Where the Reeds Remember: The Weight of Borrowed Names

The sprig of silverwort caught on the second strike. Vesper cupped her palm around the small flame, sheltering it from the draft that crept beneath her quarters' door. The dried herb crumbled between her fingers, releasing a thin grey ribbon of smoke that tasted of moss and old rain. Above the smoldering remains, she held her marshbone charm: a thumbnail of yellowed bog-ivory strung on a leather thong, its surface carved with the crescent of a heron's wing. The smoke kissed the bone. The bone drank. Her latent magic, the small inheritance of marsh-witchery that had lain dormant in her blood since childhood, retreated like a tide pulling back from a low shore. She felt the absence settle in: a faint coolness behind her sternum, the same numbness that came from pressing a tongue to frozen iron. Familiar. Practiced. Necessary. Twice a month, since she was eleven, she had done this small theft of herself. "Those don't grow around here." Wren stood in the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, both hands tucked behind her back in the studied casualness of a girl trying very hard not to look like she was snooping. She was perhaps fourteen, all elbows and bright eyes, her scout's leather jerkin a half-size too large for her frame. Her freckles stood out against her skin like seeds scattered on red clay. Vesper did not look up from the charm. "No. They don't." "Then where do they grow, then?" Wren's words tumbled out at their usual pace, quick and stacked one atop the next. "Because I've catalogued every plant within a day's ride of the Mireholt's edge for Mistress Maren, and I would remember silverwort if I'd seen it. I would. I remember everything. I can list you six kinds of bog-thistle and which ones are good for poultices and which ones will give you a rash that lasts three days if you touch the underside of the leaf, and I once identified a fungus that the healer at Ashwick thought was a toadstool but it was actually a waxcap and it was edible and I was right and he bought me a meat pie, which is how I know for certain that my memory is, well, very good." Vesper let the girl talk. It was easier than interrupting. She pinched the last ember of silverwort between thumb and forefinger and ground it into the small brass dish she used for the ritual, the ash hissing faintly as it met the cool metal. The smoke thinned. The room, which had smelled for a brief instant of upland heather and something older, something mineral and cold, settled back into its usual scent of tallow, damp wool, and the faint green rot of the marsh creeping in through the floorboards. "The northern fens," she said, when Wren finally drew breath. "Past the Greymere watershed. There's a stand of it on the inland side of the Long Causeway, where the peat turns to gravel." "Past the Greymere," Wren repeated, as if committing the name to a ledger behind her eyes. "That's, what, six days north? Seven?" "Eight, if the causeway's flooded." "And you carried dried silverwort all the way south. In your pack. For eight years." "Something like that." Wren's gaze dropped to the charm. In the guttering light of Vesper's single tallow candle, the bog-ivory seemed almost to glow from within, a faint sepia warmth that had nothing to do with the flame. The heron-wing crescent caught a shadow and held it. "What does it do?" Wren asked. "The bone. I mean, I know charms do things. Mistress Maren has one with rowan seeds and river-sand in a glass vial, and she says it's for keeping fever out of a wound, but I never asked what yours was for, because people don't ask marsh-guides what their charms are for, that's rude, I know that's rude, I'm not trying to be rude, I just, well, I saw the smoke and I thought, Vesper's burning something, and I thought maybe she was ill, but she's not ill because she walked us through the Reed-That-Bites yesterday without limping, and Mistress Maren said that was the hardest crossing she'd done in a decade, so she's not ill, so why is she burning silverwort over a bog-ivory charm in her quarters at half-past two in the morning when everyone's meant to be sleeping?" Vesper looked up, finally. The girl's cheeks were flushed. Her hands had come out from behind her back and were now twisting the hem of her jerkin into small knots. "You talk fast when you're nervous," Vesper said. "I talk fast all the time. Mistress Maren says I'll run out of breath before I'm twenty." "Mm." Vesper set the charm down on the small wooden box that served as her bedside table, beside a tin of sovereigns she had not yet counted and a folded letter she had not yet opened. The bog-ivory lay still, its glow fading. She felt the absence behind her sternum deepen, settle, become the new shape of her. For the next twelve days, give or take, her blood would be obedient. For the next twelve days, no marsh-light would answer her if she called. For the next twelve days, she was what she had made herself: a guide, and nothing more. She began to coil the leather thong around two fingers, a habit from years of handling it. "Sit down, Wren." Wren sat, on the edge of the small stool by the door, as if she had been waiting for the invitation and was now determined not to overstay it. Her boots were muddy. There was a smear of peat across one knee. She had clearly come straight from her watch rotation. "You wanted to ask me something," Vesper said. "Besides the silverwort." Wren's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "You don't talk about home." Vesper's hands stilled on the thong. "Don't I?" "You talk about the fens. You talk about causeways and peat-bogs and which reeds are safe to sleep on and which ones will swallow a pony to the withers. You talked for an hour yesterday about the spawn-timing of marsh-frogs. But you don't talk about where you learned all that. You don't talk about your family. You don't talk about why a Kaelborne is leading a royal expedition through a swamp instead of doing whatever Kaelbornes do, which I don't actually know what Kaelbornes do, but I assume it's something, and it probably isn't this." The tallow candle guttered. Somewhere beyond the thin walls of the quarters, a night-bird called, a low wet sound that could have been laughter if it had belonged to anything with a mouth. "I asked around," Wren admitted, when Vesper did not speak. "In the village, before we mustered. There's a Kaelborne farmstead up past the Greymere, everyone knows that. There used to be more of you. Now there's just, well. Just you, I think." The room was very quiet. The ash in the brass dish had gone cold. Vesper could feel the absence behind her sternum like a stone laid carefully in a hollow, and she understood, as she always did after the ritual, that the absence was not the same as peace. It was simply a quieter kind of weight. "I had a sister," she said. The words came out before she had decided to let them. She watched them land in the space between them, watched Wren's face shift from curiosity to something more careful. "You had," Wren said softly. "Had." "Sorry. I didn't know." "No one did. It's not the sort of thing one announces at muster." Wren nodded, quick and small, as if agreeing to a rule she had only just learned existed. Her hands had stopped twisting her hem. She sat very still on the stool, the way young creatures sit when they sense that something in the air has changed its weight. "What was her name?" Vesper looked down at the charm in her lap. The heron-wing crescent was just a carving. Just a curve of bog-ivory worn smooth by years of handling, by the small thefts of magic she performed twice a month so that she could walk through the Mireholt without becoming part of it. There was no glow now. The bone was only bone. "Lirien," she said. "Her name was Lirien." "Was she older or younger?" "Older. By three years. She was the one who was meant to be the marsh-guide." "But you're the guide." "Yes." "So she, what, she didn't want to? She went and did something else?" Vesper lifted her gaze to the candle flame. It stood very straight and very still in the absence of any draft. Beyond the door, somewhere down the corridor of the caravanserai, a man's voice rose briefly in laughter and was hushed. The prince's party, settling in for the night. Tomorrow they would march into the Mireholt proper. Tomorrow the reeds would close over their heads and the sky would become a rumor. "She went walking one autumn," Vesper said, "and she did not come back." The words hung in the room. Wren did not fill the silence with chatter. For once, the girl seemed to understand that silence, here, was a kind of courtesy. "The marsh took her," Vesper added. "We don't know how. We don't know where. We searched for nineteen days. My mother never walked properly again. My father sold the southern fields and bought a rowan stake from a hedge-witch and drove it into the peat where she was last seen, and the wood went black within the hour, and he took that as an answer, though what kind of answer I have never been certain." She spoke in a voice that was even and dry and utterly without tremor, the voice she used when discussing route-findings and weather windows and the load-bearing capacity of bog-bridges. The voice of a guide. The voice of a woman who had long practice in holding the shape of a thing without letting its weight show. "So now you're the guide," Wren said, "because she isn't." "Now I'm the guide because no one else in my family can walk the Mireholt without losing themselves in it. The Kaelbornes have always had the talent. Some of us more than others. My mother could call marsh-light from a quarter-mile. My sister could hold her breath under peat-water. I have a little of both, and I am careful with what I have." "And the charm keeps it, what, smaller?" "The charm keeps it leashed. Without it, the mire would know what I am. With it, I am only a woman with good boots and a competent memory." Wren considered this. Her brow furrowed, the freckles drawing together like seeds in a closed fist. "Is that why you never talk about home?" she asked. "Because if you talk about it, you'll remember?" Vesper did not answer for a long moment. Outside, the night-bird called again, a sound like water finding its way through a broken reed. "I talk about home whenever the mire requires it," she said at last. "The peat-depths, the spawn-tides, the standing-stones, the causeway-floods. They are all home. They are all I have left of the people who taught me to read the ground." She picked up the charm and slipped it back beneath her collar, where the leather thong settled cool against the hollow of her throat. The bog-ivory lay against her skin like a small, cold tooth. "Go to bed, Wren." "But I have questions." "Ask me one tomorrow. On the march. You may have three questions per day, provided none of them are about my sister." "Three questions. Per day. Noted." Wren slid off the stool. At the door, she paused. "Vesper?" "Mm." "The rowan stake. The one your father drove into the peat. Is it still there?" Vesper turned down the wick of the candle. The room folded into a darker grey. "Yes," she said. "It is still there." "And what does it mean? That it went black?" "It means the marsh heard us," Vesper said. "Whether it answered is another matter." Wren nodded once, slowly, and was gone. Her footsteps faded down the corridor, quick and uneven on the warped floorboards. Vesper sat in the near-dark with the ash in the brass dish and the small absence behind her sternum, listening to the marsh breathe against the walls of the caravanserai. Tomorrow, they would go in. Tomorrow, the reeds would take them. And somewhere beneath the peat, in the cold country where her sister had walked out of the world, something that was not her sister might still be waiting to be asked the right question. The first ladder rung was slick with dew. Vesper set her boot against it and felt the cold soak through the leather, a thin shock that traveled up through her ankle and settled somewhere behind her eyes. She climbed without looking down, because looking down at the caravanserai courtyard in the dark made the whole of it seem to lean, and she did not need the caravanserai leaning at her. Above her, the garrison wall rose like a long spine against the sky, the merlons notched into a black fretwork, and behind the fretwork the sky had not yet decided whether to be night or morning. She pulled herself onto the parapet and swung a leg over, then froze. He was already there. Prince Caelen Avenmoor sat on the wider of the two merlons with his back to the marsh, a sheet of paper pinned to his knee by the wind and a stick of charcoal in his left hand. He had wrapped himself in a borrowed cloak, a caravaner's thing of grey wool that smelled of horse and woodsmoke, and his hair was uncombed and falling into his eyes. He did not look like a prince at all. He looked like a student who had fallen asleep in a library and been carried up here by mistake. "Good morning," he said, without looking up. Vesper eased herself onto the stone beside him, leaving a careful two feet of distance between them. The wall was cold, and wide enough to sit on without falling, though the edge dropped cleanly to the courtyard fifteen feet below. From this height the Mireholt spread to the east like a dark breath held in the earth's throat. She could not see it yet, only feel it, the way you felt a held breath in a room before someone spoke. "You're up early, your Highness." "I couldn't sleep." He tilted the paper so she could see. A line of charcoal traced the marsh's edge, the reeds, the place where the causeway bent toward the standing-stones. "I thought I would sketch what I could before the light changed it." "You've got the causeway wrong." He lifted his head. In the pre-dawn grey his face looked younger than it had at the briefing table, the soft jaw, the mouth that sat slightly open as if he were always about to ask something. "How so?" "The kink is half a mile further south. And the standing-stones aren't three. There are nine." "I only drew the three I could see." "There are nine," Vesper repeated. "Three of them are sunk. You can't see them from here. You can't see them from anywhere, unless the peat gives them back, and that happens only twice in a generation." Caelen set his charcoal down and regarded her with the particular attention of someone who has been told he is wrong and is considering whether to be offended or grateful. He chose grateful. "Tell me about them." "They're not for telling. They're for not stepping on." "You sound like every book I've tried to read about this place." He smiled, but the smile did not quite reach his eyes. "Every history says different things, and every history says it's the only true one." Vesper did not answer. She was watching the sky over the marsh. The first paling was there, a thin line of ash-grey beneath the black, and against it the reed-tops were beginning to show as a darker line still, the way ink shows on damp paper. Somewhere a snipe called, the sound like a small blade being drawn across a whetstone. The cold had crept inside her collar and was settling against the back of her neck like a hand. "Tell me what you see," Caelen said. "I see a marsh." "Be more specific. You are the guide. The expedition is in your hands from the moment we pass the first reed-bed. The least you can do is tell me what I'm walking into." Vesper turned her head and looked at him. He was studying her with that scholar's patience of his, the way he had studied the map on the table last night, as though she were a page in a book he meant to read carefully. She had the sudden urge to swipe the charcoal out of his hand and pitch the sketch into the dark below. "What do you see?" she asked, instead. "A wasteland." He said it simply, and with the certainty of someone repeating something he had been told. "A drowned place. Half of it is water nobody can drink, and the other half is bog that swallows horses and carts and the hopes of every king who has tried to settle the border. The histories say it has been a ruin since the Third Dynasty fell." "The histories are written by people who never lived here." "And you have?" "I have." She picked up a loose flake of stone from the parapet and turned it between her fingers. It was the colour of old bone. "When I was nine I walked out into the Mireholt with my father and didn't come back for nine days. We lived on smoked eel and rainwater. We slept on tussocks with our boots tied to our wrists in case we turned over in the night. And on the eighth day I saw the Heron Tower." "The ruin? The one they say is haunted by something older than the kingdom?" "My father said it wasn't a ruin. He said it was a house. He said a family lived there once, before the causeway went under, and the children used to come out at dusk to feed the herons on the lawn." She flicked the flake of stone off the wall. It fell without sound. "He said the marsh is not a wasteland, your Highness. He said it is a wounded kingdom. And that the wound is still fresh." Caelen was quiet for a long moment. Below them, in the courtyard, a lantern moved across the cobbles, and someone coughed, and a horse stamped in its stall. The sound came up faint and damp and far away, as if the marsh were already beginning to swallow the caravanserai one noise at a time. "That is not in any of the histories," he said at last. "No." "It is not in the Histories of the Reign, or the King's Mirror, or the marsh-charter of King Aldous, or the Cartulary of the Western Reaches." "No." "I have read all of those." He said it without pride, the way someone might say they had drunk all the water in a particular well. "I have read them more than once. I have read the banned ones too, the ones that are kept in the locked cabinet in my father's study and which I was not meant to find the key to. The heretical histories. The ones that say the marsh was not always a marsh. The ones that say there was a kingdom here once, with a name, and a court, and a line of kings that ended not in conquest but in something else, something the records will not name." Vesper looked at him then. Really looked. The borrowed cloak sat askew on his shoulders, and his fingers were ink-stained at the tips, and his eyes, in the growing light, were the colour of river water over sand. He had the look of a boy who had read too many books in too many cold rooms and now found himself standing at the edge of one of them, and was not sure whether to be excited or afraid. She decided he was both. "Which book?" she asked. "The Book of the Lost Names. It is kept under lock and seal in the royal archive, and the cover has been half burned, and the title page is missing. But inside it says the marsh was once a kingdom called Mireholt, and that it was not drowned by any flood but by a curse laid upon it by a queen whose name was struck from every other record. And that the curse can be lifted, but only by a certain thing being carried to a certain place at a certain hour, and that no one in four hundred years has been able to work out what the thing is, or where the place is, or which hour." "That sounds like the kind of book that gets people killed." "That sounds like the kind of book that gets people sent to the Mireholt on royal expeditions." He smiled, and this time the smile did reach his eyes, and there was something in it she did not trust at all. "My father thinks I am here to settle a succession dispute. My brother thinks I am here to be gotten rid of. The kingmaker, Lord Veylan Ashenmere, thinks I am here because I am too bookish to cause trouble and too wellborn to abandon." "And what do you think?" He looked down at his sketch. The line of the causeway was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, and his thumb rubbed at it as if he could wear the error away. "I think," he said slowly, "that there are two kinds of history. The kind that is written down and locked in cabinets, and the kind that lives in the ground and the people and the way the reeds grow. And I think that the second kind is older, and more often true, and a great deal more dangerous." "And which kind are you bringing into my marsh?" "Both, I am afraid." He folded the sketch in half, and then in half again, and slipped it inside the borrowed cloak. "I have read every banned history I could find. I have memorised the routes. I have paid gold to a man in the lower city who claimed to have a page from the lost cartulary of the Heron Tower. It turned out to be a forgery, but the rest of what he had was not. And I have come here not because my father sent me, but because I believe the kingdom in the marsh is not dead. It is sleeping. And I believe I am meant to wake it." The snipe called again. Closer now. The ash-grey at the horizon had thickened into the colour of a wet plank, and against it the first true shape of the Mireholt was beginning to show, the dark belt of the reeds, the lower dark of the water, the far dark of the standing-stones she had told him he could not see. "Your Highness," Vesper said. "If you have read those books, then you have read what happens to people who go looking for sleeping kingdoms in cursed marshes." "I have." "Then you know that none of them came back." "Yes." "And you still mean to go." "Yes." He turned to her. The charcoal was still in his hand, and his fingers were very steady. "I mean to go, Captain Vesper Kaelborne. And I am asking you, as the guide my father has hired to keep me alive, whether you will take me." The light was coming up now in earnest, and the marsh was no longer a held breath but a slow exhalation, the mist lifting off the water in pale rags that trailed through the reeds like the sleeves of drowned women. Somewhere in that mist the causeway bent in the wrong place, and the standing-stones waited in their circle, three showing and six hidden, and the Heron Tower stood in its ruin with its lawns gone to peat and its herons long flown. Vesper looked at the prince. She looked at the marsh. She looked at her own hands, the nails rimmed with peat-stain that no amount of scrubbing ever quite removed, and at the thong at her throat where the bog-ivory charm lay cool against her skin. "Three questions," she said. "I beg your pardon?" "You may ask me three questions about the marsh per day. On the march. Provided none of them are about my sister." He blinked. "I wasn't going to ask about your sister." "You were thinking about it." "I was thinking about a great many things." He almost smiled. "I will take your three questions, Captain. And I will try to earn a fourth." She nodded once, slowly. Below them, in the courtyard, a horn blew, low and long, the sound of a garrison rousing for a march. The mist curled. The reeds bent. And somewhere in the marsh, in the cold country where the rowan stake had gone black in the peat, something that was not yet a voice but might once have been one began, very faintly, to clear its throat. The south gate of Ashenmere opened onto a tongue of causeway that crossed the first quarter mile of marsh on arched stone, and at mid-morning the sun was just beginning to climb the eastern sky and burn the mist down to a white gauze that clung to the reed-beds like a thrown veil. The company waited in the gate's shadow where the flagstones still held the night's chill, and Vesper was counting the saddlebags for the third time when Wren came trotting up the causeway with two pole-lanterns hooked over her skinny shoulders. "Got them," Wren said, slightly out of breath, slightly too loud, the way she had said everything since the marsh began. "Blacksmith said the wax was fresh but the wicks were naught but tallow and spite so I swiped four of the good ones from the scullery and told Cook it was house-mice." "House-mice do not take interest in lamp-wick," Vesper said. "Then Cook is a greater fool than house-mice, Captain, which is saying something." "Stop calling me Captain." "Aye, Captain." Vesper took the closer lantern from her, hooked it on the near pack-horse, and turned to look the rest of them over. The prince was already mounted, sitting his bay mare with the careful posture of a boy who had been taught to sit a horse before he had been taught to tie his own shoes. His cloak was buttoned wrong. Thessaly Maren had not yet noticed and would notice, Vesper thought, within the next three minutes. Sir Bram Holt was rearranging the lead-rope of the sumpter mule with the slow, frowning patience of a man who had once lost a siege over a badly knotted halter and had never quite forgiven rope for it. "Sir Bram," Vesper called. "Is the sumpter sound?" "Half-sound," Sir Bram said, without looking up. "Which in a mule is as good as a horse. Which in any army is as good as a miracle." "And the prince's girth?" "Tighter than his belt at a feast." Sir Bram straightened, rubbed his hands on his thighs, and squinted out at the causeway. "This is the road, then. Straight on, is it?" "Not straight." Vesper came up beside him, the thong at her throat shifting against her collarbone. "Curves at the third marker. Hug the left bank where the peat floats. Never let the animals drink." "Never let the animals drink," Sir Bram repeated. "In a marsh." "In a marsh." He considered this. "I have commanded worse orders and obeyed better." "Sir Bram." The prince's voice, from the saddle. Warm, a touch shy. "You have not commanded anything this morning except the mule, and the mule is winning." "The mule always wins, Your Highness." Sir Bram touched the brim of his helmet in something that was almost a salute and almost a mockery of one. "That is the first thing they teach you at the border. The mule always wins." Thessaly Maren came last, up the causeway from the gate, her satchel of wound-salves and her press of dried herbs riding on her own back because she did not trust a pack animal with anything that could not be replaced at the next wayfarers' bothy. She stopped when she saw the prince, took two steps forward, and with two efficient fingers undid the top button of his cloak and re-did it correctly without a word. "Thank you," the prince said, after a small silence. "You are welcome," she said, also after a small silence, and walked on past toward the sumpter mule, where she began a quiet argument with Sir Bram about the proper stowage of a jar of honey-plaster. Wren had drifted. Vesper had been watching her in her peripheral vision the way she watched everything at the edges, and the girl was not at the road's edge. She was three paces off it, one boot on the causeway stone and one on a hummock of moss that bulged up out of the marsh like a green knuckle, leaning to look at something pale and limp in the shallows. "Wren." "Captain, I think it's a hand." "Come back to the road." "Captain, look, it's a glove on a stick, I think it's a glove on a stick, only the fingers are bent wrong for a glove and I think the thumb has a wart or a blister or a--" "Come back to the road now." Wren came back to the road. She came back too quickly and her heel skidded on the wet stone and Sir Bram caught her elbow without looking, the way a man catches a falling thing he has caught a thousand times before. "Stay on the edge," Vesper said. "At all times. The causeway is six feet wide and the marsh is as deep as a house is tall and twice as hungry. You do not step off it. Not for a glove, not for a heron, not for a crown-piece tossed into the reeds." "I wasn't going to step off," Wren said, very small. "You were leaning." "I was leaning." "A leaning girl on a one-legging road will end the same way." Vesper held her gaze until Wren looked down at her own boots on the stone. "You have the lanterns. You mind the lanterns. The lanterns stay on the road. So do you." "Aye, Captain." "Sir Bram. Mage Maren. Your Highness." Vesper turned, swept the causeway ahead with one quick look, and stepped out onto it. "We go." They went. The first quarter mile is the kindest. The causeway stones are tall and clean-laid and the masons of Ashenmere built them to last, and the road walks itself, almost, with the gate at your back and the first marker-stone already showing ahead in the thin white air. The prince's mare picked her way along the stones with the dainty distaste of a horse that knew exactly how far down the brown water was and was not pleased about it. The sumpter mule, behind, planted its feet and prayed in mule-fashion at every joint. "Where the causeway bends," Vesper said, without turning her head, "you will see a heron rise on the left bank. You are not to look at it." "Why not?" Wren asked. "Because if it rises, it rose for a reason. The reason will be either a fish, or you." "A fish or me." "Fish is preferable." The prince made a small sound that might have been a laugh. "Your Highness," Vesper said, still not turning. "You may laugh. You may not lean." "I have not leaned, Captain." "You are listing." "I am sitting a horse." "Sit it plainer." He sat it plainer. The mare, beneath him, flicked one ear back in what Vesper suspected was approval. Thessaly Maren fell in at the rear of the line, walking with her hands folded at her belt and her eyes on the back of Vesper's neck. She had a way, Vesper remembered from the night before, of watching without seeming to, the way her mother had watched, and her mother's mother, and all the Marens back to the one who had first refused the bog-ivory and lived to tell of it. The Marens had a phrase for it that Vesper had only heard once, on a winter night in a kitchen that smelled of dried meadowsweet. The first daughter watches and does not eat of the offered cup. It was not a proverb. It was a job description. At the third marker the causeway did bend, and the heron did rise, and Wren did not look at it because Wren had been told not to, and the obedience sat on her like a coat two sizes too large. "Past the bend," Vesper said, "the stones get older. Smaller. They were put down by a queen no one remembers. Some of them shift." "Some," Sir Bram said, from the front of the sumpter. "Most," Vesper said. "Most, he echoes." The knight rubbed a hand through his beard. "I have a question, Guide." "No." "I have not asked it yet." "You are gathering breath for it. Do not bother. I know which one it is." "Which one is it, then?" "You want to know if I am leading you the right way." Sir Bram considered this. "Yes," he said at last, slowly. "That is the question." "The answer is: I am leading you the way that is right for the road I was hired to lead." "And that is different how?" "Because the right road and the safe road are rarely the same road in the Mireholt. The safe road goes around. The right road goes through. I was hired to go through." "Aye," Sir Bram said. "And if I want the safe one?" "I will not give it to you." "And if I demand it?" "Then you hire a different guide and take your prince through the marsh on your own and I will take my fee and go home." The prince had turned, in the saddle, and was listening. Thessaly Maren had also turned, though she had not appeared to. Wren had not turned at all because Wren was still watching the place where the heron had risen and was trying to see if it had left a feather behind. "Sir Bram," Vesper said, gentler now, because gentler was sometimes the way to get a man to keep his feet under him. "I have led three parties into the Mireholt in my life. Two came out. The third is a story I will not tell on a causeway." "Two out of three." "Two out of three. The third made its own choice and I am not its keeper and I will not be its mourners." Sir Bram was quiet a long time, the kind of quiet a big man can hold like a cup without spilling. Then he tipped the brim of his helmet, again, again that almost-salute. "Through, then," he said. "Through it is. Lead on, Guide." "Stay on the edge," Vesper said, to Wren, for the fourth time that morning, for the last time that morning, and meant it for every time after. Wren pulled her pole-lantern tight against her shoulder, and the wax caught the first true sunlight that had yet to find the road, and for a moment the small flame inside, which had been a small flame all along, was something brighter than itself. The causeway stretched ahead into the gauze of mist. The marker-stones waited. The Heron Tower, somewhere ahead, was already thinking its old thoughts in its old ruin. And Vesper, who carried a charm of bog-ivory at her throat and the name of a sister she would not say in her mouth, lifted her chin a little, and led them on, and did not look back, because looking back was a kind of promise, and she did not make promises any more in the Mireholt.