For Will Rudge

Behind her, the saw began. Wren didn't turn round. She heard it, and she heard Bracken breathe in hard through his nose, and she heard Dorrit talking under the rasp of the blade in a low steady voice. "There. There. You're all right. You great lump, you're all right. Madoc, if you let go of that arm I'll take yours off next."

"Don't take the wrong one," Bracken said. His voice was thick.

"I've half a mind to take both. Then you'd have to stop picking fights with walls. Hold him, Madoc."

"I'm holding him."

The saw went on longer than Wren could have believed. She put both hands flat on the lectern and looked at the book and at nothing else.

"Pip," Dorrit said. "The torch. Bring it here. Don't look."

There was a hiss, and a smell of scorched meat that went all through the cold room. Bracken said a word Wren had never heard, even from Dorrit. Then, after a moment, in a different voice, he said, "Smells like supper."

"Shut up," Dorrit said. "Shut up, you stupid, stupid man." She was crying. Her hands went on working. Wren could hear the linen tearing for the binding.

"Keep the ring," Bracken said. "On that hand. It was my father's. Don't let 'em bury it."

"I'll keep it. Hush. Lie back."

The page she had turned was covered. The ink had come up over both sides of the leaf, cramped and black, and on the next page it was still rising a line at a time. She could see the end of it now, near the bottom of the third page, where the writing stopped and left a space. The last letters of the signature were coming up out of the paper as she watched.

Across the chamber, the Chainman was walking toward her.

He had come in by the great door behind her, and Wren turned her head and kept both hands on the book. The arch stood far off across the floor in front of her, with its blank keystone. Iyene lay at the foot of the lectern on the door side, and a few yards to Wren's left Dorrit and Madoc knelt over Bracken on the stone. Out of the smoke by the doorway, the tall white shape came on.

He came slowly, and his chain dragged behind him over the frost with every link ringing on the stone. His cold ran ahead of him and was on her face already, the dry killing cold of the White with the smell of iron in it; he himself was still forty feet off. His face was turned toward her, toward the lectern and the book.

Madoc stepped out behind her, between the lectern and the door.

He had no arrow on the string, only his bow in one hand and nothing in the other. He stood a few yards out with his feet apart while the Chainman came on toward him.

"Madoc," Wren said.

"I know."

"You can't do anything."

"I know that too, Gatewife. I'm standing here anyway."

Pip had gone back to Iyene at the foot of the lectern, with her sabre across his knees. He looked up at the tall white shape coming toward them, his face blotched and wet, and he didn't move either.

The Chainman stopped a yard from Madoc without looking at him. He was looking past him at Iyene, lying against the lectern's foot with her eyes closed and frost in her hair. The chain hung from his shoulders and swung a little, and was quiet, while he looked at her.

Then he lifted his head to Wren.

"Book," he said.

It was the young man's voice, hoarse and ordinary, the one she had heard across the Kestrel Gorge, and it went through her. She had the pen in her hand. The last line of the signature had finished and lay black and done on the page. Her eye went to the top of it and caught on the first line and would not let go.

"Wait," she said to him. "It's about you. It's for you. Listen."

He didn't move. Wren read it aloud, and her voice shook on the first line and then steadied, because she needed it to. The page said:

For Will Rudge, chainman, of Cael Meddan.

My name is Wystan Fallowmere. I was Keeper of the Book, and one of the Seven. I am old now. I am writing this at a kitchen table, in a farmhouse at the foot of the Stair on the east side of the mountains. I have made it so that it can be read only in the Hall. That is the only place it will be any use.

Will, we took your name.

There were seven of us at the table, and I was the youngest. Oriel said the ward needed one name left off, and that it had better be a name nobody would miss. Somebody said the chainman. I don't remember who. I have tried for forty years to remember, so that it would not have been me. I put up my hand with the others.

You played at the Lamp and Ladder that night. I was there. I danced to your reel with a girl from Bridge Street, and when you finished you bowed to the room and knocked over your beer. I knew what we had decided that morning, and I didn't tell you. I have thought about that beer more than I have thought about anything.

Afterward we burned every paper with your name on it. I burned some of them myself.

Your daughter was four months old. I carried her over the Stair inside my coat, and she didn't cry once. Her name is Anwen. I have let her think it is Anwen Fallowmere, and I have raised her as my daughter. She has your hands. She hums your tune at the churn and doesn't know where she learned it, and I have never had the courage to tell her. She is married now, with a boy. She keeps bees on the hill behind this house.

To whoever of his blood reads this in the Hall: I wrote the binding first, in the Hall, on the page before the last. Then I wrote the Stair shut behind us on the last page, standing on the Stair, while the ink still answered my hand. Then I gave the book to Anwen's blood and to no other. Since then it will not stay for me. I did it so that one day his own blood might give him back his name. The book is his, and because it is his, it will take his name at the Roll.

My ink will not hold forever so far from the Hall. Three hundred years, perhaps. When it fails, he will wake.

I don't ask him to forgive me. I ask you to know whose book it is.

When the road opens, the book goes home. The book is his.

Wystan Fallowmere, who voted.

Wren stopped reading, because there was nothing more to read.

The chamber was very quiet. Behind her, even Bracken's hard breathing had stopped to listen.

"His daughter," Dorrit said from behind her. Her voice was hoarse. "Anwen. That's—Wren, that's the first name in the family register. Granna reads it out at Midwinter. Anwen Fallowmere, and then all the rest of them down to us."

"I know."

"She's his. We're his. You're—"

"I know, Dor."

Beside her, Alder had put his hand over his eyes. "Somebody said the chainman," he said, to nobody. "I have lit a candle to those seven every Midsummer of my life. I taught boys to bow to their names."

From the floor by Iyene, Pip said in a small cracked voice, "She had that Minute out every night since Coldharbour. By the fire. I thought she was reading her orders." He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

Wren looked up from the book at the Chainman. He hadn't moved while she read, but the chain had, shivering all down its length when she read the name Anwen, and then going quiet again.

She looked at his face, and this time she held it.

It was a long white face under the rime, and it was all wrong, too high up and too long in the jaw, stretched out of true by the cold. But the jaw was hers; she had seen it in Tansy's hand-mirror every morning of her life. The mouth was set the way Dorrit's set before she said something rude. And the hands hanging at his sides among the loops of chain were a young man's hands, long-fingered and blunt at the tips, with calluses on the fingertips of the left.

They were a fiddler's hands. She looked down at her own on the lectern, and back at his.

He lifted one of them and held it out to her, palm up, for something that was his and that he had been kept waiting for.

"Give it back," he said.

"Do you know what it is?" Wren said. "What you're asking for?"

He looked at her. His hand stayed out.

"It's your name. It says so. Will Rudge. Do you know it?"

"Taken," he said.

"Yes. They took it. Do you remember anything? Do you remember her? Anwen?"

He was quiet so long she thought he hadn't understood, and the chain clinked on him. Then he turned his head a little, toward the side of the room where Dorrit knelt with Bracken, and back to Wren, as if he were trying to find something in the air between them.

"Small," he said. "Warm. In the—" His free hand moved, a clumsy curve in front of his chest, the shape of something held in the crook of an arm. "Gone."

Behind Wren, Dorrit made a sound in her throat. "That's how he carried me," she said. "Like that."

"She didn't die," Wren said to him. "Wystan took her. He took her over the mountains. You heard it."

"Gone," the Chainman said again, as Cob Hedley said the name of a ewe he'd lost in the snow.

Then, very softly, he began to hum.

It was hoarse and uncertain, a voice that hadn't sung since before the Frost, but Wren knew it before the second bar. It was the Old Reel, the bright climbing first phrase that every child in Dall learned before their letters. He hummed it out of that long white face in the middle of the Roll Chamber as if he were humming it to someone small and warm in the crook of his arm.

He got four bars in, and lost it, and stopped.

"Mine," he said.

"I know," Wren said. "I know it is."

"Wren," Alder said.

He was standing beside her. He had been standing there all through the reading, she realized, one hand on the lectern and one on his staff. He looked older than she had ever seen him, with the Chainman's cold on his face and his lips blue.

"Wren. Listen to me. You know what it will cost."

"Yes."

"You can't know. Not yet. You've paid four times and every time it has been dearer. This is the greatest work of the road there is. It is the Roll. It is the ward the Seven made, the thing all of this was built to hold." He was speaking fast, not like himself. "It will take the dearest thing you have. It will take the thing you'd least think it could."

"I know what it'll take."

She did. She had known since she picked up the pen. Before, the book had always waited until she wrote, and then taken, and she had gone looking afterward and found the gap. Now she had the pen in her hand and nothing written, and already her fingers were cold to the wrist, and she felt the book reaching. It went past the bee-yard and the kitchen and the fiddle, past Tansy's face and Dorrit's laugh, which she had thought were the dearest things. It went past all of them and settled on something she had never thought of as a thing at all, because it had always simply been there.

Someone calling her in from the hives at dusk. Calling her by her name.

"Give me the night," Alder said. "An hour. There may be a way to word it that costs less. There may be something in the Survey's craft, in the old forms. Let me think. I have spent my whole life on this and I have never been let to think about the one thing that mattered, because I was lied to. Let me think now. Please."

"He can't wait an hour," Wren said.

"How do you know that?"

"Look at him."

The Chainman was shaking. It had started while she read, and she had not seen it for looking at his face, and now it was worse. His outstretched hand trembled, and the chain on him trembled and clinked, and the frost round his feet ran across the floor toward the lectern in white fingers. It had reached Iyene. It had reached the wall of names beside the arch and was climbing it, and where it climbed the names vanished under rime. The coals in the brazier by the lectern went dull, and then gray, and gave no heat.

"He's holding it back," Wren said. "The cold. He held it off Dor all the way across the White, and he's holding it off us now. He can't hold it long."

"Can't," the Chainman said. His hand shook. "Hold it. Long."

Pip scrambled back from Iyene as the frost reached his boots.

"Wren." That was Dorrit.

She came round the lectern with her hands out in front of her, red to the wrist. There was blood on her apron and on her sleeves, and more on her cheek where she had pushed her hair back, and her face was white under it.

"Don't," she said. "Don't you dare."

"Dor."

"No. You don't get to say Dor at me like that. You've paid for everybody. You paid for the bridge and the beacon and that rotten tower and the rotten water-door, and I watched you, and every time there was less of you. You didn't know about the millpond. The millpond, Wren. I taught you to swim. I held your chin up. You looked at me like I was telling you a story about someone else."

"I know."

"Then you know what it'll take this time. Look at you. You know. It's in your face." Dorrit's voice went up and broke. "Let someone else. Let him wait. He's waited three hundred years, he can manage another week! Let him stand there till we've thought of something, he's used to it—"

She stopped, and Wren watched her hear it. The Chainman stood with his hand out, shaking, and the words hung in the cold air in front of him, and Dorrit put her bloody hand over her mouth.

"Oh, gods," she said. "Oh, gods, I didn't mean it. Will. I didn't mean it."

The Chainman looked at her, and for a moment Wren thought he would answer; his mouth moved. But whatever it was, he didn't have the words for it, and he turned his face back to Wren and held out his hand.

At the door, something moved.

Wren heard it first as a scrape of feet, and then she saw them. The faded in the corridor had stood white and frozen since the Chainman walked through them, their faces turned toward the room, and now the rime was melting off them and dripping from their fingers. He was holding his cold in close, and the dead in the corridor were thawing, with the warmth of the Roll Chamber in front of them.

The girl with the ribbons in her hair stepped over the embers into the room, and the baker's man behind her lifted his hands.

"Madoc," Wren said.

"Aye. I see them."

Madoc ran. He had a handful of arrows left, and he had them out of the quiver before he reached the door. He shot the girl in the chest as she came over the threshold, and she caught and burned. He shot the man behind her. Then there were three more, and then a crowd of them, pressing up out of the dark toward the gap, dripping.

Pip got up off the floor with Iyene's sabre in his hand. Wren had never known him hold a blade bigger than a bread-knife, but he held it as he'd seen Iyene hold it, a little out from his body, point up. His face was blotched with crying and his mouth was shut hard.

"Pip," Dorrit said. "Pip, no—"

He went anyway. He ran across the room after Madoc, round the Chainman's frost, and took the left side of the doorway, where Iyene had stood.

The first one that came at him was a big woman in a fur-trimmed gown. Pip cut at her arm and missed, and cut again and took her hand off at the wrist, and she kept coming. Madoc put his last arrow into her face from a foot away, and she burned and fell back into the others, and they pulled back from the fire a little.

"How'd she make it look easy?" Pip said. His voice was shaking badly. "How'd she do it every day?"

"Practice," said Madoc. "Mind your left."

Pip minded his left. He cut the man who came at it across the throat, clumsily, and the man went down, and Pip stood over him and hacked until he stopped moving. Madoc had no arrows left. He had drawn his long iron knife and was using the bow in his other hand to shove them back.

"Keeper!" Madoc shouted over his shoulder. "We'll not hold them long! Whatever you're going to do, do it!"

Bracken got up off the floor, slowly. His left arm was bound across his chest in a sling torn from Dorrit's apron, the end of it wrapped in linen already dark, and his face was gray-green and sweating in the cold. He came round the lectern a step at a time and stood swaying on Wren's other side from Alder, and steadied himself on the black stone with his right hand.

"Sit down," Dorrit said, through her fingers. "You'll fall down. Sit down, I said."

"Captain's orders," Bracken said. "Help her." He looked down at Wren. "Don't know how. Never helped a keeper. I'll stand here. Tell me if I'm in the way."

"You're not in the way."

"Good." He looked at the Chainman, at the hand held out, and the shaking, and the frost going up the wall. "Madoc's right, Keeper. That's my advice. Free him."

Wren looked at Alder. He was shaking his head slowly, and his eyes were wet.

"I would give a Word," he said. "If there were a Word for it. There isn't."

"I know."

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, my dear."

She had only ever heard him say that to Tansy, across the kitchen table at Fallowmere, with fifty years of habit in it.

She looked at Dorrit, crying behind her hand, and at Pip in the doorway with Iyene's sabre dripping in his fist. She looked at Madoc beside him, with her fiddle case slung across his back where he had carried it through the drains. Madoc looked round at her between one blow and the next and gave her a small nod, the kind the Stayers gave across the moot hall when a thing was settled.

The Chainman's hand shook. Wren drew the ink from inside her shirt, where she had kept it from freezing since Scarrow, and unstoppered it with fingers so cold she nearly dropped it. She dipped the pen and turned the Waybook's pages on past Wystan's confession, past his signature, to the next leaf, which was blank.

"It's his book," she said, and wrote.

The cold went up her hand to the wrist and past it, to the elbow and the shoulder, where it had never gone before. The ink came out of the pen black and ran silver on the page.

Will Rudge,

Across the chamber, at the top of the arch, something rang.

It was a sound like a struck bell, but it came out of stone. The panel in the keystone, which had been blank since before the Frost, glowed. Silver came up out of it where no one had ever carved or written, letter after letter, as fast as she wrote them. The whole round room was lit with it, and the thousands of names on the walls caught the light and shone it back.

chainman,

The Chainman made the sound a man makes when he sets down something heavy he has carried a long way. He was still holding out his hand, but he had lifted his face to the arch, and the silver light was on it, and for a moment it was a face she could have remembered.

Her arm was ice to the shoulder, and the pen was hard to hold. The stone was ringing so loudly that she felt it in her teeth, and the frost on the walls was cracking and falling in white flakes. Somewhere behind her Dorrit was saying her name, over and over, very fast.

of Cael Meddan.

She lifted the pen from the page.

The silver on the paper went black and dry. At the top of the arch the name stood in the keystone, new and plain.

And the book took what it wanted.

She felt it go, like a key slipping off its ring into deep water. There was the cold gap, and she went looking into it, as she had gone looking for her mother's face after the bridge rose.

Tansy's voice was there. She could hear every note of it, calling her in from the hives at dusk as it had every summer evening of her life. It came across the bee-yard in the blue light with the smell of supper behind it. It called her by name.

She listened for the name, and the voice called, and called, and she didn't know who it was calling.