Chapter 9: Not Half a Chance

Ren goes in. Bran shuts the door after him with his heel.

The low house is one room with a curtain across the back half of it, and there are men asleep behind the curtain, and the lamp on the floor has burned down to a coal. Bran doesn’t ask him anything. He stands there and waits, and whatever he finds in Ren’s face keeps him waiting longer than he meant to.

“I need help,” Ren says.

“With what.”

“Three people. I’m going to kill them tomorrow night, or the night after. I can’t do it by myself.”

Bran’s mouth comes open. It stays that way a while.

“You’re mad,” he says.

“Probably.”

“Say it again.”

“I’m going to kill—“

“I heard you the first time.” He rubs his face with the flat of his hand, hard, like he’s trying to get the sleep off it. “You’ve come down off the terrace in the dark to tell me this.”

“Yes.”

“With no bottle.”

“No.”

Bran sits down on the edge of the pallet anyway. Standing is for when you’re going somewhere.

“Right,” he says. “Here’s what I’d have done. You knock on that door and tell me you need a man for something stupid — a wagon, a debt, someone down in the town that wants leaning on — and my boots are on before you get to the end of the sentence. That’s the kind of stupid I keep in the house.” He looks up. “The master’s door is two rows up and there’s a lamp lit behind it. You came down here instead. So what is it.”

“The Emberglass,” Ren says. “Their heir, and the two old men who walk with him.”

Bran’s face doesn’t move at all. Ren would have felt better if it had.

“Their heir,” he says.

“Yes.”

He looks at the curtain. Then at the door. Then at Ren.

“Tell it,” he says.

“There’s a house at the north end of the mill town, past the wheel, up against the water. Old man in it, eighty-one years old. Granddaughter, six. Yesterday morning three of them came off the east road and stood in his yard and offered him money for a teapot off the shelf. Family thing. It’s been on that shelf longer than he’s been alive. He wouldn’t take the money.”

Bran waits.

“He wouldn’t take the money,” Ren says. “So they burned the house down around him. There’s nothing left of him to put in the ground. Not a handful. She was in the ashes when I got there.”

“And the three of them,” Bran says. “Where are they.”

“On the east road this morning. They walked past me in the lane. The one on the left put his eyes on me for about as long as it takes to look at a fence post, and then he looked away.”

“And what did you do.”

“Nothing.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Ren lets it sit.

“There’s a mark on the young one,” he says. “On his sleeve. I put it there when they went by. Nothing you can see. It smells of almost nothing, and it holds for three days, and if you know what you’re smelling, it’s as good as a rope on his arm. Today’s the first of the three.”

“You marked the heir of the Emberglass,” Bran says.

“I marked his sleeve.”

“Same thing.”

“No. Not the same thing.”

Bran breathes in through his teeth. It’s the loudest sound this room has made all night, and he checks the curtain after it, but nothing behind the curtain moves.

“Then no,” he says.

“Bran—“

“No, and I’ll tell you why, and you can call me a coward when I’m finished.” He holds his hand up, level with his own chest, and leaves it there. “Here’s me. Kindling seventh. Here’s you: no spark in you and never has been, and I’ve watched what you do to a man standing in front of you, and I’ll grant you every bit of it. None of it counts. There’s three of them. Two are Bedrock, and you can’t get within thirty feet of either one of them before there’s nothing left of you to argue about. The third is Kindling ninth. The two of us go up that road, and there isn’t enough of us left afterward for anybody to write down a name.”

“I know what they are.”

“Then you know what I just said, and you’re still sat here.”

“I have a way.”

“A way to what.”

“To get close.”

Bran goes still.

“How close,” he says.

“Close enough that it doesn’t matter what they can do from across a field.”

“Can you kill a Bedrock.”

Ren nods.

Then he shakes his head.

“Which is it.”

“Maybe. There’s a great many ways for it to go wrong. I’ve been through all of them since dark, and I keep finding new ones.”

“How many ways for it to go right.”

“One in twenty.”

He says it flat. He could be telling Bran the price of a mule.

Bran stares at him.

“Say that back to yourself,” he says. “Out loud.”

“One in twenty.”

“That’s not a plan, Ren. That’s a hole in the ground with your name on it.”

“Probably.”

“And you’re going anyway.”

“Yes.”

Bran stands up and walks the length of the room and comes back and sits down again, which is something Ren has seen him do exactly twice, both times in front of their master.

“Is it worth it,” he says.

Ren turns the word over.

“Worth it,” he says.

“Is it.”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what use is that.”

“I don’t know if it’s worth it,” Ren says. “I’ve been trying to make it come out to a number since last night, and it won’t. He was eighty-one and she’s six and there’s no part of him left to bury, and none of that weighs anything at all where those three are going tomorrow. It doesn’t balance. There’s no sum where it balances.”

“Then leave it,” Bran says. “Wait. Pay it later, when you can pay it.”

“This morning I stood in a lane with my hands at my sides and let them walk past me. I watched his sleeve go by. I’ll be doing that every day for the rest of my life, unless the day comes when I stop.”

“Or you die in a ditch on Thursday.”

“It’s on the list,” Ren says. “One of the ways it goes wrong.”

Bran laughs. It’s not a good laugh. He puts his hand over his face and takes it away again.

“So put it in your own words,” he says. “Not the ones you practiced walking down here.”

Ren doesn’t answer him straight away. The coal in the lamp goes out while he’s thinking about it, and neither of them gets up to light it.

“Here’s the whole of it,” he says. “Nobody handed me this. There’s no one up above keeping the count of whether I hold it or not. It’s mine, and it’s small. The man burned a house with a man inside it and walked off to his breakfast, and he’ll do it again in the next village, and the one after that. So I’m putting my line here. Not the world’s line. Mine. On this road, tonight, where I’m standing.”

“And then.”

“And then anything that crosses it, I go after. Any of them. Every time, whoever it is, whatever they’ve got behind them.” He hears how it sounds and says it anyway. “It’s a bad rule. Whoever stands next to me is going to get killed for it, and I’m asking you to stand next to me anyway.”

“That’s a child’s way of putting it,” Bran says.

“Yeah,” Ren says. “It is.”

“It is, though.”

“I know.”

Bran gets the shirt on and starts on the buttons one-handed, badly, and doesn’t look up while he does it.

“Ask me in the morning and I’d say no,” he says.

“But.”

“I said yes.”

“Why.”

“Don’t.” He gets the last button. “I’ve got a why. It’s mine, and I’m not putting it out on the floor for you to weigh, because the minute it’s out here it’s a thing you can argue with, and I’d rather not.”

Ren doesn’t push it. He’d have to have something to say back, and he hasn’t.

“One thing first,” Bran says. “Tonight I say yes. Tomorrow I can say I’m out, and you’ll have nothing to say about it, and you won’t be owed a thing, and you won’t bring it up again.”

“No.”

“Because I’m not your man and you’re not mine. Two of us on one road. Nothing past that.”

“Nothing past that.”

Bran nods once, the way he does when a piece of work gets measured twice.

“What am I for,” he says.

“I’ll tell you in the morning.”

Bran takes the hatchet off the stool, which is his answer.

“Elle doesn’t hear about this,” Ren says.

“I’d worked that much out.”

“She’d stop it.”

“She’d stop you,” Bran says. “Not the same thing, and it comes out the same on the road.”

“In three days it won’t matter either way.”

Ren takes the pouch out from under his shirt.

It’s a drawstring thing, soft from handling, and everything in it came out of their master’s own hands. There’s more in it now than there was a month ago. He knows the count, because he’s counted it three times today already, the way a man counts money he’s afraid to lose.

He loosens the string and tips a few into his palm. Flawless — the best grade. Any one of them would keep a man for a year.

He puts them inside his shirt, flat to the chest, one and then the next, pressing each one down until he can feel its edge through the cloth. Then he draws the string and puts the rest away.

The master gave him all of it and told him to wait.

He presses the last one flat and doesn’t look at Bran, and Bran watches him do the whole of it and doesn’t ask.

“You’re not going to tell me what those are for,” Bran says.

“Not tonight.”

“All right.”

They go out. The terrace is black except for Elle’s window, which is still lit, and stays lit while they cross the end of it and drop below the houses. He doesn’t check it. He doesn’t tell himself he isn’t checking it.

At his own door he stops. He doesn’t open it. He stands on the step long enough to hear Maisy turn over in her sleep, and then he goes on down.

Past the last terrace the path turns into a track, and they leave the track before it reaches the mill and come out on the road.

Nobody stops them.

Behind them Yewfell is a wall and one window and the black side of the mountain. In front of them the road goes east.

Three days, and then there’s nothing left on that sleeve to find.

Ren puts his palm flat on his chest, where the shards are, and they’re cold.