Kindled by the Dragon: Of Hunters And Hidden Things

Hoofbeats broke the morning quiet before the riders themselves came into view, a low drum of iron-shod horses carrying across the hollow with the kind of deliberate weight that announced authority long before banners did.

High Councilor Vyr stood at the edge of the meadow, one hand resting on the low stone wall that separated the village proper from the common grazing land. He had been walking since before dawn, a habit he had not been able to break since the summons from the capital, and the thin mountain wind had worked the stiffness from his shoulders without doing much for the tightness behind his eyes. The village behind him was still. Smoke rose in pale ribbons from a dozen chimneys, and somewhere a dog barked once and fell silent.

Then the riders crested the eastern road.

There were nine of them, and they rode in the formation of men who had money and intended to spend it. The lead rider wore a long coat of boiled leather dyed the color of dried blood, and his mount was a grey mare with a fetched-up head and hooves that struck the packed dirt like hammer falls. Behind him, eight more followed in pairs, each pair flanking a packhorse laden with cages and coiled rope and what looked, in the early light, like sections of a portable forge.

The grey mare's rider pulled up at the village well. He did not dismount. He waited, reins gathered in one gloved hand, while his men fanned out behind him in a loose crescent that closed off the road in either direction. One of the packhorses stamped and blew, and a cage rattled.

Vyr did not move from the wall.

He had hoped to be gone from Vane Hollow before any of this began. The village sat in the long bowl between the mountain's lower ridges, and the people here kept to their sheep and their small, stubborn fields and their complaints about weather and wolves and the price of salt. They had not asked for the Council's attention, and Vyr had not intended to give it. But the reports that had crossed his desk in the capital had been specific in a way that made his blood itch, and specific in a way that could not be ignored.

Something had been killing livestock along the high passes. Something with a taste for blood and a pattern that did not match any predator in the bestiaries he had studied. Three flocks in the last turning of the moon. Seventeen head of sheep, four goats, and a draft ox worth more than most of the village huts put together. Whatever had taken them had left nothing but bones picked clean and a particular kind of silence in the fields afterwards. Not dragged. Not scattered. Clean.

And then the fires.

Small ones. Isolated. Each one starting in a place that should have been wet, in weather that should not have allowed flame. A haystack in the high pasture. The corner of a root cellar. A dead tree that had stood unburned through a hundred summer storms. They had burned anyway, briefly, brightly, and then gone out. As if something had exhaled once and moved on.

Vyr's steward had suggested, with the careful diplomacy of a man trying not to be struck by lightning, that perhaps the Council's attention might be better directed elsewhere. There were grain riots in the eastern provinces. There was the matter of the succession in the southern marches. There were seventeen different petitions from merchant houses that all claimed the right to tax some new and previously unknown commodity. The mountain passes had been quiet for decades. Whatever was happening there was, the steward had allowed, most likely the ordinary mischief of an ordinary world.

Vyr had not been able to make himself believe it.

He watched the lead rider's gloved hand tighten on the reins.

"You'll be wanting the headman," said a voice at Vyr's shoulder.

Old Brennan had come up the path without making a sound, which was a thing the old man did when he wanted to make a point about who had been walking these hills longer than anyone. He leaned on his staff the way a man leans on a fence post he intends to outlast. His beard was white and his eyes were not, and he studied the riders below with the flat appraisal of a man who had outlived three occupations and most of his opinions about them.

"He's the mayor," Vyr said. "They don't call it headman here."

"They don't call it the mayor either, if he's slow about coming out." Old Brennan spat into the grass. "That one at the well. He knows who he is."

"Lord Ashborne's man."

"Aye." Old Brennan scratched under his arm. "I've seen his lordship's men before. Fifteen years back, when they came through after the timber wolves that weren't timber wolves. They're paid by the pelt, not the problem. Their interest is in what they can carry off the mountain."

Below, the rider in the blood-colored coat had not moved. One of his men dismounted and went to the well itself, running water into a leather bucket and holding it up to his horse. The horse drank. The man poured a measure into a shallow pan and set it on the ground. A cat appeared from under the well's stone lip and approached the pan with the cautious dignity of an animal accustomed to being disappointed.

Vyr watched the cat drink.

"They're offering coin," he said.

"They're offering coin," Old Brennan agreed. "That's how it starts."

"How does it end?"

The old man was quiet for a moment. The morning wind shifted and brought with it the smell of woodsmoke and, beneath it, the colder mineral scent of the high snowmelt that fed the streams cutting down from the ridges above.

"That depends," Old Brennan said, "on what answers."

A door banged open somewhere down the lane. A woman had come out of the largest of the stone houses, a tall woman with her hair pulled back in a working knot and a wooden spoon in her hand as if she had been interrupted mid-stir. She saw the riders. She stopped. Then she walked toward the well with the brisk, contained stride of someone who had decided to be afraid later.

Behind her, a younger woman followed. Smaller, quicker, her braid swung over one shoulder, and her eyes moved over the riders the way a herding dog moves over a flock she does not quite trust.

Vyr kept his face still. He had not expected the Vane sisters to appear. He had hoped, in the careful way of a man who knew he was hoping for too much, to leave before any of the village's actual names attached themselves to the trouble he had come to read.

"Names," he murmured.

"Vane," Old Brennan said, as if that explained anything. "The tall one's the eldest. The one with the braid is the wanderer. Came back three days ago with a story about a dragon dying on a high road, which nobody believed, including her, mostly."

"Mostly."

"Aye. Mostly."

Below, the lead rider had finally dismounted. He was taller than he had appeared in the saddle, and his movements had the unhurried precision of a man who had been trained to take up space without asking permission. He swept off his hat and held it against his chest and bowed to the eldest Vane woman with the exaggerated courtesy of a man who was not, in fact, being courteous.

Vyr could not hear the words from where he stood, but he could read the shape of them in the tilt of the rider's head. He had seen that bow a hundred times in a hundred provincial halls. It meant: I am a man of importance, and I am here to do your village a great service, and I expect to be thanked for it before I have done anything.

The eldest Vane woman did not thank him. She stood with her spoon held at her side and her shoulders set, and after a moment the rider straightened and began to speak in earnest. One of his men produced a leather purse and set it on the well's stone lip. The coins inside caught the light.

The wanderer with the braid said something short and sharp. The eldest Vane woman put a hand on her arm.

Old Brennan made a sound in his throat. It might have been a laugh.

"They're offering fifty crowns for the pelt," he said. "Standard rate for a large predator. Plus expenses, plus a bonus if the head comes back with it. They've done this before."

"Fifty crowns is a great deal of money for a village like this."

"Fifty crowns is a great deal of money for most villages." Old Brennan shifted his weight on his staff. "It will buy a lot of forgiveness. It will not buy what comes after."

A man had emerged from one of the smaller houses and was walking toward the well with the rolling gait of someone who had been celebrating something the night before and had not yet entirely recovered. He called out a greeting that sounded, in Vyr's ear, as if he had already decided to be flattered by the attention. Two more men followed him. One woman with a child on her hip watched from a doorway and did not come forward.

The crowd at the well grew. The lead rider began to speak in a louder voice, the cadence of a man who had given this speech before and knew exactly where to place the pauses for effect. Vyr caught the shape of words like mountain and beast and pelt and reward, and beneath them, like a current under still water, the word that the rider did not say aloud but meant with every inflection of his body: danger. The villagers were being told that they were in danger, and that danger was the reason the purse on the well's lip should be picked up.

Old Brennan was watching Vyr's face.

"You're the Council," the old man said. It was not a question.

"I am."

"And you've come up here to see what's leaving bones in the high pasture."

Vyr said nothing.

"You'll want to talk to the wanderer," Old Brennan said. He nodded toward the braid, the quick eyes, the hand that had not yet left her sister's arm. "She says she saw something on the road three days ago that doesn't match what these men are hunting. She says it was a dragon. She says it was dying. She says it breathed on her."

"A dragon," Vyr said, without inflection.

"Aye."

"There have not been dragons in these mountains for two hundred years."

"There have not been wolves the size of ponies in these mountains for a hundred and fifty, and yet." Old Brennan gestured toward the well, where the lead rider had mounted his grey mare again and was addressing the growing crowd with the expansive confidence of a man who could already feel the purse changing hands. "Things change. Things come back. Things that were supposed to be dead prove they were merely resting."

Vyr watched the wanderer with the braid. She was not looking at the rider. She was looking up the slope, toward the tree line, toward the place where the high meadow met the lower ridges and the ridges climbed up toward the snow line. Her hand had tightened on her sister's arm, and her face held the particular stillness of someone who is listening for something she hopes not to hear.

The morning wind carried the faint, sour tang of something burned.

The trapdoor lay flat beneath the straw mat, and Sera pressed her boot into its edge until the oak plank settled flush with the floorboards around it. Not a seam. Not a breath of give. She had laid that false floor herself three winters ago, when the cellar smelled of root rot and her father had still been alive to argue about the cost of good timber. Now the cellar smelled of dried apples, lamp oil, and the faint mineral tang of the spring that seeped through the foundation in late snowmelt.

She had just finished winding the long braid of her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck when the knock came. Three raps, evenly spaced, on the heavy front door. Not the polite rap of a neighbor wanting eggs. Not the quick tap of Mira calling her down from the loft. This knock had weight behind it. Official weight.

Sera crossed to the door and opened it before the fourth rap could land.

Captain Ren stood on the step in the last of the afternoon light. He wore the dark coat of the provincial guard, the collar turned up against the wind coming down off the ridge. His hand rested on the frame above the door, not quite looming, but close to it. Behind him, two more guards sat their horses at the edge of the yard, their faces turned toward the tree line as if they expected something to come out of it.

"Sera Vane," he said. His voice was clipped, neutral, a man who measured every word the way a quartermaster measured salt. "I am told you were on the border road three nights past. I am told you saw something."

Sera leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. She kept her expression loose, the look of a woman who had nothing better to do than answer questions on a cold evening. "I saw a great deal, Captain. A flock of sheep that had wandered off the high pasture. A wagon with a cracked axle. A pair of crows fighting over something dead on the side of the road."

"And a fire."

She tilted her head. "There are always fires. Lightning. A shepherd's pipe left too close to dry grass."

"This one was not lightning." Ren's eyes moved past her, into the dim of the hall behind. He was not a tall man, but he stood very straight, and his gaze had the unhurried precision of a man used to reading rooms. "I am asking, Sera, whether you saw a person."

"I saw no one."

"You were alone."

"I am always alone."

The captain's gaze came back to her face. For a long moment he said nothing. Then, very quietly, he said, "May I come in?"

It was not a request. Sera knew the shape of a request. This was a man who had decided he was coming in and was giving her the courtesy of pretending otherwise. She stepped back and swept a hand toward the hall.

"The kitchen is warm," she said. "The parlor is not. Take your pick."

"Kitchen."

He stepped past her. His boots were muddy. Sera closed the door behind him and did not look down at the rug where the boot scrapes would land. The kitchen smelled of the rabbit she had stewed earlier, of thyme, of the iron stove that had not quite cooled. Ren's gaze swept the room the way a hound's ears swept for sound. He took in the hooks on the wall, the worn handle of her father's old axe, the saddle bag dropped by the back door. He did not look at the floor.

Sera went to the stove and lifted the lid off the pot. Steam curled up, and the kitchen filled with the smell of rabbit and onion. She tasted the faint grease of the stew on her upper lip. "You have eaten?"

"I have eaten."

"Then sit. I will pour us something warm."

She did not pour anything. She set two cups on the table and let the kettle stay cold on the iron. Ren did not sit. He stood near the door and watched her, and she let herself feel the prickle of that gaze the way a woman feels the first true cold of autumn on the back of her neck.

"You came a long way to ask about a fire," Sera said.

"I came a long way to ask about a man." Ren's voice was very even. "A man who may have been on that road. Tall. Dark hair. Said to carry a sword that does not match the pattern of any smithy between here and the capital."

"I have not seen him."

"You have not."

"I have not."

"Then you will not mind if my men walk the property."

Sera's hand paused on the kettle. She let the pause last a beat longer than was natural. Then she lifted the kettle and pretended to test its weight. "Walk the property," she said lightly. "For what? A man I have not seen?"

"For any man you have not seen." Ren's gaze did not waver. "It will not take long. The light is failing. We will be quick."

"Then you had best start with the barn," Sera said, and she set the kettle down on the stove with a small clatter that meant nothing. "I have not been out there since morning. The roof leaks in two places. You may find a man and a puddle both."

Ren studied her for a long moment. Then he turned on his heel and walked out into the hall. She heard the front door open, heard his voice, low and clipped, giving orders to the men in the yard. She heard boots on the packed dirt of the yard, two pairs, moving toward the barn.

Sera stood very still in the kitchen. The stove ticked. The kettle sat cold.

The kettle sat where she had set it. Cold iron on cold iron. Sera counted her breaths. One. Two. Three. Through the window over the sink she could see the last of the daylight slanting gold across the yard, and two shapes moving past the woodpile toward the barn. Ren's men. They would find the leaking roof, the empty stalls, the smell of old hay. They would find nothing of a man.

Sera moved.

She did not run. Running drew the eye. She walked down the short hall past the pantry, past the closed door to the root cellar, and into the small room at the back of the house where her mother had once kept a spinning wheel. The wheel was gone now. In its place, laid out on a low cot beneath a quilt her sister had pieced two winters back, lay Cael Ashavar.

He was worse than when she had dragged him in through the kitchen door an hour before sunrise. His skin had the waxy sheen of fever, and his breath came in shallow pulls that did not quite fill his chest. Sera had seen wounds before. She had cleaned and bound them on the road, on herself, on strangers whose names she never learned. But the wound on Cael's side was not a clean cut. It was a long furrow of blackened flesh, the edges crusted and weeping, and it smelled of something she did not want to name.

She knelt beside the cot and set down the basin she had carried from the kitchen. Water sloshed. Steam rose in a thin curl. She had boiled the water over the kitchen fire while Ren had waited in the yard, had poured it into the basin, had let it cool just enough to bear a hand in, and had carried it here while the guards were still saddling their horses.

Cael's eyes opened. They were darker than she remembered, and brighter.

"You should not be here," he said.

"You should not be shot." Sera spoke quietly. She did not look at his face. She looked at the quilt, at her own hands, at the basin. "Can you sit forward?"

"I cannot."

"Then you will have to manage lying still."

She drew back the quilt. The wound was worse than she had hoped. The cloth she had packed against his side earlier in the day was soaked through, and the skin around it was hot to the eye, you could see it, a faint reddish glow under the surface that meant the body was fighting and losing. Sera set her jaw. She wrung out a cloth in the hot water and laid it against the unbroken skin first, just below the wound, to test his reaction.

Cael did not flinch. His breath caught. That was all.

"Fever?" she asked.

"Something like it."

"Drink this." She had brought a cup of well water and a measure of willowbark tea she had brewed strong. "All of it."

He took the cup from her hand. Their fingers brushed. Sera did not pull back. She let the touch last exactly as long as it needed to, then withdrew her hand to the basin.

"You lied to me this morning," she said. "You said you could ride."

"I can ride."

"You cannot sit a horse without falling off it."

"Then I will not fall off it."

She made a sound through her nose that might have been a laugh in another life. "Drink."

He drank. The cup trembled in his hand. Sera watched the motion of his throat and thought of nothing useful.

When the cup was empty she took it from him and set it on the floor. Then she reached for the wound.

"Sera." His voice was very low. "There is something I should tell you."

"Tell me after."

"You may not wish to touch me after."

"I do not wish to touch you now." She laid the cloth against the wound and pressed, gently, firmly. Cael's whole body tightened. A breath came out of him that was not quite a sound. Sera kept her hand where it was, steady, counting the seconds. "But you are wounded and I am not, and I would rather have you alive to tell me whatever it is you mean to tell me."

"That is not a good reason."

"It is the reason I have."

She worked in silence for a while. The water in the basin turned pink, then grey, then a color she did not care to study. She rinsed the cloth and reapplied it. Twice. Three times. The heat under his skin began to ease, or she imagined it did. His breathing slowed. Somewhere in the house she heard the front door open and close, and boots on the floorboards, and Ren's voice, low and clipped, giving an order she could not make out.

Sera did not look up.

"They are in the front room," she said.

"I heard them."

"Can you walk?"

"No."

"Then I will have to carry you, or I will have to leave you."

"I would rather you left me."

"That is not an option." She lifted the cloth from his side and studied the wound. The blackened edges had softened slightly under the wet heat. The weeping had slowed. It was not healing. It was no longer getting worse. "There is a passage under the floor of this room. It leads to the root cellar. My father dug it when I was small. It is narrow, and the floorboards creak, and if you breathe too loud they will hear you."

"I have breathed quieter for worse."

"Can you crawl?"

Cael looked at her. The fever had put a brightness in his eyes that made him look younger, and the lamplight made him look older, and somewhere between the two was the man she had met on the road a week ago, who had given her his name like a coin dropped in a beggar's cup. "I can crawl," he said.

"Good." She helped him sit forward, slowly, her arm under his shoulders. He weighed more than she expected, or she was weaker than she thought. The wound stretched. Cael made a sound that was only a breath, but it went through her like a knife. "Lean on me. Just to the edge of the bed. Then the boards are by the window."

He leaned. She held him. For a moment she was aware of his face very near hers, of the smell of him, smoke and sweat and something underneath that she could not name, and of the way his hand came up, slowly, and settled on her wrist. Not gripping. Just resting.

"Sera," he said.

"Do not."

"I have to."

"After."

He let his hand fall. She shifted her grip and walked him, step by careful step, across the floor to the place where the boards were false. He sagged against her. She felt the heat of him through her shirt. The boards lifted easily, she had oiled the hinges last winter, and underneath was a square of darkness and the smell of earth and turnips.

"Down," she said.

He went down. It was not graceful. She heard him land, heard the small sound he made when the wound took his weight. Then she lowered herself after, pulling the boards back into place above her head, and the light went out.

The cellar was cold. The passage was narrower than she remembered. She could hear Cael breathing somewhere ahead of her in the dark, and she followed the sound with one hand on the damp wall and the other held out before her. Her fingers found his shoulder. He was shaking.

"The fever," he said, as if he had to explain it.

"I know." She kept her hand where it was. "There is a turn ahead. Then the cellar proper. There is a shelf with apples. Sit on the floor and put your back against the wall."

"You have done this before."

"I have done nothing before." She said it flatly, without pride. "I am making it up as I go."

He laughed. It was a poor sound, thin and wrong, but it was a laugh, and Sera held onto it the way a woman holds onto a rope in a swift river.

They reached the cellar. She helped him sit. He did not protest when she pressed her hand against his forehead, and he did not protest when she left it there.

"How bad?" he asked.

"You will live."

"That is not what I asked."

"It is what I am willing to answer."

The boards above them creaked. Footsteps crossed the kitchen floor. She heard Ren's voice again, closer now, and the voice of one of his men, and the scrape of a chair being pulled out. They were sitting down. They were going to wait.

Sera did not move her hand.

Cael's eyes were closed. The fever was still in him, but his breathing had steadied, and the shaking had slowed. In the dark, with no one to see, he let his head fall back against the packed earth wall and let out a long breath that sounded, for the first time since she had found him, like the breath of a man who intended to see the morning.

"You lied to me this morning," he said, very quietly.

"No

"No," she said. "I did not lie. I just did not say everything."

His eyes opened. The fever light in them was worse now, but his voice, when it came, was steady. "Then say it now."

"I cannot." She kept her hand against his forehead. The heat of him was almost a weight. "If I say it, I make it real, and I have carried it so long I do not know how to set it down."

His hand found hers in the dark. The shaking had not stopped. She held on.

A chair scraped back above them. Ren's voice, sharp with question. Then another voice answered, higher and clearer, with the clipped precision of a man accustomed to being obeyed.

Sera's ears strained. The second voice was not one of Ren's soldiers.

"Who is that?" Cael whispered.

"I don't know."

The new voice spoke again. Footsteps, measured and sure, crossed the kitchen floor. The boards complained under a weight that was neither heavy nor light.

Then Ren's voice, stripped of its earlier command: "High Councilor. We did not expect you until tomorrow."

"I came early." The words were quiet, but they filled the cellar the way a stone fills a pond. "There has been a change of plan."

Sera's hand tightened on Cael's. He had gone rigid beside her. His breath came short.

"Vyr," he said, so low she almost missed it. "That is Vyr."

The High Councilor took his time crossing the kitchen. He moved like a man who had nowhere to be and all evening to get there. The floorboards gave up their complaints one by one under his boots. Outside, a horse stamped and blew, and Sera heard the soft clink of a bit being adjusted by some careful groom.

"Vyr," Cael said again, as if the name were a stone he had to keep turning over. "He is the reason Brenna is not with me. He is the reason I came here at all."

"The dragonling," Sera said.

"The dragonling." A breath that was almost a laugh. "Yes. The dragonling he would like very much to put in a box and carry back to the capital. The dragonling I have hidden in a place he has not thought to look."

She wanted to ask where. She did not ask.

Above them, Ren was explaining. His voice had taken on the particular cadence of a man walking a narrow path between his orders and his conscience. "We secured the perimeter before nightfall. There is no one inside but a woman of the house, an old servant named Brennan who has been here forty years, and some boy who fled over the north fence before we arrived."

"Boy." The High Councilor's voice came mild as cream. "What boy?"

"A rider. Young. Went over the fence the moment he saw our lanterns. We have men on the road."

"The north fence," the High Councilor said. "Toward the river?"

"Yes, High Councilor."

"Then he is not on the road. He is in the willows. Double the men at the ford." A pause so slight it barely existed. "And bring the woman of the house to me. Leave the old servant where he is. I have questions for him later."

Sera's stomach dropped. Mira. They wanted Mira.

She looked at Cael. His eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling as if he could see through the boards.

"Vyr will not hurt her," he said. "He is many things, but he does not hurt women. Not when he needs them."

"How do you know?"

"Because he needs her. He needs the homestead standing, and the homestead needs her standing in it." Cael's fingers tightened on hers. "He has come for me. He has come for what is in my blood. And he has come for Brenna."

"Then we should run."

"We cannot. Not while I am like this." He said it without self-pity. "If I stand, I fall. If I run, I die in the willows, and Vyr finds me by morning anyway."

"Then what?"

"Then we listen." He closed his eyes. "And we trust your sister to be the kind of woman I think she is."

The boards above them groaned. A door opened and shut. Footsteps, lighter than the High Councilor's, crossed to the far side of the kitchen.

Mira's voice came next, clear and unhurried. "You've tracked mud through my parlor, Captain. I hope you intend to sweep it."

Ren began to apologize. The High Councilor cut him off, gently as a knife slipping between ribs. "Mrs. Vane. I will be direct. We are looking for a man. He is wounded, and he passed through this house today. I do not think he has left it."

A pause. Then Mira, very even: "There is a sick man in my cellar. He came to the door at dawn asking for water. I gave him water and a blanket. If that is your man, you are welcome to him. If it is not, then I have nothing else to give you."

Sera's breath caught. Beside her, Cael made a small sound, half surprise and half something she could not name.

The High Councilor was silent for the space of three heartbeats. When he spoke again, his voice was almost kind. "Mrs. Vane. The man I seek carries a fire in his blood that most people would call a curse. He is dangerous, whether he means to be or not."

"So is any man with a fever," Mira said. "I've put enough of my sister's patients to bed to know that."

"Your sister."

"Sera. She rides the border road. She has a habit of picking up strays." Mira's voice did not waver. "I cannot answer for her. I can only answer for my own house, and in my own house there is one sick man in the cellar and an old servant who is deaf in one ear and frightened of soldiers. That is all."

"May I see him?"

"You may look through the trapdoor from where you stand. You may not come down. He has had a long day, and he has not asked for visitors."

Silence again. Sera felt the sweat cool on her back. She had forgotten to breathe.

Then the High Councilor laughed. It was a small, private sound, as if he had been told a joke only he understood. "Very well, Mrs. Vane. We will leave a man at your gate tonight, and we will speak again in the morning, when your guest is feeling more himself."

"I would prefer you did not."

"And I would prefer a great many things, madam." His boots crossed to the door. "Captain Ren. With me. We have a ford to watch."

The door opened and shut. Boots on the porch. The creak of a saddle. Hooves on the frozen road, moving away, moving away, until the only sound left was the wind in the eaves and the soft pop of the fire Mira had rebuilt in the parlor stove.

Sera let out her breath.

Cael let out his.

In the dark, neither of them moved for a long time.

"She lied for me," he said at last.

"She lied for me," Sera said. "I just happened to be standing next to you."

His hand, still in hers, turned over so his palm was against her palm. The shaking had almost stopped. The fever had not broken, but it had, for the moment, paused.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't," she said. "Rest. We have a long road tomorrow, and I am not carrying you."

"I would not dream of asking."

"You would. I know the kind."

In the cellar, in the dark, with the High Councilor's horse growing smaller and smaller on the road behind them, they sat together against the packed earth wall and listened to the house settle around them, and did not speak again for a long time.