The mud at Ravenhollow's gate was the color of old plums, churned to a paste by a fortnight of carts fleeing something they would not name. Kael Vryne shouldered through it anyway, his boots squelching with each step, the scar that ran from his left temple to the hinge of his jaw pulling tight against the cold. A haze of woodsmoke and something else hung over the rooftops, something sweet and sour and wrong, the kind of wrongness that settled at the back of the throat and refused to leave.
Two crows watched him from the crossbeam of the gatehouse. Neither moved.
He had walked for three days to reach this border town, following a river that ran the color of tea, sleeping in ditches and the hollowed bellies of fallen oaks. His pack sat high on his shoulders, cinched tight against the small of his back, holding the last of what he had left to sell: a rolled bundle of correspondence stolen from a Crown taxman's saddlebag, a bent spoon he had found in a ditch, and a strip of dried rabbit meat that smelled faintly of the lavender his mother used to tuck between the linens. He carried all of it the way a man carries a secret, close to the ribs.
The gate stood open. The guards who should have been there were not, and the ropes that should have held the wooden bar in place lay coiled in the mud like sleeping snakes. From somewhere beyond the wall, a dog was barking in short, frantic bursts, the rhythm of an animal that had forgotten why it had started and could not now remember how to stop.
Kael stopped at the threshold and listened.
"Three coppers for a man who walks with his shoulders up around his ears," said a voice from the shadow of the gatehouse. "Two if he answers a question honest."
Kael's hand went to the short-handled hatchet at his belt before his mind caught up with the motion. He forced his fingers to relax. The hatchet had been his father's. His father had used it to tap the ash-barrels in the mines beneath the Ashen Reach, listening for the hollow ring that meant a pocket of bad gas, and Kael had been eight years old the summer he learned that a man could die standing up, with both boots still on, with the taste of his lunch still on his tongue. He had been eleven when he stopped flinching at loud noises. He had been nineteen when he learned to let his hand drift to the hatchet and then let it drift away again, and he was twenty-four now, and the motion came as naturally as breathing.
"You'll have to ask harder than that," he said. "I haven't paid two coppers for an honest answer since I was old enough to know the difference."
The shadow shifted. A figure stepped out, and the afternoon light, pale and thin as whey, caught a face he had not seen in seven years.
Maren.
She had been slight at sixteen, all elbows and freckles and the particular stubbornness of a girl who had decided, against all evidence, that she was going to be a healer. She was slight still, though her shoulders had broadened, and her hair, once the color of wheat in August, had gone the duller gold of late autumn straw, and there were lines at the corners of her eyes that she had not had before. She wore a patched coat of undyed wool over a stained smock, and a leather satchel sat against her hip, its flap embossed with the caduceus of the traveling healers' guild, half worn away. She was holding a small purse of oiled canvas in her left hand, and the purse was dark. Dark, and dripping.
"Kael Vryne," she said. "I had a speech prepared. Something about the road being long and the world being smaller than we thought. Do you want the speech, or do you want the purse?"
"The purse," Kael said. "I've heard the speech before. From my own mouth, mostly."
Maren crossed the distance between them in three long strides and pressed the purse into his hand. It was heavier than he expected, and warm, and the warmth was not the warmth of a body that had been carried close. He looked down. The canvas was soaked through. Between the weave, something thick was seeping, the color of blackberry juice.
"That's not coin," he said.
"No."
He looked up at her. The lines at her eyes were not laugh lines. They were the kind of lines that came from squinting across distances, and from holding a sewing needle steady under a candle flame, and from not sleeping.
"What is it?"
"Work," she said. "Of a kind. There's a man dying in the room above the chandler's shop on Carver's Lane, and he has the sweating sickness, and his wife is seven months gone, and the midwife says the child will not come without forceps if it comes at all, and the wife has asked me to stay, and I have stayed, and the man is going to die before the candles burn down no matter what I do or do not do. I need someone to sit with the wife while I work. I need someone who is not a healer, because the healers here have all stopped answering their doors, and I need someone who will not tell her what is happening in the next room."
Kael looked at the purse again. The dark stain was spreading along the seam.
"I am not a healer," he said.
"I know."
"I do not know how to sit with a woman whose husband is dying in the next room."
"Neither does anyone," Maren said. "That is why I am asking you. I watched you sit with your mother the night before she died. You brought her the lavender. You did not speak. You did not pretend. You sat with her, and that is the only thing I have ever seen anyone do right at a time like that."
The mention of his mother landed in his chest like a stone dropped into still water. He had been seventeen. He had walked to the river and back seventeen times that night, because walking was the only thing that kept the silence from filling up the room and pressing down on her chest until she could not breathe. Maren had not been there. Maren had been at the healer's hall in Arncaster, two days' ride east, learning how to set bones and mix poultices, and he had not sent word because there had not been time. He had not known that she had known about the lavender at all.
"You remember the lavender," he said.
"I remember everything," she said, "that I have not been able to forget."
Kael looked at the gate behind him, at the road that led back toward the Ashen Reach, at the cart ruts in the mud and the broken rope and the empty gatehouse. He looked at Maren. He could feel the hatchet against his thigh, and the correspondence against his back, and the bent spoon, and the strip of dried rabbit, and the weight of his father's name, and the weight of his own, and the weight of every step he had taken to get here, which was the weight of a man walking away from something and walking toward something and not entirely sure which was which.
"I'll sit with her," he said. "But I'm not taking the purse until I've earned it. And I'm not sitting with her until you've told me what is in it."
Maren glanced down at the dark stain spreading along the seam. The dog beyond the wall had stopped barking. The crows on the crossbeam had not moved.
"Teeth," she said. "Molars. Four of them. Pulled from a man who did not survive the night. The wife kept them. The wife says he asked her to keep them. I do not know why a man asks his wife to keep his teeth. I am a healer, not a priest. But I have carried them since morning, and they are heavy, and they are not what I want in my satchel when I am trying to bring a child into the world."
Kael looked at the purse again. He thought about his father tapping the ash-barrels in the mines beneath the Ashen Reach. He thought about the hollow ring that meant a pocket of bad gas. He thought about the way a man could die standing up.
"Give it here," he said.
Maren handed it over. The purse settled against his hip with a small, wet sound. He did not look inside.
"Show me the way," he said. "And on the way, you can tell me why you came to meet me at the gate instead of waiting somewhere warmer. And you can tell me who told you I was coming. And you can tell me what you are not telling me, because I have known you since we were nine years old, and you have never once in your life handed a man a purse of teeth without a reason, and the reason is never the reason you say it is."
Maren looked at him for a long moment. The pale light caught the freckles across the bridge of her nose, and the lines at the corners of her eyes, and the particular set of her mouth that he remembered from the year she had decided to become a healer, which had been the year she had decided she was not going to be afraid of anything ever again, which had been the year after his mother died, which had been the year she had walked the two days from Arncaster without telling anyone and arrived at his door with a basket of bread and a bottle of wine and a look on her face that said she was not going to ask if he was all right because she already knew the answer.
"I will tell you on the way," she said. "But not all of it. Not yet. There are things that need to be told in the right order, and the right order is not the order I would choose if I were telling this story for the benefit of the telling."
"That's the first honest thing you've said since I got here," Kael said.
Maren turned and started walking. The mud sucked at her boots. Kael fell into step beside her, and the purse of teeth swung between them, dark against the pale wool of her coat, and neither of them looked at it again.
They walked for the better part of an hour before Maren spoke again, and when she did it was without preamble, the way she always began the hard things.
"Lord Elath died three nights ago. You may have heard that much, if you've heard anything."
Kael had heard. The whisper had reached Ravenhollow before he did: the Lord of Wyrm's Hollow, dead in his own bed, his household scattered, his manse sealed by the Crown's men before the body was cold. The official word was fever. The unofficial word was a dozen different things, none of them repeatable in mixed company.
"I heard," he said.
"What you didn't hear," Maren said, "is that I was there."
She did not look at him. The road bent around a stand of alders, their roots poking through the mud like the knuckles of buried hands. Somewhere ahead a wood pigeon's call went unanswered.
"I wasn't there as a guest," she went on. "I was there because his steward hired me to dress the sores on his arms. The lord had a sickness of the skin, a thing I've seen before in men who work with certain metals. I thought it was lead poisoning at first. It wasn't. But that's not the point."
"The point," Kael said, "is the coffer."
"The point," Maren said carefully, "is the night he died. I was in the herb room off the kitchen yard, grinding willow bark, when I heard the noise. It wasn't a human noise. I want you to understand that. It wasn't a scream, and it wasn't a sob, and it wasn't any of the sounds that a dying man makes when the breath is leaving him. It was a sound like something trying to remember how to speak."
The mud pulled at Kael's heels. He did not slow down.
"I went to him," Maren said. "I had no business going to him. The door to his chamber was open and the candle inside was burning green, and I went in because that is what I have always done, and because I have never been able to walk past an open door when the person behind it is suffering. You know that about me."
"I know that about you," Kael said.
"He was already gone. But the thing on the table beside his bed was not gone. The thing on the table was breathing."
She stopped walking. The road was empty ahead of them, empty behind them, the alders pressing close on either side and the mist sitting low in the ruts. Kael stopped too, because he had learned a long time ago that when Maren stopped walking, there was a reason.
"It was an iron coffer," she said. "Sealed. No keyhole. No hinges I could see. The metal was black, and it was warm, and when I put my hand near it I could feel something moving inside it, the way you can feel a moth moving inside a closed jar. I did not open it. I want you to understand that. I did not open it. I picked it up, and I put it inside my coat, and I walked out of the manse through the kitchen yard, and I did not stop walking until I reached the river ford at Marling, and even then I only stopped because my legs gave out."
"How did you get it past the gate?" Kael said. He kept his voice flat. That was harder than it sounded.
"I didn't," Maren said. "I went out over the wall, where the creeper grows thick. I tore my dress on the thorns and I didn't feel it. I walked in the river for a quarter mile to lose the dogs. I am not proud of any of this, Kael. I am telling you because you are the only person I have ever trusted with anything I am not proud of."
He believed her. He believed her because he had known her for nineteen years, and because she had never in his presence told a lie that mattered, and because the purse of teeth between them was heavier than any purse of teeth had a right to be.
"What's inside it?" he said.
"I don't know."
"But you've heard it."
"Yes."
"What does it sound like?"
She looked at him then. The freckles across her nose had gone pale in the cold, and her eyes were the color of river water in winter, and the set of her mouth was the set he remembered from the year she had cut open her own forearm to show him where the veins were, so he would know what to do if she ever cut herself in the wrong place.
"It sounds," she said, "like a child reciting the names of the dead."
Kael did not say anything for a long time. The mist curled around their ankles. The wood pigeon called again, and this time another answered from somewhere in the alders, though whether it was the same bird or a different one, Kael could not tell.
"You want me to take you to Ashemark," he said at last.
"Yes."
"Why me?"
"Because you are the only person I know who has been in the deep places under the Reach, and because you are the only person I know who has come back from the deep places under the Reach and is still willing to walk into a dark room, and because if what is inside that coffer is what I think it might be, then I am going to need someone beside me who has already seen worse."
"You don't know what's inside it."
"No."
"Then you don't know what I might have seen that was worse."
"No," Maren said. "But I know you, and that is enough."
Kael looked at the purse. The leather was dark, and the teeth showed through it in a way they had not shown through before, as though the light were leaning against them from the wrong side. He thought of the manse at Wyrm's Hollow with its sealed doors and its green candle and its lord dead in his bed. He thought of the iron coffer breathing in the dark. He thought of the child reciting the names of the dead, and the sound it must make against the skin of a woman's chest when she carries it close to her heart for three nights in a row.
"What is in Ashemark?" he said.
"The College of Cael has a vault," Maren said. "Sealed vaults. They keep records there that the Crown cannot touch, and objects that the Crown does not want anyone to see. If there is anyone in the kingdom who can tell me what is inside this coffer without opening it, it is one of the Keepers of the College."
"And if there isn't?"
"Then I will know I am in the wrong place, and I will keep walking."
Kael looked at her. The mist had begun to bead on the wool of her coat, and the purse hung between them, and the teeth inside it were very quiet.
"A third," he said.
"A third of whatever is inside, if it can be divided. A third of whatever it tells us, if it cannot. A third of whatever it is worth, if it comes to that. I will write it in my own blood on the road here, if you want me to."
"No," Kael said. "I want you to tell me what you are not telling me."
Maren looked at the road ahead. The road bent again, and beyond the bend the trees thinned, and beyond the trees was the open moor, and somewhere past the moor was the long climb to the high passes, and beyond the passes the lowlands of the south, and somewhere in the lowlands, Ashemark.
"I am not telling you," she said carefully, "that Lord Elath called my name before he died. I am not telling you that he said my name in a voice that was not his own. I am not telling you that the coffer stopped breathing when he said it, and started again when he stopped. I am not telling you any of that, because if I told you that, you would turn around, and I need you to walk beside me."
"I wouldn't turn around."
"Yes," Maren said, "you would. And you have turned around enough."
The mist thickened. The wood pigeon called once more, and this time no answer came.
"A third," Kael said.
"A third," Maren said.
He did not say yes. He picked up the purse, and he put it inside his own coat, against his chest, and the weight of it settled against his ribs like the weight of a sleeping child, and somewhere inside the leather something shifted, and was still.
They walked on.
The moor opened before them like the page of an unwritten letter, wide and grey and trembling with mist. Kael could feel the wind on his face before he could see where it came from. It smelled of wet stone and the distant sea, and beneath those smells, faint but unmistakable, the iron tang of something burned long ago.
Maren walked with her head down, the pack riding easy on her shoulders, her staff striking the path with a rhythm that had not changed in three hours. She had not spoken since the last bend. Kael had not asked her to. The purse lay warm against his chest, and the warmth was not his own, and he did not let himself think about that, the way a man does not let himself think about the tooth that aches when he bites down on it. He thought about Ravenhollow instead. He thought about the town square, and what he had seen there, and what he had counted, and what the count had meant.
He had counted forty-seven. Forty-seven bodies stacked in the square of Ravenhollow like cordwood at the close of a lean autumn, except that cordwood does not bleed, and the dead of Ravenhollow had bled, and the flies had come, and the crows had come, and the smell had risen into the smell of the autumn woodsmoke and been swallowed by it, and the people of the town had walked past the stack with their eyes averted and their mouths shut, because the man who had stacked them had told them not to look, and the man had been wearing the badge of the Crown, and the badge of the Crown is a thing that closes mouths the way frost closes ponds.
Forty-seven. He had counted them twice, because he had not believed his eyes the first time, and the second count had been the same. Forty-seven men, and not all of them men, and not all of them from Ravenhollow. He had recognized three of the faces. One had been the farrier from the village where Kael had sold his sword in the summer, a small man with clever hands and a wife who braided his hair in the morning. One had been the girl who had brought him ale at the Broken Lantern in the autumn, the girl with the chipped tooth and the laugh like a brook. One had been no one he could place, but the brand on the man's forearm had been the brand of the Ashen Reach, and Kael knew that brand, because Kael had carried that brand, because Kael had earned that brand in the years when he had dug in the black pits beneath the mountain, when the Crown had owned his hands and his back and the breath in his lungs.
He had walked away from Ravenhollow without selling his sword. He had walked away from the Broken Lantern without sleeping in the bed Bress had offered him. He had walked out onto the road in the small hours, and the road had bent, and the mist had come, and he had kept walking, because the alternative was to stop, and to stop was to think, and to think was to count the forty-seven again, and to count the forty-seven again was to remember that the farrier had a wife, and the girl with the chipped tooth had a mother who had not been in the stack, and the man with the brand had been someone who had once been a boy, and the boy had had a name, and the name was gone.
He thought of these things as he walked. He did not think about the purse.
Maren cleared her throat. The sound was small and deliberate, like a stone dropped into still water to test the depth.
"You are quiet," she said.
"I am walking."
"You are walking and you are quiet. These are not the same thing. You are walking like a man who is listening to something inside his own head, and what is inside his own head is louder than what is on the road."
Kael did not answer. A grouse burst from the heather to his left with a clatter of wings that made him flinch, and the flinch made him angry at himself, and the anger was the old familiar anger, the anger that sits in the chest like a coal that will not go out.
"I have walked this moor before," Maren said. "In the summer, when the heather is out, it is purple for as far as you can see, and the bees are so loud you cannot hear yourself think. In the winter it is white, and the wind is a knife, and you walk with your head down and your mouth shut, and you count your steps because counting is the only thing that keeps you company. This is neither of those. This is the in-between, and the in-between is where the old stories live."
"What old stories?"
"The ones about the things that walk the moors when the world is changing. The things that have no names in any language. The things that the shepherds will not speak of except in the summer, when the doors are shut and the fire is high."
"Superstition."
"Yes," Maren said. "Superstition, and the memory of superstition, and the fear that the memory is not a memory at all. I am a healer, Kael. I have stitched men shut and pried men open. I have held the hand of a woman who was bringing a child into the world and the hand of a man who was leaving it. I have seen the small magics that the body does to itself, and the larger ones that the world does to us when we are not watching. I do not disbelieve. I have run out of the room that disbelief sits in."
The path dipped into a hollow, and the heather rose on either side until it brushed their hips. Maren stopped, and Kael stopped because she had stopped, and for a moment they stood in the hollow with the mist curling around their knees like grey water.
"Show me," she said.
"Show you what?"
"Show me what you saw in Ravenhollow. Not the count. The other thing. The thing that made you count."
Kael looked at her. She had not looked at him since the bend in the road. Now she did, and her eyes were the pale grey-green of the moor itself, and they were steady, and they were not kind, because kindness would have been a softer thing.
"The farrier's wife," he said. "She was standing at the edge of the square. She was not crying. She was not screaming. She was standing at the edge of the square with her arms at her sides, and she was watching the flies move from one face to another. And when the soldier who had stacked them told her to go inside, she did not go inside. She stood there. And the soldier raised his hand to her, and she did not move, and the soldier did not strike her, because the other soldiers were watching, and the other soldiers would have remembered."
"Why did she not move?"
"Because she had seen her husband's face in the stack, and she had counted the bodies around him, and she had understood something. I do not know what she understood. I only know that she had stopped being afraid, and that the stopping was a kind of weapon, and that the soldier had seen it, and that the soldier had been afraid of her."
Maren nodded. She picked up her staff, and the motion was slow, and the staff did not strike the path this time. She held it across her body like a yoke.
"And the girl with the chipped tooth?"
"Her mother was not in the stack. The mother was in the doorway of the Broken Lantern. Bress was standing behind her, with his hand on her shoulder. He was not speaking. He was holding her the way a man holds a horse that is about to bolt, with pressure and not with words. He saw me on the road. He did not wave. He did not call out. He only looked at me, and the look was a question, and the question was whether I had counted."
"And you had."
"I had."
The mist shifted. A shape moved in the heather to their right, low and quick, gone before Kael could turn his head fully toward it. Maren did not flinch. She had been walking moors longer than he had.
"We cannot outrun it," she said.
"I have not said I want to outrun it."
"You are thinking it. You are thinking it the way you thought about the purse, by not thinking about it. You have a purse against your chest that is breathing, and you are walking beside a woman who has told you she will not tell you the truth about it, and you are doing both of these things, and you are doing them because the alternative is to stop, and to stop is to count, and to count is to remember."
"Stop."
"No. You stop. I will walk ahead. I will walk to the top of the rise, and I will see what is on the other side, and when I know, I will come back, and we will go on, or we will not go on, but either way we will know."
"You are not going ahead of me."
"Yes," Maren said, "I am."
She walked past him. He let her. Her pack swayed. Her staff did not strike the ground. The heather closed over the place where she had stood.
Kael stood alone in the hollow. The mist moved. The purse shifted against his ribs, and the shift was the same shift it had made since the moment she had pressed it into his hand, the small, slow adjustment of something that was not cloth and not leather and not the contents of either. He had not opened it. He would not open it. He understood this about himself the way he understood the count of the forty-seven: as a thing that was true, and that would not change, and that would cost him.
He thought about the farrier's wife. He thought about the look on Bress's face. He thought about the soldier who had not struck her. He thought about the brand on the arm of the man in the stack, and he thought about the day he himself had been branded, and the man who had held the iron, and the smell of his own skin burning, and the sound he had made, which had been no sound at all.
He thought about Maren, walking ahead of him now, up the rise, her hair moving in the wind.
He thought about the whispers in the road.
He had heard them first at the Broken Lantern, three nights before. Bress had been cleaning a glass with a rag that had seen better days, and the fire had been low, and the other travelers had been asleep, and Kael had been sitting at the table in the corner with the mug of ale that Bress had poured without being asked, and the mug had been warm in his hand, and the warmth had been a small kindness, and he had been about to drink.
The whispers had come from the road outside. They had not been words. They had been the sound that words make before they become words, the way a wave is the sound that water makes before it becomes a wave. They had risen and fallen, and Kael had set the mug down, and he had crossed to the window, and he had looked out, and the road had been empty, and the mist had been on the road, and the whispers had been in the mist.
He had not spoken of it. He had finished the ale. He had climbed the stairs to the room Bress had given him, and he had lain down on the bed, and he had not slept. In the morning he had come down, and Bress had been at the bar, and the fire had been rebuilt, and the other travelers had been eating porridge, and no one had looked at him, and no one had spoken, and he had walked out onto the road.
The whispers had come again that day, and the next, and the next, and they had grown louder, or he had grown more willing to hear them, and on the third night he had stood at the window of the Broken Lantern and listened until Bress had come up the stairs behind him, and Bress had stood in the doorway, and Bress had said, "You hear them."
Kael had not turned around. "What are they?"
"The road is talking. The road has been talking for a season. Some say it is the bones of the Reach. Some say it is the breath of the Crown itself, turned against the stones. Some say it is only the wind in the cracks, and the wind in the cracks is only the wind."
"What do you say?"
"I say," Bress had answered, "that the road did not talk before the summer, and in the summer the soldiers came through, and in the autumn the dead were stacked in the square, and now the road talks, and the talking is a kind of counting, and the counting is a kind of naming, and the naming is a kind of claim."
"A claim by whom?"
"By whoever is buried beneath the road. By whoever has not been allowed to be buried beneath the road. By whoever was dug up and burned and scattered, or dug up and left to the crows, or dug up and never named at all."
Kael had slept that night, and in the morning he had walked to the square, and he had counted the forty-seven.
Maren was at the top of the rise. She had stopped. She was looking at something on the other side, and the looking was a long one, and the wind was moving her cloak, and the cloak was moving the way a cloak moves when the wind is cold, and when the wind is cold the world is saying something, and what it is saying is that the season is turning, and that the turning is not kind.
She turned. She looked down at him in the hollow.
"Come up," she said. Her voice carried on the wind. It was steady, and it was not afraid, and it was not unkind.
He walked up. The heather dragged at his boots. The purse warmed against his chest. At the top of the rise he stood beside her, and he looked where she was looking, and he understood why she had asked him to come.
The lowlands spread below them, green and brown in the late light, and the road cut through them like a grey ribbon, and the ribbon bent and bent and bent, and at the farthest bend, where the light was failing, there was a smudge of smoke that was not woodsmoke. The smoke was black, and it rose straight up because the air was still, and it was the smoke of something that was not a hearth.
Maren did not speak. Kael did not speak. The mist closed in from the west, and the moor behind them was empty, and the lowlands before them were not empty, and the road between them and the lowlands was the road they had walked, and would walk, and the walking was a third of whatever was inside the purse, and a third of whatever the purse was worth, and a third of whatever it told them, and the other two thirds were the forty-seven, and the farrier's wife, and the girl with the chipped tooth, and Bress at the door of the Broken Lantern, and the brand on the arm of the man in the stack, and the whispers in the road, and the road talking, and the road not stopping, and the road going on.
Kael picked up his pack. He set his shoulders against the wind.
"A third," he said.
"A third," Maren said.
They walked down the rise toward the smoke.