The marsh-men came back before the lamp in the gatehouse had burned down an inch. Idrin had not believed they would. He had sat on the gate-foot step with the shaking lamp in his lap for some time, listening to the boy’s voice in the dark, and he had told himself that a reeve who had been beaten at a gate would take his dead and go home to his wife, and that the boy would be left to the Hold’s mercy. Then he heard the splash of poles in the water, and he stood up, and the lamp went out in his hand.
They did not come up the causeway with torches this time. They came in the dark, low and quick, and the first he knew of them was a sound that was not the sound of water at all, a grating scrape of wood over stone, and a grunt of effort, and then the splintering crack of a raft’s lashings giving way.
“The chain,” said Harrow, from the gate-post, in a voice gone flat with alarm. “They’re at the chain. They’re pulling the raft off the river wall.”
“Why would they want the raft?”
“They want the chain,” said Ysra, from the top of the stair. Her voice was very tight. “The raft’s tied to the wall with a chain that goes into the stone. They’re not taking the raft. They’re taking the chain out of the masonry.”
Idrin ran. He ran out under the arch and down the causeway steps, and the stones were slick under his feet, and there was a smell of wet rope and crushed reed and something sharper underneath that he would later learn was marsh-fire, the oily black smoke that the reeds gave off when they were burned green. The raft was half out of the water at the foot of the river wall, its flat boards heaved up and split, and six men were hauling on a chain that ran from its bows into a socket of rusted iron in the foot of the wall. The socket was cracked. Mortar dust came off it in a fine grey cloud with every heave. The men were grunting, their faces dark in the faint starlight, and one of them had a knife between his teeth.
Idrin shouted. He did not shout the Forms. He shouted his own name, which was the only thing he could think of. The men turned.
One of them came at him with a long pole, swinging it low at his knees. Idrin jumped back, too late, and the pole caught his shin and took his legs out from under him, and he went down on the wet stones with his head ringing. He tried to roll. Something bright flashed above him. A man was on top of him, heavy and smelling of smoke and mud, and the knife was in his hand, and the hand was coming down toward Idrin’s throat with a steady, practised, unhurried motion, as a man reaches for a rope to tie off a load.
Idrin could not move. He had both hands on the man’s wrist, and he could feel the strength in it, and he knew that it was going to be enough.
Then a figure stepped out of the shadow of the gate.
He was a short, wide man, broader in the shoulders than most men, and he wore a guard’s leather jerkin with the buckles undone and a pair of heavy gauntlets on his hands that came up past the elbow. His face was flat and pale in the starlight, with a heavy jaw and a mouth set in a straight line, and his eyes were dark and perfectly calm. They looked at the man with the knife on Idrin’s chest as a closed door looks at a knock, without interest and without any intention of opening.
He had a short sword in one hand. He did not raise it. He simply put his left gauntlet against the back of the knife-man’s neck and pushed.
The man came off Idrin like a sack being dragged from a cart. He went sideways across the wet stones and his head struck the causeway edge with a crack that Idrin heard above the water, and he did not get up. The stranger turned without a word and went for the next man, who was already coming at him with a pole, and he caught the pole in his bare left forearm, where the gauntlet had been torn away at the wrist, and let the blow go through the arm and into his body as though it were nothing, and swung the short sword in a flat, economical sweep that took the second man under the ribs.
He folded. The stranger stepped over him and turned.
The third man had a crossbow. He had come up behind the stranger in the dark and he was levelling it at the stranger’s back, his face twisted with a kind of fierce terror. The stranger did not turn. Without looking, the stranger lifted a sword arm over the head, reversed the blade, and threw it with a short, hard, practised jerk of the shoulder, and the point went into the man’s chest just beneath the collarbone. He sat down on the causeway stones as if his legs had been cut from under him, and the crossbow clattered away into the water.
It had taken perhaps half a minute. Idrin had not moved. He was lying on his back on the wet stones with his hands still raised, and he could not feel his legs, and the stranger was standing over him with a gauntlet hanging at his side and a sword dripping in his other hand, and he looked down at Idrin with the same flat calm expression he had worn throughout.
“Get up,” he said.
“I—”
“Korrin,” he added, as if Idrin had asked, and then went on in the same flat voice. “The Lash is my trade. Get up. There’s one more.”
There was one more. He was the knife-man’s companion, and he had been standing at the chain with a boathook in his hands, and now he had dropped the boathook and was reaching for the rusted socket with both hands, hauling at the iron as though he could tear it out of the wall by sheer will. The chain snapped taut. The socket shifted. Stone dust rained down.
And the stranger’s sword arm stopped in the air.
It stopped as though something had caught it from behind, something hard and tight and unyielding, and the blade hung at the top of its swing with the veins standing out on his forearm. His face did not change. But his jaw went rigid, and a line of sweat appeared along his hairline, and he made a small sharp sound through his nose that was almost a growl.
Idrin felt it too. The stone under his back twitched. A tightness ran up through the causeway, through the wall, through the gate-post and the arch and the soles of his feet, and it tightened on the stranger’s wrist like a bracelet closing, a thin band of cold, unbending weft that had come out of the stone to hold him. Idrin saw the band. It was grey, and it shone faintly in the starlight, and it ran from the causeway stones up the stranger’s arm to the elbow, where it spread and held.
Somewhere above, on the wall, Harrow gasped aloud. “The stone,” he said, through clenched teeth. “It’s taken the stone.”
And from the gate-post, a sharp cry from Pell, so loud it cut through the water-sound: “My paddle! It’s slipped out of my hand, it’s gone right out of my hand, I didn’t drop it, something took it!”
Idrin lay still and felt the bloom run through the body. It came up out of the causeway and into the wall and into the gate and into every Hand that was awake, one after another, a shock of cold and weight and pain that did not belong to any single one of them. It was like the ripple across the surface of a pond when a stone has been thrown into the middle of it. He could feel Harrow’s shoulders knotting. He could feel Pell’s hand go numb. He could feel, very faintly, through some stranger thread that was not his to hold, something quiet and tired at the top of the stair that was Ysra, counting, and something further off, in the cellar, that was not counting at all.
The stranger’s arm trembled. He was looking at the band round his wrist with an expression of cold, bitter, absolute concentration.
“Let go,” said Idrin, from the stones. His voice came out very small.
Nothing happened.
“Let him go,” he said again. He rolled onto one elbow, slowly, as a man rises from a sickbed, and looked at the band on the stranger’s arm, and spoke to it in the clerk’s dry voice he had learned from Tallow. “His blow is entered. The man is down. The chain is held. The Hold has what it needs.”
The band loosened. It did not vanish. It drew back down the stranger’s forearm, slowly, like a sleeve being eased off by careful hands, and the stranger’s sword arm came down with a jerk, and he staggered a step, and then stood still.
He looked at the man on the chain. The man had dropped to his knees on the causeway with his hands over his face, and he was not moving. The chain lay slack on the stones.
“They were in the way,” said the stranger, to nobody, in a flat, clear voice. It was the first thing he had said since he stepped out of the shadow. He did not sound sorry. He did not sound anything. He wiped his short sword on a tuft of marsh grass that grew at the edge of the causeway, one long careful stroke on each side, and then he looked at Idrin with the same unblinking calm.
“The boy’s still breathing,” he said. “The one with the broken arm. He’s on the stones by the gate. I checked him while you were lying there.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. You should have struck first.”
Idrin got to his feet. His shin was throbbing, and his head ached where it had struck the stones, and he could feel the cold wet of the causeway through his boots. “I didn’t strike at all.”
“That’s the trouble.” He sheathed the sword with a single neat motion. “You should have. That’s what a gate is for.”
“A gate is for keeping things out,” said Idrin.
“A gate has kept things out of this Hold for two hundred years,” said the stranger, quite calmly. “And the thing it has kept out most reliably, in all that time, is help.” He turned to look up at the wall, at the dark shape of the arch and the closed oak doors, and his face in the starlight was not kind, and not cruel either. It was only exact. “Who is inside the wall?”
“The Hold,” said Idrin. “Its people. The Hands. The clerk and the cook and the mason.”
“The living,” said the stranger. “Who is living, inside the wall?”
Idrin hesitated. “The cook. The clerk, I think. The mason. The woman on the stair. And me.”
“Five,” said the stranger. He nodded, once, as a quartermaster nods at a sum that has come out as he expected. “The living are a trade I can calculate. I can count them off, one by one, as I count the men who come up the causeway. The living are the only things in this Hold that can be used up.” He looked at Idrin again, and his dark eyes did not blink. “So I’ll count them. I’ll start with you, Highness. You’re the one who was lying down.”