Water gate Village sat at the junction where the great lowland drainage canal met the eastern agricultural dike. A cluster of forty low-roofed cottages built of river-slate and limewashed fieldstone, dominated at its western gate by the long, windowless stone gable of the communal granary and the smaller limewashed burial house beside the canal weir.
Word traveled faster than mule-carts along a dike road. A reed-cutter polling his punt down the outer canal at sunrise had seen the four wagons and the ashwood litter crossing Old Dredger’s Sluice and had carried the news ahead to the village lock-keeper.
By the time Seyun, Ilyra, Tomas, and Corren carried the litter through the open timber gate of the village yard and halted before the low stone porch of the limewashed burial house, thirty townspeople were standing in silence along the gravel margin of the canal.
None of them shouted or crowded the wagons. Lowland canal-folk had lived for ages at the bottom of the river valley where the great sects of Oran sent their grain levies, their timber rafts, and their border patrols. They knew the look of blood-stained leather pauldrons and scorched wagon wheels. They knew what it meant when four bearers walked ahead of a mule team carrying a canvas-draped frame on their shoulders.
Standing alone on the flat river-slate step of the burial house porch was a woman of forty-eight in a clean, faded apron of raw, unwhitened hemp linen, her gray-streaked brown hair pinned back neatly beneath a widow’s kerchief she hadn’t yet tied under her chin.
Her hands—red and chapped around the knuckles from thirty winters of scrubbing reed-linen in cold canal water—held the shoulders of two children standing pressed against her skirts. An eight-year-old boy with Pel’s square chin and wide gray eyes, and a five-year-old girl clutching a carved willow whistle against her pinafore.
It was Marta, Pel’s wife, with the two late-born children the old driver had spent the winter road-season working to feed.
Slowly and with total gentleness, Ilyra, Seyun, Tomas, and Corren knelt all at once on the gravel before the porch and lowered the ashwood litter onto the two stone frame stands that the burial-house keeper—a bent old man in a lime-stained smock with a gangly fourteen-year-old apprentice—had carried out into the sunlight.
The ashwood pole left Seyun’s bruised left shoulder. Then, he remained on one knee beside the frame stand for a breath, his hand resting near young Tomas’s trembling elbow so the sixteen-year-old boy wouldn’t feel he was standing alone before his master’s widow.
Marta didn’t scream or throw herself across the canvas. She let go of her children’s shoulders, stepped down off the slate porch. Then she folded back the top corner of the tarpaulin until she could see Pel’s quiet, washed face and the neat stitches where Seyun had closed the collar of his sheepskin coat. She laid her chapped right palm once against her husband’s cold cheek, rested it there for three breaths. Then drew the canvas smoothly back into place.
She looked once at young Tomas’s raw, hemp-burned wrists and the fresh scab on his lip. Then she gave the boy a small, steady nod that told him louder than any words that she knew whom Pel had stepped in front of to save.
Before Ilyra or Tomas could speak, Custodian Halen bustled forward from the lead wagon, smoothing the mud-stiffened blue lapels of his Aperture Court robe and holding out a small leather drawstring pouch that clinked with two stamped silver pieces.
“Good woman Marta of Sluice-Gate,” Halen began in the ringing, practiced nasal rhythm of a Court sub-steward addressing bereaved tenants. “On behalf of the First Sub-Vault of the Aperture Court and White Heron Hall, I extend official condolences for the loss of Seasonal Teamster Pel, son of Corv, who fell this morning to a stray bandit axe while faithfully transporting the village’s spring seed-barley reserve. In recognition of his service, I’m authorized to disburse the full two-silver lawful burial release—”
Marta didn’t look at the leather pouch in Halen’s hand. She didn’t even lift her fingers from the edge of the canvas tarpaulin.
Instead, her steady gray eyes moved past Halen’s plump shoulder, past the first two wagons loaded with plump hemp sacks of winter barley, and stopped squarely on the third wagon parked twenty paces back by the canal gate.
Even in the cool late-morning sunlight of the village yard, the third wagon looked nothing like a grain cart. Its outer oak side-boards were blistered black from the fire-oil ambush on Day 3. Its rear wheels were caked to the hubs in black marsh peat. And from the front of its heavy canvas hood, where Seyun’s wet marsh-wort sack still lay draped over the three projecting copper needles, a slow, rhythmic double-beat of warm herbal vapor puffed into the air like the breath of a caged beast.
Every villager by the canal weir had been staring at that scorched, steaming third carriage since the gates opened. Men who spent their lives hauling hundred-pound sacks of winter barley knew that seed grain didn’t breathe white vapor through hollow copper pipes or need an inner-hall spearwoman with a blood-soaked cloak to guard its tailboard.
Beside the porch, the bent old burial-house keeper and his fourteen-year-old apprentice Lorn stood motionless with their hands folded into their lime-stained aprons, their eyes fixed on the scorched iron wheel-rims of the third cart. Even the village blacksmith at the edge of the crowd had lowered his hammer to his leather apron, recognizing the smell of cooled spirit-bronze and burned pine-tar drifting from the wagon bed.
For thirty years, the families of Sluice-Gate had watched the great sects of Oran send their sealed barges and guarded wagons through the canal locks. Always with smooth-faced officials in blue or white silk who paid two silver coins whenever a lock-keeper’s arm was crushed by a spirit-timber raft or a wagon driver was cut down in a road feud that no villager was allowed to ask about.
Custodian Halen shook the small leather pouch slightly so the two silver pieces chimed against each other, expecting the widow to reach for the coins as bereaved tenants in the city apartments always did. Just then, a Court clerk stood on their doorstep.
Yet Marta didn’t move a muscle toward the purse. Behind her on the porch step, five-year-old Sera hid her face against her brother Kip’s wool waistcoat, while along the canal bank the thirty townspeople stood as still as the grey boundary stones along the weir. The smell of wet marsh-wort, scorched oak, and mule-sweat hung heavy in the noon air. It mixed with the faint, clean scent of whitewash and dried lavender from the open door of the burial house behind the frame stands.
Seyun, still kneeling on one knee beside the rear ashwood pole of the litter, looked from the two small silver coins in Halen’s plump fingers to the worn, twice-stitched leather soles of eight-year-old Kip’s shoes. In his mind, the numbers tallied themselves with the pitiless care of an archive balance sheet. Two silver pieces would pay the village carpenter for six pine boards and a pound of iron nails. That left not a single copper bit for the four winter months. Just then, the canal froze solid and no reed-punts moved on the water.
“My husband drove the spring barley carts from Oran for thirty-one years, Master Custodian,” Marta said. Her voice was quiet, level, and rough as dry reed-straw roof. “Twice in the famine year of the frost, highwaymen stopped his team on the river bluff. Both times Pel unhooked the lead mule, gave them four sacks of loose grain off the tailboard, and brought his boys and his wagons home without a scratch on their skins—because Pel knew that four sacks of barley aren’t worth a boy’s life, and highwaymen don’t swing axes at old men once they have their meal.”
Her eight-year-old son Kip stepped half a pace closer to the litter, his small fists balled at his sides as he stared up at Halen’s blue robe. Meanwhile, the thirty townspeople along the canal bank leaned forward in dead silence.
Marta turned her head slowly from the steaming third wagon to look directly at Ilyra’s blood-stained white cloak and Seyun’s blistered, ink-stained hands.
“Keep your two silver pieces in your purse for a minute, Master Official,” Marta said, her voice carrying clearly across the limewashed courtyard, “and let someone whose boots have mud on them answer me one question before we carry my man inside.”
She pointed one red, chapped finger past Halen’s elbow at the rhythmic white puffs rising from the copper needles of the third carriage.
“Did my husband die for the winter barley that feeds this village,” Marta asked, “or did he die for the thing that’s breathing under that burned canvas?”