Jory Fenn got the gatehouse hearth to draw on the third try, and the satisfaction of it was out of all proportion to the work. He had cleared the flue with a bundle of dry reed and a length of old chain that the Hold seemed glad to give up, and when the first real flame rose up the throat of the chimney and out into the evening air, he sat back on his heels and felt about nine years old. His mother had taught him to build a fire the way other women taught their children to pray. A fire that would not draw was a lie told by a house, she used to say, and houses that lied to you ought to be made to pay.
“You’re smiling,” said Idrin, from the bench under the window.
“I’m warm.”
“You’re smiling at a chimney.”
“It’s a good chimney,” Jory said. “It’s been waiting for someone to ask it nicely.”
Idrin had his saddlebag open across his knees and a book out of it, a thick Lessaran volume with a cracked spine, its pages marked with strips of linen in four colours. He had been reading since the light went. He read the way he did most things, which was carefully and with the air of a man who expected to be checked. Jory had known him since they were both boys in the Chancery’s own stables, where Idrin had been the seventh prince of a crown with no use for a seventh anything, and Jory had been the son of a farmer whose sheep had been taken for a debt that the Chancery never bothered to count. They had grown up with the two halves of the same insult, and in the years since Idrin had made a habit of asking Jory what he thought before he thought it himself. Jory had come to think that was the nearest thing to love that a prince was able to offer.
“Listen to this,” Idrin said. “A man who is not entered in any Register may take ground that is unclaimed, provided that ground is not held by a subject of the Crown, and provided that he enters one subject of his own in the Register that governs the ground. The entry of a subject validates the claim. The claimant is thereafter the lord of the ground, under the Crown, for as long as the subject remains.”
“Subject of whom?” Jory asked.
“The book doesn’t say.”
“It must say. It’s a law.”
“The book says a subject. It does not say of whom. Clerks never write the second half, because the first half makes them rich.” Idrin turned a page with the flat of his thumb. “It’s the Writ of Vacancy. The Crown wrote it three hundred years ago to fill the marches with men who would pay taxes on empty ground. They called it a kindness.”
“Of whom, though,” Jory said. He was not going to let it go. He had argued with farmers for a living, and he knew the one question that a man could never answer without giving something away. “Who’s the subject?”
Idrin closed the book on his finger. He looked, for a moment, very young. He had been nineteen for four months, and the coat he wore had been a dress uniform in Sallowmere before the Chancery stripped its braid off, and the braid had left pale threads in the wool where it had been. Jory could see the threads now in the firelight.
“Of the Crown of Lessary,” Idrin said. “That is the usual meaning.”
“And are we? Subjects of the Crown?”
“I am not. The Chancery struck my name from its own book when I refused to sign an order. That was the word they used. Struck.” He said it evenly, the way he said everything he had decided not to feel. “I am an exile. An exile may still take ground. The book does not say an exile may not.”
“So you’re a subject of nothing, and you’re going to make a subject out of a wall.”
“Out of the Hold’s one entered subject,” Idrin said. “Yes.”
“The one entered subject is a wall with an opinion,” said Jory. He said it without heat, because it was true, and because he had been staring at the board for an hour. “It’s a line on a board. It can’t pay taxes.”
“It has a number. It has an entry.”
“Which is?”
“Nought, nought, nought, one,” said Idrin, and Jory heard the correction in the tone, the particular exactness that Idrin’s tutors had put into him with a stick. “It’s the first line of the Register. The Register is the Crown’s own book, Jory, copied out for the Hold in a clerk’s hand. Whatever wrote it had authority to enter a subject, and it entered one, and the subject has been on that board so long that the Crown forgot to strike it.”
“Then maybe the Crown forgot to strike the lot of it.”
“Maybe.”
Jory got up and fetched the kettle from its hook, filled it at the bucket by the door, and set it on the fire. He did it because his hands wanted something to do and because the fire was pleased with the attention. When he looked up Idrin had opened the book again and was writing in the margin with his gold-nibbed pen, in a quick, clean hand that did not waver. He wrote a line, looked at it, crossed out half of it, and wrote it again underneath.
“What’s that?”
“A claim.” Idrin turned the page toward him, and Jory read the line aloud, slowly, because he could not help sounding it out.
“We find the matter improperly raised, and we request that the Hold be recorded in our name.”
Jory looked at him. “That’s Forms.”
“It’s the Forms of the Saelmar nursery. I was taught them before I was taught to hold a fork.” Idrin’s mouth moved in a way that was almost a smile. “Every command a prince gives is a sentence in them. We find. We request. We are pleased to decline. It is the Crown’s grammar, and it comes down from the overseers who wrote the wages. The idea is that a thing cannot be argued with once it has been said in the right order.”
“A claim’s not a bed,” said Jory. “You can’t sleep in it.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“The marsh-men on the Lessary Road aren’t going to be impressed by a sentence with we in it. They’ll hear a boy talking to himself and they’ll come up the causeway to see if he has any money.”
“They are not going to come up the causeway.”
“They came up the causeway in the spring, the Lessary riders said so, and they’ll come again.” Jory sat back down on the bench and put his boots to the warm stones of the hearth. “You can’t keep a wall with words. I’ve tried. My father tried with the Crown’s own bailiff and it did him no good at all.”
Idrin put the pen down.
For a while the only sound was the kettle beginning to think about boiling, a small rising hiss, and the fire settling in the grate with the sound of a dog turning in its sleep. Outside, the wind had dropped. The broken bell in the frame over the wall had stopped rattling, and in its place there was the distant, persistent noise of the Sallow running under the causeway. Jory listened to it and thought, without quite meaning to, that the river was counting something.
“If the claim is good,” Idrin said at last, slowly, as a man says a sum he has been dreading, “it stands only if the entry is valid. The entry is valid only if the subject is a subject. A subject is a person who has consented to be entered. So the Mantle must be a person, and must have consented.” He rubbed his thumb along the spine of the book. “Put plainly, the Crown counts a thing only if the thing can say yes to being counted.”
“Has it?”
“Nobody has asked it.”
“Well,” said Jory, “you could ask it now.”
Idrin laughed, a short surprised sound, and then he was not laughing at all. He looked toward the gatehouse door, which stood open on the dark arch and the still chain beyond it, and the silence in the room came back down over them both like a cloth.
“We are not going to ask a wall whether it would like to be a subject,” Idrin said.
“No.”
“That would be absurd.”
“Yes,” said Jory, and was surprised to hear that he meant it kindly.
He took the first watch on the wall because it was his turn and because he could not sit still. The stair to the wall-walk had a short turn at the top where a man could lose his footing in the dark, and he went up it with one hand on the stone, counting the steps without meaning to. Nineteen. He had been counting things since he was small enough to be sent to the flock with a stick and a number, and the habit had got into him the way damp gets into a wool coat. He kept a count now of the days since he had left the farm, the coins he had been paid by Idrin, the coins he had not, and the miles to Lessary. He had begun the count in the first week of the Lessary Road. He had no idea why he kept going.
At the wall-walk the air was cold and clean and smelled of marsh. The marsh lay beneath the north wall in a long dark sheet, and across the sheet, a long way off on the far bank of the river, a fire burned. It was small and steady. It did not flicker in the wind as a campfire does. Jory watched it for a while and it did not move, did not spread, did not dim. It was simply there, much as a star is there, and it was looking, he thought, at the gate.
He went back down the stair and told Idrin about it. Idrin asked him how many people were round the fire. Jory said he could not tell. Idrin asked whether it moved. Jory said no. Idrin nodded, very slowly, and took the pen out again.
“Write it down as a fact, then,” he said. “Not a fear.”
Jory watched him write. A fire on the far bank, steady, not moving. Observed by J. Fenn, first watch. Then Idrin looked up and said that he would sleep now, and went to the pallet in the back room without waiting for an answer.
Jory stayed by the fire. He poured the boiled water into a dented pot with the Chancery mark scratched off its base, and drank a mug of something that tasted of barley and wet ash, and counted the mugs, which were four. He had got up to the fourth when the hearth stones under his stool gave a small, patient knock.
One. He stopped.
Two. He did not move.
Three, from beneath the stones, in a voice so low it was more like the feeling of a count than a count itself, as a child counts in the dark to keep from being afraid.
Jory sat still and listened. The voice went on, carefully, one at a time, and it was not hurrying. At forty it stopped, as if it had been counting for a long while and was waiting, now, for someone to notice that it had.