POV: Seraphina
She woke and the cold was back. She had known it would be. Thalion was still asleep. When she sat up, his hand found her wrist before the rest of him woke. She put her mouth to his knuckles and laid the hand back down. She dressed in the dark and went out.
Yona was already outside with the lamp lit, her back to the flap. She kept who was still in the tent to herself, and always would. She stood and set the clothes right. She left the arms for last. Yona had done it every morning. No lie got past her.
"Both collarbones," Yona said.
She fastened the collar and stood back. Seraphina looked down at her own arm anyway. The gold ran past the elbow, over the shoulder, and out along both collarbones. There was not much left between it and her heart. Yona had told her last night that there was nothing in her to spend. She had not told her how high it had got.
Anton had carried the staff up from the stone. It leaned inside her tent, and it had not warmed.
Edrin was on the north face with the diggers when she came out, working one-handed and getting less done than he thought he was. She stopped a few paces off and kept her hands at her sides.
He straightened up and saw her do it. "That is the first time you have not tried," he said.
"The whole camp is under orders. Nobody will take my hand."
"I know. I had my no ready before the light came up." He almost smiled. "You have taken the fun out of my morning."
"Corwin says one more week in the sling or the shoulder sets wrong for good."
"So he told me. Twice. It is easy to say with two good arms."
He bent back to the turf.
"You are doing that badly," she said, and left him to it.
"I know," he said to her back.
Yona's rider had gone at dusk, before anyone decided anything. Her letter gave Lucien the progression and told him the cleansing was needed again. Corwin's note went with it, and Yona's notes went under that.
Her own rider went at first light on the fastest horse. Lucien first, and every page his house held on this valley. Then on to the capital. The camp had Thalion's soldiers and Gavrel's eighteen. The Empress's twenty had come up with Lucien and stayed. All of them had been counted for a camp with her fire in it. She asked the crown for thirty more. Ten to bring Lucien up the road, and twenty to stand around a camp whose fire was out.
She wrote it to Empress Eleanor and signed it herself. Thalion read it over her shoulder with his hand resting at the back of her neck.
The first spades were in the ground before her rider was out of sight. They had come up this rim to spend one night and go down in the morning. Now they were staying, and Gavrel put them to work so they would not sit and think about why. The fire pits went smaller still. Men who had carried a tent on their back since the first estate were cutting turf.
By the second day the column had made itself into a fort. Nobody called it one. Brennan had the provisions out in rows on the third morning and went over the numbers twice. The camp ate whether it moved or not, and thirty more were coming. The rim grew nothing, so riders went four hours out for horse feed and came back with less than the camp needed.
Her own work had started on the first morning, while the camp dug. She had given the order before the descent and never filled it. Three of Gavrel's men had more in them when she stood on the line. Renn was one. Anton, the Shard, was the second. The third was Gavrel himself. Each had woken at a different estate, and a keeper family had held every one of those estates once. Somebody had spent a hundred years killing the keepers off and wiping the record after. She wanted to know where their blood came from.
Flamekeep held the records that could answer it. The Order kept the paladin rolls. Neither was on this rim. She was above a dead valley with empty hands. So she went and asked the men herself.
Liora caught her before she reached the first fire.
"No," Liora said.
"You will be with me."
"At thirty fires, in a camp that has strangers in it, and you in the open at every one." Liora said it quietly. "Tell me who you want and I will bring them to you."
"Then they come to my tent one at a time and get looked at. By dark the whole camp knows I am counting them." Seraphina reached for her boots. "I want this to look like nothing."
"It will not," she said.
"Walk with me anyway."
Liora walked with her, and made her objection once.
She started with Renn, Gavrel's corporal. He had a farm accent and an open face. She sat at his fire and asked where he was from. Then she asked his mother's name. He gave it, and went on talking about her long after the question was answered. Seraphina wrote the name on the slate, with the village, and the house his mother's people had worked for.
Anton stood the whole time and answered every question in four words or less. He did not ask what she wanted his mother's name for. She thought he had worked that out already, but he gave her the answers anyway.
She left Gavrel until the third day. He came in when she sent for him, dust still on him from the work, and stood square in front of her.
"Your mother's name," she said. "Where she was born. What house her people served, if they served one."
He blinked once. "My lady?"
"Her name, captain."
He gave it to her. The village too, and the two houses his mother's family had worked. He stood there while she wrote it down, still waiting to be told what it was for.
She did not tell him.
"Thank you, captain."
"My lady." He went back out to the work.
After he had gone she wrote the two house names under his. That made all three.
Sereth found her first. Corwin still had him down for rest, and he was at the edge of her fire, waiting to be noticed. She asked him about his mother.
He answered, and then he kept answering. He gave her the village and the name. Then what the woman did for a living, and what she said to him the day he left. He was still talking when she had what she needed.
"Thank you," she said.
"Anything, my lady." He said it too fast. "Anything at all."
She wrote the name down and did not look up until he had gone. She had healed him clean, and hers was the first face he saw when he woke. He had not looked at her any other way since. She had wanted one more name for the slate. To Sereth, the saintess had come to his fire and asked about his mother.
On the third night Thalion asked her what had been standing on the other side of the stone. She had kept that answer out of his tent until now. She had wanted one place free of it. But he was awake and steady in the dark, and she did not want to carry it alone any longer. So she told him. It was the first night since the valley that Suri had stayed. The cub slept at the bottom of the bedroll.
"It was awake," she said. "The demons are mindless. That thing was not. It faced me through the seam and held still. It was there when I closed the stone on it."
She stopped. The words came out too small for it.
"That is all I did. I closed a door in its face. I do not know if it is still there."
"You are sure."
"I carried the cold of it out with me. I still have it. It sits under everything, too deep to reach. That much I am sure of. Every valley we have called dying might be a door. And I have been the one prying them."
He was quiet a long while.
"I have been counting the estates," he said. "Thirteen mended. Three circled. I have been counting them as work done."
"They are."
"Or thirteen doors you might have opened." He said it flat and even. "I gave the order for every one of them."
She looked over at him in the dark.
"That is not how it works."
"It is how it works for me."
She moved over and set her forehead against his shoulder and stayed there.
Liora put a number in front of her on the fourth morning. "Four," she said. "The man from the wagons has four of the eighteen listening to him now. He had two before the descent."
"The digging?"
"You." Liora did not soften it. "Eleven fires in three days, and no reason given at any of them. The whole camp is trying to work out what you are looking for in their blood. He does not have to say a word."
"Say the rest of it."
"There is no rest of it. That is what I am telling you." Liora looked at her while she said it. "I have watched that man since the wagons and I have nothing. He is where he should be, when he should be. Every word out of him is one you could put in a hymn."
"Then watch him longer."
"I am going to." Liora looked out along the tent line. "But you are helping him faster than I can work."
On the fourth evening Yona came up from the medical ground with a used wrapping and temper in her face. Somebody had been through her burn pile, and she wanted the cub kept out of it.
"Suri does not go near your burn pile," Seraphina said. "The smell of my dressings drives him out of a tent. He would not put his nose in a heap of them."
"Then he has learned to use a knife." Yona laid the wrapping out flat between them.
It was one of the dose cloths Lucien had folded the compound into, her name on each in his own hand. The pile had been picked through, and the cloths were scraped bare. The marks ran straight and even, edge to edge. Only a blade left marks like that. Whoever held it had wanted every grain of what was left.
Liora came and turned the cloth to the light.
"An animal did not make those marks," she said. "And a thief takes. The only thing missing is what dried into the cloths. He wanted to know what is in the doses Lucien left you."
"Why."
"I can think of reasons. All of them end with you dead. And I cannot tell you if this is the man from your tent or a second one. I have never had a man to watch. I only ever get what he leaves behind. He left the prints first, and now this. I am always one slip behind him."
Liora did not leave her side after that. She slept across the tent flap. At the fires she stood at Seraphina's back and faced the dark. Seraphina let her do it. That night she lay awake a while, listening for a man who made no sound.
Brennan brought her the boots on the fifth morning. He set them down and gave the feed report in the same breath. "His Highness said before we rode," Brennan said. "It took me a while to find your size in the wagons."
She looked at them. The night before the descent, Thalion had sat across her fire and told her the split in the left one would not last the week. The next morning she went down into that valley and forgot the boot.
He had not. He could not touch the thing that was killing her, so he had seen to her boots.
She put them on and laced them. They fit.
"Tell him thank you," she said.
"He said not to." Brennan picked up his tally and went back to the wagons.
By then she had eleven names on the slate and no way to check one of them. She sat outside her tent with it on her knee, and Suri stretched out across the new boots in the sun. At the other estates the ground had greened within a day of the sealing. Here the soil stayed grey. Maybe the seal was weaker, or the break under it ran deeper. Nobody could tell her which.
She had been watching the slope since the descent. It did not occur to her to turn round and look at the men standing behind her.