Chapter 78: What a Man Takes
Orvek packed on the twenty-fourth, and it took him about four minutes.
Mataon watched from the doorway because he had not been invited in and had come anyway. A blanket. A second shirt. Flint. A wedge of hard cheese Isbet had put on the table without saying anything about it.
Then the slate, and the stone knife, and nothing else.
"No staff?"
Orvek shook his head once.
"You’ve carried that staff since the refuge."
Orvek picked up the slate, wrote three words, and turned it round.
*A staff is a weapon.*
"It’s a walking stick."
Orvek wiped it and wrote again.
*To me. Not to them.*
He stood the staff against the inside wall, where it had been since the day he walked in, and did not look at it again.
Souk said no on the twenty-fifth, and she said it before anybody asked.
She came to the sick-house with the map rolled under her arm and put it on the table and unrolled it, and there were sixteen new pins in it since the meeting on the flat.
"I’m not coming."
"Nobody asked you to."
"Somebody was going to, in about a day and a half, and I’d rather not have it in the room." She flattened the corner of the map with the heel of her hand. "I’m no use in Deuna. I don’t have the language, I’ve never worked their registries, and my face is the only asset I’ve got and it stops working the moment somebody there writes it down."
Edrin said, "And here?"
"Here I am four days from a man who buys a particular paper and has stopped buying it." She tapped the band. "I’ve got a stationer who will not talk to me, in a way that told me everything, and I’ve got sixteen places in this circle where a person could live for nineteen years without being interesting. Give me the ninety days and I’ll give you a name."
"You might not get one."
"I might not get one." She rolled the map back up. "But if I go with you I definitely don’t, and then we’ve spent two people and learned nothing, and I’d have gone because it felt better than staying."
She said it steadily and she was not looking at anybody.
Later that evening Mataon found her in the back room with the pins out and re-sorted into a line on the table, all sixteen, and she was not doing anything with them. She was just sitting with her hands flat on either side of them.
He did not say anything. He put a cup down where she could reach it and went out again.
Corvane’s rider came on the twenty-sixth with three lines and no seal.
*The quarterly return goes out on the first of Ravenmark. After that your notice is on the central roll and I cannot recall it. I have asked twice whether an office may withhold a foreign instrument from a return. The answer is that it may not. I did not expect a different answer and I asked anyway.*
Edrin read it twice.
"She asked twice."
"She asked twice," Mataon agreed.
"She knew the answer before she wrote the first letter."
"So did I, when I read the clause in her office in Frostmere. She asked anyway." He folded it. "Put it in the book."
"Which column?"
"Whichever one you’d put a kindness in."
Anser, without looking up, said the roll had no such column, and Edrin said then make one, and Kess said she would, and by the end of the week there was a page at the back of the second book with four entries in it and a heading in a nine-year-old’s handwriting.
***
They left at first light on the twenty-eighth.
There was no crowd. Hanne had asked people not to make one, on the grounds that a hundred and ninety people all saying goodbye properly will keep a man at a gate until noon.
So there were seven at the wall, and it had been arranged, and everybody knew it had been arranged, and that made it easier.
Tovan gave Orvek a strip of cured leather about as long as a forearm. "For the slate. So the edge doesn’t wear through your coat again."
Orvek turned it over twice and put it away without writing anything. From him that was a considerable speech.
Vezra had a small tin. "Salve. Your hands crack in Ravenmark and you never say."
Maelor said nothing at all. He put one hand flat on Orvek’s shoulder for about three seconds and took it away and walked off toward the forge, and did not look back, and Orvek watched him go the whole way.
Kess came last, with the second book under her arm as always, and she did not offer him anything.
"I’m not giving you a thing to carry," she said. "You said a staff is a weapon and I’ve thought about it and I think a gift is a debt. So I’m not giving you one."
Orvek looked at her.
"I read your line out this morning. Out loud, to the whole book, the way we do at month’s end." She had the flat administrative voice she used when she was holding something down. "Entry one hundred and eighty-eight. Orvek. Citizen. Unownable by charter, first line. It’s still there. It’ll be there on the first of Ravenmark and it’ll be there in ninety days and it’ll be there if you don’t come back, because I’m one of the two people who decide and I’ve already decided."
Orvek crouched down so his eyes were level with hers. It took him a while; the cold had got into his knee.
Then he wrote one word on the slate and held it up.
*Both.*
Kess read it, and nodded once, and did not cry until they were about forty paces down the road, and Hanne, who had been standing behind her for exactly that reason, put a hand on her shoulder and let her.
***
The road to the Marches ran east through the neck of the valley and then north along the ridge, and they had done the first day of it four times that season.
Barni walked at the horse’s shoulder. Rhavena rode ahead, because she had the packs at the border and would ride as far as the line and no further, and had spent six days being furious about the second half of a document in a way that had settled into something quieter and worse.
By afternoon the valley was out of sight behind them.
"You’re doing the arithmetic," Barni said.
"I’m doing several."
"Do the loud one."
"Twenty days until the quarterly return. Sixty-two until the appearance lapses. Four days to the border, nine or ten to the office if the roads hold." He watched the ridge come up. "And ninety-one days since a man in that circle bought a year of paper."
"That last one isn’t a clock."
"No," Mataon said. "That one’s a man who knew before I did."
Barni was quiet for a while.
"You want to know what I’ve been thinking about instead of doors."
"Very much."
"I’ve been thinking that in eighteen months I have never once seen you walk toward something you were afraid of at this speed." The ears went flat and came back up. "You usually circle it. You read it twice. You put a spear across the narrow part and wait for it to come to you, and I have watched you do that in four separate places and it has kept us alive."
"And now?"
"Now you’re walking at it. And I’ve decided that’s not courage, and I’d like you to hear me say the other word."
"Say it."
"It’s guilt," Barni said. "He’s going because his name is in a book you built. You know that. And a man who’s walking fast because of guilt tends to arrive early and think late, and I have been that man, in a manner of speaking, and it cost me a great deal."
The road went on under them.
"Are you going to slow down?" Barni asked.
"No."
"No," Barni agreed, comfortably. "But you’ll know why you didn’t, and that’s most of it. Now stop looking at me like that, you’ll frighten the horse."
[Departure — 28 Pyrelon, 334 A.Z.]
[Party: Mataon Gaael (subject, Deuna Central Roll, pending) · Orvek (subject, Deuna Central Roll) · Barni]
[Escort: none beyond the Marches line, by decision of the roll]
[Register custody: Kess and Orvek, jointly. Contingency filed 20 Pyrelon.]
[Quarterly return: 1 Ravenmark — 20 days]
[Appearance lapses: 62 days]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 123]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 28 · INT 36 · PER 36 · WIL 39]
They made the ridge road before dark and camped where the wind came round the shoulder, and Rhavena built the fire badly on purpose so that Mataon would have to fix it and stop thinking for four minutes.
It worked. That annoyed him, and she knew it had worked, and neither of them said so.