The World Grows Wider

The man at the end of Zara's arrow had come around by the time the others gathered over him, and the first thing he did with his returning senses was tell Makani to put him down.

Makani did not put him down. He had the ambusher by the collar, hauled up off the wet stones of the road, and he asked his questions the way a goliath asks them: who had sent them, how they had known which road, whether Bardolph Vane had paid for any of it. The man, mid-thirties, scarred along both forearms, the kind of body that had been in fights before this one, gave back nothing but contempt. He didn't know any Bardolph. There had been a man on a horse, earlier, and they'd simply let him through — and when Makani asked who had told them to, the man held his eye and lied without even troubling to make it sound true. No one. It just seemed like a good idea.

Edric caught Makani's eye, put a hand on the big man's shoulder, and then did something kinder than anyone else on that road thought to do. He walked Gilli a little way off and turned her by the elbow toward the sky. Look at those clouds. Look — butterflies, just there, shall we go and see? Gilli looked, and agreed the clouds were quite lovely, and observed that the butterflies were dung beetles, and did not turn around.

Behind them, the prisoner spat blood and offered a trade — a name for a name. You first, big man. Makani gave his own. The man kept his. My name isn't important. I serve my dark master, and he will find you, Makani. He laughed while he said it. No, his master hadn't told them where the party would be. He'd told them to watch for an idiot and his friends coming down in a carriage, chasing a man on a horse, and that was all the description they had needed. We were told to give you a way out. We were told to scare you off. But he's seen your face. He's seen your friends' faces. You won't leave Karrowmoor. You're dead, Makani — do you hear me?

Makani heard him. He snapped the man's neck, set him down, and turned to the others with the air of someone reporting the weather: a whole lot of nothing, something about a dark lord, something about being dead. Should they bury them?

They buried them. Face down, every one, as Bardolph had taught them on their first night in the valley, so that when they start digging they dig the wrong way. The light was already going by the time the last of them was covered, and nobody wanted to make camp on open road beside a carriage that seemed to draw trouble. They drove for Millstead instead, and made it with the evening bell ringing them the last half-mile in, the cold drizzle that had followed them all day still falling. Leon was stacking dirty plates when they came through the door. Friends — if you keep coming in here I'm going to have to start charging you. But not tonight. There was a spare room, and warm water upstairs, and nothing to eat but dry bread. Makani pressed a gold coin on him anyway.

Edric dreamed that night, and it was not the ordinary kind of bad sleep.

He stood at the edge of a treeline in a valley very like the ones he had been travelling through, except that the sun was out — low and dusky, late in the afternoon, no rain at all — and in a clearing below lay farms and a town, people going about the end of their day. Beside him stood an old woman, hunched, a scarf drawn over her head and a basket on her arm, so that he couldn't see her face. She seemed troubled by something.

And then, without any journey between, he stood outside a sturdy stone building that he took for some kind of holy place — not a church he recognised, not a house of Lathander, but something in the shape of it and the markings on its walls said sacred. There was machinery inside, too dim to make out. In the doorway, the old woman was taking a pen from a much larger figure, a woman so wrapped in shadow that she was barely a shape at all, who held out an open book. The old woman signed her name in it. Then she turned and looked at him.

He knew the face. He had seen it a hundred times. It was Sela's — his fortune teller, his luck — except that here she was flesh, skin and bones, alive.

Then it was morning, and he had slept the whole night through, and he did not feel rested at all.

Millstead's errand was a small one, and Edric took it gratefully. The farm-supply man recognised Edric the moment he opened his shutters. He'd done what was asked, he said — made a broom out of that branch Edric had brought him, the one cut from the thing on the road — and it was a broom, he supposed, though he couldn't account for why it kept sprouting. Little leafy twigs, overnight, all along the handle. Fifteen silver. Edric thanked him warmly for his craftsmanship and paid without haggling.

It was Marcus, of all people, who drew the party's history out of them that morning. He had been unusually quiet since the ambush, and when he finally spoke it was to produce a creased and flattened letter from his pocket — the invitation the ambushers' leader had torn up and thrown in the mud, which he'd quietly gone back and retrieved. Had anyone else received one of these, from this Ostrend woman? Was she refined, dignified, a woman of means? A woman of nothing anymore, Makani told him. She's dead. Murdered by her own steward, forty years in her service. Her grandson Casimir was running Grayvault now, nineteen years old and out of his depth, and the party was on the road to find the man who'd done it. Marcus absorbed this, looked at the letter he'd rescued, admitted that he had rather thought the name meant something, and allowed that he supposed he'd come along.

Thornhollow was open for business under the drizzle — children in the lanes, labourers in the terraces, houses stacked two and three storeys high inside the wall. Makani's first stop was Old Smitty, who greeted him like a favourite nephew, asked after the greatclub, and sold him a fine set of smith's tools for twenty gold on the understanding that a goliath carrying Smitty's work around the valleys was the best advertising a smith could buy. Then he went on to the stables, where the same boy who'd been frightened half to death by Zara on their last visit asked, before anything else, whether the scary woman was with them.

He'd never heard of any Bardolph, and he didn't deal with the fancy people up at Grayvault. But there'd been a carriage through not long ago — bigger than theirs — and the man riding in it had not looked right to him at all. Ghostly pale. Fine clothes, jewellery even, the kind of thing you didn't see in Thornhollow. Strong as an ox, and so convincing when the boy tried to charge him for the stabling that the boy had ended up talking himself down. He'd had men with him, armed and armoured, one of them a big man — and armed men were rare enough in this part of the valley that the boy had marked them as suspicious. The carriage had passed back through since, he thought. Without most of the men.

When Makani asked about long teeth and long fingernails, the boy asked whether they'd met him.

Marcus, pressing a silver coin across the stall door, got the rest: a cleaner sort of man than the usual traffic, a little older, heading south. Makani nodded. That was their man. And when Edric asked who in Thornhollow knew the old mines, the boy suggested they find Hendrik — or Thaddeus, who kept things safe around here, though now that he thought of it, Thaddeus hadn't been seen for a little while. The party, who knew exactly where Thaddeus was, said nothing.

The mines were the argument of the morning. The survey maps from Grayvault's archive showed a worked-out seam running under this ground toward Seamfall, and Gilli had a good feeling about it — Lathander teaches us to go to the places that need light — and there might be bats. Marcus was briefly in favour, on the grounds that there might also be silver, and then briefly against, on the grounds that caves are wet and his hair would take an age to dry. Edric was against from the start. He had seen what comes out of caves, and none of them led to Farthingholt. They put it to a vote, which Edric won, and pointed the carriage south.

They came down out of Coldhallow's hills with Edric driving, past the scatter of houses that was Seamfall and the old mine-mouth up on the hillside, and into Farrow's End, where the Ostrend seal on the carriage door did something none of them had planned for. The market town took one look at it and decided royalty had arrived. Vendors mobbed the wheels — roast meats, hammered necklaces, tonics of every colour — pressing in so thick the horses could barely walk. Marcus stood up through the roof hatch, called Lathander's blessing down on all of them, and flung a double handful of silver out over their heads to one side. The crowd went after it. Edric bellowed House business, coming through! and did not stop.

On the quiet road beyond, where the way bends toward Bellwater, a man in a coarse tunic sat outside a little stone shed with a book in his lap, and waved. Gilli saw the sun of Lathander stitched on his chest and had the carriage stopped before anyone could argue.

He was lame and dirty and delighted to see her — a sister, out here! — and when she asked whether he'd seen any Clearings, he opened his book and admitted it had been a couple of months. He kept watch here for a reason: the shed sat between two valleys, and from it a man could see a long way down both. He recorded the light for Prior Anselm, at the Priory in Sallow End, a little past the Tallowbridge Inn — a shadow of what it once was, he said, but unmistakably Lathander's. The last Clearing he'd seen had been on his own way here, just south of the road near the Tallowbridge Inn, off in the woods. It was beautiful. He could make Clearlight himself, perhaps, if he had the instruments, or a Clearing, or any Clearlight to begin with. He had none of the three. He would be out here another month yet, by Lathander's grace, and he didn't much like it, and they should go now if they meant to reach Undersluice before dark.

They went.

Bellwater announced itself in water: a fast stream never far from the road, fed by tributaries from both slopes, with little islands of rock and tree standing up out of the current. Undersluice was a trade town like Farrow's End, and it mobbed the carriage just the same, but the bell was already ringing as they rolled in and the crowd thinned with every stroke. The old man who kept the stable wanted two gold, not the five silver Makani offered, and got it — along with a handshake Makani made sure he'd remember.

The young woman at the inn door wore a red thread at her wrist and a pendant at her throat: two hands, crossed and grasping, bound at the wrists with red cord. Marcus, who had asked Gilli to point out anyone who looked open to guidance, recognised the crying god's sign at the same moment she did, and slid two gold across the counter with his warmest smile and a request for a room for those who walk in grace. It bought the inn's best suite — third floor, end of the hall, its own bath, a view over the courtyard and the river — which turned out to have space for exactly one devotee. Gilli, a priestess of the people, graciously let him have it. The young woman bowed her head as she handed over the key and said, very quietly, Today is the first day in what's left of your life — so live it well.

In the common room, Edric took stock of the other guests with the bell still ringing, looking for a steward's face. He didn't find one. He found a much younger man sitting alone in the corner, who had been watching them since they walked in, with a look on his face somewhere between worry and puzzlement.

Makani took the room with Edric. You've had trouble sleeping lately, he said. I'll keep an eye on you. Edric thanked him, and meant it.

They were readying for bed when both of them caught it at once — someone standing a little too close outside the door, listening, then gone. Edric was in the hall before he'd finished deciding to be: Marcus's grand door at one end, the stairwell at the other, and footsteps going down. On the landing, a man descending. Edric reached for the magic to hold him still, and the man shrugged it off and ran — straight into Makani's whip, which took his feet out from under him on the stairs.

It was the young man from the corner. His name, eventually, was Vessen, and he was desperate to be believed. He meant them no harm. He knew they were not Casimir Ostrend, and not family, and it puzzled him why strangers were riding in the Ostrend carriage. He'd only meant to see whether they were friends of the House he might speak to in the morning. He was from Old Ash, sent into Coldhallow to seek an audience with the Lady Ostrend, and he thought he'd got lucky.

With Makani's knee on his chest, he delivered his message. Lord Vosk would like an audience with the Dowager, at a time and place of her choosing. Lord Vosk came in peace, and believed he might be able to help her, since he was uniquely positioned to understand what Coldhallow was going through: he, too, had refused to sell off the property of his valley, much as the Dowager had apparently refused the many offers to buy out hers — and he was left to wonder why. Old Ash was beautiful, Vessen said, and desperately poor, and it had its fill of financiers and messengers coming by with offers. Lord Vosk had refused them all, as his father had, and his father's father. If they ever attended the Assize, Vessen told them, they'd learn soon enough that there were not really nine ruling houses in Karrowmoor at all. He had nothing in writing — only a stamped insignia on a cord around his neck, the seal of House Vosk.

Edric weighed it, and then went out on a limb. They were authorised to speak for House Ostrend, he said, and they would meet Lord Vosk in place of the Lady, who was too ill to travel. Vessen, despite what he described as internal injuries, called it a fortuitous meeting. Lord Vosk would receive them at Vosk's Hold, at their earliest convenience. Edric gave him a gold piece for his trouble — you represent your lord well; next time, don't go sneaking around in the dark — and let him go.

Edric had nearly gone under, in the soft place right before sleep, when he heard it: a low sound like a pipe organ, playing a tune he knew. The lullaby. The one from the Farthingholt songbook.

He slept, and so did Makani, but not for long. They woke into full dark. The hearth had gone out. The door to the hallway stood open, a pale slice of lamplight beyond it, and the room itself was black. In the far corner, where neither of them could see, something spoke — bring me the — — and then a figure rose out of the shadow there and lifted one arm, pointing straight at Edric, and opened its mouth wider than any mouth should open.

Makani, who sleeps with his greatclub laid on his chest like the effigy on a tomb, was already reaching for it.

Down the hall, in the best suite in Undersluice, Marcus snored.