The brine stung her knuckles raw by the third hour, but Thessa Vorne kept scrubbing.
The flagstones of the cloister garth had been laid down three centuries before her grandmother's grandmother took her first breath, and the moss that crept between them was a stubborn, ancient thing that laughed at soft brushes and clean water. It took a bristle brush, a wooden pail, and the kind of patience that monks in their tidy cells liked to write sermons about. Thessa had no patience. She had calluses, a bad knee that clicked when the weather turned, and a tin of lye soap that Brother Renard had grudgingly measured out for her from the monastery's dwindling stores.
The water in her bucket had gone the color of weak tea. Her sleeves were rolled past her elbows and the cold had turned her forearms the mottled red-brown of a winter apple. Somewhere above her, a crow called from the broken guttering of Saint Ulma's bell-tower, and the sound bounced off the old stone and came back to her flat and lonely, the way crows sound in the north where there is nothing else to listen to.
She liked it, in a way she would never have admitted.
The monastery of Saint Ulma clung to the cliffs above the Greywash like a barnacle on a sinking hull. Below her, where the garth ended in a low wall, the sea foamed white against black rocks, and the wind off the water cut through her threadbare coat as if the cloth were made of gossip. Behind her, the cloister ran in two stories of arched gallery, the columns worn smooth by three centuries of passing robes and bare feet and the occasional booted soldier who had staggered in from the marches looking for bread and a confessor. Most of the windows were shuttered now. The monastery had been thinning for years, its brothers drifting south to livings in wealthier towns, until only a stubborn remnant remained: old Brother Renard who ran the kitchens with the patience of a saint and the flexibility of a fence post; Brother Colm who kept the bees and spoke to them in a dialect no one else understood; and Brother Talley, who was the youngest of them by thirty years and the most easily flustered by thunder, loud noises, or unexpected guests at supper.
Thessa shifted her weight, and her knee clicked like a knuckle snapping. She grimaced, set her brush down, and stretched the small of her back with both hands pressed flat against it. The cold stone of the cloister wall met her shoulders. She let her head tip back and looked up at the sky, which was the color of old pewter and getting darker.
A figure appeared at the far corner of the garth, walking fast, his robes hiked up at the hem to keep them out of the puddles. Brother Talley moved the way small birds moved, in starts and darts, his head jerking this way and that as though he expected something to leap out at him from behind a column. He was carrying something in his hands. Thessa straightened.
"Brother," she called, because the courtesy cost nothing, and because Brother Talley was one of the few people in this place who had been kind to her without making a performance of it. "You'll splash your hem."
He did not slow. He crossed the garth in a series of quick, slightly ridiculous strides, his sandals slapping the wet stone, and came to a halt before her with the breath going in and out of him in little gasps. Up close, his face was the color of tallow and his eyes were too wide, and his hands were trembling so badly that the thing he held rattled against itself.
"Thessa," he said. "Thessa, I've been looking. They said you were at vespers, but you weren't at vespers, you were here, of course you were here, you always do the floors in the morning and vespers in the afternoon only on the days Brother Renard lets you have the second portion of bread, which is Tuesdays and sometimes, when the supply cart comes, on Saturdays, and today is, oh, today is Thursday, and I am talking too much, Thessa, I am talking too much because I am frightened."
"Sit down," Thessa said.
"I cannot sit down."
"Sit down anyway."
She took the thing from his hands because he was plainly about to drop it. It was a letter, heavy, folded twice, and sealed at the crease with a disc of black wax the size of a copper coin. The seal bore a device she had not seen in seven years but would have known in the dark: a tower wreathed in a thorn branch, with a single star struck through its heart. The Idaren device. The mark of the house that held her father's oath.
The cold that had been sitting in her joints all morning went a little deeper.
"Sit," she said again, and this time Brother Talley sat, on the lip of the dry fountain at the center of the garth, with his robes pooling around his knees in dark folds. He pressed both hands between his thighs to stop them shaking. Thessa looked at the letter. She did not open it.
"Where did this come from?"
"It came by rider this morning," Brother Talley said. "Black horse, black cloak, no livery on the breast that I could see, but the saddlecloth was Idaren, the grey-and-silver, I am certain of it, I served in their chapel library for three years before I was, before I was sent here, I know their house-mark as well as I know my own name. The rider would not come inside. He would not eat. He would not take water. He stood at the gate like a post and would only speak to Prior Aldous, and Prior Aldous read it and then Prior Aldous looked at me in that way he has, that way that means someone is about to be made useful against their will, and he said, Brother Talley, you know this girl, you know her father was oath-bound to them, and I said yes, Brother, and he said go and find her, and I said yes, Brother, and he gave me the letter and said give it to her and do not read it on the way, and I did not read it on the way, I was tempted, Thessa, I will not lie to you, I was very tempted, but I did not."
Thessa turned the letter over in her hands. The wax was fresh. She could smell the tallow of the candle it had been pressed with, and under that a sharper note, something resinous, the kind of scent that clung to a scribe's hands after a long day of sealing. The paper was good. Too good for a monastery. The kind of paper that the great houses used for things they wanted to last.
She broke the seal with her thumbnail and unfolded the letter.
The hand was not one she knew. It was a clerk's hand, trained and careful, the letters formed with the kind of severe regularity that came from years of copying out ledgers and treaties. There was no salutation. There was no greeting. There was only:
To Thessa Vorne, daughter of the late Alaric Vorne, formerly of the company of the Greycoats, bound by oath and indenture to the honorable house of Idaren, greetings.
You are hereby commanded and required to present yourself at the court of His Lordship Castian Idaren, Warden of Arenhold, Lord of the Thorn March, at the hall called Arenhold, within thirty days of the date of this letter, there to answer such questions as may be put to you and to render such service as may be required of you by the terms of the indenture signed by your late father in the year of our Lord nine hundred and seventy-three.
Failure to appear within the time appointed will be taken as an act of treason against the house of Idaren and will be answered as the law provides.
By the order of His Lordship Castian Idaren, Warden of Arenhold, and by the hand of Maren Idaren, his sister, keeper of the rolls.
Thessa read it twice. The second time was no better than the first.
The wind off the sea picked up and shook a loose shutter somewhere above them, and the clatter of it rang across the garth like a small bell. Brother Talley was watching her face with the anxious attention of a man who had brought a sick child to the physician and was waiting to be told whether the child would live.
"Treason," he said, very quietly, as though if he said it softly enough it might not be true.
"Yes," Thessa said.
"They cannot mean that. It is a letter of summons. They send letters of summons to lords and merchants and to the daughters of oath-bound soldiers, that is customary, but treason is not customary, treason is what they say when someone has stolen silver or ridden with the enemy or, or burned a barn, you have not burned a barn, Thessa."
"No," Thessa said. "I have not burned a barn."
"Then why do they say it?"
"Because," Thessa said, and folded the letter carefully in half and then in half again, and tucked it into the breast of her coat where it sat against her ribs like a flat cold hand, "because they want to be sure I come."
She picked up her brush. She set it in the bucket. She considered the flagstones in front of her, which she had been scrubbing for the better part of the morning and which were, if anything, slightly dirtier than when she had started. She did not pick the brush up again. She stood with her hands at her sides and the water dripping off her fingers and looked out across the low wall at the sea.
Seven years. Seven years since she had walked out of Arenhold's lower gate with a canvas bag over her shoulder and the indenture her father had signed still folded in the bottom of it, and the lord of the house standing on the wall above her watching her go with an expression she had not, in all that time, been able to read. Seven years of scrubbing other people's floors and mending other people's roofs and learning, in the slow patient way that one learns anything worthwhile, that the world did not, in fact, owe her a debt for what her father had done, and that the best a soldier's orphan could do was keep her head down and her hands busy and hope no one noticed her.
Someone had noticed her.
"The house has not sent for me in all this time," she said, more to the sea than to Brother Talley. "They took my father's service and called the debt paid when he died. I have a copy of the discharge. It is in my pack under the bed in the women's cell. They cannot rewrite history just because they have decided they need a new pair of hands."
"Thessa," Brother Talley said, and his voice had gone smaller, and the scholarly lilt that usually warmed his speech had flattened out into something plainer and more frightened. "Thessa, you must not say things like that where anyone can hear you. The Idaren are not, they are not as they were. There have been rumors on the supply road. The brothers who go down to Vell for market say the lordship has changed hands twice since old Lord Avenor died, and that the new lord is a hard man, and that the Burnished Order has a new commander, and that the wards on the hall have been changed, and that the queen's man came through in the autumn and rode out again before the first snow, and whatever all that means, it does not sound like a house that writes the word treason into a letter for the joy of writing it."
"I know what it sounds like," Thessa said.
"What does it sound like?"
"It sounds like someone in that hall has decided that the oaths of dead men are more flexible than they used to be, and that the daughters of dead men are convenient tools for whatever work is to hand."
Brother Talley made a small unhappy sound in his throat.
Thessa looked down at him. He was sitting on the fountain's edge with his hands still pressed between his knees, and his face had the pinched white look of a man who had carried a hot coal all the way across the cloister in his bare hands and was only now realizing how much it had burned him.
"Brother," she said. "You did not make me bring it. You only carried it."
"That is the same thing."
"It is not the same thing."
"It is the same thing. Prior Aldous knew I would do it. He chose me because he knew. He always chooses me for the things he does not want to do himself, because he knows I will say yes, and I did say yes, and here I am, sitting on a fountain in the cold, watching you read a letter that uses the word treason as though it were a polite invitation to supper."
Thessa almost smiled. She caught it before it reached her mouth, but she felt it move through her anyway, a small warmth in the cold day, and she was sorry for Brother Talley in a way that was not pity but something closer to recognition. She knew what it was to be the person a prior chose for the awkward errands. She had been that person for half her life.
"Dame Ysolde," she said.
Brother Talley blinked at her.
"You said the Burnished Order has a new commander. The one they dismissed under disgrace three years ago, the one they say haunted the southern marches until Lord Castian took her in. She is at Arenhold."
"I did not say her name."
"You did not need to. There is only one knight-commander the Burnished Order dismissed under vague disgrace that the road-talkers still speak of, and she rides with Idaren now. I heard of it in the spring, from a tinker who came through with pins and bad news."
"Dame Ysolde Brennigh," Brother Talley said, almost to himself, as though confirming something he had hoped might not be confirmed.
"You know her?"
"I knew her letter. When I served in the chapel library at Arenhold, before my, before I was sent here, I copied out a fragment of a letter she had written to Lord Avenor, an old letter, the ink was already flaking, it was about something that had happened at a place called the Hollow Ford, and the words she used were very precise and very cold, and the lord who gave it to me to copy said, when I asked him who had written it, only that she was a woman who did not lie in her letters and did not forgive in person. I have not forgotten the letter. I do not forget letters." He paused, and looked at her. "Thessa. If Dame Ysolde is at Arenhold, and Lord Castian has written to you in this tone, then something is happening in that hall that is larger than a summons to a former soldier's daughter. Something that needs oaths to be called in."
"Or paid out," Thessa said.
"Yes," he said, and his voice was very small. "Or paid out."
She turned and looked at the monastery. The bell-tower. The shuttered windows. The line of Brother Colm's beehives at the far edge of the garth, each one wrapped in its straw skirt against the coming cold. The small grey lives of the brothers and sisters who had sheltered her for seven years without ever asking her what she was running from, because in this part of the world, no one asked that question unless they wanted to be told an answer.
There was a woman she had not spoken of in all that time, who had come to the monastery gate one autumn evening with a young man at her side and a hard face and a Burnished badge on her shoulder, and who had spoken to Prior Aldous for an hour in the prior's study with the door shut and the candle burning, and who had gone away again without so much as glancing at the garth where Thessa had been kneeling with a brush and a bucket. That had been two years ago. Thessa had not known then that the woman was Dame Ysolde. She knew now.
Brother Talley was watching her still.
"Will you go?" he asked.
Thessa thought of the letter sitting against her ribs. She thought of the word treason. She thought of her father's face, the one she could no longer quite picture, the way you cannot picture a face you have not seen since you were small, no matter how many times you try. She remembered a man's voice saying, low and rough and certain, that an oath given was an oath held until the body gave it back. She remembered that the man who said it had died in a muddy field on the southern marches with an Idaren arrow in his shoulder pouch and no one to close his eyes.
"I have to go," she said.
It was not the answer she had wanted to give. It was the only true one.
Dawn came grey and thin, the way it always came over the Cloister of Vell. Mist pooled in the lower garth like milk poured into a bowl, and the bell in the bell-cote rang once, low, the sound swallowed before it could reach the pines. Thessa had not slept. She had spent the hours between Compline and Matins packing a satchel that held too little and thinking about a face she could no longer quite remember, and when the first light came she was already standing by the postern with her cloak drawn over her shoulders and her boots already muddy from the path.
Brother Talley was waiting for her at the cloister gate. He had a lantern in one hand, though the morning was light enough, and a small bundle in the other, and he looked like a man who had spent the night composing a speech and forgotten half of it.
"I will walk with you to the ford," he said.
He did not offer to walk her any further than that, which was a kindness, because the ford was where the road to Arenhold began, and past the ford a different kind of waiting started.
They walked in silence through the wet grass. A thrush was singing somewhere in the alders, a little too loudly for the hour, as if it had somewhere to be. Thessa kept her eyes on the path. The bundle in Talley's hand crinkled as he walked, and twice he opened his mouth to speak, and twice he closed it again. At the ford, where the track dipped down to the stepping stones and the water ran brown and quick over the rounded pebbles, he stopped and held out the bundle.
"Bread," he said. "And cheese. And a little jar of the prior's honey, though he will deny it if you ask where it came from."
Thessa took it. The cloth was warm from his hand.
"Write to us," he said. "When you can. The prior will worry if you don't, and when the prior worries, he reads his psalms twice as fast and forgets to eat, and then Sister Ursula has words with him, and then everyone is unhappy."
"I will write," she said.
She meant it. That was the trouble with Brother Talley. He made you mean things.
She crossed the ford on the stepping stones, and when she reached the far bank she did not look back, because she knew that if she looked back she would see him standing there with the lantern still in his hand, and she would have to decide whether to wave, and she would wave, and then she would have to walk on anyway, and the wave would feel like a lie. So she did not look back. She climbed the low bank and went around the bend in the road and out of sight, and only when the trees had closed behind her did she let herself breathe.
Dame Ysolde was waiting at the bend.
She was sitting on a fallen trunk at the roadside with her back against a birch and her sword across her knees, and she looked as though she had been sitting there for an hour and was prepared to sit there for another. She wore a plain war-cloak the colour of wet slate, and her hair was bound close under a hood, and her face was the colour of tallow in the early light, which was to say it was not a friendly colour. She did not rise when Thessa came around the bend. She only lifted her head and looked, once, up and down, the way a woman who had spent her life on roads looked at a person who had come to walk them with her.
"You're late," she said.
"I said Matins."
"Matins was an hour ago."
"Matins takes however long Matins takes."
Ysolde made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had been willing to commit. She stood, and the sword went from her knees to her hip in one movement so smooth it barely qualified as a movement at all, and she adjusted her cloak across her shoulders and set off down the road without waiting to see if Thessa was following.
Thessa followed.
The road from the Cloister of Vell to Arenhold was not a road, properly speaking. It was a series of agreements the land had made with itself over the centuries, none of them binding. In the high meadows near the monastery it was a cart track, broad enough for two horses if both horses were of a forgiving temperament. By the time it dropped into the Witherlands it had narrowed to a footpath, and by the time it reached the low hills west of Arenhold it had given up altogether and become a suggestion of direction marked by broken stones and the occasional cairn.
Ysolde set a pace that was not cruel but did not pretend to be gentle. She did not speak for the first hour, and Thessa did not press her. There was a kind of respect between them that worked best when it was allowed to stay quiet. Thessa knew what Ysolde was. Ysolde knew what Thessa was. Neither of them had any need to perform it.
When the road entered the Witherlands, Ysolde spoke.
"You have not been through here before," she said.
"No."
"Then listen." She did not turn her head. Her voice was low and rough, like a file drawn across wood. "The Witherlands have not always been what they are now. Once they were orchards and pasture, the southern bread-basket of the realm. After the third Sundering storm they were something else. The water here does not always run downhill. The shadows move on their own schedule. The trees remember things that trees should not remember, and they do not always keep their memories to themselves."
Thessa thought of the thrush in the alders, singing too loudly.
"We will be through before nightfall," she said, "if we keep this pace."
"If we keep this pace, and if the road agrees to be where we left it, and if nothing comes down from the high hills to see what we are." Ysolde's hand rested on the hilt of her sword as she walked, the way another woman might rest her hand on a prayer bead. "The road through here has grown hungry since the last storm. Not the way a starving wolf is hungry. The way a thing that has learned to eat ideas is hungry. It will try your mind before it tries your body. Do not stop in the open. Do not look at anything that looks at you. Do not speak your own name aloud between here and the western cairn."
"I wasn't planning to make a habit of it."
"I have seen better soldiers than you forget that they had names."
They walked on.
The Witherlands were quiet in a way that had weight to it. There were no birds. There were no insects. The wind, when it came, moved through the bare branches of the twisted trees without making a proper sound, as if it had been muffled at the source. The light that fell through the canopy was the colour of weak tea, and the shadows under the trees were the colour of strong tea, and between the two colours everything looked stained. The air smelled of cold iron and wet stone and something else, something sweet and slightly rotten, like fruit that had fallen a long time ago and given up being fruit.
Thessa kept her eyes on Ysolde's back. She had decided, somewhere on the road, that if she looked at anything else for too long she would be tempted to wonder what it was, and wondering was the first step toward the kind of attention the Witherlands were hungry for. So she watched the slate cloak, and the shoulders under it, and the way those shoulders never tensed and never relaxed, and she counted her steps, and she did not speak her name.
They stopped twice. Once at a stream that ran the wrong way, crossing the path from east to west and then doubling back on itself like a dog trying to decide. Ysolde studied it for a long moment, then stepped across without breaking stride, and Thessa stepped after, and the water did not touch her boots. Once at a cairn where the path forked. Ysolde did not hesitate. She took the left fork, and after a few paces the right fork ceased to exist, which was to say it had never existed, which was to say the path had simply agreed with itself about which way to go.
In the late afternoon, the trees thinned. The light changed. The air smelled of rain.
"There," Ysolde said, and pointed.
Arenhold rose on its hill like a fist. It was not a large castle, but it had been built to look like one, and it had succeeded, in the way a fist succeeds at looking like a fist. The walls were dark stone, slick with the rain that had just begun to fall. The towers were square and unornamented. The banners on the keep were the colour of dried blood, and they hung limp in the still air. The gates were iron, and the iron was black, and at this distance you could see the rust running down them like old tears.
The road dropped into a hollow and then climbed again, and by the time they reached the gates it was raining in earnest, a thin cold rain that found the gaps in your cloak no matter how you arranged yourself. Two watchmen stood under the overhang of the gatehouse, and a third was leaning against the wall with his arms folded and his cap pulled low. They were big men, the way men in the north are big when they have grown up on grey meat and hard bread, and they had the look of men who had been told to expect trouble and had decided that expecting trouble was most of the work.
Ysolde stopped ten paces from the gate.
"You," the first watchman said. He did not point. He did not need to. "Name and business."
"Thessa Vorne," Thessa said. "I carry a letter from the prior of the Cloister of Vell, summoning me to the keep at the order of the Lord Castian Idaren."
The watchman looked at her. Then he looked at her cloak, where the House crest was pinned at the throat, the silver hawk of the Vorne on its field of ash. He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he spat on it.
The spit struck the crest and ran down the silver in a thin line, and the rain took it away, and the watchman did not blink. His companion spat too, a second later, more out of habit than conviction, the way a man spits when his friend has spat and he doesn't want to be left out of whatever the spitting was about. The third watchman did not spit. He only watched, with the expression of a man who had seen worse things done at this gate and did not feel the need to contribute.
"Bring the summons to the captain at the inner ward," the first watchman said. "You can wait under the gatehouse till the rain lets up or till someone comes for you, whichever happens first. The road south is that way." He pointed back the way they had come. "If the letter's a forgery, we'll know soon enough."
Thessa did not move. She felt the cold of the rain on her neck and the warmth of the spit drying on the crest and the warmth of the anger under her ribs, and she kept her face very still, because her father had taught her that the most dangerous thing a soldier's daughter could do at a gate like this was let the gate see that it had landed.
"And the woman with me?" she said.
The watchman looked past her at Ysolde. His eyes dropped to the sword at Ysolde's hip, to the hilt wrapped in black leather, to the pommel with the small worn device of the Burnished Order, half-obscured by mud and rain. His face did something complicated.
"No swords past the drawbridge," he said. "House rule. She can leave the blade here and come in under escort, or she can stay out here with you."
"That is a Vorne blade," Thessa said. "It is hers by right."
"She can leave it here."
Ysolde had not moved. She stood in the rain with her hood up and her hands at her sides, and the water ran down her face and collected in the lines of her mouth and fell from her chin in a steady stream, and she did not look at the watchman. She was looking at the gates, at the iron and the rust and the dark stone of the walls, and her face had the expression of a woman looking at a thing she had known all her life and finding it exactly as she remembered it.
"Give me the blade," the watchman said, holding out his hand.
"No," Ysolde said.
"It's that or she stays out here."
"Then she stays out here with me."
The watchman considered this. He looked at Ysolde's face, and whatever he saw there he decided not to argue with. He jerked his chin at the gatehouse overhang.
"Under there," he said to Thessa. "Out of the rain. Someone will come for you when the captain's had a look at the letter. Don't wander."
Thessa stepped up onto the stone lip of the gatehouse and out of the rain, or mostly out of it. A thin spray still reached her where she stood, and the cold of the stone came up through her boots. Behind her, she heard Ysolde's boots settle on the wet ground, ten paces back, in the rain.
She turned.
Ysolde had not followed her under the overhang. She stood in the open, in the rain, in the road, with her cloak darkening on her shoulders and the water gathering in the folds of it. She did not look angry. She did not look patient. She looked like a woman who had been through gates like this before, and who knew that the rain was not the worst part of what was waiting inside them.
"Go," Ysolde said. "Do what you came to do."
"They'll let you in when I'm inside."
"They won't let me in at all."
"Ysolde."
"Go." Her voice was low and rough and certain, the way it had been the night she had come to the monastery gate with the young man at her side and the hard face and the badge on her shoulder. "I will be here when you come out. I have waited at worse gates in worse rain for worse reasons. This is not new to me."
Thessa looked at her. The rain ran down between them, a curtain of grey, and beyond the curtain the gates of Arenhold stood open onto a courtyard full of mud and shadows, and a boy was already running toward the gatehouse with a lantern in his hand, sent by some captain who had heard the watchman's horn and wanted to see what the horn was about.
"Go," Ysolde said again.
Thessa went.
She walked under the gatehouse arch and into the courtyard of Arenhold, and the boy with the lantern fell into step beside her, and the gates did not close behind her, but she heard the watchmen shift their weight and she heard the rain fall on the iron and she heard, very faintly, the sound of a woman breathing in the dark beyond the walls, steady and uncomplaining, the way a woman breathes when she has decided to wait as long as waiting takes.
Somewhere above her, a light moved behind an arrow-slit in the keep. Someone was watching her come in. Someone had been watching for a long time.