Chapter 76: The Radius
By the twelfth of Pyrelon there were nine copies of the condition in Hearthroot, and Anser had made only four of them.
Anser’s four went up by the gate, on the sick-house door, in the forge and on the seed store. The forge copy went brown from the heat inside a day and nobody replaced it, because everybody had already read it.
The other five had been copied out by people for themselves. Mataon found one in the seed store, in a hand he did not recognise, with the last line copied twice.
Deuna Central Roll requires no travelling papers for a subject entering the jurisdiction that holds his record.
He stood in the doorway with a sack of winter beans against his hip and read a stranger’s handwriting saying it back to him, and understood that the town was not frightened.
It was working on it.
Souk had taken the wall of the back room.
She had asked Maelor for pins and got forty, and she had put up a sheet of the Marches survey Corvane had lent them in Frostmere, and around the border-post she had drawn a circle in charcoal.
"Three days out," she said. "That’s the radius. Anything inside that line could have answered us in nine."
"That’s a big circle."
"It’s an enormous circle. It has Ashvale town in it, four villages, two river landings, the Marches central roll itself, and about nine hundred square miles of nothing." She tapped the eastern edge. "But it also has an inside edge. A courier doesn’t ride at a gallop for three days. Anything under a day and a half is too close — they’d have answered in five, not nine, and they’d have been showing off."
"So it’s a band."
"It’s a band. Two days wide." She stood back from it. "Which is still four hundred square miles, and I want you to understand this isn’t a triumph. This is the first honest thing we have been able to say about where a person is, and it took me eleven days and Corvane’s map."
Edrin was looking at the pins rather than the charcoal.
"You’ve put one in Ashvale town."
"I’ve put nine in Ashvale town." Souk did not turn round. "Because that’s where a person lives who wants to be near a registry office without being noticed by it, and it’s the only place in the band with a stationer that sells the right paper. I’ve written to him. He’ll tell me nothing. But he’ll tell me nothing in a particular way, and I’ve spent a career reading that."
***
The roll met on the fourteenth, and it was the largest meeting Hearthroot had ever held.
They had it outside, because the sick-house would not take a hundred and ninety people. Tovan set benches on the flat by the gate. Vezra rigged a canvas against the wind that failed twice before it held.
The drawn pair sat behind a table with the second book on it, and both of them looked like people who had not slept.
The question was not whether Orvek went. He had decided that, in public, and the roll did not revisit a decision a man had made about himself.
The question was what the town owed him for it.
Hanne read the four items they had to settle, because Anser had written them out and because reading aloud twice was the practice now.
Whether anyone could lawfully go with him. What Hearthroot would do if he did not come out. Who held the register while he was gone. And whether the town would ask him to carry anything.
"That last one’s mine," Edrin said. "I put it on the list, and I think the answer’s no, and I want both of those on the record."
"Say why," Hanne said.
"Because the moment he carries a document for us, he stops being a subject appearing on his own account. He’s our agent, in a jurisdiction that doesn’t recognise us." Edrin had his hands flat. "It’d be the most useful thing in the world for me. It’d also hand them a reason to arrest him that isn’t what he is."
Nobody argued. Anser wrote it down.
The first item took the longest, and it went nowhere for an hour.
Ivara had ridden in on the eleventh, off the western circuit. She wanted to take four wardens as far as the border and camp there until it was over.
"That’s lawful," Edrin said. "The Marches is our side. You can sit on the line and eat sandwiches for ninety days if you like."
"And past it?"
"Past it you’re a foreign national without papers in a jurisdiction that issues papers as a favour. They’d process you in a morning."
"Then get me papers."
"Deuna doesn’t issue travelling papers to Marches citizens for the purpose of attending a hearing about a Marches citizen." Edrin said it wearily, because he had said it four times already in different rooms. "I’ve asked. Corvane’s asked. They don’t say no. They give you a form, and that form has never once come back to anybody."
Rhavena, standing at the back with her arms folded and her jaw set in the way that meant she was being extremely patient, said, "And if we simply go."
"Then Orvek walks into an examination with an armed escort of foreign nationals waiting outside it," Edrin said, "and every word he says in that room is the testimony of a man under duress from his own side. They wouldn’t even have to lie about it."
Rhavena unfolded her arms and folded them again, differently.
"I hate this," she said.
"Yes."
"I want that written down."
Anser, who wrote down everything, was already writing it down.
***
Mataon had been quiet for most of it.
He was not being humble. In the autumn he had learned that a founder who speaks early gets agreed with. Since then he had learned that a citizen who speaks early gets agreed with too, and that one was worse, and it had taken him longer to notice.
But he had been reading the seed-store copy for two days, in the hand he did not recognise, with the last line written twice.
And on the eighth reading of it, standing at the back of his own town’s meeting with his hands in his pockets, he finally understood what the sentence actually said.
He went very still.
Barni’s head came up from the grass.
"No," Barni said.
"I haven’t said anything."
"You’ve gone the colour of a man who has thought of something, and I would like the record to show that I objected before you opened your mouth."
Anser looked up.
"Write it down," Mataon said.
He came to the front and asked Hanne for the sheet, and read the last line aloud, and then read it again, slowly, the way Rell read.
"Deuna Central Roll requires no travelling papers for a subject entering the jurisdiction that holds his record."
"We know," Hanne said.
"You know what it does for Orvek. It’s a courtesy extended to a subject." He put the sheet down on the table. "It doesn’t say *this* subject."
Souk got there first. He watched her get there, and watched her put a hand flat on the table.
"Oh," she said.
"They hold a record on me." Mataon heard his own voice stay level and was distantly grateful for it. "Notice of pending classification, served the fourteenth of Sylphenia, entered by their own office. I’m line forty-five. Whatever else that paper did to me, it made me a subject of Deuna Central Roll, and their own instrument says a subject needs no papers."
The canvas cracked in the wind. Nobody said anything.
"I can walk in," he said. "Not as a representative. Not as an escort. As another one of theirs."
[Assessment — Deuna Central Roll, Office of Foreign Instruments]
[Subject: Mataon Gaael · Status: pending · Record held]
[Instrument of 9 Pyrelon extends entry without travelling papers to any subject of this roll]
[No exclusion clause is present]
[Feat: PER +1 — the sentence was read eight times before it was heard]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 28 · INT 36 · PER 36 · WIL 39]
Edrin had gone grey.
"He’s right," he said. "I’ve read that page forty times. He’s right, and I didn’t see it, and I’m the registrar."
"You were reading it as a threat."
"I was reading it as a threat." He laughed once, without any humour in it at all. "It’s a threat and it’s a door. They cut it one man wide and they measured the wrong man."
Kess had not said anything for two hours. For Kess that was extraordinary.
She was sitting on the end of the bench with the second book on her knees and her feet not reaching the ground, and she waited until the noise had gone down, and then she put her hand up like a child in a school she had never been to.
"Kess."
"If you both go in," she said, "and neither of you comes out."
The flat by the gate went very quiet.
"Custody is both of us. Neither one alone. That’s what we wrote. That’s the reason." She was not crying and her voice was completely steady and Mataon thought that was somehow the worst part. "So if he doesn’t come out, I hold it alone, and that’s against the rule. And if you don’t come out either, then the person who wrote the rule and the person it was written with are both in Deuna, and I’m nine."
Anser’s pen had stopped.
"I’m not saying don’t go," Kess said. "I’m saying somebody has to write down what happens next, before you do. And it can’t be either of you, because you’re the two who’d be gone."
Hanne looked at Edrin. Edrin looked at the table.
"She’s right," he said.
"I know she’s right," Hanne said. "I’d just like a minute where I don’t have to say it out loud."