Greaves returned the blanket that evening, folded into a square so exact it could have been army issue.
"Your blanket, my lord."
"Thank you."
"I didn't need it."
"I know."
That was all either of them said. It was the longest conversation they'd had that wasn't an order.
Theo called the meeting for seven the next morning, because that was when you called meetings, and because he'd never once run one without coffee and was curious what it would be like.
The dining hall had a table for sixty and four people at one end of it. Wren had brought the ledgers. Greaves had refused a chair until Theo asked twice, and now sat in it like a man waiting for a verdict. Tobin had been fetched from the barracks as "the ground," whatever that meant, and perched on the edge of his seat as though it might be taken back. Pell Vandry had not been invited. He had arrived, as far as anyone could tell, because of the smell of bread.
On the wall behind Theo he had pinned a sheet of Wren's good paper, with a list in his own handwriting.
GrainWagesThe debtThe lakeDon't dieGreaves read it twice. "The last one's vague."
"It's the one I'm most committed to."
"It's after the lake," said Wren.
"It's the sum of the other four."
Nobody laughed, but Tobin's mouth did something that might have grown into it if he'd let it.
Wren went first, because Theo asked, and because she turned out to be the only one in the room who would answer a direct question with a number. Grain: nine days now, not eleven. Wages: the garrison hadn't been paid in eight months. "They know," said Greaves. "They haven't asked."
"Why not?"
"The last man who asked," Greaves said, to the table, "ran the north wall with a stone in each hand until he stopped."
Theo didn't ask who had given the order. He didn't have to. He sat with it for a moment, the way you sit with a bill, and then said, "Then I need everyone's arrears counted by Friday. Not paid. Counted. I want to know exactly what I owe."
Wren wrote it down. The pen scratched. She did not look up, but her shoulders had come down about an inch.
"Does anyone know where the last of the grain's coming from?" said Pell, around a mouthful. Everyone looked at him. "Sorry. I'm only asking because the circle's warm."
"Warm?"
"At night. It isn't drawing. It's…" He searched for the word."Banked. Like a stove someone's let go low. It's waiting for fuel." He swallowed. "I thought you'd want to know."
Theo wrote it on the bottom of the list, under Don't die, in letters slightly smaller than the rest. Circle: warm.
He gave everyone a job before they left. Wren would find every coin in the keep, including the ones that weren't supposed to be there. Greaves would find out which soldiers had aged hardest and put them on light duty before they collapsed on their own. Pell would eat something that wasn't cheese and report on the circle. And Tobin, who had been sitting very still, would walk the barracks and tell Theo what people were actually saying.
"Not to get anyone in trouble," Theo said. "I just can't fix what I can't hear."
Tobin looked as if he'd been handed a live bird. "Me, my lord?"
"You're the only one I've met who answered a straight question without checking the door first."
* * *
The knocking came at two in the morning.
"My lord." Tobin's voice, low and breathless, through the wood. "Corporal Dunmore's been caught at the postern with a pack. The captain says it's the old law."
Theo was already pulling on his boots.
The guardhouse was a stone room with a single lamp. A man stood in the middle of it with his hands tied in front of him, forty or so, though the last two years sat on him like a coat that didn't fit. He wasn't struggling. He looked like someone who had run out of reasons to be afraid and was left with only the tiredness. Four soldiers stood along the wall, avoiding his eyes. Greaves stood by the door.
"Jory Dunmore, corporal, third company," said Greaves."Caught leaving his post with a full pack and three days' bread. Desertion's hanging in the Marches, my lord. Always has been." He said it flat, as a fact about weather. "It's your law."
"I know whose law it is."
Dunmore, Jory, Ledger murmured, in the clerk's voice.Forty-one. Eight months' wages outstanding. Wife, Hanna, in Harlow village, nine miles south.
Theo looked at the man. The man looked at the floor.
The words came to Theo before he'd decided to say them. They came up out of the body the same way the sword stances had, as a tune comes up out of a piano. "Name. Rank. Reason."
It was Dain's voice, and it was a blade. Cold, clean, bored. The four soldiers along the wall flinched in the same instant, a small ripple like wind over grass. Jory Dunmore's knees went, and he dropped to the flagstones like a dropped sack.
It was the easiest thing Theo had ever done. That was what he couldn't get past. It had taken no effort at all, and the whole room had obeyed it, and some part of him that had spent eleven years saying no problem, I'll cover itunderstood in an instant exactly why people had been afraid of Dain Ashcombe.
He hated how well it worked.
He walked across the room and sat down on an upturned barrel, so that he was lower than the man on the floor."Jory," he said, in his own voice, the one that still sounded a little off. "I'm sorry. Why?"
Jory stared at him as though the question was in another language.
"My wife's in Harlow," he said finally, hoarsely. "I haven't had a word from her in eight months. Not one. Nobody comes, nobody goes, you closed the post. She had the cough when I left. I don't know if…" He stopped and pressed his bound hands against his mouth.
"I closed the post."
Order dated the fourteenth of Reaping, said Ledger. Mail held at the clerk's office pending the Rite. To prevent word of it leaving the keep.
There was a stir at the door. Wren stood there in her coat over a nightdress, with her hair down, which made her look about sixteen, and a stack of letters held against her chest in both arms. She must have run.
"Seventeen letters for the garrison," she said. Her voice was thin. "I couldn't burn them. I didn't have the order. I kept them in the desk."
"Bring them."
She did. Theo found the three with the right name and passed them to Jory, whose hands were free now, because Greaves, after a long look at Theo's face, had untied them without being asked. The corporal read the first one standing. His face did something that Theo didn't watch. He read the second. He sat down hard on the floor and read the third, and when he reached the end he made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
"She's well," he said. "She's well. She's been sick, but she's well. She says the neighbor's boy has been bringing wood."
Nobody spoke for a long moment.
"Wren," Theo said. "How much is he owed?"
"Twenty-four silver, my lord."
"Pay it. Out of the strongbox. Enter it as an advance, by my order." The pen was already scratching. "Jory, you've got ten days. Take bread, take what you can carry, and go see her. Come back on the eleventh."
"My lord—"
"That's not a trick. I'm not going to hang you when you get back. I'm going to need you."
Greaves had gone very still by the door. When Jory had been helped out, still clutching his three letters like a man carrying water, the captain said, "If he doesn't come back, my lord, they'll all run."
"Then I was wrong," said Theo, "and it's mine."
"And the law?"
"I'm going to think about the law. Not tonight."
Greaves looked at him for what felt like a long time. Then, with the stiffness of a man reaching for something on a high shelf, he said, "Dain never asked a man why."
"I know," said Theo. "I've started to notice."
* * *
Jory Dunmore walked out of the main gate at dawn with a pack and a sack of oats and nobody to stop him. The garrison watched from the wall. Not a word. Three hundred and seven people looking at one man's back, and every one of them doing the same arithmetic.
"They're all waiting to see if he comes back," said Tobin, at Theo's elbow.
"I know."
"If he doesn't…"
"I know, Tobin."
The boy was quiet. Then, half to himself, "I'd come back."
"I know that too," said Theo.
It was Tobin who found it, a little later, when he went up to check the north wall. A small bundle sat on the parapet, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with red twine. Inside were six smoked fish, shining with oil and smelling like a good decision, and a single scrap of bark with a series of knots tied into a loop of cord.
"Hush-gift," Wren said, when she saw it. She'd come up to look, and she picked up the bark by one corner, as if it might be hot. "Goblins leave them at the border of someone they want to talk to."
"That's good."
"Or someone they want to be left alone by."
"Which is it?"
"Nobody's ever lived long enough to find out."
I count five knots and a loop, said Ledger. I believe it is a word. I cannot read it. I would like it noted that I am annoyed.
Theo stood on the wall with six smoked fish and a piece of bark. Twenty-five days to the payment. Eight days of grain. A man walking south into the morning with three letters. And somewhere in the dark line of the Wood, someone had seen the light from the circle, and noticed that the new lord of the Marches had opened his gate.
He held the fish out to Tobin. "Go and ask the kitchen what to do with these."
"Are we eating them, my lord?"
"I'd like to," said Theo. "I'd also like to be alive on the tenth day to find out what the knots say. Let's do both."