They were still bringing them in at dark.
The market square holds four rows of stalls on a trading day. That night it held eleven rows of people, laid out head to the east because somebody had decided that was the right way and nobody had argued, and the rows weren’t finished, because men were still going into the rubble of the gatehouse with lanterns and coming back out carrying.
I helped until Elowen took the end of a stretcher out of my hands and told me to go and eat something.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask.” She had blood to the elbow that wasn’t hers and a smear of it dried along her jaw. “You’ve been on your feet since first horn. If you fall over I have to treat you, and I have a hundred and ten people ahead of you in that line.”
The Scarred Flagon was full and nobody in it was drinking.
That’s the part I couldn’t have predicted. A hundred people in a public room with ale in front of them and the ale going flat, because everyone had come in out of the dark to be near other people and then discovered there was nothing to say. The fire was built up too high. Somebody had propped the door open even though the night was cold, and nobody closed it, and I understood after a while that the door was open because the town wanted to hear the square.
Tomas put a bowl in front of me. It was the ugly one.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“Eat it hot.”
He went. He’d been going all evening, table to table, putting food in front of people who hadn’t asked for it, and I watched him do it to four more before I picked up the spoon, and I noticed that not one of them argued with him either. There’s a kind of authority that comes from having fed people for twenty years.
The stew was good. I ate all of it and couldn’t have told you what was in it.
Around me Marchgate talked in the low way people talk when the news isn’t finished. Someone at the hearth kept saying the gate was gone, gone, not damaged, gone, and each time somebody else agreed with him and he said it again. Two of the Golden Host argued quietly about whether a wall could be held without a gate and both of them knew the answer. A woman came in from the square, stood four steps inside the door, and went out again without speaking to anyone.
The girl who cleared the tables came for my bowl and didn’t pick it up.
“They said you were in the gap,” she said.
“I was.”
“My brother was on the eastern relief.” She had her hands full of crockery and held it the way you hold something that’s keeping you upright. “He’s not in the square and he’s not in the chapel and nobody at the roster has said his name since yesterday.”
There were a great many true things available to me. That the orchard post had gone before the horns and nobody had been able to reach it. That the rows in the square weren’t finished. That men shelter and come in at dawn.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Coll. Coll Aster.”
“Then I’ll go out at first light and I’ll know it one way or the other before noon.”
It wasn’t a promise that anything would be good and she was old enough to hear that it wasn’t. She took the bowl away.
I went up. My room was warm from the kitchen and already made, which somebody had done for me during the worst day in the town’s memory, and I sat on the edge of the bed with my boots on and didn’t lie down for a long time.
Eighty-one. The number had been going around the Flagon all night the way a number does, changing by two or three depending on who was saying it.
I’d killed a great many goblins in that hole and I hadn’t been touched, not once, and there were eleven rows in the market square. Both of those things were true and neither of them argued with the other, and I lay awake underneath the pair of them until the window turned grey.
Tamsin was at the ruined arch before me, which I’d expected, and she had two horses, which I hadn’t.
“The orchard post,” she said. “You’re coming because you asked a girl a question last night and the whole room heard you.”
“Word travels.”
“It’s a town.” She swung up. “Also because I’m not walking that ground alone and everybody else is carrying stretchers.”
We went out through the hole.
That’s a thing I hadn’t done yet, and it changed the morning. You don’t walk out of Marchgate. You go through a gate, under an arch, past a man who looks at you. We rode out over broken stone between two ends of a wall that no longer met, and there was nothing on either side of us, and the fields simply began.
The ground east of the wall had been a spring meadow the day before. It was churned to black mud for two hundred paces and there were things in the mud, and burial parties were already out on it in a long line with carts, working from the wall outward.
“Four hundred of theirs,” Tamsin said, following my eyes. “Give or take. We’re burning them in the borrow pit past the mill. It will smell for a week and there’s no help for it.”
“And the rest just walked away.”
“In step.” She didn’t say anything else about it, which was worse than if she had.
The orchard post stood a mile and a half out where the old road bends, or had. In daylight the stump of it looked less like a warning and more like a bad tooth in the earth. Forty winters had gone into that timber. Somebody had cut it off eighteen inches above the ground with an axe and then set fire to what was left.
Tamsin got down and walked a slow circle before she let me approach.
“Before the horns,” she said. “Look at the char. It rained at second bell and the burn ran under the wet.”
“So somebody came up here in the dark, took the post, cut the wire, and went back.”
“Somebody who knew there was one man on it.” She crouched by the ditch, where the relay wire lay in two ends in the grass. She held one up. “Cut. Not pulled, not burned. Cut clean with a tool, by a hand that was not in any hurry.”
We found Coll Aster dead forty paces down in the low ground where the hedge runs out.
He was face down with one arm under him and the other reaching, and the grass around him had been pressed flat in a rough circle where he’d turned and kept turning to hold something in front of him. He’d been doing it right. He’d put his back to the hedge and made them come at him from one side, and it’d worked for as long as it worked.
Three of them lay in the grass with him.
He’d taken three, alone, nineteen years old, in the dark, with nobody in the world watching to know he’d done it.
Tamsin crouched and turned him over with more gentleness than she’d shown me in three days. She put two fingers under his jaw out of habit, held them there a moment, and took them away.
“Coll Aster,” she said. “Nineteen. He’s been dead since before the horns.”
She closed his hand around nothing and set it on his chest.
“He heard them cutting,” she said. “That’s what this is. He was up the post, he heard something at the base of it, and he came down.”
I looked back the way we’d come. The stump stood clear against the sky, close enough to count the iron straps on the bracket.
“How far is that?”
“Forty paces.”
“He was forty paces from the post.”
“He was forty paces from a bell that could have told the wall.” She stood and wiped her palms down her thighs. “They cut the eye first and then they killed the boy who came to see why. Everything after that was already decided.”
I’d been asleep in a wall shelter while this happened. That’s not a useful thought and I had it anyway, standing in the wet grass with the sun coming up over the orchard.
“His sister clears tables at the Flagon,” I said.
Tamsin didn’t look up. “I know.”
The repair crew came out at midmorning to pull the stump, on Aldara’s order to have the post standing again before dark, and there was no time to be delicate about the old one. They got a chain around it and two horses on the chain, and when it came up out of the ground it brought its footing with it, and something in the broken foundation caught the light.
The foreman got it out with a pick and turned it over twice and couldn’t make anything of it, so he put it in his pocket, and that afternoon he put it on Dorva Ironhand’s bench because she was the only person in Marchgate who might tell him what it was.
We took Coll home on a door. The woman with the wax tablet was at what used to be the gate.
She said his name, and marked it, and that was how his sister found out.
Aldara’s house sat square beneath the inner wall and smelled of damp wool, lamp oil, and coffee boiled past forgiveness.
She waited behind a scarred table in half-plate she hadn’t taken off in a day and a half, Oathkeeper at her hip, the old scar along her jaw tight. Tamsin came in behind me. Dorva Ironhand was already there with a rolled strip of leather in front of her and a small iron caliper set beside it.
“Numbers,” Aldara said.
“Eighty-three,” Tamsin said. “Two more died in the night. Sixty-three of them were on the gate span.”
Aldara didn’t write it down. She looked at the table for a moment and said, “Go on.”
“A hundred and six who can’t stand a watch this month, and eleven of those won’t stand one again. Coll Aster off the eastern relief, found this morning.” Tamsin put her hands behind her back. “Two more off that same relief aren’t found at all. Merrit Salk and Aden Croy. Everyone else in this town is accounted for, alive or in the field north of the mill.”
“Since the horns,” Aldara said.
“Since the horns.”
“Keep the tablet at the gate until I say otherwise. I’m not having their names go onto a slate because we got tired of holding a stick of wax.” She let that sit. “The eastern line?”
“Fourteen fit hands.”
“Say the rest of it.”
“Six can hold what’s left of the wall. Five can cover the approaches. Three know the bell line well enough to mend it. All three places need covering and we can’t do it without thinning every post.”
“That’s the problem,” Aldara said. “Not cowardice and not orders. Too few trained people asked to be in three places at once, and now no gate.”
My mouth had begun assembling something about dividing me into thirds. It died before it reached my tongue.
“They cut the post before the horns,” I said. “Quietly, with a tool, by somebody who knew there was one man on it. Coll came down off the post to see what the noise was and they killed him for it, and then they came.”
“Yes,” Aldara said.
She let it sit there. I’d wanted her to argue with me.
“They’ll come again,” I said.
“They will. They spent four hundred to learn what this wall does, and they left knowing more about us than we know about them.” She turned her hand over on the table. “Dorva.”
Dorva unrolled the leather.
Inside lay three things: a splinter of the gate’s banded oak with the iron still fused to it, a fragment of arch stone, and a bronze lozenge blackened by fire and melted along one edge, its face marked with a small hammer above a split bar.
“The oak first,” she said. “Because you’ll all want to ask about the woman and I want you to hear this before you do.” She turned the splinter so the light ran along the break. “That gate did not burn and it did not shatter. Look at the grain. It came apart along every join at once, every peg and every band, the way a thing comes apart when it stops agreeing to be one thing. I have been at this forty years and I can tell you how every kind of gate fails. I cannot tell you how that one did.”
Nobody said anything.
“Can it be rebuilt?” Aldara asked.
“The gate, yes. Six weeks with a Crown mason for the arch, and I do not have a Crown mason, and neither do you.” Dorva set the splinter down. “And it will fail the same way the next time she walks up to it, because I would be building the same gate.”
“Then we need a different answer,” Aldara said.
“Then we come to this.” Dorva put one blunt finger on the bronze lozenge. “The repair crew pulled it out of the footing of your burned post this afternoon. The newer iron had been built around it. Whoever cut your relay wire tore the fitting apart to get at it and left it in the hole, which tells me they wanted it and could not find it in the dark.”
I leaned closer without touching it. “What is it?”
“Thren-Khaz work.” She turned the bronze between two thick fingers. “The mark matches the old gate drawings. So does the shape. This makes Ironfast’s door answer.”
Everyone in the eastern marches knew the black door. Six centuries of hammers, spells, and ambitious thieves had failed to scratch it.
“Answer,” Tamsin said. “Not open.”
“Answer.” Dorva didn’t soften it. “Opening it will be our problem. I will not stand in this room and tell a woman who has just buried eighty-three people that I have a key.”
“Why was it under our bell post?” I asked.
“Because Marchgate wasn’t the first thing to watch that road. Somebody built over the old line and forgot what the bronze was.”
“And what’s inside?”
“Nothing useful is written down.” She nudged it with a scarred knuckle. “The records place an Ironfast work beside the old road. Later copies call it a fortified workshop. No surviving page lists what was kept there or what six centuries left of it. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.”
“So we’d be going after a closed door and a hope.”
“We have fourteen fit hands and no gate,” Dorva said. “That arithmetic buried eighty-three people this week and it will not improve on its own. The Thren-Khaz made things that outlived kingdoms. If there is anything behind that door that can hold a wall or spare a pair of trained hands, we need to know it, and if it is six hundred years of rust, we need to know that too and stop looking northwest every time we run short.”
Aldara rose. Her armour scraped quietly against the chair.
“Five,” she said. “Small enough to move and large enough to survive being wrong. Dorva takes the mechanisms and the cargo. Jak Fenn owns the route. Elowen Thorne decides who is fit to go on and when we turn back. Isolde Ashenmere leads in the field for as long as the plan holds, because she is the only person in this town who has seen anything like what came up to my gate yesterday.”
She looked at me last.
“And I would have you in it,” she said. “Not because Marchgate can spend you. Because whatever is behind that door, you will be the one going through it first, and because I watched you stand in a hole for an hour with a woman you had never met. That is a thing I am asking you for. You may want a night and a number before you answer me.”
Three days ago the asking alone would’ve been the whole meal.
“What does it pay?” I said.
“Five gold retainer. Fifteen more on success. Twenty-five for death or crippling. Terms spoken aloud at Tomas’s table the day after we’ve put them in the ground, in front of witnesses, and you can refuse any part of them there. I won’t do contracts across an open grave.”
“Then I’ll want the number and Dorva’s honest opinion of what’s behind that door, and you’ll have my answer at that table.”
Dorva’s missing fingertip tapped once against the caliper.
“Sensible,” she said, and began wrapping the leather.
From what I’d seen of her, that was a parade.
They burned the goblin dead in the borrow pit and buried their own in the long field north of the mill, and it took all of the next day.
Marchgate doesn’t have a rite for eighty-three. It has one for a man, and it uses it eighty-three times, which is what they did. A Solaran named each of them at the graveside while the diggers stood off a respectful distance with their spades, and then they filled it in, and then he named the next one.
Coll Aster went into the ground somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. His sister stood with a woman I took for an aunt. She didn’t look for me and I didn’t put myself where she would’ve to.
It was evening before Aldara did the other thing.
She did it at the Flagon, which surprised me until I thought about it, because the square was full of turned earth and nobody was going to stand in it for a ceremony. The common room was packed to the walls and out the propped door. Tomas had put every bowl he owned into circulation and half of them had come back.
“Before anybody drinks anything,” Aldara said, “we say what it cost.”
She named the gate, and the arch, and the gatehouse floor. She named the hundred and six who wouldn’t stand a watch this month and the eleven who wouldn’t stand one again. She named Coll Aster and where he’d been found and what had been around him when they found him, and she named eighty-two others by name, from a slate, without hurrying, and it took a long time and nobody moved.
Then she said, “And I will tell you the rest of it plainly, because you will hear it wrong otherwise. We did not beat that. Four hundred of them died and they left in step. What stopped them coming through the wall and into these streets was two people standing in a gap for an hour.”
The room didn’t cheer. I hadn’t expected that either.
“Isolde Ashenmere held the breach with her hands until the rest of us got a line into it,” Aldara said. “Edrin Hale stood in the narrow part of it and did not move. I have walked that rubble. I have seen what is on it.”
A hundred people looked at me and I discovered I had nowhere to put my face.
“There is a purse for each of you,” she said, and set one on the table in front of me, and one on the table where Isolde was sitting with a cup she hadn’t touched. “Thirty silver crowns. It is the standing rate for a defender who holds a breach, and it has not been paid out in this town since before I commanded it.”
The weight of it surprised me. Then it annoyed me, and I sat there a moment working out why.
I had money. I came to Marchgate with it and I’d leave with it. Thirty crowns was a month of Tomas’s worst room and his best stew, and I hadn’t stood in that gap for a month of stew.
“Whose is it,” I asked, “before it’s mine?”
“Marchgate’s common purse.”
“Then Marchgate keeps it.” I put it back down on the table, and the sound the coins made was the loudest thing in the room. “Split it among the families in the north field. Start with the Asters, because a boy came down off a post in the dark to see what the noise was, and if he hadn’t, nobody would have known anything was wrong until they were already through.”
Nobody clapped. I hadn’t wanted them to and I still felt the absence of it, which told me something unflattering that I chose not to examine at that table.
Across the room Isolde looked at her own purse for a while. Then she picked it up and put it inside her coat, and looked directly at me while she did it.
“I earn my living,” she said, when I got to her side of the room later. “I don’t have a dead father’s money.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“Your face did an entire speech.” She turned the cup on the table. “It was a good thing you did and I am not going to pretend it wasn’t. Do it again in front of me and I’ll charge you for the sermon.”
Tomas came past and put a cup in front of me without being asked, then stood there until I picked it up.
“The gate stood for ninety years,” he said. “Drink.”
That was the whole toast, and it was better than a longer one, and the room drank with him. Somewhere at the back a man laughed too loudly out of pure relief and nobody minded, and the noise came back into the Flagon by degrees, the way it does.
When I got up to go, the men on the bench moved to make room for me.
They did it a little too quickly.
By the time I reached my room the Flagon had gone down to chair scrapes and banked fire.
I locked the door. Duskfang leaned against the bed. There was no purse on the table because I’d left it downstairs, and the table looked better without it.
A locked door, a full stomach, and nobody needing me to mean anything by either.
The mark in my palm warmed.
“Not tonight.”
Tonight.
I sat on the edge of the bed. “If this is about the wall, I used the blade and I lived. We can admire the miracle in silence.”
Not the blade. That power is yours, and I don’t bill a man for his own hands. The warmth spread up my wrist and settled there. This began under Shadowmaw, when I opened fully and carried you through what should’ve killed you.
The room seemed to draw in around the table.
There it was, the difference I’d been afraid she’d blur. Nightblade and the weight behind my strikes had come with the bond and cost nothing. The Flood had been something else. She’d poured through every limit I owned, and for a week afterward my body had forgotten how to answer even the small gifts.
“You waited until now to name a price.”
I waited until there was something to collect.
“Of course you did.”
Go through the black door.
I had my mouth open for the next piece of the argument, and nothing came out of it.
“That was mine to decide,” I said. “I told Aldara I’d want a night and a number. I meant it.”
Take the number. Take the night. Argue your terms until Dorva loses patience with you. Nothing in her voice moved at all. And then go through the door.
“And if I don’t?”
Then the debt stands, and it grows, and one day I call it somewhere you have less room to stand. A pause, entirely unhurried. I’d rather spend it here, where you were going anyway. That isn’t mercy. It’s timing.
“You could have asked.”
I don’t ask. You have met people who ask. The warmth turned over in my palm, slow as a cat. Aldara asked you this afternoon, and you liked it so well you made her say it twice.
That was the trouble with her. She wasn’t often wrong, and she was never wrong kindly.
“The woman at the gate,” I said. “You said something when she broke it. You’ve said nothing since.”
The warmth in my palm didn’t change at all, which was itself an answer.
Go through the door, Edrin.
I looked at the ceiling for a while.
“I was going anyway,” I said.
Yes.
“Then it cost you nothing to say it.”
It cost you something to hear it. That was the part that was owed.
The warmth eased out of my palm and didn’t come back.
I lay down with Duskfang within reach and listened to the watch bells trade a broken wall between them. Out past the north field there was turned earth over eighty-three people, and a girl who cleared tables had an aunt and no brother, and somewhere east of us two men were on a wax tablet with nothing written beside their names, and in the morning I was going to sit at Tomas’s table and take money to walk into a hole in the ground.
I couldn’t make those into one shape. I stopped trying somewhere before the bells did.