Chapter 79: Courtesy
They reached the Marches line on the first of Ravenmark. That was the day his notice went onto the central roll. Neither of them mentioned it.
Rhavena had known where she would stop since Hearthroot. She had picked the place four days ago on the map and said nothing about it, and when they came round the last bend she pulled up without being told, at a stone marker that was not a border so much as an agreement about one.
"Here," she said.
"I know."
"I want you to look at where my feet are." She did not dismount. "They’re on this side. I want that seen, and I want it seen by you, because in about six weeks I’m going to want to have lied about it."
Barni sat down in the road.
Orvek walked past her, three paces, four, and stopped and turned round on the Deunan side and looked back at her, and held up one hand.
Not a wave. Flat, palm out, the way you show somebody you are not carrying anything.
Rhavena’s jaw did something and settled.
"Right," she said. "Go on then."
She turned the horse before they were out of sight. Mataon understood that, and did not watch her go, and she would have understood that.
***
The post at Vellow Cross was smaller than he had expected. They came to it before the middle of the morning, with the frost still in the ruts.
He had built a version of it on the road — walls, a gate, men with the flat expressions of men who have decided in advance. What was actually there was a long low building with a slate roof, a rail for horses, a well, and a boy of about fifteen sweeping the step.
Inside there was a counter, a stove, and a clerk of perhaps fifty with reading glasses pushed up into grey hair. He was eating an apple and he put it down on a folded cloth.
"Good morning," the clerk said. "Entering or passing?"
"Entering."
"Papers, unless you’re a subject."
"We’re subjects."
The clerk’s expression did not change, but something in the room did. He drew a bound ledger toward him, opened it at a marker, and took the glasses down off his head.
"Then no papers. Names, please, and I’ll want the hand on the register."
Orvek wrote his on the slate and turned it round. The clerk read it and copied it out without any comment at all.
Mataon noticed that. In eighteen months he had watched perhaps forty people meet Orvek, and not one of them had failed to react.
Then he found the record.
It took him under a minute. Mataon watched him do it, and understood that the record was not hard to find, and had not been hard to find at any point in eleven years.
"Ah," said the clerk. "You’ll want the standard entitlements, then."
"The what?"
"Entering subjects." The clerk turned the ledger round so they could see. He did not have to do that. "Road allowance, three coppers a day against the office of record. Lodging at any post house on the line at no charge. Medical attention if required, again at no charge. And a travel escort if you want one, though most don’t."
Mataon put both hands on the counter.
"Say the reason."
"Beg pardon?"
"There’s a reason those exist. Say it out loud."
The clerk looked at him for a moment. Then he took his glasses off entirely and folded them, and Mataon revised his estimate of the man upward and did not enjoy it.
"Because a subject who arrives sick or starved is a loss to the claimant," he said. "It’s in the standing orders in almost those words. I’ve read them for twenty-two years and I’ve never once said them to a man’s face, and I’d rather you hadn’t asked."
"So would I."
"Yes." The clerk put the glasses back on. "The offer stands regardless. It’s a warm room and it’s free, and the reason it’s free doesn’t make the room colder."
Orvek wrote one line and held it up.
*Do the entitlements come out of a person’s price?*
The clerk read it. He was quiet for a good three seconds.
"They’re recorded against maintenance," he said. "I don’t know what’s done with the figure after that. I’ve never been told and I’ve never asked, and I’d like to say that’s because it isn’t my department."
Mataon’s own record took longer.
"Pending," the clerk said eventually. "Fourteenth of Sylphenia. Originating office—" he stopped, and read the seven characters again, and then went and got a second book from the shelf behind him and looked in that.
"Something wrong?"
"No. Yes." He came back. "You’re pending, so most of it doesn’t apply to you. No road allowance, no lodging, no medical. Pending isn’t an asset. It’s an intention."
"And the escort?"
"Not offered. You’re not worth escorting yet."
He said it without any edge at all. It was a fact about a column.
"What made you fetch the second book?"
The clerk hesitated, and Mataon watched a man decide how much of his working life he was willing to say aloud to a stranger before noon.
"I’ve been on this counter eleven years," he said. "I have taken in a great many instruments from that office and I have never once seen a subject walk in under one. They come by cart, in a group, with a carrier’s docket. Not on their own feet with a name they gave me themselves."
"And?"
"And I wanted to see whether there was a procedure for it." He closed the book. "There isn’t. So I’ll enter you under general presentation, and somebody at the central roll will make a note about me, and that’s fine. I’d rather be noted than guess."
***
They took the road east from Vellow Cross in the early afternoon. Deuna did not look like anything.
That was the part he had not prepared for. He had spent four months building it — a place with a colour to it, a wrongness you could point at from a ridge. What was there was ploughed fields, a hedge line, a man mending a gate, two children arguing over a bucket, and a road in better repair than the Marches side.
"You were expecting worse," Barni said.
"I was expecting visible."
"Nothing that runs for four hundred years is visible. It’s just the weather."
They passed a milestone with a number on it, and a shrine, and a woman driving six geese with a stick, and at the crossroads a wooden board with public notices nailed to it, weathered and layered, the oldest ones papery under the newest.
Mataon stopped and read it. Of course he did.
Grain prices. A lost dog. A marriage. And on the left, in a column of its own, four narrow slips with a printed header and a handwritten line under each.
*Classification confirmed. Entered by order.*
Four names. One of them was a child’s, or at least the age given was nine. Barni sat down beside the post and did not read it.
He stood in front of it for a while. Somebody had nailed the newest one up straight and centred it, taking care.
"Say it," Barni said.
"It’s a noticeboard. It’s the same board as the grain prices." His voice came out level and he was distantly proud of that. "It’s not hidden. It’s not shameful. It’s between a lost dog and a wedding, and somebody straightened it before they left."
"Yes."
"How do you audit that?"
"You don’t," said Barni. "Not that. You audit the office that printed the header."
[Border crossing recorded — Vellow Cross, 1 Ravenmark 334 A.Z.]
[Entered under general presentation. No procedure of record for self-presenting subjects.]
[Subject: Orvek — entitlements offered: road allowance, lodging, medical, escort]
[Subject: Mataon Gaael — status pending; entitlements not applicable]
[Note: pending is not an asset. It is an intention.]
[Level 30 → Level 31]
[Stat points available: +3]
[Basis: an offered kindness read to its source without refusing the room]
[END +1 · PER +1 · WIL +1]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 29 · INT 36 · PER 37 · WIL 40]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 127]
[Appearance lapses: 58 days]
He allocated the points walking. He had never done that before, and he did not stop to read the window twice.
That night they slept in a hedge because the free room was free for one of them, and Orvek would not take it, and Mataon did not argue with him about it, and Barni complained about the hedge for forty minutes with real feeling and then went to sleep before either of them.
Some time after midnight, Almina said, "You are angry."
"I’m making a list."
"Of what."
"Of every place today where somebody was kind and it cost them nothing, because the kindness was already budgeted." He watched the sky. "The clerk. The straightened notice. The free room. Nobody I met today was cruel. Not one. And forty-four people in my valley are on a board somewhere between a dog and a wedding."
"And what does the list do?"
"It gives me somewhere to put it that isn’t the clerk."
Almina was quiet for a moment.
"That is the correct place," she said. "Keep it there. It is much easier to hate a man than a header, and the header is what you came for."