Rain returned to the pass before dawn—not a honest downpour that washed the slate clean, just a thin, greasy mountain drizzle that soaked into wool and made every limestone joint in the fort ache like a bad knee.
Inside the Grand Hall, Tessa Dene was kneeling beside a wooden trough, sifting dry hill-sand through an old wire mesh to get the pebbles out before mixing her morning batch of lime mortar. Noll kept a small draft moving through the upper cornice vents so the lime dust wouldn’t settle in her hair, while he rested his main attention out on the lower porch flags.
Two woodcutters from Mere—Jori and Corin, the same pair who had stumbled onto the porch during Noll’s first week in the wall—had ducked under the outer arch ten minutes ago to keep their kindling bundles and axe-heads dry while a grey squall blew across the ridge.
Neither woodcutter came past the canvas curtain. Since Sella Rusk had marched Kip, Bess, and Fennik back down to town the previous evening with eight shillings’ worth of scrap iron and all their fingers attached, the hill fort had evidently been promoted in parish gossip from a haunted slaughter-pit to a dry awning where a working man could smoke a pipe out of the wind.
“Tilda at the wash-house told my wife they took the boards off the downstairs windows at the Survey House yesterday afternoon,” Jori said, leaning his bundled ash faggots against the dry inner face of the porch pier and knocking the wet mud off his clogs. “Two carters came up the south road from the crossroads with six crates of blank ledger books and a tin bathtub.”
Corin spat over the low porch wall into the nettles and rubbed an oil-rag along the cheek of his felling axe. “A tin bathtub means it isn’t just a circuit bailiff. Circuit bailiffs wash in the horse-trough if they wash at all, and spend the rest of their time drinking the reeve’s plum brandy. Tilda say who’s coming?”
“The big one himself,” Jori said, lowering his voice half an octave the way country men did when they named a wolf, a tax-collector, or the winter pox. “Lord Auditor Vane. Orin Vane, head of the whole March Ledger.”
Inside the damp limestone of the porch jamb, Noll felt his attention sharpen. He had heard the name Orin Vane twice in tavern taprooms down near the southern crossroads—spoken by traveling factors who checked the seals on their grain-weights whenever the March Ledger was mentioned—though Noll had always made a point of leaving any town forty-eight hours before an auditor’s coach arrived.
“Vane?” Corin frowned, squinting at a nick in his axe-blade. “I saw him once, five winters back, when the silver-pit factor tried to short the timber-haulers on cord-measure. Wasn’t what I expected for a high lord from the capital.”
“How so?” Jori asked.
“Well, you look for velvet, don’t you?” Corin gestured with his oily rag. “Gold chain round the neck, fur on the cuffs, three fat clerks carrying his ink-horn and barking at the porters to clear the kennel. This fellow stepped out of the post-wagon in plain unbleached sheep’s wool. Grey as a turnip sack. Didn’t have a ring on his fingers, didn’t wear a silver buckle on his shoes, and never raised his voice above church-whisper the whole afternoon.”
“Cheap?” Jori guessed.
“No,” Corin said slowly, tucking the rag back into his belt. “That was the queer part. Tilda was scrubbing the front steps of the Survey House when he walked in—just a girl of fourteen then, with chapped knees and a bucket of dirty lye-water. Any other lord would have stepped over her like a puddle. Vane stopped on the bottom step, took his hat off in the drizzle, asked her given name and her mother’s parish, and when he came back down the road two summers later, he walked through the door and said, ‘Good morning, Tilda, did your mother’s rheumatism ease after the dry spring?’ Remembered every stable boy, every carter, and every scullery maid on the payroll by their Christian names.”
Jori grunted, impressed despite himself. “Sounds like a decent sort of gentleman.”
“Tilda doesn’t think so,” Corin said, picking up his axe bundle as the drizzle thinned over the pass. “She says a lord who curses at you when his boots are muddy forgets your face by suppertime. A man who remembers what your mother’s knees feel like without ever smiling once—she says she’d rather wash shirts for a hangman. Come on, the clouds are lifting over the timber-lot.”
The two woodcutters shouldered their bundles, tapped two knuckles respectfully against the dry limestone pier—a nervous little countryside salute to the unseen landlord of the hill—and trudged off up the ridge trail toward the birch copse.
Inside the Grand Hall, Noll stayed silent for several seconds while the crunch of their clogs died away.
“Tessa,” Noll said through his mortar mouth, his voice lacking its usual theatrical bounce. “Did you hear that?”
Tessa didn’t stop shaking the wire sand-sieve over the trough. “Everyone in Mere knows Tilda hates the Survey House. Though she took the silver shilling they paid her to air the mattresses yesterday, because a shilling buys coal.”
“I don’t mean the mattresses,” Noll said. “Prit. Come out here and read me whatever you have on this Lord Auditor Orin Vane. I know you’ve got something tucked inside that coat; you’ve been rustling like a dry wasps’ nest ever since Jori said the name.”
Prit stepped out from the niche behind the inner doorway. The bone imp was holding a tattered, water-spotted sheaf of parchment folded into quarters—a remnant salvaged from the ruined dispatch-box of his fifth master, the garrison core Iron-Vow, twenty-two years ago.
“I have opened an administrative tracking column under March Ledger Personnel on the side slate, Master Vey,” Prit said, setting his white filing chalk carefully on the stone ledge and unfolding the yellowed parchment with his dry finger-bones. “Orin Vane was a junior circuit examiner when my fifth master was catalogued, and rose to Lord Auditor of the Northern Marches eleven years ago. The circular notes agree entirely with the woodcutter’s account. He accepts no gifts, drinks plain well-water at state banquets, wears undyed wool woven at the parish workhouse, and maintains an index of every minor servant across the seven northern bailiwicks.”
Tessa dumped a scoop of sifted sand into the lime bucket and reached for the water dipper. “So he’s polite to the maid and doesn’t steal the spoons. Why are you two acting like he’s got two heads?”
“Because, my dear Tessa,” Noll said grimly from the wall, “for thirty-one years I made my supper in mark-rooms and magistrates’ parlors from Bracken Ford to the southern salt-marshes. I know what to do with a greedy man. A greedy man is God’s own gift to a small-time operator. You show him a gilded walnut, you let him think he’s cheating you out of ten crowns while you’re taking him for four, and everyone goes home happy.”
Noll shifted his sight along the damp mortar of the hall, wishing for the hundredth time that he had a pair of hands so he could pace the floor properly.
“And I know what to do with a proud man,” Noll continued. “You call him My Lord, you bow low enough to show the patch on your coat-tail, and you let him correct your grammar while you palm his watch. Flattery and greed are honest human appetites, Tessa. They have edges. When a man gets his belly full of roast goose or his purse full of silver, he goes to sleep by the fire and leaves the rest of the town alone.”
“And a man in plain wool who remembers the scrub-girl’s name?” Tessa asked, pausing with the iron water dipper halfway to the bucket.
“A man who wears sackcloth when he could wear velvet, drinks well-water at a duke’s table, and memorizes the name of every stable boy in the county isn’t being kind,” Noll said flatly. “He’s keeping an inventory. You can’t bribe him with silver because he doesn’t want silver, and you can’t flatter him because he already thinks he’s the only sober man in a madhouse. What a man like that wants is for every living soul in the valley to sit on the exact shelf where he put them.”
Beside the niche, Prit folded the yellowed circular along its ancient creases and tapped the bottom edge of his dark slate with one dry knuckle-bone. Clack.
“Your assessment is historically sound, Master Vey,” the bone steward said quietly. “Every one of my six dead masters survived greedy tax-farmers, corrupt bailiffs, and grasping barons for decades. One simply paid their toll or hid the extra sheep in the cellar until they rode past. None of my six masters ever survived a tidy man who wanted to improve the world.”