Sleep came in scraps. Rainmarch’s twenty-seventh found me drifting under it, surfacing, sinking again, never far enough down to lose the room. The boards creaked whenever the wind leaned on the shutter, and every sound found somewhere to be in my dreams.
In one of them I was back in the hole. The rubble was where I’d left it and they came over it two at a time, which was accurate. What the dream added was that they kept coming after I stopped wanting them to. I had my arm up and Duskfang going dark and the thing in my chest that had felt so clean at the time was still going, and there was nothing behind me anymore. No shields on the low side. No storm at my left. Nobody to hold it for. Just a gap, and a man filling it, and an endless supply of things to feed into the front of him.
I woke with my breath jammed high and my fist clamped white around the hilt.
The blade had done nothing. My sleeping hand had wanted a weapon and gone and got one.
“Splendid,” I told the ceiling. “I can now lose arguments to furniture.”
Nobody was there to receive it. It was mine, and that counted for something.
I set Duskfang against the bed and put both feet on the boards. One dipped near the washstand. Another rose beneath the bed. The kind of detail terror had been too loud to let me notice.
The mark under my palm stayed cool. Astarra had said her piece and gone, and I was grateful for the quiet right up until I caught myself waiting for it to end.
Gray morning came around the shutter in thin colorless strips. Below, a pot struck stone, and Tomas’s uneven tread crossed the common room.
Three knocks.
“Bread and eggs are on,” he said through the door. “They stop being on within the hour.”
“Tomas.”
“Aldara sent word. She wants you at the gatehouse. First light.” The stick tapped once against the boards. “That was first light some while ago.”
“I know.”
He went. He didn’t ask what I meant by it, which I appreciated more than the eggs.
Aldara had given me a night. The night was over. Her message could wait behind the two names still missing on the eastern road.
There was no purse on the table to leave behind, which I’d expected to feel better about than I did. I strapped on Duskfang, ate standing at the bar, and chose the gate before I could dress the choice as anything grander.
I paid Tomas three copper and went out the east gate instead.
The road east still held the night’s cold down in its ruts.
I was two hundred paces past the orchard post when I heard mail behind me.
“You’re alone,” Tamsin said.
“I’m aware.”
“On the ground that did this.” She came up level and didn’t slow. “You walked past me at the gate. You didn’t stop.”
“You’d have told me not to come.”
“I’d have come with you.” She said it without heat, which was worse. “Which is what I’m doing. Take the low side. Stay where I can see your shoulders.”
The tablet named the two: Merrit Salk and Aden Croy, off the eastern relief, the same post that had lost Coll Aster. We walked the line the way the burial parties had walked it, and it was worse the second time, because now I knew what that ground could hide.
Three nights. Whatever was out here had been out here through three nights.
Tamsin searched the way she did everything, without any visible hope. She went low and she went slow and she looked underneath things. Twice she stopped, put her hand flat on the grass, and moved on without telling me why. Once she went into the ditch to her knees and came up with a strip of sacking that had come off a cart.
I found a boot print and followed it forty paces before I understood it was mine.
We found Merrit Salk in a drainage culvert a mile and a half out, and we found him because he’d stopped being able to keep quiet.
It wasn’t a word. It was the sound a man makes breathing when breathing has turned into a piece of work. Tamsin was off the road before I finished turning my head.
He’d gone into the pipe feet first and pulled the brush in after himself. Then his leg had gone wrong, or had already been wrong, and he’d lain in four inches of runoff for three nights with his own belt cinched around his thigh.
He had a knife in his hand. He’d been holding it for three nights.
“Merrit,” Tamsin said. “It’s Coldwell. Let go of the knife.”
He didn’t let go of the knife.
“Merrit.”
“They came back through,” he said.
His voice had been somewhere unpleasant and hadn’t entirely returned. He said it before his own name, before he asked for water, before he asked whether the gate had held.
“Say that again,” Tamsin said.
“The night after. Late.” His fingers kept working on the knife handle. “I heard them on the road over me. A lot of them, walking, not hurrying. Going away from Marchgate.”
“Which way.”
“Northwest. Off the road. Onto the buried one.”
Tamsin’s face didn’t move. I’d learned to fear that stillness, but it told me nothing she hadn’t said.
Ironfast lay northwest.
I’d spent the previous afternoon listening to careful people discuss a sealed door as a question of scholarship. Tokens and old drawings and what six centuries might've left standing in a room. Hesh Three-Notes had gone up that road with everything he’d counted at our gate, and he hadn’t needed a token or a drawing, and he had three days on the conversation.
Getting Merrit out took a long time.
The pipe was narrower than he was, and he’d swollen inside his own leathers, and every way we tried put weight somewhere on the leg. In the end Tamsin went in headfirst to her waist and I held her ankles, and she talked to him the entire time in the flat voice she used on frightened animals and young guards. When he finally let go of the knife it was because she’d been asking for four minutes, and not because I’d done one useful thing.
He weighed nothing. That was what I hadn’t expected. A grown man, three nights in cold water, and he weighed nothing at all.
We didn’t find Aden Croy.
We walked the line twice more with Merrit propped in the ditch under Tamsin’s cloak, and went past the hedge into the wet fields, and put our hands into every place a man might’ve put himself. The ground gave us nothing. No blood, no kit, no dragged grass, nothing that said he’d ever been on that road at all.
“He might be walking,” I said. “He might be three villages down with a farmer’s daughter and a story he’ll dine on for a year.”
“He might.”
“You don’t think so.”
“I think the ground’s had three days and hasn’t given him up.” She got Merrit’s weight onto her shoulder. “Take his other side.”
We came in a little before noon.
The woman with the wax tablet was at the gate, where she’d been the evening before and the morning before that.
She said Merrit’s name and marked it.
She didn’t say the other one, and she didn’t mark anything, and she didn’t put the tablet away either. She stood with it in her hand and went on watching the road, because there was no column ruled on it for a man the ground had simply decided to keep.
Aldara wasn’t under the gatehouse stairs, because there weren’t any gatehouse stairs. There was a heap of them roped off against the inner wall, with a boy sitting on the rope to stop people using the heap as a shortcut.
She was in the hole.
I found her in the middle of a gap you could’ve driven three carts through abreast, watching a crew fail to get a cribbing frame square on ground that wouldn’t hold a peg. She’d been in half-plate for three days. I was four hours past the hour she’d asked for, wet to the thigh, with another man’s blood dried on my sleeve.
“You didn’t come,” she said.
“No.”
She looked at the sleeve. Then past me, at the two men carrying Merrit up the road toward Elowen’s door.
“Is that Salk?”
“Culvert, mile and a half out, three nights in the water. The leg’s bad. Elowen has him.” I made myself say the rest of it. “Aden Croy isn’t out there. Or he is, and the ground’s keeping him.”
“You went out on your own,” she said.
“Tamsin caught me up.”
“I know. She left word at the gate before she went.” The scar along her jaw pulled and didn’t turn into a smile. “I wanted you here at first light, and instead you’ve walked back in with one of my people alive on your shoulder. I’d rather have it that way round than the other.”
She turned and started walking, and didn’t check whether I’d follow. “Come and look at my wall.”
We walked the gap.
It took no time at all, which was the point of it. Forty feet of Marchgate’s eastern wall was a graded slope of its own rubble with green cribbing going up on both sides and river sand shovelled into the low part, and sitting in the middle of it on one broken axle, packed to the boards with stone, was the wagon somebody had shoved into the hole on the morning of the attack. Nobody had moved it. There was nothing better to put where it was.
Forty-one men stood on that slope in three shifts around the clock. Aldara gave me the number without being asked, and then what it meant, which was the part I hadn’t worked out.
“Six of those are my bell line. Nine walked the northern approaches. Four are the only people I have who can drive the western posts and be believed when they get there.” She let it lie a moment. “They’re all standing on a pile of gravel instead, looking east, because if they stop looking east there’s nothing between that field and the market but a wagon.”
While she said it a woman came through the breach.
She came up the graded slope from the outside with two baskets of river fish on a yoke, wished the nearest militiaman a good morning by name, and went on down into the town toward the market, because the hole was a hundred paces nearer than the north road. He said good morning back. He didn’t stop her. There wasn’t anything to stop her with.
“That’s Mag Suller,” Aldara said. “I’ve known her thirty years and she’s never once gone the long way round. Perrin there has known her thirty years too, and he isn’t wrong to let her through. What am I going to have him do, turn her back onto the field?”
“You could post a line at the top of the slope.”
“I have. That’s Perrin. He’s the line.” She stopped where the crib timbers ended and the sand began. “A wall isn’t stone, Edrin. A wall is a thing people can’t walk through without deciding to. The moment they can walk through it, the town starts behaving like a town without one, and it does that in about a day and a half, and you can’t train it out of them. I don’t have a gate. I have a habit that’s wearing off.”
The crew got the frame square. It went out of square again as soon as they weighted it, and one of them said something short, and they started over.
“Six weeks and a Crown mason,” I said.
“Which I don’t have.” She watched them begin again. “If they come back before I do, this town doesn’t survive it. Not holds badly. Doesn’t survive it. I’d rather you had that from me standing in the hole than work it out on the road and think I’d hidden it.”
I looked out east through my own wall at the grass and the burn scar.
“Then you should know where they went,” I said. “Merrit heard them go back through. The night after the attack, late, moving away from us. A lot of them, walking, not hurrying. Northwest. Off the road and onto the buried one.”
Whatever Aldara had been going to say next, she put it down.
“Say that again slowly.”
I said it slowly.
She turned and looked northwest at nothing: a stretch of low country and a sky going white along its edge.
“Hesh spent a morning counting my gate,” she said. “Then he broke it, and then he didn’t come through it. He took his people up the only road out there that goes anywhere worth going.”
“He can’t open the door. Dorva has the token.”
“Dorva has a thing that makes the door answer, and she’s twice been careful to tell me that isn’t a key.” Aldara’s hand rested on Oathkeeper without closing on it. “And I wouldn’t care to bet Marchgate on Hesh Three-Notes needing a door.”
“You’ll have my answer at Tomas’s table tonight,” I said. “You already know what it is.”
“I’d rather have it in front of witnesses than from a man who’s just carried somebody home. You’re not at your most careful.” She almost let the corner of her mouth go. “Was there a condition? There’s always a condition.”
“If Aden Croy is anywhere on that road, we bring him home. However we find him.” I looked northwest, at the country Merrit had heard them cross. “I’m not walking past a man out there because he isn’t on the list of what we went for.”
Aldara didn’t answer straight away, and when she did it wasn’t agreement.
“Say that at the table,” she said, “where there are four other people who’ll have to keep it with you. Not to me, out here, where it costs you nothing but the saying.”
Dorva didn’t send for us. She let it be known that the forge would be open, and that people intending to come back out of Ironfast would find it useful to be standing in it by midday.
The doors stood wide. Metal rang inside, steady as an argument nobody had won. Dorva worked a broken shutter hinge while the rest of us took up the least flammable corners of the shop.
Isolde stood at a table of rolled plans, forge light catching the silver at her wrists. Jak leaned where he could see both doors. Elowen sat on an upturned crate with her satchel between her boots, hair escaping its ribbon on one side. She'd come straight from Merrit Salk and hadn’t washed to the elbow yet.
“Hold this,” Dorva told me.
I took the tongs. The hot strap dragged at my shoulder while she hammered the split closed.
“We aren’t going down there for trophies,” Isolde said over the blows. “If there’s anything behind that door that can hold a wall, we learn what it does before we decide what leaves with us.”
Dorva struck once more and plunged the hinge into water. Steam climbed between us. “And a drawing doesn’t overrule the metal in front of me.”
Elowen retied her ribbon, missed the knot, and tried again with visible annoyance. “If someone’s hurt, I decide whether they go on.”
Jak offered her a leather tie from one of his innumerable pockets. She looked at it, looked at him, and took it without pretending the ribbon hadn’t beaten her. His hands were back at his belt before the thanks finished leaving hers.
“Even over the cargo?” Dorva asked.
Elowen got the knot on the second try. “Especially over the cargo.”
She was younger than the certainty in her medical voice made her sound. The stubborn ribbon restored something like fairness.
Isolde unrolled the old exterior survey: a black door, a stretch of buried road, and nothing at all past the threshold. Her gaze touched Dorva, then me, then the empty half of the page.
“And me?” I asked.
Dorva set the mended hinge beside its broken twin. “You’re the part of the plan that goes wrong on purpose. When the route fails and the mechanism fails and somebody has to stand in the hole while I put it right, that’s you.”
“The handsome emergency.”
“The mobile one,” Jak said.
“We’ve worked together once,” Dorva said, wiping her hands. “In a hole. With a wall on both sides of us, one direction to face, and no plan at all.”
“It went rather well,” I said.
“It went well because two of you are frightening and the rest of us could see where the enemy was.” She dropped the rag on the bench. “Underground there’s five directions, no wall, and nobody behind you doing the obvious thing. A party that survived a breach together is more dangerous to itself than one that hasn’t, because it thinks it knows something. Yard.”
The yard behind the forge sloped toward a dry trough and had collected everything Marchgate no longer trusted indoors: split timber, stone blocks, old horseshoes, three iron markers laid out in a crooked route. Jak pointed left. Isolde marked a boundary with her boot. Dorva rapped a rotten brace with one knuckle.
“Far marker and back,” she said. “Jak calls the road. Isolde moves the limit. If that brace shifts, don’t love it merely because it’s close.”
“I reserve love for sturdier objects.”
“Move.”
I moved.
The first plank rolled under my heel. Jak changed the route before I recovered and I nearly crossed Isolde’s line to save the turn. Her raised hand stopped me. I folded the step inward, clipped a post with my shoulder, and reached the marker without going down.
“Shorter,” Elowen said from the trough. “You’re reaching for ground that isn’t there.”
Second pass, Jak broke the rhythm twice and Dorva moved a marker while I was looking elsewhere. The yard kept refusing to become a duel, which denied me every instinct I own.
“Why that route?” Isolde asked, when Jak sent me between the trough and a stack of tile.
“Direct one puts his sword arm beside your casting hand.”
“Then call the collision before you call the turn.”
Jak moved one marker with his boot and sent me through again. He didn’t thank her for the correction. He used it, which I was beginning to understand was the same thing from him.
On the third pass, Dorva hung a rusted iron strap across the route. “It blocks the route. Remove it without crossing her line.”
I drew Duskfang. Nightblade came without bargaining, a dusk-dark edge settling over the steel. One short cut took the strap in two and left the post behind it untouched. The lack of resistance pulled a grin out of me before I could stop it.
Isolde moved the boundary. Jak called the turn. The drill gave me no time to admire myself.
Near the return, gravel rolled under both boots. I caught the brace, felt it move, and let go before my weight followed. My knees took the rest, inside Isolde’s line.
“Again,” Dorva said.
“He’s slowing,” Elowen said.
Dorva looked at my feet rather than my face. “I see it.”
Elowen crossed the yard and put her hand out. “Wrist.”
“I have a pulse.”
“A thrilling discovery. Give it here.”
She counted under her fingers and looked at the lowering sun. “Drill’s done. You leave in the morning with reactions that still belong to you.”
I looked to Isolde for an appeal and wasn’t offered one.
“Your call outranks my appetite,” I said.
“Yes.” Elowen let go of my wrist. “You can dislike that on the way to supper.”
Jak gathered the markers. The others went ahead down the alley.
Isolde scuffed out her boundary with one heel and didn’t go with them.
“You’ve been careful with me all afternoon,” she said.
“I’ve been careful with everybody. It’s a new discipline. I’m told it takes.”
“No.” She came around the trough, and the current at her wrists lifted the hair on my forearm before she was near enough to touch me. “You’ve been careful the way a man is careful about a thing he doesn’t want named in a room with other people in it.”
“Would you like it named?”
“I’d like it understood.” She stopped close enough that I had to decide where to put my eyes, and got the decision wrong twice. “At the gate you had that darkness in your blade. Afterward, you had my mouth on yours. You haven’t once looked at me straight since.”
“I've been…”
“Careful. Yes.” Her chin came up. “In a corridor under Ironfast I give an order and you follow it, and neither of us gets to be careful about why. So we settle it out here, where the only things at stake are my dignity and your composure.”
“And which of those are we settling?”
“Yours,” she said. “Mine was never in question.”
She put one hand flat against my chest. Not gently. There was charge in it, a small bright crawl that went through the leather and made my heart stumble over its own next beat, and she kept it there long enough to be certain I understood she could feel it doing that.
“Good,” she said. “Settled.”
“I want it recorded that nothing whatsoever was settled.”
“Noted.” She took her hand back. “Supper.”
She went off down the alley and left me standing in a forge yard with my pulse in my ears, entirely unsure whether I’d just won anything.
The Scarred Flagon had filled with watchmen, repair crews, and residents intent on continuing the gate argument through supper. Tomas put us at the long table and put stew in front of us before anyone could mistake a negotiation for a reason not to eat.
“Terms get spoken plainly,” Isolde said.
Dorva opened Aldara’s written agreement. “Five gold retainer to each. Fifteen more if the recovery succeeds. Twenty in a shared purse for rope, lamps, food, tools, medicine. Personal wants come out of personal coin.”
“Death or permanent disability?” Elowen asked.
“Twenty-five gold to the member, or to their beneficiary if they die.”
Elowen put down her spoon. “Permanent disability includes any injury that ends the work a person lived on before it. Marchgate doesn’t get to settle that at the price of a scar.”
“Your determination,” Isolde said. “Not the payer’s.”
“Accepted,” Dorva said, and scratched it into the margin. Then she looked up. “And you’ll be the one making it, in a room with the man’s family in it, about a hand that still opens and closes.”
Elowen didn’t answer straight away, which I thought better of her for.
“I’ll carry it,” she said.
Jak leaned over the page. “Route’s mine. If I call a floor, we don’t cross it.”
“No,” Isolde said.
He looked up.
“If your veto is absolute, you can end this commission forty feet inside the door by disliking a joist, and Marchgate gets nothing and pays five retainers for it.” She didn’t soften it. “You call the floor. I decide whether we find another way to the room or turn around. Those are different jobs.”
Jak was quiet a while. Nobody filled the gap.
“Write it,” he said. “I call it. You spend it. If you spend it wrong it goes in the ledger with your name.”
“It goes in the ledger anyway,” Isolde said.
Dorva wrote it, then set the pen down flat, which she hadn’t done for anything else.
“Then the other one,” she said.
Nobody asked which. That told me the four of them had been round this before, in other rooms, with other people.
“If a member can't be moved,” Dorva said, “and moving him would cost the party, the party goes.”
The gate argument went on around us. Somebody at the hearth wanted the bell hung a foot lower.
“No,” I said.
Dorva looked at me the way she looked at a seam. “Say the rest of it.”
“I pulled a man out of a pipe this morning who’d been in four inches of water for three nights holding a knife.” My voice came out flatter than I meant. “If that had been written down, would we still go in after him? Or would somebody have done the arithmetic on Tamsin going in headfirst with me holding her ankles and decided the party couldn’t carry it?”
“We’d have gone,” Jak said. “Above ground. Daylight. Two of you, one of him, and a road home.”
“And under Ironfast?”
“Under Ironfast,” Dorva said, “there's one way in, the same way out, and whatever six hundred years has left standing between them. If you go back for a man who can't walk, you’re not saving one. You're betting four.”
“Then let it be my bet.”
“It’s never your bet.” She said it without any heat at all, and the flatness made me wonder who she’d once watched make the same wager. I didn’t ask. “That’s what the clause is for. It takes the choice off whichever of us is standing there feeling brave, because the one feeling brave is never the one who pays.”
I looked around the table for an ally and didn’t find one. Elowen was watching her hands. Jak had gone back to his stew. Isolde met my eyes and held them and didn’t come to my side.
“I told Aldara this morning that if Aden Croy is on that road, we bring him home,” I said. “However we find him. She wouldn’t take it from me out there. She sent me here to say it where the four of you have to hear it.”
“On the road,” Isolde said. “Above ground. In daylight, with a way out at our backs. Say it that way and I’ll witness it.”
“That’s a smaller promise than the one she gave me.”
“It’s the one you can keep.”
The stew had gone cold in front of me at some point that I hadn’t noticed.
“Write it,” I said. “Both of them.”
Dorva wrote both, then read the leave-behind clause aloud a second time, slowly, the way you read a thing to people who will need to have heard it. Each of us said yes in turn. Mine came out steady, and I hated it.
“Salvage,” Jak said, after a moment.
“Five equal shares after shared costs. Anything we can show was made to hold a wall belongs to Marchgate.” Dorva didn’t look up from the page.
Isolde would carry the mission cargo. She put a hand flat on the blackwood case and set the terms of it herself. “Dorva says what goes into it. Two witnesses whenever it opens, and no private pockets.”
I spread my hands. “A cruel rule for a man whose armor has one pocket and a hole in it.”
Jak looked at the pocket. “Then it’s contained.”
My laugh got out before I could improve it, and the table let it die under the argument about the replacement bell, and I was grateful to the argument.
Tomas came by, took the cold bowl out from under my hand, and put a fresh one down.
“You didn’t eat,” he said, and went.
Dorva ran one thick finger beneath the final line. “Lives before cargo. The leave-behind clause still stands.”
Tomas brought Aldara’s sealed cashbox, broke the wax where we could all see it, and set five leather rolls on the table.
No cheer went up. Around us Marchgate ate and disputed its repairs. The agreement lay between five bowls with the grease starting to cool at the edges, and I sat looking at my name on it, put there by nobody but me.
We’d meant to give the fitting-out a day. Hesh had three on us, so we gave it an afternoon.
Harlow’s took most of it. Rope hung under the awning beside framed packs, bedrolls, and kindling, and Jak rejected one coil without saying why.
Dorva made Sable Harlow take the next by one end while she hauled on the other.
“That one,” she said when the fibers held.
The medicine came from Brenna’s doorway, where Elowen uncorked one blue vial, smelled it, and put it back.
“That one’s lost strength.”
Brenna took the criticism without blinking. “It’s three-quarter strength.”
“It’ll be half by the time we need it.”
Brenna replaced it with sealed antitoxins and fresh poultices. “Keep them away from lamp oil.”
Elowen looked directly at Dorva.
“I know what medicine is,” Dorva said.
“Today’s full of discoveries.”
The shared purse covered five road kits, rations, torches, two ropes, Dorva’s tools, Elowen’s medicines, and the blackwood case. I paid Dorva two silver of my own for a whetstone.
“Personal coin?” Dorva asked.
“My purse. My edge.”
Isolde tested the case. Both latches clicked shut under a breath of pressure. Nine gold, seven silver and two copper left in the purse, and Dorva wrote the total down and closed the ledger.
We fitted the packs by lamp in Dorva’s yard, walked the loaded weight in circles until the rattles gave themselves up, and stacked everything under guard inside what was left of Ashward Gate. I ate, slept badly, and woke before the bell.
Rainmarch’s twenty-eighth came cold and clear. We shouldered the packs before dawn.
There was nothing outside to hammer straps onto. The night shift stood along the graded slope in the dark with the wagon black behind them, and the crib timbers went up pale and green and unfinished on both sides, and past the top of the sand the eastern field lay flat and empty all the way to the burn scar.
Mag Suller came up the slope with her fish while we were shouldering the packs, and wished the night shift a good morning by name, and went on down into the town.
Aldara waited under the gatehouse in half-plate, Oathkeeper at her side. Tamsin stood with her, already watching the road instead of us.
“You five go into Ironfast, learn what survived, and come back with anything that materially strengthens this town,” Aldara said. “Lives and a route home before every find. And you go knowing somebody walked that way ahead of you.”
Isolde settled the mission cargo case against her pack and said, “It stays with me. Dorva decides what belongs inside. Elowen witnesses every opening.”
Aldara nodded.
Tamsin didn’t offer a maxim or a blessing. She checked the knot on my shoulder strap, tugged it once, and stepped back.
“Harrows Turn lies east,” I said.
“Ironfast lies northwest.”
“I’d noticed.”
“Good. Keep noticing the road you’re on.”
At her gate, Aden’s name remained unmarked on wax.
Jak took the northwest road. Isolde matched him. Dorva and Elowen followed.
I looked once at the repaired braces, and once at the low country where Merrit had heard them cross, and went after them.