The Empty Kingdom

On the first morning after the gorge they walked down out of the rowans and into an orchard, and Pip stopped dead and said a word that made Dorrit clip his ear. Wren did not blame him; she nearly said it herself.

The orchard went down the hillside in front of them as far as she could see. The trees had been planted in rows long ago, and the rows could still be made out, though the trees had grown huge and wild and leaned together overhead like old men talking. Every one of them was loaded with small red and gold apples, hung so thick that the boughs bent down to the grass, and under them the windfalls lay in drifts. They had lain there in drifts, Wren thought, every autumn since the Frost, and rotted, and fed the grass, and come again. The air under the trees was warm and brown and humming with wasps, and it smelled so strongly of apples and cider that it made her eyes water.

"Who planted all this?" said Pip.

"Somebody who meant to come back," said Bracken.

Barrow did not care who had planted it. He put his head down and began to eat, and would not be moved, and Merritt, tied on his back, laughed weakly and said to leave him, he'd earned it.

They filled every bag they had, and Dorrit filled her apron and her hat. Pip ate until he was sick behind a tree, then came back pale and grinning and ate another. Even Iyene took one and ate it walking, core and all, in small neat bites.

Wren ate one because Dorrit pushed it into her hand. It was sharp and sweet and cold from the night, and when she had finished it she threw the core away and walked on.

That was the West. Wren had thought it would be ice, because everyone in Dall said so, and instead it was autumn.

The land went down in long gold folds from the foot of the mountains, and the old road went down with it. It was a real road here, the King's Road, broad and paved and running straight west, with grass between the stones and young birches pushing up through it in places. Every mile a Survey milestone stood at the roadside, a short square gray post with a rounded top, cut with road-marks. Iyene could read them. When Pip wanted to know what they said, Alder told him at length, and Pip was sorry he had asked.

On either side of the road lay the farms. Stone walls green with moss ran over the hills in long lines, and the fields between them had gone back to heather and hawthorn. The houses were gray stone like Fallowmere, with the thatch long gone and the roof-beams showing, and there were barns and sheepfolds and wells with no buckets. In one yard a plow stood where somebody had left it, rusted into a red lump, with a young ash tree growing up through the frame.

Nobody lived in any of it. There was no smoke, no dog barking, no cockerel, no bell. Deer grazed in the old fields and lifted their heads to watch the company go by without bothering to run, and ravens sat on the walls and said crawk without bothering to fly. Once, on the second afternoon, there were wolves on a ridge a mile to the north: four gray shapes in a line along the skyline, trotting parallel with the road and keeping pace.

"They're following us," said Pip.

"They're following the mule," said Bracken. "He smells like dinner."

Pip moved a little closer to Barrow and patted him. "Don't listen to him."

The wolves went away over the ridge at dusk, but that night they howled, far off and long, and Barrow stamped and blew in the dark, and nobody slept well.

Wren was not good company, and she knew it, and she could not help it.

It was the walking. When she walked there was nothing to do but think, and when she thought, she went looking for her mother's face. She did not mean to. She would be looking at the road, or at Barrow's ears, and then she would find she had gone looking again and found the cold gap there. Every time it was worse than the first time, and it made her want to hit something.

So she snapped. She snapped at Pip when he asked her how the book worked, and whether she could write a bridge over a river anytime she liked, and whether she could write him a house. She snapped at Alder when he started to tell her about the Survey roads, and he stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked at her and did not start again. She snapped at Bracken for walking too fast and at Iyene for walking too slow. Iyene said, "Noted, Keeper," and kept the same pace.

She did not snap at Merritt, who was too sick to snap at. Merritt rode on Barrow's back with her bad leg stuck out stiff and her face gray and sweating, making jokes that were not funny in a voice that got thinner every day. Dorrit changed the honey on her leg every morning and every night, and every morning and every night the red went a little farther up.

And for two days she did not snap at Dorrit.

They slept the second night in a way-house.

It stood by the King's Road at the top of a long rise, under an old beech tree, and it was the first building they had found with a roof. It was built of big stones without mortar, low and round-shouldered, with a chimney at one end, and the door was still on its hinges. Pip found that out by pushing it. It swung open with a long scream of rusted iron that sent every raven in the beech tree up into the air at once.

"Sorry," said Pip, to the ravens.

Inside there was a stone floor, a hearth, a stone bench along one wall, and three centuries of dead leaves. Dozens of marks were cut into the bench, where travelers had scratched their letters with knife-points. Wren ran her fingers over them. She could not read most of them, and one of them was a little picture of a fish.

Iyene stood in the doorway and looked back east along the road, toward the Cloudwall standing high and dark against the evening. Somewhere behind it, far up the gorge to the north, the Chainman was walking.

"Fire," she said.

Bracken looked up. "Sir?"

"He's beyond the Kestrel, hunting a crossing. He'll not find one tonight. Light a fire, Sergeant, before Mistress Fallowmere lights one under me."

It was the first fire in two nights. Bracken built it high, and the flames went roaring up the old chimney and found the birds' nests up there and burned them out in a shower of sparks. The heat came into the little room and into Wren's bones. Merritt lay close to the hearth on every blanket they had, with her eyes shut and her face turned to the warmth. Dorrit heated water in their one pot and cleaned the leg properly, with light to see by. When she had finished, her mouth was shut tight.

They ate apples roasted in the embers, the last of the hard bread, and a hare Wren had knocked down with her sling that afternoon. When they were full and warm and the fire had settled, Iyene set down her cup.

"Warden," she said. "I'd like to know what you are."

Alder had been half asleep in the corner. He opened his eyes.

"I beg your pardon?"

"At the gorge you spoke, and a cliff came down. Mistress Fallowmere says at Fallowmere you spoke, and a ring of fire went up round the yard. I have commanded this company for a week. I'd like to know what else you can do, and what it costs. I'd like to know before I need it."

"And after, at the steps, you looked like a man who'd been bled," Dorrit said. "I saw you. What does it take out of you?"

They were all looking at him now: Iyene with her arms folded, Bracken over his cup, Pip on his stomach by the fire with his chin on his fists. Wren looked at him too. She had been going to ask him on the rim, and then she had not wanted to know.

Alder sat up and took his time about it. He settled his cloak and laid his staff in his lap and cleared his throat, and Wren saw him get ready to give a lecture, and saw him decide not to.

"Very well," he said. "The Wardens keep the Words. You will have heard of it in Merrow, Captain, as a thing old men in libraries pretend to. It is not a pretense. There are Words in the old tongue, from before Meddan, that are not words for things. They are the things. A Warden who knows one can speak it, once, and what it names will happen."

"Once?" said Pip.

"Once. When I speak a Word, it is gone from me. I cannot say it again. I cannot remember it. I could not teach it to you if you held a knife to my throat, because I no longer know it. There is only a place in my head where it was." He glanced at Wren, and away. "The College gave me nine, one at a time, over forty years. I had spoken none of them until this August."

"Nine," said Iyene.

"Nine. I spoke Fire at Fallowmere, to save the yard. I spoke Breaking at the ravine. Those are gone." He counted them off on his long ink-stained fingers, and his voice did not shake. "I have seven left. Warding, which draws a line the dead cannot cross until the sun comes up. Holding, which will hold one creature where it stands for a few heartbeats. Waking, which can call a person back from the very edge of death. Opening, which opens any lock or gate or seal. Light, which blinds. Wind. And Silence."

The fire cracked.

"Seven," said Iyene at last.

"Seven."

"And each time you're as you were at the steps."

"Each time I am good for nothing for a day afterward, yes. I am seventy-one. It does not get easier."

"What's Silence do?" said Pip.

"I have never wished to find out."

"Then how d'you know it's any good?"

"Pip," said Dorrit.

"It's a fair question!"

"It is," said Alder. "And I don't know. I know what it is. I have never known what it is for."

Iyene looked at him across the fire, and Wren could see her fitting it into whatever map she carried in her head.

"Seven," she said again. "You'll tell me before you spend one, Warden."

"I will tell you if there is time. At the gorge there was not." Alder leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. "I would like to be clear, Captain, since we are being clear. I am not a weapon. I am an old man with seven words left to say, and when they are gone, I shall be an old man with none."

"I've served with worse," said Bracken. "Served with a lieutenant once who had only the one word, and it was 'Charge.'"

"What happened to him?" said Pip.

"He said it."

Pip laughed. Merritt, by the fire, laughed too, a thin sound, and then coughed. Even Alder smiled with his eyes shut.

Wren did not laugh. She sat with her back against the old bench and her arms around her knees and looked at the fire, thinking that two of his were gone already, in less than a month, and the Chainman still walking. Nobody had asked about hers. She had spent one, and she did not know what the next would cost her, or what was left that the book would want: her mother's voice, or Tansy, or Dorrit, or the Old Reel.

She got up and went outside, and stood in the dark under the beech tree until the cold drove her in.

The quarrel came on the third day, at the farmhouse.

It was a big farm, bigger than Fallowmere, a square of gray buildings round a yard with a well in the middle and a great barn on one side. The house had kept most of its roof. Iyene sent Bracken and Pip to look through it for anything worth having: iron, a pot, a blanket that had not rotted. Dorrit went because she wanted to look, and Wren went because Dorrit did.

Inside it was dim and dry and smelled of mice. There was a long table in the kitchen, and a bench, and a dresser with the plates still on it, gray with dust, and by the cold hearth there was a cradle. Nobody said anything about the cradle.

Pip went up the ladder to the loft and came down again a few minutes later, quieter than he had gone up, with something in his hand. It was a little wooden horse, no longer than his palm, carved out of some pale wood and painted red once, though most of the paint had worn away. One ear had been broken off and glued back on, a little crooked.

He turned it over in his fingers.

"There's a bed up there," he said. "Little one. It was under the pillow."

He looked at it a moment longer. Then he put it in the pocket of his coat, carefully, and buttoned the pocket, and went out into the yard without another word.

Dorrit watched him go with wet eyes.

"Poor little mite," she said. "Whoever she was. Packing up in a hurry, and forgetting her horse. Crying for it all the way over the mountains, I bet." She wiped her eyes with her wrist. "Your mam had a horse like that, did you know? Granna told me. Your mam had a wooden horse she took to bed till she was nine, and she wouldn't be parted from it, and one day the dog..."

"Don't," Wren said.

"What?"

"Don't talk about her."

Dorrit stared at her. "I'm only saying..."

"Well, don't. Don't say. You don't get to tell me things about my mother. She wasn't yours."

It came out of her too fast and too loud, and it hung there in the dusty kitchen, and she could not take it back.

Dorrit's face went red, and then pale.

"No," she said. "She wasn't mine. Mine's in the burying ground at Dallbridge with my da, and I never saw either of them, because I was four months old. So I'll grant you that, Wren. She wasn't mine." She took a step forward. "But I'm sick of you. I'm sick to my back teeth of you. You've been a cow for three days."

"I have not..."

"You have! You've been a cow to Pip, who worships you. You've been a cow to Alder, who's old and gray and spent half of himself getting us over that gorge. You've been a cow to every one of us, and we've all been walking round you on tiptoe, because poor Wren, poor Wren's lost something. Well, poor Wren's not the only one. Fenn's lost everything. He's standing in the ice up there with those poor dead folk, or worse. Merritt's going to lose her leg, and if I'm unlucky she'll lose the rest. And you're sulking."

"I'm not sulking!"

"You are. You're sulking because the book took something off you, the way Granna said it would, the way you knew it would when you picked up that pen. I watched you. You knew. You did it anyway, and it was brave, and it saved all our necks. And now you've got to carry it." Dorrit's voice cracked. "So carry it. Don't make the rest of us carry you."

Wren could not speak. Her throat had shut.

"And I'll talk about your mam if I want to," said Dorrit. "She tucked me in too."

She turned round and walked out of the kitchen and across the yard. Wren heard her go past Bracken, and heard Bracken say something, and heard Dorrit tell him to shut up, and heard him shut up.

Wren stood a long time in the dark kitchen, with the dusty plates and the empty cradle.

All that afternoon they left her alone.

They walked on west through the long gold light. At a Survey stone Iyene checked her compass and her old map and turned them off the King's Road, south-west across country along an overgrown track between walls. Dorrit walked at the front with Bracken, and Wren walked at the back with Barrow and Merritt.

"She's right, you know," said Merritt, from the mule's back.

"I know she's right."

"I'm only saying. In case you didn't." Merritt shifted her leg and hissed. "I've had sergeants shout at me like that. It's always the ones who like you. The ones who don't just let you fall in the ditch."

In the late afternoon they came to a stream, broad and quick over brown stones, where there had once been a ford and a footbridge; the footbridge was gone. Bracken waded in first, testing the bottom with his spear, and came back.

"Knee-deep," he said. "Cold. Stones slippy."

He picked up Pip under one arm and carried him across before Pip could object, set him down on the far bank, and came back to lead Barrow over. Then he came back again and stood in front of Dorrit, dripping.

"Mistress Fallowmere."

"No."

"I've not said anything yet."

"You were going to offer to carry me. And I'm saying no."

"I was going to offer my arm."

"And I'm saying no to that too." Dorrit hitched up her skirts and stepped into the water. "I've been crossing streams since before you were weaned, Sergeant."

"I doubt that, Mistress. I'm nineteen years older than you."

"Well, I've been crossing them longer than you've been rude, then, and that's saying something."

She strode out into the stream and got halfway before her foot went out from under her on a green stone, and she went over sideways with a shriek.

Bracken caught her. Wren did not see him move. One moment he was on the bank, and the next he was in the water up to his knees with Dorrit held up against his chest and her skirts streaming, and neither of them was saying anything. They stayed like that longer than they had to.

On the far bank, Pip put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Dorrit came back to life. "Put me down, you big oaf."

"In the water, Mistress?"

"On the bank! On the bank, obviously!"

He carried her to the bank and set her down very carefully, as if she were a crate of glass, and went back for Alder. Dorrit stood wringing out her skirts, red in the face, and did not look at anybody. Pip, grinning from ear to ear, opened his mouth, and Iyene said, "Sandover," and he shut it.

Waiting her turn on the near bank, Wren found she was smiling. It hurt a little, like a cramp going out of a muscle.

That night they camped in the lee of a wall, and Bracken made a small fire in a hollow of stones. Wren went and sat down beside Dorrit, who was grinding herbs in a cup with the handle of her knife and did not look up.

Wren held out an apple. It was the best one she could find in the bag, red all over, with no bruise. Dorrit looked at it, and then at her.

"Is that an apology?"

"It's an apple."

Dorrit took it. She turned it over. "It's a good apple," she said.

"I'm sorry, Dor."

"I know you are."

"I said a rotten thing."

"You did. I said a few myself." Dorrit bit into the apple and chewed. "I'll say more, I expect. We're not done with this road yet."

They sat together and watched the fire. At last Wren said, very low, so the others would not hear, "Tell me what she looked like."

Dorrit stopped chewing.

"I've got the voice," Wren said. "I can hear her. I've got the shawl, and her hands on the fiddle, and I know about the stings. I've just not got her face. I go to look and it's not there. So tell me."

Dorrit put the apple down. She thought about it, frowning into the fire, with her lip between her teeth. Then she began to talk, slowly, looking at the flames and not at Wren.

"She had a wide face. Wider than yours. Freckles all over it, summer and winter. Dark hair, like yours, only she wore it up with pins, and it was always coming loose. When she laughed her nose went sideways. Her front teeth had a gap in them that she hated, and she'd put her hand over it when she smiled, only she forgot, mostly. She had your eyebrows. Straight, like they were drawn with a stick. And when she was tuning the fiddle she frowned at it, she frowned at it like it had said something rude to her, exactly like you do." She stopped. "That's all I've got. I was eleven."

Wren listened to all of it and put each piece in its place: the freckles, the gap, the nose, the eyebrows. They sat in her head like words on a page, and they did not make a face. She had known they wouldn't.

"Thank you," she said.

Dorrit took her hand and held it, and they sat like that, watching the fire, until Iyene told them to sleep.

On the fourth evening they came to the barn.

It stood at the top of a wild orchard on a slope running down to a stream, and it was the only shelter for miles. It was a long roofless box of stone open to the sky, with a great arched doorway at the west end and the wreck of a hayloft along the north side. The orchard came right up to its walls. The trees were thick with apples here too, and the grass under them was pale in the dusk.

Merritt was worse. She had been worse all day, and in the afternoon she had stopped making jokes, and at the last halt she had not known where she was and had called Iyene "Mother." The red on her leg had gone up past the hip, and her skin was so hot that Dorrit could feel it through the blanket.

They carried her into the barn and laid her against the east wall, out of the wind. Dorrit sat beside her and changed the honey and looked at the leg, and did not talk to anyone. Iyene crouched by them a while, speaking to Dorrit in a low voice, and then went to the doorway and stood looking south-west into the dusk, the way they would go tomorrow.

"How far?" Wren asked her.

"Two days. If we push."

"Can she last two days?"

Iyene did not answer.

Bracken took the first watch, and Wren sat up with him because she could not sleep. They sat in the great arched doorway with their backs against the jamb. A moon nearly full rode high over the orchard, laying long silver bars across the grass between the black shadows of the trees, and the fallen apples glinted in the light. It was cold enough that she could see her breath.

Bracken sat with his spear across his knees and had not spoken since the moon came up. He was not a man who talked for the sake of it, and Wren liked that about him tonight.

"She'll be all right," Wren said. "Merritt."

"Aye."

"You don't think so."

"I think your cousin's the best field surgeon I've seen in eighteen years, and I've seen a few." He shifted the spear. "And I think the Captain'll carry Merritt the last mile on her back, if it comes to it. She's done it before, for me."

"She carried you?"

"Dragged me. Two miles, through the salt marsh at Brenn. I was bigger then, too." He almost smiled. "Don't tell Pip. He thinks I was born like this."

Wren laughed, and put her hand over her mouth, and looked back into the barn. Nobody had woken. Merritt was muttering, and Dorrit was asleep sitting up against the wall beside her, with her head on her chest.

When she looked back, Bracken had sat up. He was looking down the orchard, and his hand had closed on the spear-shaft.

Down among the trees, in the black shadows between the silver bars, there were lights. They were small and pale, and they were moving, four of them and then six. They drifted slowly between the trees, rising and falling a little, as if people were walking up through the orchard with lanterns held at head height. They were coming toward the barn.

"Torches," Wren whispered. Her heart leaped. "Bracken, there's people..."

He put his hand on her arm. His grip was very hard.

The lights came out of a band of shadow into a bar of moonlight, and for a moment Wren could see them clearly.

There was nothing in their hands. The pale lights were their faces: gray-blue and blank, with eyes as white as milk, and so pale that they caught the moonlight and gave it back. They came up through the apples in a slow uneven line, and the frost whitened the grass where they walked.

At the front of them, taller than the rest, came a man in a Crown rider's coat.