Chapter 3 Chapter 3

Isolde POV

At the ninth bell the next night, Matron Hale brought the tea, and I did not drink it.

I took the cup, lifted it, and let the rim touch my mouth. Then I took in a small sip and held it behind my teeth while she watched me. She watched every night. It had been part of the ritual for so long that I had stopped seeing it. When she turned to go, I spat the mouthful into the water jug and poured the rest in after it.

My hands were already shaking. I told myself it was the cold.

The day had passed in the account room, and no one had said a word to me except to move me out of the way of a delivery. I had learned something from that. A woman who had been sold was a woman who could be left alone. They thought they knew where I would be and what I would be doing. They had not asked.

After the midday meal, I had gone out to the garden and rubbed candle tallow into the latch of the north gate. Then I had gone back inside and finished the quarter's totals, because leaving them undone would have been noticed.

I waited until the house went quiet. Tenth bell, eleventh. I put the ledger inside my coat, wrapped in the spare shirt, and tied the coat shut with the kitchen knife's sheath through the belt. I took two heels of bread from the pocket of my apron. I did not take the grey gown or the red cord. I went down the back stairs in my stockings and put on my boots at the door.

The gate opened without a sound.

---

I had a map. It was not the kind most people carry. Mine was made of freight notes. For seven years, every cart that came to Stillwater had left a slip with the carter's route on it, the road he took, the ford he used, the days the weather cost him. I had read all of them, because reading them was my job. Over time, they had added up to a picture of the valley that nobody else had bothered to put together.

The Brevna River ran along the eastern edge of Alaric's land. On the far side, the slips said, there was nothing the carters would go near. They called it the empty hills. They said wolves lived there who owed nothing to anyone.

The carters crossed at Linden Bend when the ice was thick enough. In seven winters, it had held a loaded cart in four. That was before midwinter. It was now the beginning of winter.

I did the sum in my head and did not like the answer. Then I put it away, because the other answer, the one with Ferrant Gale in it, was worse.

The fields were white with frost, and I walked along the edge of them, where the stubble gave me something to hold. My breath showed. The cold got into my fingers, and then somewhere past the second mile, something odd happened. I could smell smoke from a house I could not see. I could hear a dog, far off, turn over in its sleep.

I stopped and listened. It was the only time that night I stopped by choice.

I did not know what it meant. I was a wolfless woman who had skipped one cup of bark tea, and my head ached, and my skin felt too tight. I told myself I was frightened and imagining things.

At the crossroads, I heard hooves.

Two riders were coming up the Keep road from the south, with a lantern. I got into the ditch on the side of the verge and pulled the coat over my head. The frost on the grass soaked straight through my skirt. They slowed at the sign, and one of them said something low, and the other laughed.

They wore salt-stained coats. I could see the white crust on the hems.

"He wants her undamaged," the first one said. "No marks on her. The lord was clear."

"Four days."

"Four. Then she's the lord's problem."

"Poor thing."

"Poor thing's a Stillwater girl. She'll sit there and say thank you."

The second man laughed again. They rode on toward the Keep, and the lantern light went with them.

I stayed in the ditch long after the sound had gone. I thought, Four days. It had been five at the oath stone. If I had waited one more night, I would have had three, and fewer places to hide.

I got out and walked. I did not feel the cold in my feet anymore, which was a bad sign, and I knew it was.

---

The river came into view an hour before dawn, or what I took for an hour before dawn, because I could not see the sky. It was wide and flat and grey, and the bank dropped away in a step of frozen mud. Linden Bend was supposed to have a stand of willows on the near side. I found them by walking into one.

I stood at the edge and looked at the ice.

It did not look like anything. That was the trouble. Ice at night is a plain, dull sheet, and it gives no sign of how thick it is. The carters had a way of testing it with an axe, and I did not have an axe. I had a kitchen knife.

I knelt, cut at the surface with the point, and got a chip about the width of my thumb. It was thicker than a coin and thinner than a hand. I could not tell which thing would matter.

Behind me, a long way off, a bell rang once. It was not a Stillwater bell. It was the Keep, calling the watch.

They would find the gate in the morning, or the empty bed, or the account room with nothing out of place. They would send someone. Then they would send more.

I put the knife back in its sheath.

I stepped out onto the ice.

It held. I took another step, and it held that too. I kept my weight low, with my feet apart, the way the carters said to cross a frozen pond, and I walked.

Halfway across, there was a sound under me. Not a crack. It was a deep, soft note, like someone pressing a finger into a drum. I stopped moving.

The note came again, and it came from everywhere.

I thought about the ledger, wrapped in my shirt, inside my coat.

I thought about the empty hills and what might be in them.

I thought, very clearly, about how stupid it was to have done the arithmetic and then walked out anyway.

The ice opened under my left foot with a noise like a door being slammed. I went in to the waist, and the cold hit me so hard that I did not feel it as cold. It was a blow. It drove the breath out of my chest and left it somewhere behind me.

I got my arms out onto the edge. It broke. I got them out again. It broke again. Each time I went a little deeper, and the coat grew heavy, and my boots filled and pulled like hands at my ankles.

I do not remember deciding to hold onto the ledger. I remember that I did.

The third time, I could not feel my arms at all.

Something moved on the bank, a dark shape, and a man's voice said a word I did not understand. A second shape dropped flat on the ice. Something landed beside my head with a slap, and I looked at it, and it was a rope.

I could not make my hand close on it.

"Stop," the man said. He was close. His voice was steady and low. "Stop, stop, I've got you, don't kick, you'll break it more—"

A hand closed on my collar.

It was warm. It was the warmest thing I had ever felt.

I thought, with the last part of me that was still counting, That is not Gale'

s man.

Then the river took the rest of the thought.