The reed boat came up the river on the eleventh morning after the bog, and it came without a sound. Idrin saw it first from the gate-foot, a small dark hull drifting out of the mist below the causeway with its prow pointing toward the arch. It was no bigger than a bath. It had been made from bundles of marsh reed tied tight with black cord, and it sat low in the water, riding the current in a slow turn, and nobody was paddling it.
He called for Harrow. Harrow came from the wall, counting, and looked down at the boat with its load, and said there were four bundles of reed and one of wool, and that the wool was tied to the prow with a double knot. He did not say how he had counted it through the mist. Idrin had stopped asking that kind of question some days before.
The boat came in against the causeway stones and stopped. The current pushed at it and it did not move. Idrin went down the causeway steps and knelt on the wet stone, and reached out with his good hand, and took hold of the knotted wool.
It was a bundle of grey wool, tightly rolled. Under the wool, folded inside a fold of waxed cloth, lay a sheet of coarse marsh-paper, the colour of old bark, covered on one side in a child’s careful, looping hand. The letters were large and round and laboured, and each one had been formed with great attention, the tongue poking out at the corner of the mouth as a child’s does when it is trying very hard to get something right.
Idrin read it aloud, because he could not help himself.
“To the Prince of the Hold. From the reeve Bardo Kell, for the marsh-towns. Corran is gone home to the reeds, and his arm is set, and the cook has been good to him. He is not a prisoner and he says so. The dead are to be buried in the marsh, not under your wall, where their own water can say their names over them. The two men in your cellar are to be sent back to us, by the causeway, at the next water. This is the marsh’s word.”
He stopped. The letters swam for a moment, and then came clear again.
Below the reeve’s words, in a different hand, neat and spare and very old, someone had written a second line. A word for a word. Salt for stone. We will say what the salt is when the Hold has met us at the causeway and agreed to it. No more is owed.
“Salt for stone,” said Harrow, quietly, from the top of the steps. “That’s nine words in the first part and six in the second. Fifteen words. And a child wrote most of them.”
“Who wrote the second line?”
“The reeve,” said Harrow. “You can see it’s older. He’s written it with a stick, not a pen. The marsh doesn’t use pens much. It cuts its letters in the bark.”
Korrin had come down behind them. He had been on the wall with the Watch, and he had heard the boat’s bell-note, which was a bundle of tin cans tied to the stern and rattled by the current. He stood at the top of the steps with his arms folded and his face set, and when he heard the words salt for stone he gave a short hard bark of a laugh, without any humour at all.
“Trade stone with a marsh,” she said. “That’s a joke, Highness. The marsh put a man through the gate with a knife two weeks ago, and now it wants to exchange its salt for our wall. I’d sooner trade the wall for a brick of mud.”
“The marsh is hungry,” said Pell.
She had come down the steps with her bread-cloth over her shoulder and her knife in her belt. She stood now on the bottom step, looking at the reed boat with her head on one side, and she sniffed. It was a long, considering sniff, the sort she gave to a sack of grain before she decided whether it would keep.
“It’s hungry,” said Pell again. “I can smell it on the wind. There’s no salt on that river, and there’s no salt in those bundles, and the bark’s been cut by somebody who’s been reduced to writing his prices on the back of a fence. He wants salt. We’ve got salt in the granary, flat and sour, but salt’s salt, and I’d sooner feed a hungry man with bad salt than a full one with nothing.” She turned to Korrin. “And that’s a reason to talk. Hungry men are the most sensible men in the world. They can’t afford to be otherwise.”
Korrin looked at him with flat scorn. “They’re the most dangerous,” he said.
“Same thing, in a kitchen,” said Pell.
Idrin looked down at the letter again. He read the second line through, slowly, twice, and he felt the old reflex rise in him, the instinct to write an answer in the Forms and send it back on the water with the seal of a Warden upon it. We find the matter improperly raised. He had written that sentence before. He could feel the words in his mouth now, ready and smooth.
He did not say them.
He went up the steps to the gatehouse and sat down at the table, and found the Chancery paper in the box, and took out his own pen, the gold-nibbed one his mother had given him. He dipped it in the stone inkwell that Pell had found for him. He wrote slowly, in his own hand, which was not a clerk’s hand and not a prince’s, but simply the hand of a man who had been taught to write neatly and was trying, for once, to write honestly.
To the reeve Bardo Kell, from Idrin Saelmar, who is the Hold’s Pretender, and who signs this as himself. Corran is welcome to his home, and to his bread. The dead shall be buried as the marsh asks, and the Hold will send them down the river by the boat, with their names in the water. The two men in the cellar are guests of the Hold, under the Hold’s word, and will go home when the Hold has asked them what they want, which it has not yet done. I will meet you at the causeway, on the first day of the new month, at the stone where the Writs were read. I will bring my own bread. I cannot promise you salt. I can promise you my face, and I have been told it is not a very good one.
He read it over. Then he signed it, and folded it, and sealed it with a dribble of plain wax from the candle, without a stamp.
It was not a Writ. He knew that. He had written it in his own hand, without a Form or a site or a term, and the Register would not record it. There was no line on the board for it. There would be no memory taken, and no Seal added, and no entry for the clerk to copy into the minutes. It was only a letter, and it went out of the gatehouse in Idrin’s own hand, and for the length of time it took him to walk down the causeway steps he felt almost light.
He lasted about a minute.
Then he saw Harrow’s face at the foot of the steps, and Korrin’s, and Pell’s, and he remembered that the letter was an agreement, and that agreements had to be kept by somebody, and that he was the one who had signed it.
He tied the folded paper to the prow of the reed boat with a strip of the grey wool, in a double knot, the way it had been tied when it came. He did not need to think about how. He had seen it done. He shoved the boat out into the current with his good hand, and the bell-cans rattled as it moved, and the water took it.
It went out into the river, slowly, the way it had come. Idrin stood on the causeway steps and watched it go, the small dark hull riding low and steady on the brown water, the grey wool bright at the prow. It drifted past the foot of the river wall and the broken raft and the Lowgate houses with their open doors. It reached the bend of the reeds.
Then it stopped.
It did not drift on. It turned in the current, slowly, as a boat turns when a hand on the tiller has decided the matter, and it came round until its prow was pointing back at the causeway. Then it held. It sat still on the water against the wind, the bell-cans silent now, the grey wool at its prow lifting very slightly in the air, and it did not move again.
It was not waiting for the current. It was not waiting for the wind. It held as if the bundle had been tied to it by someone standing on the far bank of the reeds, someone patient and unhurried, who had been told to wait for an answer and had not yet been given one.
“That’s not a boat,” said Harrow, at Idrin’s shoulder, very quietly. “That’s a reply.”