Chapter 8: Nothing Left to Bury

The road down off the yews runs with water the whole way.

The satchel is on his shoulder. In the breast of his coat, flat against his ribs, is the pouch of flawless shards the master put into his hand yesterday, and he has not spent one of them and does not mean to.

There is a sentence in his mouth. He had the whole of it on the step, with the door shut behind him and the two of them still inside, and he has it now:

One day Cassius Aurelis goes down on his knees in front of the master and says out loud what he did, with people standing around to hear it.

Then he does the sum, because sums are cheap and he is good at them.

Cassius Aurelis is twenty years old. He holds Crucible first. Master Vane holds Crucible fourth. The rolls say third, and they have said it for nine years, and the hand that signed them was the master’s own. Cassius put him on his back in one pass.

So the space between Ren and Cassius is not a road he hasn’t walked far enough. It is a wall.

Ren is sixteen. He has never held a spark.

The sentence has no date on it, and it isn’t going to help anybody today. So it goes back in his mouth, where it will keep, and he walks.

The lane comes up out of the water meadow and into the town past the mill, the wheel knocking around behind the houses, and the town is up and working.

“Ren. Morning.”

“Nell.”

She’s at her gate with a basket on her hip and both hands on the basket, and she has the look of a woman who has been awake since the middle of the night and has decided not to say so.

“Head again?”

“The whole front of my face,” she says, and touches above her eyes. “Like a band of iron.”

“Fourth night?”

“Fourth. I counted wrong last night. That’s how tired I am.” She laughs at it like it isn’t funny. “You’ll come by.”

“Before noon.”

Tobin’s on his step with his boots in his hands, because he can’t get down to them anymore. Ren gives him the two things he always gives him: heat before the work and not after, and let his daughter lace the boots. Tobin says he knows. He says it again when Ren is walking away, in case Ren didn’t hear it the first time.

Then the town starts doing something.

It isn’t anything anybody says. He says good morning to four more people and gets good morning back, and then something crosses their faces. A flinch, small and fast, the way a dog flinches at a hand that isn’t going to hit it. Then their eyes go down to the ground, or sideways at the mill, or off somewhere past it.

Nobody tells him anything.

Halfway up the lane an old man is standing with both hands on a fence rail. He lifts two fingers off the rail, twice, which is the oldest way there is of saying come here.

Ren goes over.

“Boy.”

“Morning.”

“You’re going to Jory’s.”

“He’s owed a look. He’s had that cough six weeks.”

The old man looks up the lane. Then down it. Then at Ren.

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“Because it isn’t what you know,” the old man says. “It’s what they think you know. And you’ve got a face that shows every bit of it.”

Ren waits.

The old man takes his hands off the rail and puts them back on it.

“Yesterday,” he says. “Yesterday, after you’d gone up the hill. Two of them came up this lane in white with swords on their backs. They went to his door.”

“Two.”

“Two at the door.” A breath. “There was three of them in the town before it was over. I don’t know what to tell you about that.”

Ren waits.

“They wanted a pot.”

“A pot.”

“A teapot.” The old man’s mouth works like he’s tasting something he doesn’t want. “Old thing. Jory’s mother’s people turned pots, way back. He’s had that one hanging by his fire since before I was married.” His hands come up off the rail and come back down on it again. “They asked him for it and he told them no. Told them it wasn’t for selling and it wasn’t for taking, and he stood in his own doorway and said the whole of it twice.” The rail takes it. “And he was right. And he’s dead. A man of eighty-one made a speech to three people who could move this town off the map without breaking stride, and there’s no more of him in that yard than there is smoke. Nothing to put in the ground. His girl has been in the ashes since sunup, digging.”

“Maisy.”

“Six years old. Maybe seven.”

“She’s got nobody.”

“She’s got nobody,” the old man says.

“Who were they?”

“How would I know who they were?” He’s angry at the question, which means he’s afraid of it. “White coats. Swords. There’s Orders all over these hills and they all dress the same.”

Ren asks him two more things and gets nothing out of either one.

He has heard the shape of this before, up on the hill, from two people who don’t agree on much. Elle said it and didn’t dress it up: the ones who take the degrees stop weighing people somewhere along the way. Not cruelty. There’s just nothing left on the scale. Bran said she was being generous — cross one of them and it isn’t you that pays. Your house pays. Your street pays. And afterward it doesn’t get called anything. It’s just what their hands did.

Ren had thought Bran was being bleak.

“I have to go up there,” he says.

“Then go.” The old man picks up an empty bucket and turns for his own gate. Then he stops, with his back to the lane. “Boy. They’re coming up from the water.”

Ren turns.

Three of them, coming up the lane from the river end.

White coats on a gray wet morning, long swords slung across their backs, hands empty. The one in front is young — twenty, give or take, which is four years older than Ren and a great deal more than that — and there is something in his face that would be handsome if he weren’t spending it.

Ren has their measure before they’re twenty paces up the lane. The one in front holds Kindling ninth. The two behind him hold Bedrock, both of them, gray in the beard, and the one on the left has had his hands on a sword forty years.

In the lane everything stops except the wheel.

Nell sets the basket down on the ground and stands with her hands flat on her thighs and looks at the mud. Tobin comes off his step with his boots under his arm and his hat in his hand and his head down. In his own yard the old man bends at the waist.

Nobody says anything. Nobody has to.

The weight of them gets there before they do. It’s in the ears and under the jaw and across the back of the neck, and it wants the whole lane down on its knees, and the lane gives it what it wants.

Ren’s body takes it like a rock takes weather. His knees hold.

The gray man on the left turns his head, unhurried, and looks at Ren the way you look at a post to see whether it’s set in the ground. There is no spark in him. No gathering, no thread. Nothing a man like that has a name for. The gray man makes a small shape with his mouth — all he is willing to spend on it — and turns back around.

The young one never looks at him at all.

They come level.

Ren’s hands are at his sides. The one in his coat pocket comes out with a twist of paper in it, and he opens it against his palm with his thumb, and the movement is small and takes no time.

A pinch goes off his fingers and lands on the back of the young man’s cuff. Pale, near colorless, finer than flour, and no smell to it at all. It holds three days, in sun or in wet, and if you don’t already know to look for it you never will.

Nobody ever does.

They go by. Ren stands where he is.

At the end of the lane they stop, where the east road turns off, because the town isn’t worth walking out of without remarking on it.

They don’t lower their voices. Why would they.

“How long have we got?”

“Months,” the young one says. “Three months to the Reach, and nobody watching these roads but us.” He stretches his arm out and looks at it, wrist over, wrist back.

“Four months on the road is four months,” the gray man on the right says.

“Then we’ll be four months on the road.”

The gray man on the left says it in the flat, practiced voice of a man who has been paid to say it before: “The heir has pulled something out of this country that the Emberglass can’t put a name to. They’ll tell that one at home for twenty years.”

“Neither of you could name it.”

“No.” The gray man looks at the ground. “And I’ve handled everything this country has given up in forty years.”

“Then they’ll want to hear it from me,” the young one says, and laughs, and it costs him nothing.

The heir. There is only one of the three that can mean, and it isn’t either of the gray men.

“Tomorrow we walk the east road,” he says. “There’ll be something on it worth the walk.”

“Or nothing.”

“Then we’ll have looked,” he says.

They go. Ren stands in the lane until the three of them are a smudge on the east road, and then he doesn’t stand anymore.

He runs. He goes by the mill at a run without stopping. The girl’s leg is eleven days in and it keeps until tomorrow; Nell’s band of iron keeps until noon. He goes on by, and that’s another debt, and he is keeping a list.

Jory’s is the last house before the river, and it takes Ren three minutes to get there and he remembers none of them.

It’s down. The roof has come into the walls and the walls are standing on three sides and black to the top, and a rope of smoke goes up out of the middle of it and bends off north. The ground has been wet the whole way down the hill and it’s wet here, and the ash in the yard is gray soup under his boots.

Maisy is in the middle of it, on her knees, in the place where the boards used to be. She’s digging. Both hands buried to the wrist, ash packed up her arms, her fingertips split open to the bone and the blood running down into the ash, and she keeps going.

“Grandpa. Grandpa. Grandpa.”

There is nothing of him to find. That has been said to her. She’s digging anyway.

Ren stands in the gap where the door was.

His hands are shut. He doesn’t call her name. He looks up at the sky, which is doing nothing at all, and stays that way long enough for the smoke to change direction, and then he breathes out and goes in.

“Maisy.”

Her head comes up.

Her face is gray to the hairline and streaked where the crying ran through it, and both eyes are swollen near shut, and she knows him anyway. She comes up off her knees and hits him at a run and gets both arms around his waist and puts her face into his coat.

“Ren. Ren. They killed him. They killed Grandpa and they burned him, and I looked and looked and he isn’t in it.”

“He isn’t anywhere,” she says.

“I know.”

He goes down on one knee in the wet ash so she doesn’t have to climb him, and puts a hand on the back of her head, and lets her cry into his shoulder until it turns into hiccups, and then until it stops being anything, and then she goes heavy all at once, her hands still balled up in his shirt.

He kneels there with her.

“Maisy.”

Nothing.

He looks up and down the empty yard anyway, twice, before he puts his mouth against the side of her head.

“I’ll do this one for you.”

He says it quietly, and once.

Then he gets an arm under her and stands up with her.

She weighs nothing. The walk up is long and he doesn’t hurry it.

The master’s window is lit at the top of the path. He goes past it.

Elle’s is lit two doors down the terrace. He goes the other way.

His own door is unlocked. He puts Maisy on the bed and gets the blanket over her, and sets the water jug and the cup on the floor where she’ll find them if she wakes in the dark, and wipes her hands with the wet rag and binds them, and stands over the bed a while.

There’s nothing else in the room to do, and if he stands there much longer he’ll be standing there when she wakes.

He goes out.

The dark is down properly. He cuts across the terrace to the low house, where Bran sleeps with the rest of the men who haven’t got a room of their own.

There’s still a little light in the window, and the door isn’t shut.

Ren puts his knuckles on the frame.

Bran pulls it open the rest of the way. He’s got his shirt off, and the hatchet is on the stool behind him where he left it when he came in off the yard, and he doesn’t ask anything.

He steps back out of the doorway.