The Crown's Officer

The riders came up the lane on the third morning after the burying, a little before noon, and Wren heard them long before she saw them.

She was on the barn roof again, mending the thatch where she had lain on it. Dorrit was below her in the yard, rehanging the gate on new hinges that Garret's sons had brought up from the dead man's forge. Nobody had wanted to go into the forge. In the end Garret had gone in by himself and come out with the hinges and a shut face.

The sound that came up the lane from Dallbridge was horses, a good many of them, walking. There was a jingle of harness and a man's voice raised, and then a mule's bray, long and furious, and a shout, and laughter.

Wren sat up on the ridge and shaded her eyes as they came round the last bend in single file. First came a woman on a tall bay horse, and behind her rode a man so big that his horse looked like a pony under him, with a long spear sloped over his shoulder. After him came a boy on a shaggy cob, and then four more riders in dark blue coats, and last of all Hobb Millson on foot, red in the face, leading two mules. One was a patient brown, and the other a gray with its ears flat back, doing its best to bite him.

"Dorrit," Wren called down. "The Crown's here."

Dorrit straightened from the gate and looked down the lane. "Is that them?"

"I think so."

"There's not many of them."

"No."

"I thought there'd be an army." Dorrit wiped her hands on her apron. "Go and get Granna. And the Warden. I'll hold the gate."

"You'll hold it off its hinges."

"Then it'll match the last one. Go on."

By the time the riders reached the gate, Tansy was sitting on the bench beside it with her stick planted between her boots and her bandaged hand in her lap. She had put on her good black shawl. Alder stood at her shoulder, leaning on his staff, and Dorrit leaned on the gate. Wren stood beside her with the Waybook under her arm, in its oak box, because Tansy had told her to bring it and to hold on to it.

The woman on the bay horse reined in and looked down at them.

She was lean and hard, somewhere past fifty, with iron-gray hair cropped close to her skull. She wore a long blue riding coat, dusty to the knees, and a cavalry sabre at her hip in a battered leather scabbard. A scar through her left eyebrow pulled it up a little, so that she ought to have looked faintly surprised by everything, but she did not. She looked at the burned hedge, and the black ring on the ground round the farm, and the new gate, and Tansy on her bench, and then at Wren, and then at the box.

"Mistress Tansy Fallowmere," she said. It was not a question.

"I am."

"Iyene Sath. Cartographer-Royal." She swung down from the saddle, stiffly, and handed her reins back without looking to the big man behind her. "I have a warrant from the King."

"I'm sure you do," said Tansy.

Iyene Sath took a folded paper out of the breast of her coat. It was heavy paper, sealed with red wax, with a ribbon through it. She unfolded it and read it aloud in a clear, carrying voice, the voice of someone who had read orders to lines of men in the rain.

"By the King's hand. The bearer, Iyene Sath, Cartographer-Royal of Esterland, is empowered to take into the custody of the Crown the book called the Waybook, now held by the family Fallowmere of Dall, and to convey it where the Crown's need requires. All subjects of the King are commanded to assist her." She folded it again. "Signed and sealed. The Warden Marsh has seen the seal."

"I have," said Alder. "It is the King's."

"So," said Iyene, and held out her hand. "The book, if you please."

"No," said Tansy.

Iyene's hand stayed where it was. "Mistress Fallowmere. I've come nine days on hard roads. I have four riders, a sergeant and a boy, and your Warden's report of dead men walking into your yard. I have no time. The book."

"You can have it," said Tansy, "when you can use it."

"That's not your decision."

"It's not yours either." Tansy looked up at her. "You can take it off my granddaughter. I can't stop you. You've got a spear back there the size of a church, and all I've got is a stick. But it won't do you any good. You'll carry a box of paper over the mountains and it'll be as much use to you as a box of turnips."

"Tansy," said Alder quietly. "Perhaps—"

"Hush, Alder. The lady wants to learn something. Wren, give her the book."

Wren looked at her grandmother, and Tansy nodded, very slightly.

Wren set the box on the top bar of the gate and unlocked it with the key on its cord, which now hung round her own neck. She took out the Waybook and held it out.

Iyene took it and turned it over in her hands. Wren saw her look at the binding, and the brass clasp, and the worn edges, and saw the Cartographer-Royal's mouth soften for a moment.

"Survey work," Iyene said. "Tooled calf. Look at the stitching." She opened it. She turned the leaves carefully, with the tips of her fingers, and she stopped at a map of the Stair and studied it. Then she turned to the next page, and the next. "That's the Kestrel Gorge. That's the old road. Gods, they drew every milestone."

"Can you read it?" said Wren, before she could stop herself.

Iyene glanced up. "The Survey script? Yes. I've spent thirty years reading it in the King's archive. It's my trade." She looked back at the page. "Why?"

"Because I can't."

Iyene did not answer that. She looked at Tansy. "What does the book do, Mistress Fallowmere? The Warden's report was not specific."

"Give her a pen, Dorrit," said Tansy.

Dorrit went into the house and came back with the bone-handled pen and the black bottle of ink. Iyene looked at them, and at Tansy, and then she laid the book open on the top bar of the gate at a blank page near the back, dipped the pen, and wrote. She wrote fast, in a small neat soldier's hand. Wren, at her elbow, read it.

Received into Crown custody, 30 August, at Fallowmere. Iyene Sath, Cartographer-Royal.

Iyene blew on it, and straightened, and looked at Tansy. "Well?"

"Wait," said Tansy.

They waited while the riders behind sat their horses and watched. A bee came over from the bee-yard and investigated Iyene's collar and went away again.

On the page, the ink began to fade.

It started at the beginning of the line. The first letter went brown, and then gray, and then it was gone, as if a breath had been blown across it, and the next letters followed it. The fading ran along the line from left to right, quite steadily, word by word, through the date and the Crown's custody and Iyene's name. The last thing to go was the full stop. The page was as clean as if nobody had touched it.

The boy on the shaggy cob said, "Oh, that's sharp."

He was fifteen or sixteen, skinny as a rake, with sandy hair sticking up in tufts and a gap in his grin where a tooth had been. He had edged his cob forward to see. Now he leaned right out of the saddle, staring at the page. "Did you see that, Sir? It just went. Like it was never there. Can I have a go? Can I write in it? What if you write it bigger?"

"Sandover," said Iyene.

"Sir."

"Be quiet."

"Yes, Sir."

Iyene looked down at the blank page a moment longer, and her face showed nothing whatever. Then she closed the book, fastened the clasp, and held it out to Wren across the gate.

"Only the keeper's hand," said Tansy. "Anybody else, it goes. That's the book."

"So I see." Iyene's voice was perfectly level. "And you are the keeper."

"I was. The dead took my hand four nights ago." Tansy lifted it a little, bound in its linen. "The keeper's the girl."

Iyene gave Wren a long look, cool and measuring, the look of a quartermaster at a mule she has been sold. Wren looked back at her and held out her hands for the book.

Iyene put it in them. "Then it seems," she said, "that I need the keeper as well as the book." She turned. "Sergeant."

"Sir," said the big man.

"We'll be here three nights. Get the horses stabled at the inn. The mules come with us, the horses stay. Corporal Fenn, see the men settled. Sandover, stop gawping and take my horse." She turned back to the gate. "Mistress Fallowmere. I'll need your barn, and your well, and your kitchen table for a day. I'll pay for all of it in Crown coin. We leave at dawn on the second of September. Your granddaughter carries the book and I command the party. Is that understood?"

Tansy looked at her for a while. "You'd better come in," she said. "You look like you could do with some tea."

Nobody was happy about it. Wren was not happy, because she did not like being looked at like a mule. Tansy was not happy, because she did not like anyone giving orders in her yard but herself. Alder was not happy, because he had wanted to lead the party himself and had never quite said so. And Dorrit was not happy, because within an hour of the Crown's arrival she had met Sergeant Bracken Hale.

It was over the medicine chest, Dorrit's great iron-cornered box of oak as big as a cradle, which held every salve and tincture and dried herb and roll of linen she owned. She had it out in the yard beside the mules, ready to load, when the sergeant came over and looked at it.

He was the biggest man Wren had ever seen, bald as a stone, with a great brown beard and a nose that had been broken at least once and set badly. He carried a boar-spear taller than he was, with a broad iron head and a crossbar under it. He looked at the chest, and at the two mules, and then at Dorrit.

"No," he said.

"No what?" said Dorrit.

"That's not going on a mule, Mistress."

"It's the medicine."

"It's a wardrobe." He nudged it with his boot. It did not move. "What's in it, anvils?"

"It's my salves, and my herbs, and my linen, and my needles, and my good knife, and my saw—"

"Your saw."

"For taking off legs."

"Oh, that's all right, then." Bracken looked at the mules again. "That jenny's carrying food and oil. The john's carrying blankets and tools. Neither of them's carrying a church door full of mustard plasters over thirty miles of mountain."

"Then you carry it."

"I'm carrying a spear."

"You're carrying a spear," said Dorrit, "and a very big head, with nothing much in it. You've got two good arms. I've seen them. They're like hams. Carry the chest."

Wren, who was sitting on the mounting-block with the Waybook, waited for him to lose his temper, but the corner of his mouth only twitched under the beard.

"Mistress Fallowmere," he said, "I've been carrying things up hills for the Crown for eighteen years. I carried a cannon once. A small cannon. I'm not carrying a box of your granny's cough-drops up the Stair so you can dose me with them when I fall off it."

"Don't you Mistress me."

"It's your name, isn't it?"

"It's my granny's name."

"Then I'll call you Mistress Fallowmere the Younger."

Dorrit went red to the roots of her hair. Her mouth worked, and nothing came out of it.

"Pick what you can carry on your back," Bracken said. "The rest stays. I'll carry the saw myself. I'd like to be near it when you get ideas."

He walked away, and Dorrit stood looking after him with her fists clenched. "Gods' teeth," she said. "Cough-drops! Did you hear him?"

"He's right about the chest, though," said Wren.

"I know he's right about the chest!" Dorrit kicked it. "That's the worst of it!"

She spent the rest of the afternoon repacking what mattered into a long canvas roll that she could sling over one shoulder, without a word to anyone. Now and then she looked out of the window at Bracken, who was sitting on the edge of the well sharpening his spear, and said something under her breath that made Tansy raise her eyebrows.

Wren noticed that the saw went into the roll.

The boy's name was Pip Sandover, and he asked questions all day long, without drawing breath.

He asked Wren what the bees were for, and whether they stung, and how many times, and whether it hurt. He asked Dorrit what was in every jar she packed. He asked Tansy how she'd hurt her hand, and Tansy told him, and for once he said nothing at all for almost a minute. Then he went and found Alder, who was sitting in the shade of the barn with a book, and asked him about the fire.

"Is it true you set the whole farm on fire by talking?" said Pip. "They were all saying it in the inn. The fat man said. Hobb. He said you just opened your mouth and the ground went up."

"The ground did not go up," said Alder. "The fire rose out of the ground. It is a distinction."

"How'd you do it?"

"With a great deal of study."

"Can you do it again?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I cannot."

"Can you do it a little bit? Just a little fire? On a stone?"

"No."

"Can you teach me?"

"Certainly not."

"Is it hard?"

"Young man," said Alder, and closed his book on his finger. "I spent forty years learning what I know. I have spent one small part of it in your service already, in a manner of speaking. I will not spend another to light your pipe."

"I don't smoke," said Pip. "Sir says it stunts you."

"Then Sir is wiser than I thought."

Pip went away, and Wren, crossing the yard with a bucket, heard him say to the young rider with the freckles, "Grandad won't show me," and the rider laugh.

The four riders were Corporal Fenn, Merritt, Ash and Tolly. Fenn was a square quiet man of forty with a gray mustache, who did whatever Iyene told him before she had finished telling him. Merritt was a tall woman with her fair hair in a knot and a crossbow she was forever cleaning. Ash was the freckled one. He was twenty-two and laughed at everything and sang while he worked, badly, and Tolly, who was dark and slow-spoken and always hungry, told him to shut up every few minutes and was ignored. By the evening of the first day they had eaten half of Tansy's bread and all of Hobb's, and Ash had been bitten by the gray mule.

"Her name's Nettle," Hobb told him, while Dorrit dressed the bite. "The brown one's Barrow. She's a jenny and he's a john, and she hates everybody, and he likes everybody. Nettle bit my cousin's ear half off."

Barrow, it turned out, liked Pip best of anyone, and followed him round the yard to blow in his hair, and Pip pretended to be annoyed while he fed him apples from Garret's sack.

On the last morning, Iyene Sath sent for Wren.

She had taken over the kitchen table, as she had said she would. She sat at one end of it with the Waybook open in front of her, and a sheet of paper, and a stick of charcoal. Tansy sat in her chair by the fire and watched her like a cat watching a strange dog.

"Sit," said Iyene. "Tell me about the Stair."

Wren sat. "What about it?"

"Everything. You've lived under it all your life. The book shows the old road. I want to know what's there now." Iyene turned the book so Wren could see the map. It was the first page of the Stair, with the switchbacks drawn one above the other up the face of the Cloudwall, and little marks beside the road. "Start at the bottom. This is your gate. This is the lane. Where does the lane stop being a lane?"

"At the last wall. About two miles up."

"And after that?"

"Sheep-track. Up to the high pasture. Then the Last Cairn."

"How far?"

"Six miles from here to the cairn. Half a day, walking."

"Water?"

Wren had to think. "There's a spring at the cairn. And a beck that comes down past the hollow. It's dry in August."

"This mark here." Iyene put her finger beside a tiny drawn square with a roof on it, a little above the cairn on the map. "That's a shelter. A Survey hut. Is it there?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know."

"Nobody goes past the cairn."

"Nobody in three hundred years?"

"Nobody that came back," said Wren.

Iyene looked at her. Then she looked back at the map. "And these?" Her finger moved up the switchbacks. There were marks all the way up, in the old script. "These are the Survey's notes. Water. A ruined wall. A turning-place for carts. A long drop on the south side of this bend: mind the edge. The Survey marked everything. You've had this book in your house all your life. Have you never looked at it?"

"Once a year," said Wren. "When I oiled the leather."

"And never read it."

"I can't read it. I told you."

"Then learn," said Iyene. "Tonight. I'll teach you the letters for the road marks. There aren't many. A child could learn them in an evening." She picked up the charcoal. "Until then, you'll tell me what you know, and I'll tell you what it says, and between us we'll get up this mountain without walking off it."

She began to draw, very fast, without looking up. Before Wren understood what she was doing, there was a map on the paper: the Stair from the gate to the summit, every switchback, with the springs and shelters and drops marked in a small neat hand.

"There," Iyene said. "That's for Fenn. He'll lead. You'll walk with me."

"You can do that in your head?"

"It's my trade." Iyene blew the charcoal dust off the paper. "Yours is bees, I understand."

"And the fiddle."

"And the fiddle. Good. You'll teach Sandover a tune on the road, and he'll stop asking me questions." Iyene closed the Waybook and slid it across the table. "Keep it on you. Always. Sleep with it."

As Wren took it, she saw the dispatch case open at Iyene's elbow, a flat leather case worn black at the corners and full of papers. On top of the papers lay a letter, folded and sealed with a large red seal that had a crown pressed into it.

Iyene saw her look, and closed the case.

"What's that?" said Wren.

"Orders."

"From the King?"

"Yes."

"What do they say?"

"I don't know. They're sealed."

"You haven't opened them?"

"I'm instructed not to," said Iyene, "until the summit." She fastened the case. "Go and pack, Mistress Fallowmere. We've a long walk."

By the fire, Tansy had not moved. But her eyes had followed the dispatch case all the way into Iyene's coat.

On the last night they ate at the long table, all of them, with the riders crammed onto the benches and Bracken on an upturned barrel at the end because no chair would hold him. Hobb had sent up a ham. Garret had sent a sack of apples. Cob came up on his own, with his hand in its sling, and ate everything put in front of him and talked the whole time, and Iyene listened to him with every sign of attention and asked him about the high pasture. Ash sang a song about a sailor, badly. Dorrit sat as far from Bracken as she could get and did not look at him once, very carefully, all evening.

Afterward, when the riders had gone out to the barn and Dorrit had gone up to bed, Tansy called Wren over to her chair by the fire.

"Give me your left hand," she said.

Wren gave it. Tansy fumbled in the pocket of her apron with her left hand, clumsy, cursing under her breath, and brought something out and pushed it onto the middle finger of Wren's left hand. It went on hard over the knuckle and then sat snug: a ring, plain and heavy and dark gray, with no stone and no pattern, and cold.

"That was my mother's," Tansy said. "Iron."

Wren turned her hand in the firelight and looked at it. "I've never seen it."

"I've never worn it. I kept it in the box." Tansy let go of her hand. "Iron. Don't take it off. Not to wash, not to sleep, not for anyone. You hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Good." Tansy leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. "Go to bed."

Wren went to the foot of the stairs, and stopped there in the dark, because Alder had come in from the yard. She heard the door, and the tap of his staff on the flags, and the creak of the second-best chair as he lowered himself into it, and then only the fire settling.

"She'll be all right," Alder said at last.

"You don't know that."

"No. But I will be with her. I will do all I can."

"I know you will." Tansy's voice was low. "Alder."

"Yes, my dear."

"What aren't you telling her?"

The fire cracked, and on the stairs, in the dark, Wren held her breath.

"Nothing I know," said Alder.

"That's not what I asked," said Tansy.