Ysra’s warning came true at dusk, on the twenty-first day, and it came true in the way she had said it would, which was without any drama at all. She came down the north stair at the change of the watch with her shawl pulled tight and her face the colour of ash, and she stopped at the gatehouse door and said, to Idrin and to nobody else, that there were eleven men on the causeway, and that they had come up through the reeds in single file without a lamp, and that the raft they had come across on was tied up at the foot of the river wall with its rope in a double knot.
“Eleven,” said Idrin.
“Eleven,” said Ysra. “I counted them twice. The second time, one of them turned round to look at the stair, and I counted him again, and he was still one of eleven.”
Idrin was on his feet before she had finished. He had been sitting by the gatehouse fire with the minutes open on his knee, and the minutes had fallen to the floor, and he did not pick them up. He could hear the marsh now, through the open door. It was the low murmuring sound of many feet moving slowly through wet reeds, and under that, very faintly, the chink of metal on metal. Then a voice rose out of the dusk beyond the arch, hoarse and carrying, shouting the old Lessary toll-words that Idrin had learned at the Chancery as a child, the words the tollmen had called to every cart that came up the road from the marsh.
“Toll for the causeway! Toll for the water! Toll for the dead!”
Harrow was already at the gate-post, his hands flat on the stone, counting under his breath. Tallow came out of the gatehouse with the minutes under his arm and stopped in the doorway, his face gone very pale. Ysra stood at the foot of the stair, her eyes shut, one hand on the wall, as though she were listening through the stone for the count of feet.
Pell came up from the kitchen yard at a run. She had a bread-paddle in one hand, a long wooden thing with a flat blade, floured white across the face. Her apron was flapping round her knees. She was not frightened. She looked annoyed, as a woman does when she has been interrupted at her oven by a noise she considers rude.
“Who’s shouting at my gate?” she said.
“The marsh,” said Ysra, without opening her eyes.
“The marsh can shout at the river,” said Pell. “This gate’s got a cook in it.”
Idrin did not wait to think. He ought to have thought. He had been taught, from the age of six, that a prince did not go running into the open to meet a threat, because a prince was the thing a threat had come to take, and he had been taught that the proper response to an armed approach was to send a herald and withdraw to a defensible position. He had no herald. He had no defensible position except the gate, and the gate was the thing they were going to try to get through. So he walked to the arch and stood in the middle of it, under the crown, with the closed oak doors at his back and the lamp in his hand, and he made himself as tall as he could.
The voices came nearer. Torchlight appeared at the far end of the causeway, low and smoky, a line of small red flames moving across the flat black water, and in the light of them Idrin saw the men.
They came up out of the reeds one by one and stood on the causeway stones in a loose line. They wore cloaks of a mottled brown and green, the colour of the reed-beds in autumn, and their faces were darkened with mud or with the smoke of the torches, so that Idrin could not tell their ages. They carried long poles, and some had knives at their belts, and two of them had crossbows, Lessary-made, with the Crown’s mark scratched off the stock. The bolts were drawn back and loaded. Idrin could see the glint of the steel points in the torchlight.
At the head of the line a lean man stepped forward, into the light of the lamp, and lifted one hand.
“Prince,” he said. He did not shout. His voice was dry and tired and entirely clear, the voice of a man who has been standing in cold water for years and has got used to it. “You’re in my way.”
“I am in my own gate,” said Idrin.
“That’s the thing about gates,” said the reeve. “They’re always in somebody’s way.”
Idrin raised his voice. He had not meant to shout. But the Forms rose in his throat, and he let them come, in the clear carrying voice of the Chancery court that could fill a hall of two hundred men without strain. “You are on the Hold’s causeway, under the Hold’s reach. The reach is three leagues and you have crossed it. I order you to halt where you stand.”
The torches stopped moving.
Then one of the crossbowmen lifted his weapon and fired.
The bolt came out of the dusk with a dull thrum, and Idrin heard it before he saw it. It struck the gate-post a finger’s breadth from the side of Pell’s face. She had come round the post to stand beside him, bread-paddle raised, her floured cheek turned toward the causeway, and the bolt went into the stone at the exact place where her head had been a moment before. It stuck there, quivering, the steel point buried to the fletching in the grey rock.
Pell did not flinch. She did not spare the bolt a glance. She looked at the crossbowman with an expression of settled, rather rural irritation, and then she stepped out from behind the post, into the open, and swung the bread-paddle with the whole of her shoulder.
The flat blade caught the nearest marsh-man square across the side of the head. It made a sound like a cask being struck with a mallet, and the man went down on the causeway stones without another sound. Pell stood over him, breathing hard, her floured hair coming loose from its cloth. She looked at the crossbowman, who had begun to reload with frantic hands.
“That’s for my gate,” said Pell cheerfully, and took a step toward him, and raised the paddle again.
“Pell,” said Idrin, sharply.
“I’m only talking to him.”
The reeve had not moved. He stood at the head of the line with the torch in his hand and watched Pell, and then he watched the bolt in the gate-post, and then he looked up at the arch, at the closed oak doors and the still chain and the lamp Idrin held in his hand. His face in the torchlight was lean and weathered and very calm, and something moved in it that might have been pity, or might have been a much more bitter thing.
“Bardo Kell,” he said. “Reeve of the marsh-towns. You won’t know the name. Your Crown does. It struck the marsh-towns off its roll in the Quiet Census, every one of them, and no one in Lessary will say the word census aloud, but I remember it.” He spread his free hand toward the wall. “And now there’s a Hold on the rise with a prince in it, and a gate that does what it’s told by a boy in a coat. I came up to see what a wall looks like when it has a voice. It’s only a wall, Highness. It’s a wall with a prince in it, and the prince is the one who’s shouting.”
Idrin felt his face go hot. He did not know what to say. The Forms in his throat would not come out in order.
“Give me back the boy on your causeway,” said Bardo Kell, quite gently. “We’ll take our dead with us, and we’ll go home.”
“The boy is hurt,” said Idrin. “His arm is broken. He will be fed and set, and he will be sent home when the Hold has decided what is to be done with him.”
Bardo’s eyes went hard. It was the first time he had shown any reaction at all. Then he laughed, short and bitter, and shook his head.
“Then the Hold’s the one holding my kin,” he said, and lifted the torch higher.
Idrin shouted. He did not decide to shout. He simply opened his mouth and the order came up out of him in a rush, the words of a Writ that did not need to be written down, the old instinct of a prince who has been obeyed all his life and has forgotten what it is to be refused. “The gate will hold! Hold, I say! Nothing passes this arch!”
His voice broke on the second word.
It cracked in the middle like dry wood under pressure, and the sound of the break went out across the water and came back to him, thin and shameful. He tried to finish. His mouth was open and nothing came out of it. And then, from somewhere in the stone under his feet, something took the rest of the sentence out of his mouth and spoke it for him.
It was not loud. It was low and even and perfectly clear, in a voice that had no particular accent and no particular age, and it was not his. It said, The gate will hold. Nothing passes this arch. It said it without any change of tone, as a clerk reads out a line of figures he has already checked, and it came up through the causeway stones and the gate-post and the soles of his feet, and the whole arch hummed with it, and the marsh-men heard it, every one of them, and stood frozen on the stones.
Idrin did not turn round. He could not. He stood under the arch with his lamp held out in front of him and his mouth closed, and felt the voice go through him like cold water, and he knew, with a dreadful certainty, that it had been listening to him all along and had chosen, for once, to finish his sentence.
The marsh-men looked up at the arch. Their torches shook. The reeve was staring at the closed oak doors with an expression Idrin could not read, and then he turned his head slowly and gave an order in a low voice that Idrin did not catch. The line broke. The men went backward, one after another, into the dark, dragging their poles and the man Pell had struck, and the torches went with them, one by one, down the causeway, and the reeds took them.
Bardo Kell was last. He lingered at the edge of the light for a moment, watching the arch, and then he lifted one hand in a slow, weary gesture that might have been a salute or might have been a farewell, and turned, and was gone.
The causeway was dark. The marsh murmured. Pell stood by the gate-post with her paddle at her side and her chest heaving, and she was staring at the bolt in the stone with an expression of perfect astonishment, as though it had only just occurred to her that it had been meant for her.
Up on the wall, above the gate, Ysra’s voice came down out of the dark.
“The stair’s empty,” she said. She sounded, for the first time since Idrin had known her, entirely certain of something. “I’m sure of it this time.”
Idrin sat down on the gate-foot step, very suddenly, because his legs would no longer hold him. The lamp shook in his hand. Somewhere out on the causeway, in the dark beyond the last of the torchlight, a boy’s voice rose thin and frightened over the sound of the water, asking, over and over, in a whisper that carried all the way to the arch, for his cousin Bardo by name.