Edris leaned his head back against the petrified root column and looked up into the dark vaults where water had eaten through the stone.
“My mother died at the Red Ditch tollgate in the third winter of the salt truce,” he said into the quiet. He had never told the story to Osha without turning it into a lesson on archival duty, and he had never told it to the chapter council at all. Telling a six-legged creature on a mud bank required no posture. “My father had already marched south in his second army’s coat—not because he hated the south, but because the northern quartermaster paid in mouldy rye and the southern one paid in salt pork. My sister had the spotted lung fever. My mother walked nine miles through freezing slush with a packet of dried willow-bark and fever-root tucked inside her bodice to keep it dry.”
Pip sat very still on the gravel, all six feet folded neatly beneath its chest, its two amber eyes steady in the dimness.
“There were four guards at the timber barrier,” Edris said, his right hand closing slowly over a handful of wet pebbles. “Boys from two valleys over. Not monsters. They had conflicting papers from two district magistrates—one stamped in red wax saying the road was open until sundown, one in black tallow saying no parcels could cross without a provost’s seal. While they argued over which clerk outranked the other, a mule cart bolted in the ditch. One boy…
