The Night Before

Tansy had asked him who crossed, and he had not answered.

She sat on her bench with the lamp beside her and the blackthorn in her good fist, and she looked up at him, because there was nowhere else to look. He filled the lane, taller than the gatepost, taller than the hawthorn, a long white shape wound round and round with chain. Frost crawled out from his feet across the stones of the lane and up the bars of the gate, and whitened the latch. It climbed the hedge on either side leaf by leaf, with a small dry crackle, the sound of a fire in reverse.

The cold came off him in a slow wave. Her bad hand ached in its bandage as if it had been put back into the fire, and her breath smoked, and the lamp flame shrank down small and blue.

"Where is it," he had said. That was all.

She had not told him. She had asked him who crossed, as her grandmother had asked, and hers before her, and he had stood there with the frost running off him and made no answer. So they had stayed like that, an old woman on a bench and the thing in the lane, until the sky in the west went red.

Tansy saw it over his shoulder. The Cloudwall was a black line against the stars, and above it, low down, a glow came up the color of a forge seen through a door at night. It did not flicker. It stayed.

He turned his head slowly, as a man turns when someone calls his name across a field, and the chain on his shoulders hissed and shifted. He stood with his face to the west and the red glow on it. Tansy had kept the Waybook for sixty years and knew every mark in it, and she thought of a little cup on a crag, with a flame drawn over it. Scarrow, the book called it. She had read the name a hundred times and never known how to say it.

"Mine," he said.

The voice was hoarse and tired, the voice of a boy who has been out in the rain all day and wants his supper.

He turned from her gate and walked back up the lane the way he had come, with the chain dragging behind him on the stones and the frost going with him. She watched the white shape go up between the hedges and out onto the Stair road, and up the road into the dark, getting smaller, until the dark had him. She heard the chain long after she stopped seeing him.

Around her the hedges began to drip.

Tansy sat on the bench while the lamp came back up yellow and the owls started again in the orchard. She sat there until the stars went pale over the eastern hills and the first wren began its racket in the hawthorn. The whole time she looked west at the red place in the sky, until it faded toward morning and was gone.

That's the child, she thought. That's the child, ringing for him. What did that cost you, you stupid, stupid girl.

Then she got up, which took some doing, and went into the kitchen and sat down at the table across from the empty oak box on the dresser, and cried.

She had not cried in forty years, and she was out of practice. It was loud and ugly and it hurt her chest, and there was nobody to hear it but the clock, and she let it go on as long as it liked.

When it was done she washed her face at the pump and put on her good shawl. Then she took her stick and walked the mile down the lane to Dallbridge in the gray light. The whole valley had spent the night in the Bridge Inn with its children and its dogs, waiting to hear her scream.

They stared at her as if she were a ghost. Hobb Millson came round the bar with his mouth open, and Cob Hedley stood up so fast he knocked over a bench.

"He's gone," Tansy said. "Back up the Stair. Somebody called him."

"Called him?" Hobb said. "Who? Who'd be fool enough to call that?"

"My granddaughter." Tansy sat down on the nearest bench, because her hip had had enough. "Don't look like that. Get the lads up. I want the fire-lines in the lanes dug out again and fresh pitch in the pots by tonight."

"But you said he's gone."

"He is gone." Tansy looked at them all, the tired white faces, the children asleep on the tables. "And he'll come back one day, or something else will. Rebuild the lines anyway. And somebody give me a cup of tea before I fall off this bench."

On the morning after the beacon, Scarrow went to war.

At first it did not look like war, only like a great deal of work done all at once and in a hurry. Wren walked through the town that morning with the book against her ribs and her sling in her pocket, and everywhere she went someone was carrying something heavy.

The smithy was a cave at the foot of the crag, open to the street, and all three of its fires were roaring. Ewan Tull stood at the biggest anvil in a leather apron burned through in a dozen places, hammering out broad barbed arrowheads. Two boys at his elbow quenched them hissing in a trough and threw them into a basket.

"Gatewife!" he shouted, when he saw her. He did not stop hammering. "Come in, come in. Mind the sparks. Mind the boy. Mind everything."

"I've come to ask for something."

"Everybody's come to ask for something. Nobody's come to give me anything but a sore arm." He held up a finished head in his tongs and squinted at it. "What is it?"

She took out her sling and showed him. "Stones won't hurt the dead much. Iron might."

Ewan put down his hammer and took the sling, turning it over in his big burned fingers with real interest. Then he looked at her.

"You're good with this?"

"I kill crows with it. And rabbits. At forty yards."

"Crows." He laughed, a great warm bark that made the boys at the trough grin. "Our Madoc couldn't hit a crow with his bow till he was fourteen. Don't tell him I said." He handed the sling back. "Iron shot. Round, about so big, heavy enough to crack a skull. I'll pour you a bag of it tonight, when the arrows are done. Come back at dark."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Kill something with them." He picked the hammer up again. "And tell my sister I'm a good man. She's not speaking to me."

"Why not?"

"Because I spoke up for her son, and he spoke up for you." Ewan brought the hammer down. "In this family we don't forgive a thing like that for at least a week."

On the practice ground inside the north wall, Madoc was teaching Bracken to shoot a fire-arrow, and half the town had found a reason to watch. Morag had not sent her son to the goats after all, because the goats had been driven inside the walls with everything else. But she had not spoken to him either, and he had the look of a man who would rather have been with the goats.

Bracken drew the string back past his ear, past the point any Stayer bow was made for, and the tip of the bow split with a crack. The arrow leapt off sideways, burning, into a peat-stack six feet below a row of shrieking children, and two women ran up with buckets.

Bracken looked at the broken bow in his hands, and then at the smoking peat, and turned to Madoc with no expression on his face at all.

"I've killed men with a spear," he said, "that I liked better than this."

"You pull too hard."

"I'm told that often."

On a barrel by the wall, tearing linen into strips for bandages, Dorrit was laughing so hard that she had to put her basket down.

Pip disappeared for most of the second day and came back at dusk black to the elbows, with Ewan's two boys, Brin and Hal, trailing behind him like gulls behind a plow. All three of them smelled terrible and were very pleased with themselves.

"Drains," Pip said, dropping onto the floor of the loft. "The whole crag's full of them, like a cheese. There's tunnels under every street, cut in the rock, and they all run down and out through the south cliff. There's one comes out right under the wall walk, with a grating."

"The Survey cut them," said Iyene, from beside the loft's one lamp. "They always drained a place before they built on it. Show me."

She pushed a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal across to him. Pip knelt by the lamp and drew, quick and sure, as she had taught him: the crag a rough oval, the streets as lines, the drains dotted under them, with three mouths in the south cliff. Brin and Hal crouched on either side and pointed and argued. Iyene watched him the whole time.

"Good," she said, when he was done. "Sandover. Wash."

He went, grinning, and the boys went with him. At the ladder Hal turned round and looked at Wren with enormous eyes.

"Is it true you lit the Old Cup?"

"Yes."

"Da says it'll bring the Walker."

"Yes," Wren said. "It will."

Hal thought about this. "Da says he'll hit him with a hammer," he said, and disappeared down the ladder.

Merritt was in the healer's house, a warm room cut deep in the crag behind the moot hall, with a fire and six beds and a smell of wintergreen.

She was sitting up, and Wren had not seen her upright since the barn. Her face was gaunt, and her fair hair hung loose and lank, and her bad leg was strapped so tight with linen from hip to knee that she moved stiffly, all of a piece. There was a crossbow across her knees. She was winding it slowly with her teeth set, then letting the string back down, and winding it again.

"They told me you were dying," Wren said.

"I was. I got bored of it." Merritt got the string back to the latch and held it there, breathing hard. Sweat stood on her lip. "I can't pull a bow. Can't lift a sword over my head. But I can wind this, if I take my time. And I can shoot it lying down on a wall, if somebody props me up."

"Dorrit won't let you."

"Dorrit's not my sergeant." Merritt let the string down again. "Fenn held that gap with me, at the Ice. I watched them drag him under. I'm not lying in a bed when they come over the wall, and you can tell your cousin that from me, and duck when you do it."

Wren sat on the end of the bed.

"You lit a fire," Merritt said. "They say it was the size of a church."

"Bigger."

"Did it hurt?"

Nobody had asked her that. Iyene had asked whether it worked, and Dorrit had asked what it cost and then held her, but nobody had asked whether it hurt.

"No," Wren said. "It just took something. It didn't hurt."

"Well. That's the worst sort." Merritt began to wind the crossbow again. "Hand me those bolts, will you. Iron heads. I want to look at them."

On the third night Wren could not sleep again.

It was very late. The loft was full of breathing: Pip snoring small and whistling through the gap in his teeth, Bracken snoring large, Dorrit talking in her sleep in a cross voice about onions. Wren lay and looked at the rafters and thought of the Chainman somewhere on the road, walking toward her. The Stayer smokes had seen nothing yet, and that was worse than seeing something.

She got up and went out, and up the stair to the wall.

The night was cold and clear. Up on the crag the beacon still burned without feeding, a steady tower of flame day and night. The whole town slept under its light with the black wall lit orange on its inner face. The Stayer on the east corner nodded to her. Wren walked north along the wall walk toward the dark end, where the wall met the rock and the beacon path went up.

There was a watch-tower there, a squat round turret with a door onto the wall, and the door was half open. There was a light inside, and two voices. She knew both of them before she understood a word, and she stopped in the shadow of the parapet.

"—a Warden's duty," Alder was saying. "It is the one duty. My order exists to keep the binding. We have done nothing else since the Frost. We lit a candle and we watched it. That is all we are."

"I know what your order is."

"Then you know I have every right to ask. You carry orders from the King. You have carried them since Merrow. You opened them on the rim of the gorge, and you have been a different woman since."

Iyene said nothing. Wren heard the creak of a leather coat, as someone sat down or stood up.

"I have known you less than a month, Iyene. I have watched you fight, and watched you bury your men, and I do not doubt you. But I will not walk into the Hall of Cael Meddan beside you without knowing what you mean to do when we get there."

"When we reach the Hall," Iyene said, "the Crown's instruction is to bind him again. The old way."

It was quiet in the turret. Wren could hear the beacon roaring faintly on the summit above.

"What old way?" Alder said.

"Ask your founders."

"My founders are three hundred years in their graves."

"Then ask their papers. Ask your College. Ask anybody but me." Iyene's voice was very tired. "I've told you what my orders say. I've not told you what they mean, and I'm not going to, tonight or any night. Go to bed, Warden."

"Iyene—"

"Go to bed."

Wren went back along the wall walk fast and quiet, before either of them could come out and find her there.

She did not go to bed. She climbed into the loft, crossed the floor between the sleepers, knelt down by Dorrit and put her hand over her cousin's mouth. Dorrit woke all at once with her eyes wide and her fists up, saw who it was, and went limp.

"Gods' teeth," she hissed, when Wren took her hand away. "I nearly broke your nose."

"Come outside."

They sat on the stair outside the loft door, wrapped in one blanket, with the beacon throwing its light down the street below them. Wren told her in a whisper, word for word, as near as she could get it.

Dorrit listened. When it was done she chewed her lip.

"The old way," she said at last.

"That's what she said."

"That's a thing a man says," Dorrit said, "right before he sells you a lame horse." She pulled the blanket tighter. "What did Alder say?"

"He didn't know. He asked her."

"And she wouldn't tell him."

"No."

"Rot it." Dorrit looked down the street at the black wall and the orange light on it. "Do we tell the others? Do we tell Bracken?"

"He's hers. Eighteen years. You'd be asking him to pick."

"I know how long he's been hers." Dorrit's jaw set. "Pip?"

"He's hers too."

"Then it's us."

"It's us," Wren said. "And we watch her. And when we get there, we'll see what the old way is."

"I don't like it."

"You don't like anything."

"I like plenty. I like beer, and I like sleeping, and I liked Iyene Sath until about a minute ago." Dorrit leaned her head on Wren's shoulder. "She's saved our lives four times, Wren."

"I know."

"I hate this."

"I know."

They sat there until the cold drove them in.

On the fourth day nothing came. The smokes went up from the lookout cairns at dawn and noon and dusk, and every one of them said the same: nothing on the road, nothing on the moor. Scarrow had done everything it could do. The pitch was up on the wall in pots, and the fire-pits in the gate-court were full to the brim with heather and peat and pitch. Ewan had made arrowheads until his arm gave out, and a bag of iron shot for Wren's sling that weighed as much as a small dog. There was nothing left to do but wait, and nobody in Scarrow was any good at waiting, so Old Senna called a dance.

It was held in the moot hall. Every lamp in the town was lit, the benches were dragged back to the walls, and the peat fire was built up high. People came in from the wall in their iron and their furs and stood around the edges looking uncertain, as if a dance were an odd thing to do the night before you died.

Then Senna sat down on her stool by the fire, took out her fiddle, and looked across at Wren.

"All of it," she said. "Both halves. You start."

Wren played the first half, her half, the Old Reel, bright and quick and strange, with the turn in the middle. Her fingers knew it and had always known it, and she had stopped trying to remember where they learned. At the top of the phrase, where it had always stopped in Dall and the whole Bridge Inn would stop mid-step and roar, she did not lift her bow. She held the last note. Senna came in under it with the second half, low and dark and stamping, and the two halves met in the middle and turned into one tune.

Before the tune came round again, somebody at the back called out, "Give us a Gatefolk song, then!" Wren laughed and shook her head. They kept calling, so she played the Dall harvest tune instead and sang the verse Hobb bawled every year when the last load came in.

Bring it home, bring the last load home,
with the sheaf and the sickle and rake;
there's cloud on the Stair and a nip in the air,
and there's ale for the reapers' sake.

The Stayers did not know it, and they cheered it anyway, and then Senna struck up the Reel again and they danced.

They danced as people dance when it may be the last time. Stayer men in iron rings swung Stayer women off their feet, and children danced underneath them, dodging. Ewan Tull danced with his sister Morag, who had not smiled in four days. In the middle of the second time through, Wren saw Morag throw her head back and laugh at something he said. Pip danced in a ring with Brin and Hal and a crowd of other children. He got his feet tangled and fell over and was trodden on, and laughed so hard he could not get up. Merritt had been carried in on a chair and set against the wall, and she beat time on its arm.

The third time through, Senna nodded at Wren and played on alone.

Wren lowered her fiddle and found Madoc Tull standing in front of her.

"Gatewife," he said.

"That's not my name."

"I know. I've not been told the other one properly." He held out his hand. "Will you dance, or will you stand there with your fiddle all night like a Gatefolk?"

"I am Gatefolk."

"Aye. It's a pity. You play like a Stayer."

She put the fiddle in its case and took his hand. He danced as he shot, fast and light and without any fuss, and he did not tread on her feet once. She was out of breath in a minute. She had not danced at a dance since she was fifteen, because in Dall she was always the one playing. She had forgotten what it was to be in the middle of it, with the floor shaking and the room spinning past.

"Wren," she said, on a turn, when he put his head near hers to hear.

"What?"

"My name. It's Wren."

"I know," Madoc said. "I heard your cousin shout it at you. Twice." He swung her round. "I like Gatewife better."

Across the hall, Dorrit and Bracken were arguing.

Wren could not hear what about, but she could see it. Dorrit had her hands on her hips, and Bracken stood in front of her saying something short. Dorrit said something long, and Bracken said something shorter, and Dorrit threw up her hands and turned to go. Then Bracken put out one huge hand and caught hers and pulled, quite gently, and she came round in a turn she had not expected and found herself dancing.

She was so surprised she forgot to be angry. Bracken danced very well, like a soldier who had been made to go to a great many officers' weddings and had taken the dancing more seriously than the officers. Dorrit's mouth fell open, and then she started to laugh, and then she stopped arguing altogether and danced with him. She did not stop when the tune stopped, or when Senna started it again.

Spinning past, Wren saw Iyene standing by the door with her arms folded, watching Pip on the floor with his ring of children, and her face was soft. It changed when she saw Wren looking, and she nodded, crisp and polite, and looked away.

The tune went round and round, and the fire roared up, and outside the beacon burned on the crag. The hall was full of heat and light and the stamp of feet, and for as long as the tune lasted there was nothing in the West but Rudge's Reel.

It was midnight when it stopped.

It stopped all at once, with Senna's bow coming off the strings in the middle of a phrase. She sat with her head lifted and her old eyes wide. Then Wren heard it too, faintly, through the rock of the hall: a long, rising, wavering sound from outside.

The dancers stood where they were in the middle of the floor. Somebody opened the great door, and the sound came in with the cold.

It was the baying of hounds. It came from the north, beyond the river, and then from the east, down the valley road, and then from the south across the water-meadows. The valley below the crag was full of it, rising and falling and going on and on. Wren had heard it before, from the ruined hut on the Stair, two nights before Ash and Tolly died.

Then, over the hounds, from somewhere out in the dark, one long clear note answered them.

A horn.