The Ash Crown of Vharrowmoor: The Pale Company

The war council convened in a hall of pale stone, its vaulted ceiling lost to shadow and the stink of tallow smoke. Maps lay spread across a table scarred by a hundred prior campaigns, their edges curling in the heat of too many braziers. Seraph Voss stood among the wall hangings, half-hidden behind a moth-eaten tapestry that depicted some saint or other being devoured by wolves, and watched the room arrange itself into factions before a single word had been spoken.

Lady Ysenne Marren occupied the head of the table, though no chair of state proclaimed the right. She had brought only a folding stool and a silver-backed mirror that she used, Seraph noted, not for vanity but to watch the door behind her. Her fingers rested flat upon the wood, pale and still as carved bone.

The other voices filled the room in layers. A baron from the lowlands wanted to fortify the river towns. A captain of foresters wanted the roads between them abandoned. A priest muttered of omens read in the entrails of a three-legged goat. Through it all, Ysenne said nothing, and the candle before her burned down to a stub without her lifting a hand to trim it.

Seraph had not been invited. She had come because a rider had reached the village three days prior with a sealed writ and a small purse of silver, and the writ had asked, in terms politely imperious, for the service of the wandering sword-for-hire who called herself the Pale Company's newest blade. She had read the seal and recognized the house. She had read the name beneath it and felt the old cold settle across her shoulders like wet linen.

She stayed in the shadows and listened.

The map showed the marches in lines of ink and ochre. A smear of red wax marked the village she had left that morning, a smear of black marked the keep that had fallen the week before, and between them the road wound like a sick intestine through hills she knew by heart and wished she did not. The cult had grown bold. The Ash-Crowned had raised a new standard, a crown of char and iron, and beneath it the faithful gathered in greater numbers than anyone at this table seemed willing to admit.

"The villages will not hold." Ysenne spoke at last, and the room's noise folded itself away as if a door had been shut. Her voice was cool, level, and utterly without ornament. "We have heard what happened at Thornfeld. We have heard what happened at the chapel of Saint Ursa. The pattern is clear to anyone willing to see it. They take the small places first. They take the chapels. They take the shrines where the old bones lie."

"It is not a military matter," the priest objected, half-rising. "It is a matter of faith. If the countryfolk would but-"

"They would but." Ysenne did not raise her voice. "They would but, and they are dying anyway. I am not interested in their souls, Father. I am interested in their granaries and their daughters."

Seraph almost smiled. Almost.

The lowland baron shifted in his seat. "My lady, the Pale Company is a mercenary concern. I do not see what they offer that our levies cannot-"

"They offer a captain who has fought Ash cultists at Grethor's Crossing, at the causeway of Doune, and at the village of No Names, where your levies, Baron Aldred, broke and ran within the first hour." Ysenne's fingers tapped once against the wood, a single small sound. "I offer her a commission. I offer her command of the pale banner in this march. I offer her the right to choose her own ground and her own lieutenants, and I offer her the House Marren's seal against any claim of outlawry or debt. Those are terms worth a captain's attention."

The room went very quiet. Seraph stepped out from behind the tapestry.

"I was at Grethor's Crossing," she said. "I was not at Doune. I was not at No Names. If someone is selling a service by those names, I should like to meet them and have a quiet word about the use of mine."

Ysenne turned her head. The silver mirror in her lap caught the brazier light and threw a small coin of brightness across the ceiling. Her face, when it resolved out of that flare, was composed and watchful and not at all surprised.

"I know," she said. "I wrote the writ. I knew the false report would draw you out of whatever hole you had chosen to winter in. You were seen at the smithy of a man named Tomas Renn, east of the fen road, three weeks past. You were seen to break a cultist's jaw with the flat of your sword rather than kill him. I needed a captain who breaks jaws when killing would serve. I have not many candidates for that office."

The braziers hissed. Somewhere beyond the hall, a dog barked twice and was silent. Seraph crossed the room in measured steps and stopped at the edge of the table, hands loose at her sides.

"You have me at a disadvantage, my lady. You have read my movements for a month and I have not read yours at all. That is not a position I enjoy."

"It is not meant to be enjoyed. It is meant to be accepted." Ysenne's mouth moved a fraction, the ghost of a thing that was not quite a smile. "You were oath-sworn to Lord Edric of the Ashen March. You failed in that oath. I am the wife of an Edric, and I am offering you a chance to do better by my house than you did by his."

The blow landed where it was meant to land. Seraph's hands tightened once, then forced themselves loose again. The candle at the head of the table guttered and went out, and the smell of hot wax filled the room with a small domestic grief.

"You know that business," Seraph said, after a count of three.

"I know most of it. I know what the records say. I know what the songs say. I know what the man who held the ford that night says, and he is not kind to your name." Ysenne tilted her head. "I am offering you a command that will either redeem the story or bury it. I am offering you the chance to fail again in public, if you prefer that. I am not particular."

"You are a hard woman, my lady."

"I am a tired woman with a child and a small inheritance and a husband who plays at being a prince while the world rots around his ears. I am hard because hard is what is left." She gestured at the map. "The Ash-Crowned has broken the chapel at Brenn. The Ash-Crowned has broken the keep at Wye. The Ash-Crowned has broken every place where the old bones were kept, and the old bones are why the marches have any kings at all. In three weeks the cult will be at my son's doorstep, and I am not going to greet them with a song and a sermon."

Seraph looked at the map. The red and black smears made a pattern she could read in her sleep. The cult did not move in lines; it bled across the country like ink through wet paper, and where it touched, the paper tore.

"You will need more than a captain."

"I will need a captain first. The rest will follow or it will not." Ysenne folded her hands. "Will you serve?"

The question sat in the room like a drawn blade. Seraph felt the old weight settle against her shoulders, the cold memory of a banner she had failed to keep aloft. She thought of Tomas Renn, of his forge and his quiet life and the sword he kept above it. She thought of the road and the drowned places and the names whispered at night by people who had no other prayers.

"I will serve," she said. "On three conditions."

Ysenne's eyes narrowed a fraction, but she only said, "Name them."

"First. I choose my ground. I choose where to stand and where to give way. If your husband countermands a battle order of mine in the field, I will hang him from the nearest tree and apologize to the tree afterward."

"You will not need to apologize to the tree. My husband will not be in the field."

"Second. The men I lead are paid in coin that means something. Not promises. Not IOUs sealed with a sigil that will not be honored in six months. Coin, or the Pale Company folds itself into the hills and you may write your own songs."

"Reasonable."

"Third." Seraph paused. "I will not serve a name. I will not serve House Marren or House Edric or the memory of any Ashen Crown. I will serve the marches. If your son requires protecting, I will protect him. If your husband requires babysitting, I will babysit him. But the banner I carry will be the Pale Company's banner, and the oath I swear will be to the people of this country and not to any one of their would-be lords."

The silence that followed was of a different quality. The baron looked at his hands. The priest looked at the ceiling. Ysenne looked at Seraph, and for the first time her composure thinned enough to show the weariness beneath.

"You ask for very little," she said, "and yet it is the hardest thing in the world to give. You ask me to set my house beneath my country. You ask me to admit that my husband is not worth a sword's oath."

"I do. With respect."

Ysenne breathed in through her nose, slowly, and let the breath out through parted lips. When she spoke again her voice was the same cool, level thing it had been, but a shade further from the bone.

"Then we are agreed, Captain Voss. The writ will be drawn before sunrise. Your commission will bear the House seal as a formality, but the oath will be to the marches. I will bear witness to that wording, and my son will bear witness when he is old enough to understand what it means."

Seraph inclined her head. "My lady."

"You will ride at first light. There is a man I want you to see before you take the field. A smith, by name of Tomas Renn, who keeps a sword above his forge and would rather not be reminded of why he knows how to use it. You will tell him that I asked, and you will tell him that the country asks, and you will tell him that if he stays home this time his daughters will have no country to come home to." Ysenne rose, and the room rose with her. "You will also take this."

She drew a folded paper from her sleeve and laid it on the map, weighting it with the stub of the spent candle. Seraph reached for it and felt the old parchment and the older ink, and her hand hesitated a moment before she opened it.

It was a list of names. Beneath each name a place, and beneath each place a single symbol that she recognized with a cold drop of the stomach. The symbol of the Ash-Crowned. The crown of char and iron.

"Every shrine on that list has fallen in the last month," Ysenne said. "Every name on that list is a place where the old bones were kept. They are not random. They are not opportunistic. They are being taken in an order that means something, and I do not know what it means, and that is what frightens me."

Seraph looked up from the list. Ysenne was watching her, and behind the weariness and the composure there was something else, something that might have been hope and might have been only the reflex of a woman who had once believed in better things.

"Then we find out what it means," Seraph said. "Before it finds us."

The torch in Ysenne's hand threw their two shadows long against the far wall, and for a moment they looked like the same figure standing on either side of a fire. Then Ysenne turned and the shadows broke apart, and Seraph was alone in the lamp-glow with the list folded against her breast.

"A candle," she said. "You would have me start a war with a candle."

"I would have you start it with whatever you have." Ysenne did not turn. "Most of us do."

She let herself out through the garden door, and Seraph heard her heels on the gravel for a long time after, growing softer and softer, and then there was only the wind in the eaves and the smell of the apple wood burning down in the next room. Seraph stood for a while longer with the list against her breast. Then she put it inside her coat, where it lay over her heart like a cold leaf, and went out into the hall to find the men she had been promised.

The hall of the inn was long and low and given over to the smell of old smoke and older beer, and the lamp above the door threw a wheel of yellow light across three men who had been waiting for her there, and who rose as she came in, and who stood now in a row against the far wall like a jury.

The first was short and broad and looked as if he had been carved out of the same oak he worked with, and his eyes had the patient, measuring look of a man who had spent his life looking at horses. The second was a tall woman with a sailor's roll to her gait and a black bow across her back, and her mouth was set in a line that suggested she had been smiling about something that was no longer funny. The third was an old man in a cloak that had been mended too many times, and he leaned on the table as if the table were the only thing that was holding him upright, and he smelled, faintly and unmistakably, of brandy at seven in the morning.

Seraph stopped in the doorway and let the door swing shut behind her. The lamp above her swung in the draft and the shadows of the three men swayed like a small wood in a wind.

"Lady Ysenne," she said, "told me you were waiting."

The smith, who was the first of the three, inclined his head. "She said you would be here before the bell," he said. His voice was low and rough, the voice of a man who had learned to talk over the noise of an anvil and had never quite unlearned it. "I am Tomas Renn. I shoe the horses of this town and the next, and I have a wife, and I have two daughters who are too young to be left, and I would rather not be here."

"Then why are you here, Tomas Renn?"

"Because," he said, and stopped, and looked at the door as if the answer were written on the other side of it. "Because I heard what you did at the bridge, and I heard it twice, and the second time I believed it." He shifted his weight, and the bench under him creaked. "I have a sword above my forge that I have not taken down in nine years, and I would like, if it please you, to take it down this morning."

Seraph nodded. She did not smile. There would be time enough for smiling later, if there was a later.

The tall woman with the bow spoke next, and her voice was quick and rough-edged and had the cadence of a sea shanty run too fast. "Senna Blacktide," she said. "I keep a cog called the Mare's Smile that used to carry salt and now carries whatever pays best, which is not always salt. I knew Edric Marren before he was Lord Marren, and I would have killed him then if I had thought of it, and I would do it cheaper now." She tilted her head at Seraph, and her eyes were bright and dark at once, like a gull's. "Ysenne told me you are the kind of woman who keeps her promises. I am the kind of woman who breaks other people's. We will get along."

"And what do you bring to me, Senna Blacktide?"

"Speed," she said, "and a bow that has not missed in three years, and a hold full of dried fish that we will need before this is over." She tapped the black wood of her bow. "And I bring a memory. I know the drowned coast the way a rat knows a grain ship. If they are moving on the shrines, they are moving through my country, and I will know the smell of their oars before the oars see me."

Seraph turned to the old man, who had not yet spoken, and who was looking at her with the slow, measuring look of a man who had outlived three kings and was not yet sure whether to be impressed or merely tired. The brandy on his breath was thick enough to taste across the room. His cloak had been clasp at the throat with a pin that had once been silver, and the silver had gone to a dark grey, and the grey had flaked away in places to show the cheap iron beneath, and he wore it as if the clasp were the only thing that still held him together.

"I am Harren Ashvale," he said, and his voice was slow and cold and aristocratic, the voice of a man who had been taught to speak as if every word were a small coin to be laid down carefully. "I was a knight once, of the Order of the Pale Company, which was the last loyal order of the last true king, which was a king who lost his head in a square in the capital forty years ago and whose name I will not say in this room because the walls in this country have ears and the ears belong to the wrong people." He paused, and the brandy sloshed softly in the cup he held in his left hand. "I have served three would-be kings since. Two of them are dead. The third is in a tower in the north and would not know me if I walked into his hall, which I shall not, because the hall is watched."

Seraph looked at the cup. "And what do you bring me, Sir Harren?"

"The history," he said, "which is not a gift but a weight. I know the Ash Wars. I knew the Ash-Crowned before the Ash Wars, when he was only a man and had not yet put the crown on. I know the order in which the shrines were built, and I know the order in which they were desecrated, and I know the man who is doing the desecrating, because I helped make him, which is a thing I have not said aloud in thirty years and which I am saying now because the time for not saying it has run out."

He drank. The brandy went down in two swallows, and he did not wince, which meant that he had been drinking for a long time and that the wince had been worn away.

Seraph stood very still. The lamp above her swung in the draft. Outside, somewhere in the inn yard, a horse stamped and blew, and the sound was like a small explosion in the stillness of the room.

"You helped make him," she said.

"I was his commander," Harren said. "Before he was the New Ash-Crowned, he was a boy of fourteen with a sword too big for him and a grievance the size of a county. I trained him. I taught him the forms. I taught him the names of the saints whose bones he is now pulling from the ground. And when he turned, when he put the crown of char and iron on his own head in a chapel I had once prayed in, I did not stop him, because by then I had already decided that I was tired of stopping people, and that is the worst thing I have ever done, and I have done a great many."

He looked at her. His eyes were very pale and very clear.

"I am here," he said, "because Lady Ysenne sent a woman to my lodgings this morning with a bottle of brandy and a note that said, He is moving again, and you know who he is, and you owe it to the dead. And I am here because she is right, and because I have been drunk for a long time and I would like, before I die, which will not be long, to do one thing that is not a lie."

The room was very quiet. The lamp swung. Tomas Renn was looking at his hands, which were the hands of a farrier and were black with old iron. Senna Blacktide was looking at the door, and her hand was on the curve of her bow, and her face was unreadable.

Seraph looked at the three of them. She thought of the list in her coat. She thought of the names on the list, and the places, and the single symbol under each. She thought of the chapel in the north where she had first heard the name Ash-Crowned spoken with reverence, and of the boy of fourteen with the sword too big for him, and she thought of Harren Ashvale's face as he spoke, and she knew that the face was a face she would have to learn to read, because he would not tell her everything, and what he did not tell her would be the most dangerous part.

"Then we ride," she said. "We ride for the shrine at Brenn Hollow, which is the next on the list, and which is three days' hard ride from here if the roads are open and longer if they are not. We ride as if the dead are watching, because they are. We do not promise to win. We promise only to be there."

She looked at Harren Ashvale.

"And we do not drink until it is over."

Harren looked at her. Then he lifted the cup, and drank it down, and set it on the table upside down, and the sound of it was very small in the room.

"That," he said, "is a promise I have not made in twenty years, and which I will keep, and which will kill me, and which I keep anyway."

Seraph nodded. She did not thank him. There was nothing to thank a man for, yet. She turned to Tomas Renn.

"You have a sword above your forge," she said. "Go and take it down."

He rose, and the bench creaked, and he went out without a word, and she heard his boots on the flagstones going toward the smithy at the end of the street, and after a moment she heard the iron ring of a long sword being lifted off a hook.

Senna Blacktide was still looking at the door. Her face had not changed, but her hand had moved from the bow to the quiver at her hip, and she was counting the arrows there with her thumb, one by one, as if she were counting small prayers.

"The road to Brenn Hollow," Seraph said, "goes through the marsh."

"It does," Senna said. "And I know a boatman who will take us through the marsh for a price, and I know another boatman who will take us through for a smaller price and a larger lie, and we will use the second, because the first is a friend of Edric Marren and friends of Edric Marren are friends of no one I trust."

Harren, from the table, made a sound that might have been a laugh and might have been a cough.

"Edric Marren," he said, "who was the fourth would-be king I did not serve, because he asked me to, and I said no."

"Why did you say no?" Seraph asked.

"Because," Harren said, and he looked at the upside-down cup on the table, "because I have already helped one man onto a throne that was not his, and the blood of it is still under my nails, and I did not think I could bear to help a second. That is the whole of it. That is the only honest thing I have said this morning, and I will not say another this afternoon, because the afternoon will be longer, and I am old."

Seraph looked at the three of them. The lamp swung. Outside, Tomas Renn's boots came back, and the sword rang faintly against his thigh as he walked, and she heard him stop at the door, and she heard him breathe, and she heard the breath catch in his throat the way a breath catches in a man who has not carried a sword for nine years and who is carrying one now.

She opened the door.

Tomas stood in the light of the yard with the sword at his side and the sun on his face, and he looked, for a moment, like a man she had never seen before. Then she saw his eyes, and the eyes were the same, and the eyes were afraid, and the eyes were steady.

"The horse is ready," he said. "And the wife has put a loaf in the saddlebag, and the daughters are at the door, and I have told them I will be back, and I have told them I do not know when."

Seraph stepped out into the yard. The sun was just up over the rooftops, and the long shadows of the inn lay across the cobbles like the shadows of three men who had been standing in a row against a wall and who were now, at last, about to move.

Seraph tied the grey horse to the porch post of the inn, and the horse lowered its head to crop at the weeds growing between the cobbles, and the weeds were dry and brown and tasted of nothing, and the horse did not seem to mind. Behind her, Harren had come to the door of the inn and was standing in it, one hand on the jamb, and his face was the colour of old paper, and the wind moved the hair across his brow, and he did not push it back.

She watched him from the corner of her eye while she checked the girth. She did not look at him directly. She had learned, in the long years since the marsh and the broken oath, that a man who has just done a difficult thing is more easily broken by being looked at than by being struck. She had learned it the way a farrier learns the temper of a strange horse: by the bruise on her own forearm, the first time, and by the care she took, the second.

"So," Harren said, from the door, and his voice was the voice of a man speaking from a great distance, "we ride south, then."

"If you can sit a horse."

"I sat a horse at fourteen, girl, and I have not stopped since."

"You have stopped drinking since yesterday morning, which is harder. Sit down before you mount, or I will put you on sideways, and you will not enjoy it."

He sat down on the porch step. The step was of weathered oak, and it gave under him with a small sound like a sigh, and he put his hands on his knees and looked out at the yard, and the yard was full of morning, and the morning was full of the smell of bread from the kitchen of the inn, and the smell of bread was, for a moment, the smell of the marsh, and his face changed, and then it changed back.

Seraph mounted the grey and swung the saddle around so that she sat astride, and she brought the horse alongside the step, and Harren got up with the careful movements of a man who is conserving what he has, and she reached down and took his arm, and his arm was thin under the sleeve, and she pulled him up behind her, and he settled with his hands on her belt and his chin over her shoulder, and his breath was sour, and his breath was steady.

"Ride," he said. "I am heavier than I look."

She knew. He was heavier than he looked. He was heavier than he had any right to be, for a man of his years and his condition. He was the weight of the order, and the order was the weight of the three kings he had served, and the three kings were the weight of the Ash Crown, and the Ash Crown was the weight of every man who had died for it, and she could feel all of it, against her back, as she turned the horse south.

Tomas Renn was waiting at the gate with the sword at his hip and a coil of rope over his shoulder, and he fell in at her flank without a word, and the three of them passed out of the yard and onto the road, and the road was white, and the sun was on the white, and the dust rose under the hooves, and the dust tasted of chalk.

They rode for an hour without speaking. The road ran along the spine of a low ridge, and on either side the land fell away into folds of brown field and grey coppice, and the only movement was a hawk over the western wood, hanging in the eye of the wind. Harren's hands on her belt did not shift. His breathing was the breathing of a man who is keeping himself very still because he is afraid of what will happen if he moves.

At the second hour they came to a stream, and the stream ran over a ford of flat stones, and she dismounted to lead the horse across, and Harren slid down after her and stood in the water with his boots filling, and he did not speak, and she did not speak, and Tomas, on the far bank, did not speak, and the only sound was the water over the stones and the small clink of the bit.

On the far bank, in a stand of alders, there was a stone. The stone was knee-high and square, and it had once had a carving on it, but the weather had taken the carving away, and only the shape of it remained, like the shape of a hand that has been smoothed by much holding. Harren stopped in front of it, and his face changed again, and this time she saw what the change was: it was the face of a man who is remembering, and the remembering is a weight, and the weight is not unpleasant, but it is heavy, and it is his.

"Kane," he said, without turning. "The grave of Kane. Did you know it was here?"

"No," she said.

"It is not Kane, of course. Kane fell at the ford of the Rye, which is a hundred miles east, and there is no stone there, and I have never gone to set one. This is the grave of a man I served in my second year. I forget his name. I forget his name, and I remember the colour of his eyes, and I do not know which is the worse forgetting."

He stood there for a while. Then he waded back across the ford, and the water closed over his boots, and he climbed up behind her again, and his hands found her belt, and she felt the weight settle, and she turned the horse south.

The road narrowed as the morning wore on, and the fields gave way to heath, and the heath was purple with the last of the heather, and the air smelled of it, and the smell was resinous and dry, and it was the smell of the country Harren had ridden through forty years ago when he was a young man, and he had not yet ridden to the first king, and the first king had not yet been a king, and the Ash Crown had not yet been lost.

He told her, in a voice that was not quite a voice, that the heather was the same. The heather was the same. The road was not the same. The road had been moved by a lord who wanted his drive to be straighter, and the old road had been left to the heather, and he had not known it was still there under the heather, and he had not known he would mind, and he did mind.

"You will mind a great deal," Seraph said, "before we are finished."

"Yes," he said. "I suppose I will."

They came at midday to the edge of the estate of Lord Edric Marren. The boundary was marked by a low wall of grey stone, and beyond the wall the land rose in a long parkland slope, and on the slope, at the crown of it, there was a house of pale stone with a slate roof and many chimneys, and the chimneys did not smoke, and the windows did not catch the sun because the sun was behind a cloud, and the house had the look of a house that is waiting to be told what to do.

"There," Harren said, and his voice had the edge of a man who is about to do the thing he has been riding toward, and the edge was not courage, and it was not fear, and it was the third thing that lives between the two. "There is the house of the man who would be king, if a man can be said to be a man who would be a king, and if a king can be said to be a king who would be a king of nothing. There is the house of Edric Marren."

Seraph looked at the house. She had seen houses like this, in her years on the road. She had seen the way the windows watched the road, and the way the chimneys held their breath, and the way the walls stood a little too straight, as if they were listening for a footstep that had not yet fallen. She had learned to read a house the way a farrier reads a hoof, by the wear of it, by the neglect of it, by the places where the whitewash had been laid on over something older.

"Renn," she said. "Ride to the village. Find out what has been seen. Find out who has come in the night. Find out if the house is full or empty. Do not be seen doing it. Be back at the wall by sunset."

Tomas nodded. He did not ask why. He had not asked why since the inn. He turned his horse without a word and went off along the wall, and the sound of the hooves faded, and the heath closed over him, and the heather swallowed him, and there was only the two of them, and the grey horse, and the house on the hill.

"We wait," she said.

"We wait," he said.

They waited under an oak at the edge of the wall, and the oak was old, and the oak had been struck by lightning in some past summer, and the scar of the lightning ran down the trunk like a river on a map, and the bark had grown back over the scar, but the wood beneath was black, and the black showed through in places, like bone through skin.

Harren sat with his back against the oak, and his eyes were on the house, and his hands were on his knees, and the wind moved his hair, and he did not push it back. The sun came out from behind the cloud, and the house on the hill caught it, and the windows caught it, and the pale stone caught it, and the house became, for a moment, the house of a man who has everything, and then the sun went in again, and the house became the house of a man who has nothing, and the two were the same house, and the difference was the light.

"You knew him," Seraph said. It was not a question.

"I knew his father. I served his father when his father was a boy of fifteen who had not yet learned to lie. The father died at the Rye. The son has learned to lie. The son has learned it very well."

"Did you love the father?"

"No. I respected him. I respected him more than I respected his son, and I respected him more than I respected the two kings I helped onto thrones that were not theirs, and I respected him less than I respected the one king I did not help, who would have been a better king than either, and who is now in his grave, and whose grave I have also never set a stone to."

"You have not set many stones."

"No. I have set no stones at all. I have set no stones because a stone is a thing that says the dead man is finished, and the dead man is not finished, because the dead man is the thing I am trying to atone for, and the atonement is not finished, and so the stone must wait."

"You are using the word atonement a great deal for a man who has not been at a church in forty years."

"I have not been at a church in forty years because I do not deserve to be at a church, and the church knows it, and the priest knows it, and the pew knows it, and the only one who does not know it is the man who is not at the church, because the man who is not at the church is too busy being not at the church to know that he is not at the church, and that is the joke, and the joke is on me."

He stopped. He put his hand over his mouth, as if the words had escaped him, and he looked at her with the eyes of a man who is surprised at the noise his own throat can make.

"Forgive me," he said. "The drink is out of me, and the things I have kept in the drink are coming out, and they are coming out in the wrong order."

"Speak in any order you like. I have heard worse from better men."

"Have you."

"I have."

They sat under the oak. The sun went in and out. The house on the hill watched them with its windows. The wind moved the heather, and the heather bowed, and the heather rose, and the bowing and the rising were the breathing of the land.

At the third hour, Tomas came back along the wall. His horse was blowing. His face was the face of a man who has seen something he was not expecting to see.

"The house is full," he said. "There are forty men in the barns, and there are more in the village, and there are waggons on the road from the south, and the waggons have something under the canvas, and the something is long, and the something is shaped like a thing that is not furniture."

"How many waggons?"

"Three I counted. There may be more."

"How many horses?"

"More than I could count from the road. They have taken over the smithy in the village, and the smith is shoeing them, and the smith is not the smith of the village, and the smith of the village is in the cellar of the smithy, and the smith of the smithy has a brand on his arm, and the brand is the brand of the Ash."

"The Ash."

"The Ash. The brand of the Crown. The brand that is not a brand because the Crown is not a Crown, but the brand is the brand, and the men who bear it do not care whether the Crown is a Crown or not, because the brand is the only thing they have."