iron of old blood. The marsh smelled, tonight, like a mouth that had been closed for a long time and was beginning to open.
She went at last to her tent. She did not sleep. She lay in her blankets with the cold seeping up from the ground beneath her and listened to the wind and the breathing of the woman beside her, a young mother named Sera Quill, who had lost her boy three years ago and had been walking the marsh ever since, asking the willows, the way Maren had once asked the roads. Sera slept with her fists curled, even in sleep. Maren watched the dark. The hours passed. The bells in her mind kept ringing, low and slow, the way they had rung at Veris when the cathedral fell.
The night held its breath.
The scream came just before dawn.
It was not a human scream, though it came from a human throat. It was the scream of a man who has seen something that the mind was not built to hold, something that has cracked the door of the skull and come pouring in. It came from the direction of the mercenary company's camp, which was a quarter mile away, on the other side of a low rise. It was followed by another scream, and then a third, and then a silence so absolute that Maren could hear the blood moving in her own ears.
She was on her feet before she knew she had moved. Her boots found the ground. Her hand found the hilt of the long knife she wore at her belt, a plain thing, not ornate, the kind of knife that a woman carries when she has learned that the world does not always wait for a sword. She stepped out of the tent. The sky to the east was the color of a bruise just beginning to yellow. The air smelled of rain that had not yet fallen.
Cale was already there, Skarrow at his side, the hound's hackles up, the hound's nose working.
"Something is wrong," Cale said. It was an understatement so profound it bordered on the absurd. Maren did not remark on it.
"Wren," she said.
The boy was already running toward the mercenary camp, his boots slapping the wet grass, his breath coming in fast white plumes. She ran after him. Cale ran after her. Sera came out of her own tent, pulling her shawl around her, and followed without a word, her face already set in the lines of a woman who has learned that the worst is always just ahead.
They crested the low rise. The mercenary camp lay below them, in a shallow bowl of ground where the marshwater pooled and the reeds grew tall. There were forty men in that company, or had been. They were a rough lot, sellswords and broken gentlemen, men who had taken the red coat because they had nowhere else to go. Maren had looked them over when they had made camp near hers the night before. She had not liked them. She had not needed to. They were not her concern.
What was her concern was the banner post.
The company flew a banner from a pole they had driven into the soft ground. It was their standard, a tattered thing, red as old blood, with the sigil of their captain, a man named Ser Torval, who had a reputation for being clever with a blade and careless with the lives of men beneath him. The banner hung from a crossbar, and beneath the crossbar, pinned to the wood with long iron nails that had been driven through the wrists and the heels, were three of Maren's riders. They had been stripped of their skins. They had been opened from throat to groin, their ribs cracked back like the doors of a reliquary. Their lungs had been cut free and arranged, with a care that was almost devotional, into the shapes of cathedral bells. The bells hung from the nails, still attached by the tracheas, swaying gently in the dawn wind. The blood had run down the post and pooled at the base, black in the half-light, already beginning to stiffen.
Wren made a sound that was not a word. Cale's hand went to Skarrow's collar, holding the hound back, though Skarrow was not straining forward. The hound had gone very still, the way a hound goes still when the thing it smells is not a thing it can fight. Sera Quill crossed herself, the old gesture, the one that had been forbidden for a hundred years and was still performed, in the dark, by women who remembered.
Maren walked down the slope. She did not run. She had learned, long ago, that what is done in the dark does not care whether you run toward it or away. It will wait. She walked, and the wind moved past her, and the smell came up to meet her: the iron of the blood, the sweeter rot of the opened bellies, the strange, almost floral scent that she had smelled in the chapel of Hollowmere, when the woman in the hood had opened the box.
She stopped at the base of the banner post. She looked up at the bells. They were very like the bells she had heard ringing in her mind for years. They were very like the bells of Veris. They were, she thought, intended to be.
"Maren," Wren said. He was beside her, his face the color of milk, his eyes too wide. "Maren, what do we do."
"We look," she said. "We look, and we see, and we do not look away."