He came in the morning, alone, under a white rag tied to the end of a reed pole. Ysra saw him first, from the wall, and she called down the stair in the flat voice she used for everything that moved on the causeway. “One,” she said. “Walking. He’s carrying a rag. He hasn’t got a weapon in his hand, and he’s not walking like a man who wants to be shot.”
Idrin went out under the arch and stood at the gate-foot with his hands at his sides. He had not slept well. The bread from the kitchen had been eaten cold, and the boy, Corran, had been in the kitchen since the morning before, and the cook had told him twice that the boy was the Hold’s guest until the Chamber decided otherwise, and had not once stopped looking at him as though he were a loaf she had not yet finished rising. Idrin had thought about the boy’s three names all night, and about the marsh having a name for every drowned man, and about what he would say to the reeve when the reeve came to ask for them.
Bardo Kell came up the causeway slowly. He did not hurry. He stopped at the foot of the river wall, where the raft had been dragged out of its chain and lay on its side in the reeds like a dead animal, and he stood looking at it for a moment before he lifted his eyes to the arch. The rag hung limp from the pole. The wind was off the water, and the rag did not stir.
He was lean and weathered and not young. He wore a heavy coat of dark Lessary wool that had once been the long toll-coat of a customs-man on the Lessary Road. Someone had cut it down to fit a shorter body, and had cut it badly, so that the hem was ragged and the sleeves were a hand too long and had been turned back at the wrists. There was a faint pale line on the cloth at the breast where a badge had been unpicked. His face was brown and creased, and his eyes were the grey-green of the river in winter, and they went over the gate and the chain and the arch and the closed oak doors with the unhurried thoroughness of a man checking a bale of goods for damp.
He stopped at the place where the causeway met the gate-foot, which was the flat stone where the Hold had once read its Writs to travellers, and he did not step onto it.
“Prince,” he said.
“Reeve,” said Idrin.
“You’re not the reeve. I’m the reeve. My father was the reeve before me, and his father before him, and we’ve held the marsh-towns’ roll since before there was a Lessary to strike us from it. You can call me Bardo. Everybody else does, when they’re not spitting.” He lifted the rag on its pole, a little, so that it caught the light. “I’ve come to talk. I’m under a rag, and I’ve got no knife, and I’m not shouting. I want my cousin’s boy, and I want my dead. You’ve got both. That’s what I came up the causeway for.”
“The dead are the Hold’s concern,” said Idrin. He had decided on the words in the night, and he spoke them now in the Forms, carefully, one at a time, the way his tutors had taught him to lay down a formal reply. “They died at the Hold’s gate, under the Hold’s reach. Their bodies are the Hold’s to keep until they are claimed by their kin, in order, with their names entered. The boy is a guest of the Hold. He is injured, and he is being fed and set. He is not a prisoner.”
Bardo laughed.
It was not a warm laugh. It was short and dry and came out of him like the sound of a sack being dropped on a stone floor. He shook his head, slowly, and his creased face did not change at all, except around the eyes, where something went very tight and very old.
“A guest,” he said. “A guest. Do you know what that word means on the marsh? It means a man who comes into your house, eats your bread, and sleeps by your fire, while he waits for you to turn your back. My cousin’s boy is fifteen years old, and he’s sitting in your kitchen with your bread in his belly, and you call him a guest.” He looked at the arch, and then up at the crown of it, where the chain lay quiet. “The Crown used to call us guests, too. In the Quiet Census. They came up the marsh-roads with their clerks and their wax and their lists, and they wrote the marsh-towns into their book as visitors, and then they struck the visitors from the roll, all forty villages, and nobody in Lessary will say the word census out loud. But I remember it. I was ten years old, and I held my mother’s hand while they read the list, and the clerk called every name in the reed-houses and then he said that the names were no longer required.”
Idrin felt his face go cold. He had read the Quiet Census. He had read it in the Chancery’s own archive, in the weeks before he was exiled, when he had been sent to copy out the lists for a magistrate who wanted a second opinion. He had seen the phrase no longer required. He had not known it was a village he was reading about. He had thought it was a sum.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“Nobody in Lessary knows,” said Bardo. “That’s how a census works. You count what you want to keep, and you forget the rest.” He tilted his head, looking at the prince with a faint, tired, curious interest. “But you’ve been reading the Chancery’s lists. I can see it on your face. You’ve got the look of a boy who was sent to a clerk’s desk and found the names he didn’t want to read.”
“I was a clerk, for a term.”
“I know. I’ve heard about you. They say you refused the order.” Bardo’s voice was not kind, exactly, but it was not cruel either. “They say you wouldn’t sign it. Lessary says you’re a fool for it. The marsh says you’re a fool, too, but a different sort. You’re the only Saelmar who ever refused a list in my hearing, and you’re the only one of them who’s ever stood at a gate and talked to me as though I had a name.”
Idrin said nothing for a moment. Then he said, carefully, “What do you want, Bardo?”
“The cousin. And the dead, in the marsh, where their own water can say their names over them.” Bardo lowered the rag a fraction, so that it hung against the pole. “And I want to tell you something you don’t know, because nobody ever did, and I’m the only man on the marsh who remembers how it was. The gate has a cost.”
“I know the Writ has a cost.”
“No, Highness. The Writ’s cost is small. It’s the thing you can’t see that costs more.” He glanced toward the arch, then back. “The gate’s been paid for, every time it’s opened or shut, by somebody who’s not in the room. You think it’s a gate, and it’s a gate. But it’s a ledger too, and every time you speak to it, you’re writing in it, and the marsh has the other half of the book.”
“What is the cost?” asked Idrin.
Bardo smiled, very thinly. “That’s the price of the next question,” he said. “And I’ll name it when my cousin’s on the causeway, standing where I can see him, with his arm set and his own feet under him. Not before. You want the cost, you give me the boy first.”
“I will not bargain for a boy.”
“Then you’ll pay for my silence with a boy,” said Bardo, quite mildly. “That’s how the Hold has always paid for things, I expect. It’s the only currency that doesn’t need a clerk to count it.”
Idrin did not refuse him. He could not afterward have said why. He stood at the gate-foot with the reeve’s rag hanging in the air between them and his own hands at his sides, and he felt the old reflex of the court rise in his throat, the instinct to refuse a demand and forbid a parley and order the reeve off the Hold’s land. He did not do it. He turned instead and walked the three paces to the end of the causeway, to the flat stone where the Writs had been read, and he sat down on the edge of it with his back to the arch, as a man sits who has nothing to hide and a good deal to say.
Bardo watched him sit. His eyes narrowed. He came up the last of the causeway slowly, stopped a pace away, and then sat too, on the lower step of the stone, with the reed pole across his knees and the rag beside him in the wet grass.
They sat there for some time without speaking. The river ran under the causeway with a hoarse steady murmur. A heron stood on the far bank among the reeds and watched them, motionless, one leg drawn up.
Then Bardo leaned over, turned his head, and spat into the river.
It was an old marsh gesture, heavy and deliberate, the sort a man makes to show what he thinks of the water he has been forced to cross. The spittle went out over the current and sank without a trace.
Idrin, after a moment’s consideration, did the same.
He did it neatly. He had been taught how, by Pell, in the kitchen yard, on the second morning, with a bucket of ash-water and a lecture about the proper way to spit into a pit without splashing one’s boots. He leaned forward, pressed his lips together, turned his head, and let it go in a single clean curve that landed exactly where Bardo’s had.
Bardo looked at the place on the water where both spittles had gone under. He looked for a while. Then he gave a short, unpleasant, startled bark of a laugh, and shook his head, and slapped the reed pole against his knee.
“You’re a fool, Prince,” he said, with a kind of grudging admiration. “But you’ve been taught to aim.”
When Bardo got up to go, he left something on the flat stone where the Writs had been read. It was a fish, wrapped in a strip of salt-soaked cloth, cured in the marsh-way and dry as wood. He did not say anything about it. He tipped one finger to the brim of his coat in a gesture that was almost courteous, and went down the causeway with his reed pole over his shoulder and the rag trailing behind him in the wet grass.
Ysra came down from the wall a little later, when the reeve was gone and the reeds had closed behind him. She stood beside the stone and looked at the fish without touching it. Then she bent down, very carefully, and with the tip of one finger she counted the scales along its flank, from head to tail, in a slow, precise, unhurried voice.
She stopped at the end of the count and straightened up. Her face had gone blank.
“Three,” she said.
“Three what?”
“Three,” said Ysra. “Scales, in the row along the back. The same number as the men on the causeway.” She looked at the water, where the reeds stood silent in the morning light. “The same number as the drowned.”