Salt crunched under Ravik Valcaryn's boots as he descended the worn stairs into Pit Twelve, the third shaft of the Greycoast mines, and the air changed immediately. Above, the coastal wind carried brine and the distant complaints of gulls circling the slag heaps. Below, the world tasted of iron and the mineral sharpness of unworked crystal, a smell that coated the tongue and lingered no matter how many times a man spat. Torchlight from the upper galleries gave way to the pale phosphorescence of lichen that clung to the tunnel walls, and the sounds narrowed to the rhythmic scrape of picks, the groan of timber supports, and the occasional distant rumble that reminded every soul in the pit that the mountain above them was only borrowed weight.
Ravik had been in the Greycoast mines for eleven months. He had learned the taste of the air, the schedule of the overseers, the small economies that kept a man alive when his name belonged to another life. He had learned, too, to let his hair grow past his collar and to file the Valcaryn signet from his left hand with a chisel he kept wrapped in oilcloth at the bottom of his kit. The scar where the ring had been was pale and puckered, a small thing that ached in cold weather. He did not look at it.
"Valcaryn."
The crew-master's voice carried down the tunnel with the flat authority of a man who had shouted over cave-ins until shouting was simply how he breathed. Torval Marsh was broad where the years had not worn him down, with hands like shovels and eyes that moved across a face only long enough to note what he needed. He had been a soldier once. Everyone in the Greycoast pits had been something else before. That was the economy of exile: a man gave up his name, and in return the world forgot to ask what he had done to lose it.
Ravik straightened from the vein he had been working and turned, one hand still resting on the haft of his pick. The crystal here was the color of weak tea and broke in flakes that caught the torchlight like frozen tears. Low-grade. Not the moon-crystal the overseers prized, but enough to keep a crew in their rations and out of the punishment lines.
"Marsh."
"We move north to the Twelve-Finger vein." Torval jerked his chin toward the deeper tunnel, where the supports were older and the phosphorescence thinner. "New pickings. Overseer says there's a pocket that might run to the bright stuff. I want eyes on it before the morning count."
Ravik said nothing. The Twelve-Finger vein was a bad stretch. He had worked it once before, in his second month, when a boy from the upper crews had been caught in a partial collapse and had not been pulled out in time. The mine-wardens had written his name in the ledgers as lost to cavity fall, and the overseers had moved on to the next day's yield. That was the economy too.
He followed Torval down the passage, past crews who did not meet his eyes. Men and women with the hollow cheeks of the underfed, their movements careful and economical, the picks rising and falling in a rhythm that was almost hypnotic if a man let himself listen too long. The air grew colder as they descended, and the smell shifted from iron to something older, a mineral sourness that Ravik had learned to associate with the deeper pockets where the moon-crystal grew in clusters like petrified frost.
At the Twelve-Finger junction, Torval gathered the four-man detail: Ravik, a boy of perhaps thirteen whose name Ravik had never learned, and two older laborers who worked the salt-carts and said little. The boy was thin in the way that meant he had not been fed enough as an infant, his wrists too narrow for the pick he carried, his eyes too old. Children in the Greycoast pits were not uncommon. The overseers paid them half-rations and asked no questions about where they had come from.
"Valcaryn takes point." Torval handed him a torch with a handle wrapped in wire. "You and I clear the face. The rest stand ready to haul."
The face of the Twelve-Finger vein glistened in the torchlight, the crystal embedded in the rock catching the flame and throwing it back in fractured rainbows. Ravik set his shoulder to the first swing and felt the familiar jar travel up his arms and into the base of his skull. The rock here was softer than the upper veins, shot through with the bright stuff, and after a dozen strokes the first cluster came free in his hands, cold and heavy and singing faintly when he turned it. Moon-crystal. A full crate of it would buy a man his way off the Greycoast for a season, maybe more. A single node the size of his fist could feed a family for a month in the coastal towns where the bright stuff was worked into lenses and charms.
He set the cluster aside and swung again.
He did not hear the first tremor. He felt it, a deep shudder that came up through the soles of his boots and into his knees, and then the sound arrived: a low, rolling groan that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, the mountain itself shifting in its sleep. Torval shouted something, and Ravik saw the older laborers drop their cart and run for the main tunnel, their silhouettes swallowed by the dark. The boy did not run. The boy was standing at the edge of the collapse zone, staring at the ceiling as a fracture raced across it, and Ravik saw in the boy's face the exact moment when his legs refused to move.
The ceiling came down.
It came down in sections, not all at once, the way he had been taught in another life that cave-ins in worked mines came down. First the loose stone and the dust, a choking wave that filled the tunnel and turned the torchlight into a brown murk. Then the larger slabs, grinding against each other as they fell, and finally the slow, settling groan of a mountain finding a new arrangement for its weight. Ravik threw himself sideways, pressing into a niche where the wall met the ceiling, and felt the air crush out of him as a boulder the size of a draft horse slammed into the floor where he had been standing. His torch went out. The world became sound and pressure and the taste of dust so fine it was almost sweet.
When the settling stopped, there was silence of a particular kind. Not the absence of noise, but the presence of something else: the held breath of a mountain deciding whether to fall again. Ravik lay still for a count of thirty, listening. No second groan. No shifting. The first shelf of the collapse had braced itself against the timbers of the main tunnel, and for the moment the world was holding.
He pushed himself up onto his elbows and spat dust. His left shoulder was wrong, a deep bruise forming along the muscle, but his arms worked and his legs worked and nothing in his chest felt broken. The air was thick and hard to breathe, but it was air. He called out.
"TMarsh."
Nothing.
"TValcaryn."
Nothing either, though he had not meant to call himself. He reached for the torch at his feet and found the handle still wrapped in wire, the oil-cloth torn but intact. He worked the flint in his belt-pouch with fingers that shook only slightly, and after three strikes a small flame caught. He shielded it with his hand and looked around.
The main tunnel was gone. Where it had been was a wall of stone and timber, the supports snapped and tangled, the way out buried under tons of fractured rock. To his left, the niche where he had sheltered ended in a fissure barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through, and beyond it he could hear the faint sound of dripping water. To his right, the collapse had fallen in a different pattern, leaving a pocket of open space where the ceiling still held, and in that pocket he could see two things.
The first was Torval Marsh. The crew-master lay on his side, one leg pinned under a slab of crystal-studded rock, his breathing shallow and rapid, his face grey with dust and something worse. The second was a wooden crate that had been stacked against the far wall of the pocket, its lid burst open by the fall, the moon-crystal inside scattering across the floor in clusters that caught Ravik's small flame and threw it back in fractured, cold light.
And the third thing he saw was the boy.
The boy was not under the collapse. He was on the other side of the pocket, pressed into a corner where two slabs of fallen stone formed a crude lean-to, and he was staring at Ravik with the wide, unblinking eyes of an animal that has decided to be very quiet and hope that the thing that has noticed it will go away. One of his arms was bleeding. The bone was not showing, but the blood was running freely down his wrist and pooling in the dust at his feet, turning the pale powder into a dark paste.
Ravik counted the distance in his head. The boy was perhaps fifteen feet away, across the open floor of the pocket, with no significant debris between them. Torval was perhaps eight feet from Ravik, on the same side, with the slab across his leg. The crate of moon-crystal was between them, its contents scattered, the bright nodes glowing faintly in the dark.
Torval's eyes opened. He coughed, and the sound was wet.
"Valcaryn." His voice was a thread. "The crystal. Get the crystal to the shaft-house. They'll send a salvage crew if there's bright stuff to be had. If there's nothing, they'll write us down as lost and move on to the next yield."
Ravik did not answer. He was looking at the boy. The boy's blood was still running, and in the cold air of the pocket it was beginning to slow, thickening at the edges of the pool. The boy was thirteen, maybe fourteen, and he was watching Ravik the way the boy in the upper crew had watched the ceiling before it took him.
"The crystal, Valcaryn." Torval's hand moved, reaching for the nearest cluster, and then he stopped, the effort costing him a groan. "I can't. My leg. If you get it to the surface, they'll come. They'll have to. Overseers don't leave bright stuff in a sealed vein if they can help it. It's the only play."
Ravik stepped forward. His boot came down on a node of moon-crystal, and he felt it crack under his weight, the cold of it bleeding up through the sole and into his foot. The bright stuff was worth more than he had ever been worth in the pits. A single crate of it could buy a man's way to the Free City of Lyr, or to the southern ports, or to any one of a dozen places where a man with a false name and a filed-off signet could disappear into the crowds and never have to swing a pick again.
The boy's breathing was audible now, a thin, high sound that mixed with the drip of water from somewhere deeper in the fissure. His eyes had not left Ravik's face.
Ravik Valcaryn, who had once commanded a hundred men in the service of a crown he no longer served, who had crossed a continent with a blood oath in his chest and a sister's letter in his kit, who had learned in the Greycoast pits that a man is the sum of the choices he makes when no one is watching, stepped past the crate and went to the boy.
The moon-crystal stung where it had cracked, a thread of cold climbing the arch of his foot. Ravik pulled the boy upright by the back of his shirt. The cloth was damp and smelled of sulfur and weeks of sweat, and the boy made a sound when he was lifted that was halfway between a gasp and a sob. His legs would not hold him. Ravik hooked an arm under the boy's shoulder and braced.
"Stay on me," he said. "One step at a time. We are leaving this place."
Torval's eyes were on the bright stuff. Ravik did not look at the crate.
They made it to the fissure mouth in under a minute. The light from the gantry lamps was a pale smear across the lip, and the air up here tasted of wet rope and rain. Two of the slats were gone from the cage, and a third had split along the grain. Ravik set the boy against the frame and climbed first, pulling the boy up after him with his wrists. The boy whimpered once, low, and then bit down on the sound as though he had been punished for it before. Ravik hooked an arm around his waist and swung them both onto the gantry.
The yard was empty. The guards were gone. A single work-lamp still burned at the far corner, its wick fluttering, and the rain had picked up enough that the mud in the yard was running in shallow channels toward the drainage grates. Ravik laid the boy down in the dry shadow of the ore-cart and checked his breathing. The breath came shallow, then deeper. His eyelids fluttered. Alive. Ravik pulled the tarp off the cart and bundled the boy in it, folding him once the way he had seen his mother's women fold infants in the north cold, and then he stood and looked back at the shaft.
The cage hung over the dark, rocking in the wind.
He turned away.
The cordon around the pit town had thinned by the time he reached it. A patrol of four men went past the eastern road without their torches, moving quick, their faces turned toward a knot of riders coming up from the south. A banner snapped in the rain at their head, a color Ravik did not recognize at this distance, dark against the wet sky. He flattened himself against a rain barrel and let them pass. The sound of the hooves faded. The boy stirred inside the tarp on his back, a small unconscious shifting, and then settled.
The forest swallowed him within the hour.
He had walked most of the night when the fever turned.
It began as a heat in the small of his back that he took at first for the exertion of the climb. By the time the path had risen above the tree line, the heat had climbed to the base of his skull and was sitting there like a coal. The boy was burning against his shoulders. Ravik set him down in the lee of a boulder, in a hollow where the rain had not reached, and laid a hand on his forehead. The skin was dry and hot. The boy's lips were moving, shaping at something Ravik could not hear.
He needed shelter. He needed a fire. He needed, he thought, with the clarity that comes in the early stages of the poison, a great many things that the next hour was not going to give him.
He cut pine branches and laid them across the hollow, a low frame that would she'd the rain. He coaxed a fire from the punkwood in his kit and set the boy beside it. The boy did not wake. The boy's lips kept moving. Ravik sat with his back against the boulder and watched the steam rise off the boy's skin and disperse into the dark.
When the second rider passed, Ravik did not move.
The rider was sixty yards downslope, moving east along the ridge trail, a dark shape against the wet fern. The horse picked its way carefully. The rider did not look up. The rain had thinned to a mist. After a long moment, the sound of the hooves thinned with it and was gone.
Ravik laid his hand on the hilt of his sword and did not draw it.
Dawn came grey and close. The rain had stopped. The boy was still breathing.
The fever climbed. It climbed the way a tide climbs a flat shore, slow and then all at once, and by midmorning Ravik's teeth were chattering and his vision had begun to narrow at the edges. He could feel the bright stuff in his blood now, a cold thread that ran opposite to the heat in his skin. He had seen men die of moon-crystal before. He had dug their graves. The order was always the same: the heat first, then the cold, then a stillness that looked like sleep and was not.
He wrote the letter while his hand could still hold the pen.
He had carried the paper in his kit for three years. It was the cream-laid stock of the northern court, heavy and faintly floral, and it had survived the salt air of the Greycoast crossings and the damp of the pit barracks because he had kept it in the oilskin sleeve at the bottom of his pack. He laid it flat against the boulder and uncapped the pen. He had not written home in three years. He had written Cira once, in the first spring after the exile, and her reply had never come, and he had taken the silence for its answer.
He wrote,
Sister,
If this reaches you, I am dead or close to it. I am on the northern edge of the Greycoast range, two days east of the mines, alone except for a boy of fourteen whose name I do not know. I came south to find you. I am sorry I did not make it further.
I have one thing to tell you and one thing to ask. The thing I have to tell you is that our brother is no longer the man we knew. He sits a throne he did not earn, and he has bent the laws of the crown to break the oaths of the men who served it, and he has done this in our father's name, and our father would not have borne it. I say this knowing it is a small thing against what you have built. You have built more than I have. I say it because it is true.
The thing I have to ask is that you do not come for me. The men who ride for our brother are closing this country, and if you come they will find you, and if they find you they will use you against your own people, and your people need you more than I do. I release you from any oath of blood you may still feel toward me. I release myself from mine.
The bright stuff has taken me. I am not afraid. I have seen worse men die of less.
Your brother, R.
He folded the letter twice. He did not seal it. He laid it inside the boy's shirt, against his sternum, where it would not be lost.
The boy opened his eyes at noon.
He looked up at Ravik from inside the tarp. His lips were cracked. He had lost a tooth at some point in the night, the upper left, and the gap made his face look younger and older at once.
"You gave it to me," the boy said.
"Yes."
"You should have left me."
"Yes."
The boy looked at the sky. The clouds had thinned, and a single bar of sun lay across the boulder and across Ravik's hands, which were shaking.
"Why didn't you?"
Ravik was quiet for a long time. The cold in his chest had reached his wrists. The coal at the base of his skull had begun to dim. He looked at the boy, and the boy looked back, and neither of them looked away.
"Because my sister would not have," he said.
He wrote the second letter after the boy had fallen back into a doze. He wrote it on the back of the first, in a hand that was no longer entirely his. He addressed it to the address he had carried for eight years, the address he had been given in a stone room in the east under a name he no longer used. He wrote,
To Maelis Dunreve, at the sign of the broken compass, the border town of Dunreve, if such a town still stands.
I am dying in the northern range. There is a boy with me who will need a roof. His name is not yet mine to give. I ask that you find him one.
I am sorry I did not come in person. I am sorry I am not the man I told you I was.
The rest is on the other side.
He folded it. He tucked it under the boy's hand.
He did not write a third letter.
When the patrol found them, late in the afternoon, the boy was sitting upright against the boulder with Ravik's head on his shoulder and the fire burned down to a single coal. The lead rider swung down and crossed the clearing in three strides, and the boy did not flinch, and Ravik did not move, and the rider knelt and laid two fingers against the side of Ravik's neck and held them there for a long time.
"He is gone," the rider said.
"He told me to wait," the boy said.
The rider stood. He looked at the boy. He looked at the boulder. He looked at the letter under the boy's hand.
"What is your name?" the rider said.
The boy did not know. He had never been asked.
"The man on the ground gave me one," the boy said. "He said I could choose."
"What did he say?"
The boy looked down at Ravik's face. The face was turned toward him, and the eyes were half open and did not blink, and the mouth was set in a line that was not quite a smile and not quite a grimace.
"He said to pick the one I could grow into."
The rider was silent for a moment. Then he reached down and took the letter from under the boy's hand and broke the seal, although it had not been sealed, and read the first side, and turned it, and read the second side, and stood for a long time with the paper in his hand.
"I know the address," the rider said, at last. "I know the woman."
He folded the letter and put it inside his coat.
"What is her name?" the boy said.
"Dunreve," the rider said. "Maelis Dunreve. She keeps a shop. She draws maps. She is the kind of woman your friend would have called a friend."
He lifted Ravik's body across the saddle of his own horse. The boy walked beside him, one hand on the stirrup leather, the other hand at his side. The sun had come through. The forest opened around them as they moved down the slope. At the edge of the clearing the rider paused and looked back, once, at the hollow and the dead fire and the boulder, and then he turned the horse and followed the trail east, and the boy followed him, and the column followed them, and the long grey coast opened out below them in the afternoon light.
Ravik woke to the taste of iron and the smell of pine smoke. His throat burned where the binding-glass shard sat lodged against his soft palate, a splinter of oath-crystal no larger than a fingernail, and when he swallowed he could feel it shift, could feel its edges catch the tender flesh. The Crown's apothecary had sworn it would dissolve in time, would knit into the tissue and become part of him, and Ravik had not asked what would happen if it did not dissolve, because he already knew. The shard would work its way downward over weeks, over months, would migrate through the throat and into the chest and lodge near the heart, and there it would wait, and if he ever spoke the name of his brother's enemy in council, if he ever opened a gate that should stay shut, if he ever betrayed the pardon he had been given, then the shard would drink his warmth and leave him a corpse in the saddle. Ravik had swallowed it without water. He had felt it go down like a second breath, like a vow made flesh.
He sat up on the cot in the barracks at the eastern gate, and the world tilted, and steadied. A physician's assistant had stitched the gash on his shoulder and bandaged the place on his jaw where the glass had cut him going down, and the stitches pulled when he turned his head. The light through the high window was thin and grey, the color of dawn seen through unbleached linen, and somewhere beyond the wall a horse stamped and blew. The column was forming in the yard. He could hear the clink of tack and the low voices of men who had been bought with coin they did not love.
A knock came at the door, and a captain entered without waiting for an answer, a woman in the Queen's grey with a cavalry saber at her hip and a face that had been sunburned into something resembling old leather. She was one of the Crown's sellswords, one of the company that would escort him east, and she looked at him the way a farrier looks at a horse that has just been shod with a questionable shoe.
"You'll ride with the second rank," she said. "Your horse is the bay with the white sock. His name is Sedge. He bites if you smell of apples."
Ravik stood and tested his shoulder. The joint answered, grudgingly.
"What is your name, captain?"
"Drey." She said it the way one says a tool's name. "Stay behind me at the ford. The Thornwall scouts like to fire at riders in the front."
She left. Ravik washed his face in the basin by the window, and the water came away pink, and he dried it on the cloth and dressed in the clothes that had been laid out for him, a plain coat of undyed wool, riding boots that had been soled twice, a sword belt that was not his own. The sword that hung in it was not his own either. He had given his blade to a woman in the lower town who needed it more than he did, and the Crown had given him a replacement that was well made and entirely without sentiment. It felt like wearing another man's coat. It felt correct.
He walked out into the yard, and the morning opened around him, cold and bright.
The column was forty strong. Sellswords, most of them, with a scatter of Crown regulars whose discipline sat on them like a poorly fitted coat. They had brought pack mules and a wagon for the provisions, and at the head of the column a standard-bearer held the Queen's grey pennant on a short staff, and the pennant stirred in the wind, and the wind came off the sea and tasted of salt and ash. Ravik had heard that the eastern reaches still smelled of the burning. He had not believed it until the wind turned.
Sedge was the bay with the white sock, and he did smell of apples, faintly, from the last hand that had fed him, and Ravik approached him from the windward side and spoke to him in the old tongue the stablemasters used, the tongue that horses seemed to understand whether or not they had been born to it, and Sedge turned his head and regarded him with one large eye and decided, provisionally, to permit the contact. Ravik swung into the saddle, and the horse shifted beneath him, and the column moved.
They took the eastern road out of Avenmoor, the road that climbed through the terraced orchards and then the high pastures, and from the high pastures the city fell away below them, and the harbor, and the long grey coast, and somewhere to the west, if one knew where to look, the hollow where the boy had knelt, and the boulder, and the dead fire. Ravik did not look. He had learned, in his years of wandering, that some things must be left where they are, or they will follow you.
At the ford they watered the horses, and the water came down off the high ground brown with recent rain, and the stones of the ford were slick, and a Crown scout lost his footing and went down on one knee in the shallows, and Drey made him remount in disgrace. Ravik kept his place in the second rank, and Sedge picked his way across with the careful indifference of an animal that had crossed a thousand fords and intended to cross a thousand more. The binding-glass shifted in his throat when he swallowed. He was learning its weight.
The first night they made camp in a shepherd's ruin at the edge of the foothills, and Drey posted sentries and rationed the bread and allowed no fires that would carry, and Ravik sat with his back to the broken wall and watched the stars come out, and the stars were the same stars he had watched from the hollow, and the hollow was a day's ride behind him now, and already it felt like a year.
A man came and sat beside him. He was one of the sellswords, a tall man with a scarred face and a quiet manner, and he offered Ravik a cup of watered wine, and Ravik took it, and they drank in silence for a while.
"You took the glass," the man said, at last.
"I did."
"I have seen men take it before. I have seen one of them die of it. He had been three years in the Crown's service, and he opened a gate he should not have opened, for a woman he should not have loved, and the shard found his heart in a night, and he was dead before morning."
Ravik said nothing.
"I am not telling you this to warn you," the man said. "You know what the glass is. I am telling you because the men of this column will talk, and they will say that the exiled Valcaryn has been bought, and they will say it to your face when they have drunk enough, and you should know what they are saying before they say it."
"What would you have me do?"
The man drank. "I would have you ride well, and keep your mouth shut, and let your work speak. Words are cheap. Swords are cheap. Only the road is honest."
He went away, and Ravik sat with the cup in his hands, and the wine was thin and the cup was tin, and the stars wheeled above him, and the binding-glass sat in his throat like a small cold stone.
In the morning they rode on. The foothills gave way to the long slopes of the eastern range, and the slopes gave way to the passes, and the passes gave way to the high country where the wind had nothing between it and the sky. The air thinned, and the horses labored, and the men spoke less and watched more, and the column strung out along the trail like a thin grey thread pulled through the brown of the hills. Twice they saw riders on the ridges above them, distant and still, and Drey raised a hand and the column halted, and the distant riders watched for a long moment, and then they turned and were gone, and the column went on.
Ravik thought of the Thornwall. He had heard it described, in the camps of the border lords and the common rooms of Avenmoor, as a fortress and a symbol and a wound. It had been held by the rebels since the third year of the war, since a captain named Oram Greylen had walked out of a parley with the late King and led his men over the wall and into the arms of the pretender. The Crown had tried twice to take it back. The first assault had failed in the snow. The second had failed in the rain. The third, it was said, would not be attempted at all unless the Crown could find a man who could walk into the Thornwall without being cut down in the yard.
Ravik did not know if he was that man. He had been a commander of the Northern host in his brother's service, and the men of the Thornwall had served under him once, some of them, and some of them had loved him and some of them had hated him, and he had left them without farewell when his brother stripped him of his command for the sin of disagreeing with the war. He had ridden west. He had wandered. He had become the kind of man who carries letters for strangers and does not ask their names. And now he was riding east again, with a shard of glass in his throat and a company of dubious royal sellswords at his back, and the question of whether the Thornwall would open its gates for him was a question he could not answer from the back of a horse on a trail that smelled of pine and cold water.
On the fifth day they crossed the watershed. The trail descended into a different country, a country of deeper valleys and thicker forest, and the air changed, and the smell of ash that had haunted the wind grew stronger, and by nightfall of the sixth day they could see the first of the burnt holdings, a stone barn with its roof gone and its walls still standing, the thatch scattered across the field like the she'd hair of some great beast. The men rode in silence past it. The horses did not like the smell.
On the seventh day they came to the river that ran below the Thornwall. The river was broad and brown and slow, and on the far bank the fortress rose from the rock like something grown there, a mass of grey stone and darker timber, the banners of the pretender hanging limp in the windless air. The bridge had been broken. The ford had been staked. A single gate faced them across the water, and the gate was shut, and on the wall above it men walked with crossbows, and the crossbows caught the light when they moved.
Drey reined in beside Ravik. She did not look at him. She looked at the gate.
"Well," she said.
Ravik looked at the gate. The gate looked back at him, in its fashion, with the patience of a thing that has waited a long time and intends to wait longer.
"I will ride forward," he said. "Alone."
"You will do as you are ordered, exile."
"You are not my commander, captain. The Crown's pardon made me a free man in everything but name. I will ride forward alone, or I will not ride forward at all."
Drey turned her head and looked at him then, fully, and her face was the face of a woman who has heard many men say many things and has learned that most of them are lies. But there was something in the set of Ravik's jaw, in the way he sat the horse, in the way his hand rested on the rein, that gave her pause. She had seen commanders before. She knew the look.
"Ride," she said, at last, "and do not make me regret it."
Ravik touched his heels to Sedge's flanks, and the bay walked down the bank and into the water, and the water came up over the horse's knees, and the binding-glass in Ravik's throat caught the cold of the river through his skin, and he felt it, a small bright point of heat against the chill, and he thought of the oath he had sworn, and the oath he had broken, and the oath he was about to swear again, in a different tongue, to a different master, for a different reason.
He crossed the river. The gate did not open. He reined in below the wall, and the crossbows above him did not move, and the men behind them did not speak, and the river ran brown and slow behind him, and on the far bank the column watched, and Drey sat her horse and watched, and the wind came off the wall and smelled of stone and iron and the faintest ghost of wood smoke, and Ravik lifted his head and called up, in the voice he had once used to call across a battlefield, in the voice he had not used in years, a single name.
"Oram."
The name went up the wall like a bird. The men on the wall stirred. One of them went to the gatehouse. A long minute passed, and another, and the river moved behind Ravik, and the binding-glass moved in his throat, and the sun moved in the sky, and at last a voice came down from the wall, a voice Ravik had not heard in seven years, a voice that had been young when he last heard it and was not young now.
"Ravik Valcaryn."
"Oram Greylen."
"Why have you come?"
"To ask you to open the gate."
A silence. Then the voice again, and in it something that might have been laughter, and something that might have been grief, and something that was neither and both.
"You took the glass."
"I took the glass."
"Then come in. Quickly. Before the wind changes."
The gate moved. It moved the way old gates move, with reluctance and protest, and the iron hinges cried out against the stone, and the light came through the widening gap in a single bright stripe, and Ravik put his heels to Sedge and rode forward into the Thornwall, and the gate closed behind him, and the river ran on, and the column waited on the far bank, and the wind turned, and the smell of ash came down from the east, and somewhere in the world a boy sat in a hollow beside a dead fire and tried to remember the face of the man who had given him a letter, and could not, and would not, and would, again, in time.