The last iron fittings went into their canvas sack, and the ruined wagon stood in the yard looking like what it was: evidence. Sable had gone back inside. The practical quiet she’d left behind had people working in it.
“Clean cut,” the carter said. “Not one buckle bent.” He looked at the wrap on my hand. “You ought to let somebody else do the cutting.”
“I’ll consider becoming sensible.”
“Don’t strain yourself.” He dug in his pouch and held out a copper. “You saved me the load with the first cut. This is for the second.”
“You don’t owe me.”
“Wasn’t asking permission.”
I took it. The coin was warm from his palm.
“Thank you.”
“Stop that before you make it dear.” He shouldered the sack and went to see about his horses.
His lead mare met him at the hitching rail and stole the end of the sackcloth. He called her a faithless thief. She chewed harder. Their argument lasted halfway across the yard, entirely serious on his side and entirely successful on hers. I found myself smiling before either of them noticed.
The clouds had lifted a little by the time I reached the street. Thin brightness caught the upper windows and left the lower stones dull, and Marchgate went on around me at full volume: a carter in a red cap accusing a smith of selling him his own bent nails back, two travelers splitting a pear under an awning like it was the last one in the world, a street singer losing his place and starting over without shame.
Nobody had sent me anywhere. No message waited in my pocket. No errand had my name on it. The purse at my belt sat one hundred eighty-one gold, nine silver, and three copper heavy, my hand was mending on a healer’s schedule instead of mine, and the eastern road could stay somebody else’s problem until morning. Food could be the whole reason a man went somewhere. It seemed a scandalous theory, and I walked toward the Scarred Flagon to test it properly, and my stomach endorsed the research.
The inn door opened on heat and noise and pepper, and pulled me in like a current.
Inside, the evening had already chosen its argument.
“Paint it,” a watchman was saying, cloak still glittering with rain. “A gate brace ought to look like the town means it.”
“Paint holds water against the wood,” a repair hand said. “You want it pretty or you want it standing?”
“I want both.”
“Then you want two braces, and you’re paying for neither.”
Watchmen and mill hands filled the benches under the smoke-darkened beams. Tomas stood behind the serving board with his iron-shod stick in reach, moving on the familiar hitch in his right leg, setting bowls down faster than hungry men could reach for them. He caught my eye and pointed at a stack of clean bowls.
“You’ve got one good hand.”
“That’s a generous count.”
“Then don’t drop anything.” He loaded three bowls into my arms and was gone down the bar before I could negotiate terms.
I stood there for a beat, a man with more than one hundred eighty gold on his belt, holding crockery. Then I looked around the room and did the arithmetic. Tomas served the watchmen. He served the mill hands. Strangers got waited on, quick and polite, the way you handle money. The people who got handed things were the ones he shouted at by name, the ones expected to still be here at closing. I could’ve set the bowls down and been a customer.
I carried them.
The first bowl knocked my bad forearm hard and made me stop to breathe. I shifted the stack against my ribs and carried them like a man who’d meant to do it that way, which fooled nobody.
By the third trip, Tomas had worked out exactly how much labor one good hand was worth. I carried spoons, fetched a jug, cleared empties against my ribs. When one slipped, a woman at the nearest bench caught it with her elbow and pushed it back to me.
“Careful. That one’s older than the inn.”
“Then it’s survived worse men than me.”
“It’s survived better ones, too.” She went back to her cup without waiting to see whether it landed. It landed. The whole bench heard it land.
Tomas set supper in front of me, stew in a chipped bowl with coarse bread and pickled spring greens. “Eight coppers.”
I put the coins down. “Does that include the labor?”
“No. The labor’s charity.”
“I’m touched.”
“Don’t be.” And he was three tables away.
The stew deserved a better vessel. Thick, rich, full of softened roots, herbs warm at the back of the throat, greens sharp enough to slap a man awake. I tore the bread and dipped until the crust sagged, and around me the room ran its own business at full tilt. A serving spoon went missing. Three people accused the repair hands, one repair hand accused the watchmen, and Tomas found it under a folded cloth and announced that everyone involved owed him a copper in principle. Nobody paid. The paint argument absorbed the spoon scandal without slowing down.
Somewhere in the middle of it my shoulders let go. I stopped scanning the door after every noise. The room had work of its own, and none of it needed me to decide anything.
I finished and carried my bowl to the serving board. Tomas took it from me on the way past.
“I have it,” I said.
“I know.” He took it anyway. “Carry the spoons.”
Near the bar he set a small iron key on the wood between us. “Your room. Saves you waiting on me.”
I closed my fingers around the key. I’d left too many rooms without looking back.
“Do I get charged extra if I sleep badly?”
“Only if you blame the furniture.” He picked up the bread basket and left me with the key in my palm.
“That one’s fit for a hinge,” the woman at the repair stall said.
“That one’s fit for the bucket.” The gauge-man tossed it. “Next.”
By the following afternoon Marchgate had turned its square into an argument with stalls. Rain had left the paving clean and the air sharp, carts pressed in from three directions, and the repair crew sorted bent nails across a canvas, each one tested against a little iron gauge. A boy flattened the mild bends with a hammer. An older smith rejected anything cracked along the head, no discussion, no appeal.
At the herb stall beside them, a seller weighed feverfew against a brass scale while her customer leaned in.
“You said a full measure.”
“I said a fair one.” She pinched off two damp stems and didn’t look up. “Full costs more.”
I was smiling before I could stop myself. Then I heard the lute.
She’d set up near the apothecary frontage with a half-circle of listeners she’d apparently conjured out of working people on a working day. Dark curls around a warm olive face, strong bare arms, a red bodice worn like a banner rather than a garment, and a way of standing that assumed space would make room for her, which it did. Her voice went through the square without shouting. Trained. Warm. Carrying.
“The gate keeps names,” she sang, “the road keeps feet, and every town keeps count of what it fears to lose.”
“That last part needs work,” a nail-sorter called.
“It needs a better audience,” she said, grandly wounded.
“You’ve got six of us and a mule.”
“The mule has excellent taste.”
The listeners laughed, and she took the laugh with a sweeping bow, like it was roses. She turned to mark a scrap of paper at her belt. The red bodice and strong curve of her waist made the turn worth watching. I watched. So did half the square.
Her dark eyes swept the workers, found the stranger at the edge of the crowd, and fixed on me.
“You came from Brookhaven,” she said. “What detail do people keep getting wrong?”
The square went on around the question. Oil jars clinked. A cart horse stamped. And I stood there holding everything I wasn’t going to say, which was most of it, which was a demon and a fall and the sound a town makes when it stops.
“It happened at midday,” I said. “People keep giving it a night and a siege. It took less time than a market argument. That’s the detail I remember. I don’t know what happened afterward.”
I kept the rest behind my teeth. Brookhaven had been made to carry enough in other people’s mouths. I wasn’t going to hand a stranger an ending I didn’t own.
She marked her scrap with a charcoal nub. “Midday. Nothing more.”
“That’s not much of a song.”
“Neither is a nail until someone puts it somewhere useful.” A flourish toward the square. “Nessa Vane.”
“Edrin.”
“Edrin.” She tried my name against a rhythm, found a quieter chord, and sang, half to herself, “At Brookhaven the ground came open at noon, and no voice answered after.”
The line landed too neatly, like a coin that rings wrong. “I didn’t say that last part.”
Her pick stilled. “No. You didn’t.”
“Noon proves nothing on its own,” said a voice from the apothecary doorway. “Half a town’s at market and half’s in the fields. Silence after proves less than you think.”
“Brenna,” Nessa said, “you’ve chosen a cruel moment to become sensible.”
“Then listen.” The woman in the doorway wore a leather apron over a green dress, auburn hair escaping its tie, freckles bright, two fingers stained with ink, the smell of mint and sulfur arriving a half-step ahead of her. She pointed at the scrap. “Cross it out.”
“I’ll revise.” Nessa drew her line. “The ground came open at noon, and no one knew why.”
“Better.”
“You say that like you’re weighing herbs.”
“Cross it out properly.”
A watchman called the gate list from the square’s eastern side, the names due through the walls, and a teamster pushed forward to ask whether his delayed brother had been listed. The watchman read the names again, louder. The brother’s name wasn’t there. The teamster stood with his hat in his hands until the market moved him along.
Nessa tucked the charcoal away. “The song stays unfinished, then.”
“Sounds uncomfortable.”
“Truth usually is. Fortunately, discomfort has a magnificent voice.” She struck the opening chord again to prove it.
Brenna went back to her doorway. I stayed where I was, between a song with a hole in it and a woman who weighed things, while the market argued on.
“No,” Nessa announced, stopping on the fourth chord. “That chord has the moral character of a damp sock.”
Late afternoon had thinned the market without quieting it. Stalls closed in stages, washerwomen settled under the awning with damp bundles against their knees, repair hands drifted in from the eastern road with pitch-dark palms, and children collected wherever adults stood still long enough to be interesting.
A boy near the post snorted. He had a wooden wheel under one arm and flour across his cheek. “Sounds like a cart stuck in a ditch.”
“A damp sock and a stranded cart may be cousins,” Nessa said. “They’re not twins.”
She shifted on the low bench and struck the progression again, boot marking the beat. When she leaned into the low note, her voice took possession of the awning. I watched her hands find the next chord and, when they weren’t busy, the rest of her.
Careful, sweetheart. That one performs for a living.
So do I, I told her.
Yes. She’s better at it.
“The gate was mended at morning,” Nessa sang, testing, “by hands that had no time. The cart broke down at noontide, and the mule refused the rhyme.”
“The mule refused the hill,” called a washerwoman. “Not the rhyme.”
“A vital distinction. I’ll write it in my heart, where all great corrections belong.”
“Write it on your paper. Your heart’s too crowded.”
Laughter went around under the awning, and Nessa bowed as though the washerwoman had spoken before a duke. Then she arrived at the matter of the brace, and a joke offered itself to me, and I’ve never once managed to leave one lying there.
“The brace has more opinions than a guard captain,” I said.
The adults laughed. A repair hand slapped his knee. And the boy with the wheel frowned at me with the grave concentration of a magistrate reviewing a forged seal.
“It doesn’t have opinions,” he said. “It has a split by the lower peg. That’s why it leans.”
The laughter turned around and came back at me, kinder than mockery and every bit as earned. The boy didn’t even stay for his victory. He adjusted his wheel and waited for the song to get back to being accurate.
I like the child.
Everyone likes the child, I told her. The child is a menace.
“There,” I said. “Beaten by a boy and a piece of wood. Tell no one.”
“You said it where everyone could hear,” the washerwoman pointed out.
“A tragic lapse.”
Nessa struck a chord that was almost applause and rebuilt the verse as she went. “The brace leaned hard by the lower peg, where the split had found its way. So hands brought wedges, rope, and care, and held the gate till day.” She stopped short of the refrain’s last word and looked out at all of them. “What held it?”
“The wedge,” said one repair hand.
“The rope,” said another.
“The new brace,” called the washerwoman.
The boy lifted his wheel. “The people holding it up while you fixed it.”
Nessa let the answer stand in the air until everyone had heard it twice. “Excellent,” she said. “Annoyingly excellent.”
She began again, softer. “The brace leaned hard by the lower peg, where the split had found its way. What holds a gate when iron fails?”
“The hands,” answered the boy.
“The hands,” Nessa repeated.
“Oak brace, elm wedge,” Brenna called from the apothecary doorway. “The wedge swells in rain and stays put.”
Nessa folded the fact into the verse, keeping the words plain enough for a child to sing, and the melody came up sturdier for it. Elm taking rain. Oak holding fast. Hands bracing the weight. The repair hands argued whether the rhyme should favor rain or grain, and she accepted neither until the tune could carry both.
I stayed against my post, smiling when the others laughed, saying nothing when the melody opened its unfinished door again. Nobody pushed me through it. Answers rose from under the awning before each note could fade, and not one of them needed to be mine.
The next morning I had nothing to do, and it took me half of it to work out that this was what was wrong.
Every day since Brookhaven had arrived with work attached. Reach a town. Get riders sent east. Get told what they found. That morning the list was empty, and I stood in the Flagon’s doorway with my hands hanging and understood I was about to spend a day walking around a town for no reason, the way a person does.
So I did that.
Marchgate takes an hour to cross if you don’t stop, and I stopped constantly.
The March Road goes through it end to end, in at the northwest and out at the Ashward Gate in the east, and everything else hangs off that road the way meat hangs off a bone. South of it the market runs in three streets that have grown into each other. North of it lies the caravan yard, a field of gravel the size of Brookhaven with sixty wagons on it and a customs house whose queue never got shorter.
I tried to count the town and gave it up twice. Brookhaven had two hundred and eleven people, and I could’ve named most and told you which ones owed my mother money. Here I passed more strangers between the Flagon and the fountain than I’d met in my life, and none of them would ever learn my name, which turned out to be restful in a way I hadn’t expected.
Nobody stopped me going up onto the wall, which I’ve thought about a good deal since.
There was a stair beside the Ashward Gate with no rope across it and nobody at the bottom, so I went up, and a militiaman at the top looked at my sword and then at my face and decided I was somebody’s business but not his. The rampart ran away north and south under my boots, three men wide, the timber creaking the way sound old timber creaks.
From up there the eastern field went out flat and green to a line of scrub, the road to Harrows Turn crossing it and vanishing, and a quarter mile out there were long shallow marks in the grass that were neither natural nor new.
“What are those?”
“Ditches.” He didn’t look. “Old trouble. Before my time.”
“Did they work?”
“Town’s still here.”
Below us the gate stood open on iron plates worn bright, the counterweight chain going up into the dark of the arch, and two men greased something at the head of it with the unhurried competence of men who have done it two hundred times.
“How long to shut it?”
“Bell and a half. Longer if the road’s full.” He shrugged. “We don’t, though. Ninety years and it’s been shut twice.”
I looked at it a while longer than the answer deserved.
It is a good wall.
“That’s nearly warm.”
It is a good wall, she said again, in the voice of somebody who has seen what comes to good walls, and then she didn’t say anything else about it.
I came down off the stair, and the noise took me most of the way to the Iron Fist before I noticed I was following it.
Heat pressed out through the open front, coal smoke and hot oil and fresh-ground steel, and metal rang back in the dark of it, steady as a bell rung by a man paid by the hour. I stopped in the doorway with nothing better to do, and stayed because of the argument.
The smith stood at a broad worktable, grey-streaked auburn hair in tight braids, her beard divided into two shorter ones beneath them, burn scars stacked up both forearms above a leather apron worn over mail. The missing tip of her left ring finger made the hand turning the little metal plate look deliberate, as though the finger had been spent on something worth the price. A customer waited across from her with a broken cart fitting.
The plate had curling leaves cut around its edge. Even I could see the craft in it.
“It’s handsome,” she said, in the tone other people use for confessions.
“So you approve?”
“It isn’t.” She set it flat and tapped the fasteners with one blunt knuckle. “Fitted like that, no repair hand reaches these heads without taking half the cart apart. Your driver breaks an axle in the rain, he needs a brace, not a sculpture.” She brought up a plain square-edged bar pierced with open holes. “Four bolts. All reachable from outside. It outlives the leaves, and when it doesn’t, a man with cold fingers can mend it.”
“It’s ugly.”
“So’s a cart in a ditch.”
He took the bar toward the rear bench. Behind them an apprentice complained that the rivet tray was beside the wrong anvil.
“It’s beside the anvil you’re using,” she said.
“Not the one I need.”
“Then move it.”
The tray moved. Then she turned and found me in her doorway, and looked at me the way she’d looked at the plate.
“You’ve been standing there a while.”
“I’m admiring the ugly one.”
Something happened at the corner of her mouth that in a less economical woman would’ve been a smile.
“Dorva Ironhand,” she said. “Don’t lean on the door frame, it’s hot.” Then she went back to her anvil, and that was the whole of our first conversation.
I took my hand off the door frame. It was hot.
“Did you strike anything?” Elowen asked at midday, three days to the hour after she’d ordered me back.
“No.”
“Lift anything heavy?”
“Briefly.”
“The forge.”
It didn’t sound like a guess. She pressed along the bones, bent each finger against her thumb, then unwound the support and set a wooden peg across my palm.
“Crush it.”
I did. The grip held, whole and mine.
“Again.”
The wood creaked.
“Done,” she said. “Bones set. Strength back. Strike things. Lift things. Stop favoring it before you teach the arm a bad habit.”
I turned the bare hand over. Ten days earlier I’d watched the fingers close around an axe because a flood of impossible power had refused to let them stay broken. This was quieter. Better.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. It was good work.” Something younger slipped into her voice after the certainty. “Mine, I mean. I mended that hand. Try not to feed it to anything else.”
“I’ll ask before the next spider.”
“Don’t.”
By evening, half of Marchgate seemed to be walking toward supper. Children vanished into doorways at shouted names. Carts shed mud. Sunset caught the upper windows and turned them gold.
The Scarred Flagon had filled before I arrived. Nessa sat at the middle table with a cup between her hands. Brenna had charcoal on two fingers and a piece of bread in the other. Three patrolmen crowded the far bench.
Tomas put a bowl in front of the empty chair.
“Eight coppers.”
I paid and sat. Stew steamed up into my face, thick with pepper, onions, and meat cooked until surrender. Fresh bread came beside it.
I tore the loaf with both hands. The crust cracked; the soft middle pulled apart in a cloud of steam. I did it again for no reason except that I could. A ridiculous grin arrived somewhere between the second piece and the stew.
“He votes for the bread,” Nessa said.
“The stew hasn’t presented its case.”
The first bite made conversation a problem for later.
“Now he votes for the stew,” Nessa said.
“The stew has earned it.”
She tapped the table and began the refrain they’d been worrying all afternoon.
“Raise the beam and set it true,
Hold the road for all who come.
When the Marchgate hinges groan,
Name the hands that kept them whole...”
The last note hung open.
“Still no ending?” I asked.
“Seven endings,” Nessa said. “Six are crimes.”
“The seventh miscounts the workers,” Brenna said.
A patrolman lifted his cup. “Name the hands and hide the ale.”
“Crime eight,” Nessa said.
“It scans.”
“So does a death sentence.”
Tomas passed with a bread basket. “Sing after you chew.”
They tried again. This time the patrolmen joined at the second line, too loud and not quite together. Brenna stopped them because they’d put the hinge on the wrong side of the gate. Nessa told her songs had no sides. Brenna turned a piece of paper over and drew one.
I laughed into my bowl.
Brookhaven used to sing after supper. The thought came without warning. I gave it the space of one breath and kept my seat.
On the third attempt, the man with the cup supplied his line again.
“Name the hands and hide the ale!”
The whole table took it up. Nessa protested through the first repetition, surrendered during the second, and by the third she was singing louder than anyone.
I joined them with my mouth full. Brenna slapped time against the table. Tomas threw another loaf onto the board without looking. The song staggered onward, inaccurate and happy, while the bowl warmed both my hands.