The cellar lamp had been trimmed twice since the Chamber rose, and it still smoked. Idrin had watched Pell do the trimming. She spat on her thumb and pinched the wick the way a sergeant pinches a recruit’s collar, and then she told him, without looking up, that he was thinner than the cellar and should eat something before he tried to be a prince on an empty stomach. The Chamber went up the stair one Hand at a time after that. Ysra went first, counting. Gaunt went next, complaining about the steps. The casks stood empty in their rows, the wall where the chalk had been was bare again, and when the last footstep had faded there was nothing left under the vault but the lamp, the pillar, and the two of them.
Korrin sat with his back against the pillar and his boots stretched out across the flags. The iron had grown out of the stone at the height of his wrists, two dark bands that ran into the column as smoothly as tallow runs down a candle. The chain between them lay in a loop across his stomach. Every breath he took moved the loop, and every movement made the same small sound, a clink like a coin dropped and caught before it reaches the floor.
“You’re going to say something,” said Korrin. “You’ve been going to say it since the Chamber rose.”
“I’ve been thinking about it.”
“That’s worse. Thinking is what the clerk does, and then he writes it down.”
Idrin lowered himself onto the nearest cask. The left hand in its sling throbbed when he moved, a dull heat along the palm where the new skin pulled, and he kept the arm still against his coat and let the right hand rest on his knee. Across the cellar the stair-foot door stood half open. Tallow’s lamp was still burning in the little room where the Hold kept its paper, and Idrin could hear the scratch of a pen. He had asked for the minutes of the causeway to be brought down. Tallow had carried them down himself, and he read them without any of the pleasure he usually took in a clause.
“Tallow,” said Idrin. “Would you read the entry for the causeway?”
The scratching stopped. Tallow came to the doorway with the minute-book held open against his chest, his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, and cleared his throat as a clerk does before he gives a number he does not like.
“Causeway at the Hold’s river gate, nineteenth day of spring,” he read. “Korrin, called the Lash, of the Hold, bound to the pillar by the Mantle. Three men of the marsh-towns, who came up the causeway with fire. Entered as killed in the defence of the gate. The Lash does not dispute the count.” He lowered the book. “That is the whole of it. I added nothing. I wanted you to know that I didn’t.”
“I don’t dispute it,” said Korrin.
“Three,” said Tallow, and closed the book.
Korrin looked at him for a moment, then turned his flat dark eyes on the prince.
“I’m not going to say sorry for them,” he said. “Don’t ask me to. I’ll say it to the bone-woman when she’s ready for bone, and I’ll say it to the ones who had mothers. But not to you, and not to the book.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“You were going to.”
“I was going to ask what you want,” said Idrin. “That’s a different question.”
He laughed at that, a short hard sound that the vault flung back at them. The chain jumped on his stomach, and the cuffs rang once against the stone.
“Want,” she said. “All right. You asked. I want to be on the wall. I want to see the road from the top, where I can see who is coming up it, and I don’t want to see it through a grating in the floor. I want a spear, and a Hand beside me on the walk who doesn’t call me girl. And I want the granaries of Lessary opened.” His voice dropped. “By force. Tonight, if you’ll give me the word. The Crown keeps three barns full of grain on the Lessary road, and the carters’ children in the marsh villages are thinner than any child in this Hold. I’d take the barns in an hour and give the grain away at the gate, and I’d not feel a thing for the carters, because they’d not feel a thing for mine.”
“I won’t open Lessary’s granaries by force,” said Idrin.
“No?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll starve on your own bread, Highness.”
“Then we will find bread that belongs to nobody,” said Idrin, “which I am told is harder.”
Korrin studied him. For the first time since he had come down with the lamp, something in his face moved that was not contempt.
“That’s the first honest thing a prince has said to me,” he said at last. “Most of them lie about barns. The grain’s gone bad, or the carters are thieves, or it’s all going to a better cause. You said no, with a face like a dropped plate, and I’ll respect a man who doesn’t pretend.” He shifted his shoulders against the stone. “Take the iron off. I’ll not run. You have my word, and I’ve given it to fewer people than the Chamber has counted.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because I’d have run already, if I meant to. I’ve had a month of iron, and I’ve counted every link.”
Idrin looked at the cuffs. They had grown out of the pillar on the first night, while he and Harrow were still arguing about where the weight of the gate would fall, and they had not stopped growing until they fitted his wrists exactly, as a sleeve fits the arm put into it. He knew the weft had made them, and could unmake them with no more effort than a sigh. And he knew that nobody in the Chamber had ever proposed taking them off. The Hands had sat for three weeks on the casks, and had argued the rule, the bread and the nails, and no one had wanted to be the first to ask. He had not wanted it either, if he were honest. Asking would have meant that he thought she could be trusted, and he had not decided that yet.
“I’m not going to order it,” he said.
“Then don’t.”
“I’m going to ask.” He stood up. He crossed the cellar, careful of the sling, and stopped beside the pillar close enough to see the weft’s grey grain running under the iron like veins under thin skin. He laid his good hand flat against the stone beside her right wrist, the way Harrow laid his palm on a wall before he trusted it. Then he spoke, and he did not use the voice of a prince, which he had been raised to use and had almost stopped using in the Hold. He used the flat, clear voice of a clerk, which was the only one he had found that the weft seemed willing to hear.
“The cuffs are the weft’s,” he said. “A Hand of this Hold has given his word that he will not run. I ask you, as the body, to let him go. I am not commanding you. I know I have no right to command you. I am asking.”
For a while the iron did nothing at all. Then the cuffs softened, the way fat softens in a pan. The chain went slack across his stomach, and the loop of it slid down over his knees onto the flags. The bands on his wrists thinned, and thinned again, until they were no wider than a finger, and then they ran back down into the stone like water going into sand. There was nothing on his wrists but a pale ring of skin, and nothing on the pillar but the grey grain of the stone.
The chain made one last small sound as it settled.
Korrin did not move for a moment. Then he brought his hands up into the lamplight and turned them over, slowly, one after the other, and began to rub the marks with his thumbs. He counted as he rubbed, aloud, in a low steady voice, the way Harrow counted stones.
“One. Two. Three on the left. Four on the right, and the one at the bone that’s gone purple. Five.” He looked up. “I count my enemies with a knife. I counted these with my wrists, and my number’s better than the clerk’s.”
“Tallow will want the number,” said Idrin.
“Tallow can have it.” He got up carefully, one hand against the pillar, as a man gets up who has sat too long in one place and has not yet decided whether his legs are his own. He stood straight. “Here’s another line for your little book. Strike me from the causeway.”
From the stair-foot, Tallow made a small noise that might have been a cough.
“I can’t strike a minute,” he said from the doorway. “I’m sorry. A minute is a fact of the Hold’s record, and a fact cannot be unhappened. What I can do is add a line beneath it. The book allows nothing else.”
“Then add one.”
Tallow came down the cellar steps very precisely and stopped at the foot of the pillar. He opened the minute-book on the nearest cask, took out his stub of pencil, and wrote for some time in the margin, his lips moving slightly. Then he turned the book round so that the Lash could read it, and Idrin read it over her shoulder.
Korrin, unbound, speaks.
“Is that enough?” asked Tallow.
“It’s short,” said Korrin. “Good. Don’t make it pretty.”
“I never do.”
He climbed to the wall that evening. Idrin followed him, because Korrin had not told him not to, and because he had seen Korrin’s face when the cuffs fell away, and did not want him climbing a stair in the dark with nothing in his hands but the rail. Ysra sat on the bottom step of the Watch-tower stair with her knees drawn up and a lamp beside her. She did not raise her eyes as they passed.
“Eighty-one to the top,” she said. “You’re both on the count.”
“We know,” said Korrin.
“It’s a fair number,” said Ysra, to nobody, and went back to counting her own breath.
The wall-walk was cold and smelled of new slate and wet grass. The light had nearly gone. The marsh lay below the river to the south like a sheet of pewter someone had dropped and not troubled to pick up, and the road ran up out of it toward the north-west ridge, a pale line that grew paler the further it went. Korrin went to the merlon at the north corner, where Harrow’s masons had rebuilt the parapet in the spring, and leaned his forearms on the stone. He did not speak. He only looked.
Idrin came up beside him and looked too.
There were riders on the far ridge. He could see them against the last of the sky, a dark line of horses standing shoulder to shoulder along the crest, not moving. There was no banner. No lance was raised, and no torch had been lit to answer the Hold’s watch-fire. They sat their horses where the road came over the top of the rise and looked down at the gate of Ormhold as a man looks at a locked door in a house he has been told to leave.
“Count them,” said Korrin.
Idrin counted. He counted twice, because the light was failing and the horses were far off. “Eleven,” he said. “Perhaps twelve. The last is behind the others.”
“Eleven don’t sit on a ridge at dusk,” said Korrin. His voice had gone very quiet and very even, the way it went in the cellar when a question turned dangerous. “Eleven ride down, and they shout, and they wave their poles at the gate. These have stopped. Somebody’s told them to wait, and they’re waiting for it.”
“For what?”
He did not answer at once. Far below them, past the causeway and the dark bend of the river, a single light came on at the Lantern Ford toll-house, small as a pin-head, and then went out again.
“For you to go down and meet them,” said Korrin. “Or for you to stay up here and be counted.”