The trail widened, and there was a town in the bend of it.
That was all it was. The East Trail came down off the last of the high ground, went into a long slow curve around a shoulder of rock, and where the curve opened there were roofs. Twenty of them. A street that was the trail with buildings along both sides, and a wide place in the middle where the turning was, which is how it got the name, whatever anybody tells you later about bandits.
We’d ridden the last two miles the way you do when somebody’s already tried you once that day. Jak out in front with the bow across his saddle and both hands on it. Isolde watching the high ground on our left, which was the side it’d come from. Elowen in the middle because that’s where we put her without ever having discussed it. Me watching the road behind us, which had stayed empty for four hours and hadn’t stopped feeling occupied.
I’d been building the Turn in my head the whole way. Shutters closed. A man on the waystation roof with a horn in his belt. Somebody at the west end wanting our names before the horses got a drink.
What we got was a goose.
It came out of the grass at the edge of the street with its neck flat to the ground and its wings out, going for Bracken’s forelegs like she’d spent the whole spring waiting for a horse to insult her. Bracken’s carried me out of a burning tunnel with a dead man across his withers. Bracken went sideways into Elowen’s mare and very nearly put me in a water trough.
“She does that,” a voice said, with no apology anywhere in it.
A boy, nine or so, filthy from the elbows down, with a dog at each knee and a third arriving at speed. There was a stick in his hand, and he did something with it that wasn’t hitting the goose but persuaded her all the same, and she went back into the grass at a dignified pace with her opinion intact.
“Is she yours?” I asked.
“She’s nobody’s.” He looked up at me with his hand shading his eyes. “Are you stopping or going through?”
“Stopping.”
“Then it’s Ott’s, and it’s the big one, and Mam says the price is the price.” He said it the way you say a thing you’ve been made to say forty times. “Are those all your horses?”
“They are.”
“The dun’s got a stone bruise coming in the off fore.”
Jak looked down at him. Jak had been on that horse since the ambush and hadn’t said one word about it.
“Which foot,” Jak said.
“That one.” The boy pointed without hesitating. “He’s not favouring it yet. He will tomorrow. Denn’ll do it for two copper and he’ll do it right, and don’t let him tell you about his father while he’s doing it or you’ll be there till dark.”
“What’s your name?”
“Rye.” He was already going. “Rye Ott. Mam’s the big one at the wide end, I said.”
He went off up the street at a run with three dogs converting themselves into a single moving animal around him, and the geese scattered ahead of him and reassembled behind him, and nobody in the whole of Harrows Turn looked up.
That was the part I couldn’t settle into.
There was hammering coming from somewhere behind the buildings, steady, two men, one of them better at it than the other. A woman crossed the street in front of us with a basket on her hip and looked at Isolde’s leathers and Duskfang and the crossbow across Jak’s knees the way you look at weather you aren’t going out in, and said good evening, and kept going. Two old men outside the smithy were having an argument that had clearly been running for some days. A dog lay in the middle of the street in the last of the sun and didn’t get up for us. We rode around it.
Isolde brought her mare up level with mine.
“Say it,” she said.
“There’s nobody on the roofs.”
“No.”
“There’s no watch on the west end. There’s no ditch. There’s a stack of timber sitting out under canvas that four men could carry off in the dark, and the only person who’s asked us anything is nine.”
“And how does that make you feel?” she said, in a voice that was doing something at the edges.
“Insulted,” I said, and she made a sound I decided to keep.
I tried it once more, at the wide end, on a man who was rolling a barrel up a plank and had a build that said he could keep doing it all evening. I told him there was a goblin line holding a rise about six miles west, nine of them, in formation, with a horn.
He got the barrel over the lip of the plank before he answered.
“Aye,” he said. “They do that.”
“You don’t want to know about it?”
“I know about it.” He set the barrel on its end and rolled it on the rim, half a turn at a time, toward a doorway. “Six miles is six miles. Tell Ferrin if it’s eating you. He likes being told things.” Half a turn. “Mind the goose.”
Jak, who says maybe nine words in a day and spends them carefully, watched him go.
“I like it here,” Jak said.
Elowen laughed. It came out of her before she could put a hand in front of it, and it was the first noise like that any of us had made since the rise, and Isolde turned in the saddle to look at her the way you look at a bird landing close.
“What,” Elowen said.
“Nothing.”
“I’m allowed.”
“You are,” Isolde said. “That’s what surprised me.”
The waystation stood at the wide end where the street gave up and became trail again. It was long and low and old, with a new room going up on the back of it, walls and rafters and no roof, and a stack of good pale timber beside that under oiled canvas, weighted down at the corners with stones. The hammering was coming from up there. Somebody on the rafters was arguing with somebody on the ground, and losing, and not stopping.
There was a board nailed by the door with the week chalked on it. Most of it was feed prices.
At the bottom, in a different hand, bigger than everything above it and underlined twice, it said: OTT AND HARROW. FOURTH DAY. ALL WELCOME. BRING A CHAIR.
Maribel Ott came through her own common room without looking at any of it and got to us before the door had finished shutting.
She was broad and quick and somewhere past forty, with grey coming in hard at both temples and no attempt whatsoever to hide it, sleeves shoved up past the elbow in a way that looked permanent. She went round a bench, a table, a dog and a man carrying a tray without appearing to see one of them.
“Four,” she said. “Horses?”
“Four,” I said.
“Then it’s two rooms, because the third has the ceiling out of it and I’m not renting a ceiling I haven’t got. Beds are real. Straw’s two weeks old, which for us is new. Stabling with feed is four copper a head and Denn does the feet if they want doing, and he’ll charge you and he won’t overcharge you.” She looked at the four of us properly for the first time, one after another, about a quarter of a second each. “Supper’s on. It’s mutton. Before you ask, it’s always mutton, and it’s good, and if you tell me you’re sick of mutton I’ll tell you what I tell the carters.”
“What’s that?”
“Go east and see what they give you.”
“How much for the lot?” Isolde asked.
Maribel told her. Isolde paid it without a word, which in my experience means either she thought it was fair or she’d stopped noticing money, and I’ve never been able to establish which.
“Right,” said Maribel, and the coin was gone somewhere. “Nettie’ll feed you. If you want the bath it’s a copper and you want it, because I can smell the road on you and I’ve smelled worse and I’m telling you anyway.”
She was already going.
“One more thing,” I said.
She stopped without turning all the way round, which is a thing busy people do.
“There’s a goblin line on the trail west of here. Nine of them. Holding a rise.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Not any more.”
“Then eat your supper.” She did turn round then, and there was nothing sharp in it at all, which somehow made it worse. “I’ve had that road in my doorway for nineteen years, love. Every spring somebody comes in off it with a face like yours and tells me about it as if I’d moved in yesterday. Tell Ferrin. It’s what he’s for. Tell him after you’ve eaten, because he’ll keep you an hour and you’ll be no use to yourself.”
She went. Behind me, Jak sat down like a dropped sack.
The common room was long and low and warm and smelled of mutton fat and wet dog and pipe smoke and the particular sourness of a place where beer has been spilled steadily since before anybody currently drinking there was born. Half the benches were full. Nobody was talking about goblins. Two men near the fire were talking about a roof, and had been for some time, and weren’t close to finishing.
Nettie Vetch brought the food, and she brought it four plates at a time on her forearms in a way that ought not to work.
She was about my age, sunburnt across the nose in a way that looked like it never entirely went, with brown hair coming out of whatever she’d tied it back with hours ago and no apparent intention of putting it back. She set the plates down and named them, which nobody’s ever done for me before or since.
“Mutton. Mutton. Mutton. Mutton.” A beat. “I could do you a mutton.”
She laughed before she got to the end of it, which I noticed, and then a hand went up over her mouth for half a second and came down again, which I also noticed and pretended I hadn’t. There was a gap between her front teeth. She seemed to be at war with it. It had no business being anybody’s enemy.
“What’s the bread?” Elowen asked.
“Yesterday’s. It’s better than today’s. Today’s went wrong.” She said it like a confession. “That’s not Mam, that’s me. I let the oven go cold reading and I’m not going to be allowed to forget it before harvest.”
“Reading what?” I asked.
“Nothing you’d have heard of.” She was already gone two steps, and she came back one. “It’s a book about the sea. There isn’t any sea. I’ve never seen one. That’s the whole thing.”
And off she went with an empty tray under her arm, saying something to a carter that made him laugh into his cup.
I looked back at my plate and Isolde was watching me over the rim of hers with her chin down and a great deal going on behind her face, none of which she offered me.
“What,” I said.
“Nothing.” She cut her mutton. “She’s nice.”
“She is.”
“Mm.”
We’ve no arrangement, Isolde and I. We’ve never once said a word that could be held up in a room and called one. That’s not carelessness on either side. It’s the shape of the thing, and both of us built it, and I have my reasons and she has hers and neither of us has ever asked the other to produce them.
It cost me something anyway, sitting there, and I ate my mutton and didn’t look at the door again for a while, and I want to be honest that the not-looking took effort.
The mutton was very good.
“Three years,” a woman said behind us, loudly, to the whole room rather than to anyone, “is three years.”
“Three years is nothing,” an old voice said from the corner by the fire, with enormous satisfaction. “Three years is a long Tuesday.”
“Sabby.”
“I’m only saying what I think.”
“You’re only saying what you think at the top of your lungs where Maribel can hear you.”
“Well,” said the old voice, “she knows what I think. I’ve told her.”
Somewhere over by the barrels, without looking up, Maribel Ott said, “You have, Sabby.”
“And?”
“And I’m marrying him on the fourth day and you’re coming and you’re bringing a chair.”
The room made a noise that was mostly approval and partly the sound of a bet being settled, and the two men by the fire went back to the roof, and Jak, who hadn’t stopped eating through any of it, said, with his mouth full and without lifting his head, “Best inn in the marches.”
Ferrin Colm found me before I went looking for him, which I should’ve expected and didn’t.
He was waiting in the yard when I came out to see the horses settled, standing where the lamp from the stable door reached him and the dark didn’t, with his hands behind his back. He was somewhere past fifty, neat in a way nobody else in the Turn was neat, and he was wearing a coat.
That’s the thing I kept coming back to afterward. Everybody in that village wore what they worked in. Ferrin Colm owned a coat he didn’t work in, and he’d put it on to come and talk to me in a stable yard after dark.
“Master Hale,” he said.
“Somebody’s been quick.”
“Rye had your name off your saddle-cloth and round the whole street before you’d got your boots off. He does that. It saves me a great deal of walking.” He came forward two steps into the better light. “Ferrin Colm. I keep the Turn, insofar as anyone does.”
“Edrin Hale.”
“And a storm-caller, a bowman off the Marchgate rolls, and a Solaran with a full satchel.” He said it evenly, without any weight on it at all. “You’ll forgive me. It’s a short street.”
“There’s a goblin line six miles west,” I said. “Nine. In formation, with a horn, holding a rise. They took us on the trail this afternoon and they didn’t break when we hurt them.”
“Thank you.” He didn’t move. “How long will you be with us?”
It went past me the first time. I answered it like a question.
“Two nights. Three if the dun’s foot wants it.”
“Denn will tell you the truth about the foot. He tells everyone the truth about the foot, at length.” Something happened near his mouth that wasn’t a smile but was related to one. “Maribel has put you in the two rooms at the north end. They’re the good ones. She’ll have told you they’re the only ones, and that’s true this week and would not be true next week, and I’d rather you had them.”
“That’s generous.”
“It isn’t.” He let that sit exactly long enough. “The smith is Barrow’s brother and he’s slow but he won’t cheat you. The well is fine, whatever anybody tells you about the bucket. If your Solaran needs anything she can’t carry, Sabby Vetch keeps more of the old stuff than she admits to and will part with it for conversation, which she considers a fair price and which is, I should warn you, expensive.”
He hadn’t moved his hands from behind his back the entire time.
“You’ve got a wedding,” I said.
“I have a wedding.” For the first time something came into his voice that had a person in it. “On the fourth day. Ninety-one people if you count Sabby’s sister, who is coming from Vell and who has not spoken to Sabby since a matter involving a pig, which they will both raise. There are two casks coming up from Embergate that I have paid for and not yet seen. Hollis Barrow is nine days behind on that roof and swears he is four. If it rains on the fourth day and there is no roof, we will put ninety-one people into a common room built for fifty and the wedding will still happen, and I will hear about it for the rest of my life.”
“I’d take the goblins.”
“It’s worse than goblins,” he said. “Goblins have never once cost me a cask.”
And then he stopped, and looked at me, and did the thing he’d walked out here in a coat to do.
“How long will you be with us, Master Hale?”
The second time you can’t mistake it.
I stood there in a stable yard with the smell of horses and cold iron off the water trough, and I understood I was being asked to leave by a man who’d just offered me his best rooms, his smith, his well and his neighbour’s medicine chest, and who’d meant every one of those offers and also meant this.
“You want us gone before the fourth day.”
“I want you fed, rested, shod and gone before the fourth day.” He said it without a flicker. “I’d like you to understand that I have nothing against any of you and that this is not about goblins.”
“Then say what it is about.”
“Four armed strangers in a street ninety people live in.” He turned his head slightly toward the lamplight coming out of the common room, where somebody had started singing badly and been stopped by a general vote. “You are the only people in the Turn tonight carrying weapons, and one of you is carrying something I could feel from the doorway. That is not an accusation. I know what a marches road costs and I know what it costs to come off it in one piece. But I have ninety people, one street, and a great deal of drink arriving on the third day, and my entire job is the arithmetic of that. Armed strangers and a wedding are two things I would rather not add together.”
“And if I said we’d keep to ourselves?”
“I’d believe you,” he said. “I’d believe you completely. I’ve met a great many men who meant it.”
I wanted to be angry with him and couldn’t manage it, which was its own irritation. He was right. If I’d been him I’d have come out in a coat too.
“Two nights,” I said. “Three if the horse needs it. We’ll be gone by the third day, and we’ll pay for what we use, and if anything happens in this street while we’re in it, we’re yours.”
“Thank you.” He put a hand out, and I took it, and it was a working hand after all, harder than the coat had led me to expect. “One more thing, and then I’ll leave you to your horses. Nobody here will ask you what you saw on the road. Not from politeness. They aren’t interested. If that offends you, be offended quietly, because it’s the only luxury this village has got.”
He went back up the street, unhurried, with his hands behind his back again.
You liked him.
“Don’t start.”
I said nothing at all for six hours. Astarra was somewhere behind my sternum, and pleased with herself, and unhurried. He put a coat on to tell you to leave. Do you know how few people have ever taken that much trouble over you?
“Goodnight,” I told her, and went to see about the dun’s foot.
Denn Harrow had the dun’s foot up between his knees before I got to him, and he was talking, and it took me a moment to work out that he wasn’t talking to me.
“There you are,” he was saying. “There. No, I know. I know you don’t. Nobody does.”
He was long, and slow with it, the way very big men get slow when they’ve learned what happens if they aren’t. His hands were enormous. He had the hoof cradled in one of them and a pick in the other and he was going round the frog in small careful strokes, and the dun, who had tried to remove Jak’s kneecap twice that week, was standing there with his head down and his ears out sideways like a cat.
“Rye said stone bruise,” I said.
“Rye’s right.” He didn’t look up. “Rye’s always right about feet and never about anything else. There.” He turned the hoof toward the lamp. “See the darkness coming through there, that half-moon shape? He’s not favouring it yet because he’s stubborn. Tomorrow he’ll be honest.”
“Can you take it out?”
“There’s nothing to take out. That’s the trouble with people and bruises, they want the bruise to be a thing.” He set the foot down and straightened up in stages. “Poultice tonight, poultice in the morning, stand him in the cold water at the trough end for as long as he’ll allow, which is about as long as you keep talking to him. He can walk on it on the third day. He shouldn’t carry you before the fifth.”
“We’re leaving on the third.”
“Then you’ll lead him on the third and ride him on the fifth, or you’ll do what you like and I’ll have said it.” Not sharp. He was already reaching for the poultice cloth. “My father used to say a horse only ever lies to you once, and he was wrong, they lie constantly, but he was right about the once that matters.”
And then, exactly as advertised, I got the father.
I got him for a good while. I got him coming up from Vell in the year of the wet spring with eleven animals and losing four of them at the ford, and what he did with the seven, and how he ended up in the Turn because a wheel went and he was too proud to ask for the loan of another and by the time he stopped being proud he’d been there eight months and had a woman and a shed. I got his hands. I got his opinions about hoof oil, which were apparently notorious, and which Denn still holds and knows to be indefensible.
The lamp hissed. The dun went to sleep standing up with his lip hanging off. Somewhere up the street a door opened and let out singing and shut and cut it off.
I didn’t mind any of it. That surprised me. I sat on an upturned pail in a stable that smelled of poultice and old leather and I let a man I’d known for a quarter of an hour tell me about his father, and I thought about a tavern in Brookhaven with a map on the table and a beer stain on the eastern marches, and I didn’t say a word about that, because it was his turn.
“You’re getting married,” I said, when he’d wound down.
“Fourth day.” He wrapped the foot. His hands got smaller and quicker when they had a job. “You’ll have heard the argument by now. Everybody hears the argument inside an hour, it’s the first thing this village does with a stranger.”
“I heard it before I finished my supper.”
“Aye.” He tied the cloth off. “Three years since Tomas Ott went through the ice at the mill pond, and half of them say three years is decent and half of them say it’s indecent, and both halves are coming, and both halves will cry.”
“What do you say?”
He was quiet long enough that I stopped expecting an answer.
“I say it isn’t mine to have an opinion about,” he said. “She was married nineteen years. I stood at the back of that wedding as well. I’ve looked after that woman’s horses since before her boy was born and I never once said a word to her that Tomas couldn’t have heard, and I’d have gone on not saying it until they put me in the ground, and she’s the one who came and said it to me.” He picked up the pail I wasn’t sitting on. “Everybody in the Turn thinks they’re arguing about how long grief takes. They’re arguing about whether she’s allowed to want anything. I’ve got no side in that. I’m just the man she wanted.”
He said it flatly, the way he’d told me about the hoof.
“And Rye?” I asked.
The change in him was the only fast thing he did all evening.
“Rye’s the whole of it,” he said. “Rye can call me whatever he decides to call me and he can take as long as he likes deciding, and if he wants to call me Denn until he’s forty, then I’m Denn.” He hung the pail on its nail. “He came out here on his own about a month ago and asked me whether I was going to sell his father’s cart. That’s a nine-year-old walking down a dark yard to ask a man twice his size a question he’d worked out by himself. I said no. He said good, and went away, and that’s the entire conversation we’ve ever had about it.”
“Are you going to sell the cart?”
“It’s a bad cart,” Denn Harrow said. “No.”
He put his hand flat on the dun’s neck on the way past, and the dun didn’t wake up, and I went back inside with the smell of the poultice on my sleeves and a feeling in my chest I couldn’t put anywhere useful.
You are going to be very sad when you leave here, Astarra observed.
She wasn’t wrong. She didn’t press it either, and from her that’s very nearly kindness.
Elowen had been in the common room for an hour, and in that hour the Turn had found seventeen reasons to walk past her table.
She’d only meant to look at Isolde. That’s how it started. She’d got Isolde onto the bench under the good lamp with her coat off and her shirt up on the left side, and the bruise along those ribs had come out overnight the way they do, black in the middle going to a colour I have no name for at the edges, and Elowen had put two fingers on it and said, “Breathe in until it stops you.”
Isolde breathed in and it stopped her about two thirds of the way.
“Nothing’s broken,” Elowen said. “You’ve torn something small along there and it’ll hurt more tomorrow than it does tonight. I can close it or I can leave it.”
“Leave it.”
“Say why.”
“Because you did two of us on the road today and you’ve got a knee you haven’t looked at.”
Elowen looked at her for a second.
“That’s the correct reason,” she said, “and I want it on the record that you got there before I did,” and she strapped the ribs instead, and that was when the first of them came past.
It was a woman with a shoulder. Then it was a carter with a thumb that had been wrong since Embergate. Then it was a boy who had nothing whatever the matter with him and had been sent by his mother to see whether the Solaran was the sort you could ask. Nobody asked her straight out. Everybody arrived at that table sideways, with a cup in their hand and a remark about the weather, and Elowen Thorne, who’s nineteen and can’t make small talk to save her life, dealt with every one of them by asking a single flat medical question about eight seconds into the conversation and going straight past the part they were dreading.
It was the most graceful thing I’ve ever watched her do, and if I’d told her so she’d have denied the whole account.
Hollis Barrow came in at the back of the queue holding his left hand in his right, with sawdust in his hair, his beard, his collar and, I assume, his soul.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Show me the nothing.”
He put it on the table. There was a split across the meat of the palm below the thumb, deep and clean and packed with pale dust, and it’d been bleeding a while and had stopped and started again more than once.
“When,” Elowen said.
“Before supper.”
“Before which supper?”
He didn’t answer that.
“Right.” She got the bowl. “This will hurt more than the injury. Put your elbow there.”
“I’ve got a rafter to hang.”
“You’ve got nine rafters to hang,” said a delighted voice from the corner, “and you told Ferrin four.”
Sabby Vetch was seventy-seven years old, about the size of a bundle of kindling, and entirely toothless down one side of her mouth, which gave everything she said a shape that made it sound funnier than it was and was often funny anyway. She had the best seat in the room, and nobody went near it, and by the look of the cushion there hadn’t been a discussion about that in twenty years.
“I told him five,” Hollis said, to the ceiling.
“You told him four.”
“I told him five and he heard four because he wanted to.”
“Girl,” Sabby said to Elowen, “can you make his hand work by the third day?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’s got no excuse, and I’d like the room to notice.”
The room noticed. Hollis Barrow closed his eyes and endured being noticed, and while Elowen took the dust out of his hand with a probe and a great deal of unhurried cruelty, the argument came round again the way a cart comes round a turning.
It came round through Sabby, because it always did.
“Nineteen years she had with Tomas Ott,” she announced, “and he was a good man and a fool about ice, and three years is not enough, and I’ve said so.”
“You’ve said so at her,” said the woman with the shoulder.
“I’ve said so to her face, which is the only place I say things. And she looked at me and she said, Sabby, you buried Vetch and you were in the fields the week after, and I said that was different, and she said why, and I have been thinking about why for eleven days.” Sabby settled herself with tremendous satisfaction. “I still think three years isn’t enough. I don’t think I’m right any more. Those aren’t the same, and anybody who tells you they are hasn’t been old.”
“You’ll still cry at it,” somebody said.
“I’ll cry like a broken gutter,” said Sabby Vetch. “Bring me a chair with arms.”
And that was the whole of it. That was the great division of Harrows Turn, running at full volume across a common room, with both halves of it drinking the same beer and going to the same wedding and nobody once lowering their voice or looking at the door.
Nettie came past with an armful of empties and stopped at my shoulder.
“She’s my gran,” she said. “In case you were building a whole picture.”
“I was.”
“Everyone does. She encourages it.” She shifted the cups. “Your friend’s good. The healer. She hasn’t once told anybody it’ll be fine.”
“She won’t. She doesn’t say things she doesn’t know.”
“That’s why they’re queueing,” Nettie said, as though it were obvious, and it was, and I hadn’t seen it until she said it.
Then Elowen finished Hollis Barrow’s hand and made him sit for a count of two hundred before she’d let him stand, and he sat there furious and obedient with his hand up, and Sabby Vetch talked at him the entire time about a roof he was going to finish, and outside the wind got up a little and moved the canvas over the timber, and I sat in a warm room full of people arguing about nothing that could kill any of them.
The room at the north end had a window with a shutter that closed, a floor that had been swept that day, and a bed.
An actual bed. Off the ground, with a frame, and rope under the mattress that somebody had tightened inside the last year, and two blankets, and a pillow with a cover on it that had been boiled.
I stood and looked at it for longer than a grown man should look at furniture.
Since Marchgate I’d slept on the floor of a waystation, in a cart, on stone twice, in a hollow under a fallen birch with rain coming through it, and for the last four nights on the ground with a saddle under my head and my hand on Duskfang. You stop noticing. That’s the thing nobody tells you. It isn’t that you get comfortable. It’s that you stop keeping the account, and then somebody puts a bed in front of you and the whole bill lands at once.
Jak had gone to the other room and, from the sound coming through the wall, had reached the bed and stopped existing.
I got my boots off. That took a while. I put Duskfang against the frame where my hand would find it, which isn’t something I decide to do any more, and I sat down on the edge of the mattress, and the rope took my weight and gave a little and held, and I made a noise I won’t be writing down.
The door opened.
Isolde came in without knocking, which she does, and shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it for a moment with her coat over her arm and the strapping showing white along her ribs where her shirt had come untucked.
“Don’t get up,” she said. “You couldn’t.”
“I could. I’d regret it.”
“That’s the same thing at your age.” She came over and looked at the bed, and then she sat down on the end of it, carefully, the way you sit when one side of you has opinions. “God.”
“I know.”
“I’ve slept in a hundred of these. I stopped noticing them when I was fifteen.”
“And?”
“And there are two rooms,” she said, “and four of us, and Jak snores like a man being sawn in half.”
“That’s the reason, is it.”
“That’s the reason I’ll be giving Elowen at breakfast.” She got her boots off without hurrying and put them where she puts them, and lay back across the foot of the bed with her arm over her eyes, and neither of us did anything about any of it, because we’d ridden nine miles and held a hole in a wall a week ago and her ribs were strapped and the bed was the first real one since Marchgate.
That’s the part nobody tells you about a thing like this. Most of it’s just somebody being in the room. She stayed a while and neither of us said anything for a good part of it, and the noise came up through the boards from the common room, going down slowly the way a room does at the end of a night, with Sabby Vetch’s laugh coming through it every so often like a nail through a board.
“He asked you to leave,” she said eventually.
“He did.”
“Politely.”
“Extremely politely. He put a coat on.”
“Are you angry?”
“I wanted to be.” I looked at the ceiling, which had a beam across it with a hook in it that had held something for a long time and wasn’t holding it now. “He’s got ninety people and one street and a wedding, and we walked in off the road with a war-sword and you. If I had ninety people I’d want us gone too.”
“Mm,” said Isolde, and let a moment go by. “That was almost fair-minded. You should sleep before it wears off.”
She took her arm off her eyes.
“The girl’s nice,” she said. “I meant that downstairs. I wasn’t doing anything with it.”
“I know.”
“I’m telling you because I don’t want you managing me.” Flat, level, absolutely herself. “I’ve no claim on you and I’m not making one, and you’ve none on me, and if either of those ever changes you’ll hear it out loud and not in a look over a plate of mutton.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“I’ll say it again as often as it needs saying.” She turned her head on the blanket to look at me, and there was nothing unkind in it at all, which is how she does the hardest things. “You’re nineteen and you’ve started sleeping well. People get ideas.”
“I haven’t got any ideas.”
“You’ve got several. You’ve simply had the sense not to say them.” She put her arm back over her eyes. “Goodnight, Edrin.”
“Goodnight.”
I lay back on a bed with a frame under it, in a room with a shutter that closed, in a village where a nine-year-old had told me about my horse’s foot and been right, and a man had told me about his father for twenty minutes, and an old woman was arguing herself out of a position she’d held for eleven days at the top of her voice in front of the whole street.
Two nights, Astarra said. Three if the animal needs it.
“I know what I said.”
I didn’t argue. A pause, unhurried, entirely deliberate. I’ve been in one room for six hundred years, Edrin. I’m the last creature alive who would tell you not to enjoy a bed.
The mark in my palm went warm and stayed warm, which she’s never once explained and I’ve never once asked about.
Out in the dark the canvas over Hollis Barrow’s timber shifted and settled. Somebody put the bar across the yard gate. A dog barked twice and gave it up.
Beds. Actual beds.
I was asleep before I got the blanket over me.