Chapter 73: EAST
The boy came at sixth bell.
He came up the stairs quietly. The small cat came up behind him. Aiden was at the bench with the kit bag packed and the relic in it.
The boy had a slip in his hand.
"My master sends this."
Aiden took it. Academy seal. White-blue wax. A field rotation slip. The second in eight days. The Academy did not issue two that close together. The proctor had gone and got one issued.
He read it.
Lower Ashwood marches. The same region. Departure: first bell tomorrow. Duration: open.
Open. Not four days. Open.
"He said to tell you the duration is open because the rotation out there does not have a length yet. He said you would know what he means."
"I know what he means."
The boy stood at the door. The small cat went to Aiden’s boot and sat. It had not been at the Academy long enough to forget the boot.
"He said the audit only reads paper," the boy said. "So he put you on paper too. You’ll be out on a rotation, logged, doing the work. When the chamber sits down with Vane’s report, it has to read your rotation log next to it. He said that doesn’t cancel the report. It means they can’t only look at the report."
"And."
"The ground he’s sending you to belongs to House Vane. He said you already knew that. He’s sending you anyway because you can read that ground and still get off it." The boy stopped. "He said to go now. He said in a while there won’t be anything left out there to read."
Aiden looked at the boy.
"Your master read your notebook."
"He read it. He burned the page with the prints on it. He wrote a new page without them. Then he sent me here with a slip that makes me your runner for the rotation."
"You’re coming."
"He said I’ve written it down twice already, so it should be me writing it the third time. If three different people write it in three different books, nobody believes any of them. If one person writes it three times, that’s a record."
"He said one more thing," the boy said.
"Say it."
"If I see it, I do what he told me the first time. Notebook in my coat, walk back, don’t look at it twice." The boy did not move. "He said you won’t do that. He said he’s sending you because you won’t. Then he said that’s how men like you get killed out there."
Aiden looked at him a moment.
"Eat something," he said. "First bell is early."
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They left at first bell.
The road was the road. The canal plain, the first rise, the basin where the burn started. The bends of the hedges had not moved. The first rise still put the wind on his left cheek at the turn.
Six days ago he had walked this road with his standing confirmed and a week to keep it.
This morning he was not leaving anything behind. The relic was in the kit bag. The desk was closed and would read Vane’s paper whether he stood in front of it or not. The lane was safer with him gone than with him on it.
He was walking toward something this time.
He walked faster than he had six days ago. The chest did not catch on the first rise or the second. The legs did not have the heaviness in them they had carried two months back. The kidneys were clear. Whatever they had been holding, they had stopped holding it.
Nyx hated the road.
There was no dark on it. The burn plain ran flat under an open sky, and the only shade between the gate and the marches was what his coat made.
It stayed in the coat until the coat got hot. Then it came out, looked at the country, and went back in.
Somewhere past the canal it gave up on the coat. Aiden felt it go through the canvas of the kit bag without opening it and settle on top of the wrapped poison.
He stopped and got it out.
An hour later it was under the boy’s hat.
The boy stood very still with his hands out from his sides.
"It’s on my head."
"It is."
"Is it staying there."
"Until it finds somewhere darker."
The boy walked the next mile without moving his neck.
The cat watched the hat for half a mile. Then it went up the boy’s back in three steps and pushed its head under the brim.
Nyx bit it on the nose.
The cat came out backwards, fell off the boy, hit the road, and was gone under a hedge before the dust settled.
The boy had not moved. "What happened."
"Nyx bit your cat."
"It’s not contracted."
"It got bitten anyway."
The boy picked up his hat, put it back over Nyx, and shook his head. "Poor cat."
Aiden’s laugh was out before he could stop it. "Your spot. Fine."
The cat came back out of the hedge and walked well behind them for the next mile, rubbing its face with one foot every few steps.
Nyx did not move again for the rest of the road.
Miasma rode the top of the kit bag with her head pointed east. She did not turn it once between the gate and the marches.
They reached the burn line at fourth bell, with the light still on the ridge.
The camp the rotation had used was cold. Two days empty, and rain had stood in the fire ring long enough to grey the ash. The latrine trench had been filled and stamped flat, which was the senior’s rule and nobody’s habit.
Forty men had slept here. The ash was still pressed down in squares where the tents had stood. The spring ran out from under the stone twenty paces north.
He did not make camp.
He went down to the lower trail with an hour of light left. The boy came with him. The cat came with the boy.
He read the ground.
The mother’s trail was there, fresher than it had been three days ago. The pads had come down on damp earth and held their edges, so she had crossed after the last rain and not before it. The three sets of small prints were there too, still running in the space between her front and hind paws.
One set had a shorter stride than it had the last time. It had also stopped walking straight. It drifted a hand’s width off her line and corrected, drifted and corrected, the whole length of the trail he could see.
And there was a new thing on the ground.
A stake.
Squared timber, a hand-span across. He had walked this trail on the rotation, and there had been nothing on it. The cut end was still raw and yellow. Everything else on the ground was months black.
There was a brand burned into the top. House Vane. The same mark he had seen on a token under a handler’s shirt, and on the wax of the paper sitting in the closed desk.
He followed the trail east to see if there were more.
A second stake forty paces on. A third past that. A fourth where the ground began to lift toward the upper slope, and that one sat a stride out of line with the other three. Whoever drove them had stepped the distance rather than measured it, and had not come back to check.
He stood at the fourth and looked back along all four.
They made one side of a square. The other sides ran up the slope, along it, and back down.
Inside the square were the exposed roots, the ground the mother’s trail crossed, and the den.
Three days. I was on this trail three days ago, and the ground was clean. They came out here inside these three days and drew a box around a den with a mother and three young inside it.
Miasma came up onto his shoulder and put her head beside his ear. She had faced east the entire time. She was not facing east now. She was facing the stake.
He looked at the boy.
"How long after the stakes."
"My master logged a charter working once. The stakes went in, and the men came weeks later. He said there’s no date on it. They come when the house is ready."
"These stakes are fresh."
"These went in this week." The boy’s voice had gone careful. "So I don’t know how long you have. My master’s never seen stakes this new on ground with something already living inside them."
The cry came off the upper slope with the setting sun.
It was thinner than it had been three days ago. It broke in the middle and came back lower, the sound a thing made when it did not have the air to finish.
Something answered it further up the slope. The answer was smaller.
She had abandoned her den once when the men came for the first time. She had abandoned it again when they came back with the stakes. Above her was the upper slope. Below her was a charter line. That was all the ground she had left.