Chapter 8 Chapter 8

Dorian POV

Jonas Pell came back on the fifteenth day, one day early, with a smile on his face and a full cart.

I stood in the yard with Hesper while he unloaded. She had her tally board in one hand and a short knife in the other, and she had not said a word since breakfast. Rhys was by the stable door with his arms folded, looking at nothing in particular. Emeric was on the roof of the mill, which was not where Emeric usually was.

"You're early," Hesper said.

"Roads were clear for once." Pell hefted a sack onto the cart's tailgate. "I hear the camp's been busy. Heard a girl came in from Stillwater."

I kept my face still. It cost me.

"Where did you hear that?" Rhys asked.

"Oh, you know. Gossip. Everyone's got a story about the veiled one who ran." He wiped his forehead. "They say Thorne's put a price on her. A good one."

"Is that so."

"That's what they say."

Hesper took the next sack from his hands.

She did not hand it to anyone. She turned it over, slowly, and pressed her thumb against the burlap near the seam. Then she turned it again. I could see her jaw working.

"What's this?" she said.

Pell looked. His smile did not change, but something behind it did. I have been a medic for eleven years. I know the look of a man whose body has just decided something before his mind has.

"That's the grain merchant's mark," he said. "It's nothing."

"It's a thorn."

"Is it?" He laughed. "I never noticed."

"Six years," Hesper said, very quietly. "Six years you've been sitting in my kitchen."

He moved.

He was faster than I expected. He dropped the sack, vaulted over the tailgate, and cut the horse's harness with a knife I had not seen him draw. The cart tipped. Grain spilled over the snow. He was on the horse's bare back before Rhys had finished taking a step.

"Emeric!" Rhys shouted.

The roof was empty by the time I looked up. I heard the thump of feet on the far side of the yard, then nothing. Pell was already through the gate. The hooves faded down the lower road, fast.

Hesper stood very still in the middle of the spilled grain.

"I want it noted," she said, in a flat voice, "that I was wrong."

"Noted," Rhys said.

"I want it noted that she was right."

"Noted."

She went into the stores without another word. I heard a crate hit the wall.

---

Emeric came back after dusk with snow on his shoulders and nothing in his hands. He shook his head once at Rhys. He had followed Pell's trail to the Casimir tollhouse and lost it in the crowd on the toll road.

Rhys took it without comment. "Double the watch tonight. Everyone sleeps armed."

"He'll have told them," I said. "Thorne. That she's here."

"I know."

"He'll come."

"I know that too." Rhys's voice was level. His eyes were not. "Tomorrow we start planning the move. Tonight we hold."

I took the south post, behind the grain store. It was a bad spot, open to the road and the yard, but it was where I could see the loft windows, and that was the reason I took it. I told myself it was the medic in me. I had a bag of dressings and a splint kit next to me, and a flask. I told myself a lot of things.

At the third bell, I smelled lamp oil.

It was faint. It came from the north side, downwind. Under it, there was the smell of sweat and wet wool and clean steel. Thorne's scouts wore pine oil on their blades. I had smelled it once before, years ago, on a corpse.

I put two fingers in my mouth and gave the camp's low whistle. Three notes, falling.

Nothing answered. Then, from the roof of the mill, one note. Emeric. He had heard.

I drew my knife and stood up.

The first torch came over the north wall without warning. It was a rag soaked in oil, fat and bright, tumbling end over end into the thatch above the grain store. I watched it fall. For a long, strange moment, I thought: That is a very expensive way to burn someone's breakfast.

Then the thatch caught.

"Fire!" I shouted. "North side! Get the water!"

The yard filled with people. Men tumbling out of the stable, women from the loft, Hesper shouting for buckets. The roof of the grain store was already alight, orange against the snow. And on the wall, silhouetted against the fire, were shapes. Five. Six. Moving fast.

A man came over the wall and I took him in the ribs with my shoulder. We hit the ground together. I had his wrist, he had mine. He was strong, and he was trained, and he was trying to put a knife in my throat.

Over his shoulder, I saw the loft door open.

Isolde stood in it.

She was barefoot, in the shift Marga had lent her, with a blanket around her shoulders. Her hair was loose. She was not looking at the fire. She was not looking at anything in the yard. Her eyes were fixed on a point far beyond it, glassy and distant, and her lips were moving.

"Two on the stable roof," she said.

Her voice carried. It was not loud. It was just clear, the way a bell is clear.

"One at the wheel. Behind the race. And two coming around the left side of the stores, low, with the oil."

I took a fist to the jaw and did not feel it.

She was pointing. Her arm came up and out, steady, and her finger tracked something across the yard I could not see. "There. Behind the cart. He's going for the loft stair."

Rhys moved. He crossed the yard in four strides and put his shoulder through the dark space behind the cart, and a man I had not noticed came out of it, folded in half.

"Stable roof!" Isolde said again, and Emeric dropped onto it from the mill like a falling stone.

I got my knee on the scout's chest and my hand on his throat, and I looked up, and I saw her face.

She was not afraid. She was concentrating. It looked like effort. It looked like pain. Her skin had gone gray, and her breath was coming short, and sweat was running down her temples into the neck of the shift. She held her free hand against her sternum as though she were keeping something from falling out.

"Behind the stores," she said. "Rhys. Left. Left."

He went left. There was a crash. A grunt.

The man under my knee stopped struggling. I did not remember hitting him.

It took four minutes. I counted, afterward. In four minutes, six scouts had come over the wall, and in four minutes, the camp had put them down. One was dead, killed by Emeric on the stable roof, before he had managed to throw his second torch. Two were wounded and tied. Two ran. One was on his back in the snow with Rhys's boot on his chest, gasping.

The grain store was half gone. The east wall held. The north side was a black skeleton of rafters, still smoking, and men were beating at the embers with wet sacking.

The yard went very quiet.

I got to my feet. My jaw was already swelling, and I could taste blood. I looked up at the loft door.

Isolde had not moved. She stood there with one hand against the frame. Her eyes had come back into focus, and she was looking down at her own hand as if she had never seen it.

"What did I do?" she said, very softly.

Then her legs gave out.

I was there before she hit the ground. I do not remember crossing the yard. I remember Emeric arriving at the same instant from the other side, and the two of us catching her between us. She weighed nothing. She was cold, and her pulse was fast and thin.

"Marga!" I shouted.

---

I sat by her bed for the rest of the night.

Marga checked her over and told me not to hover, and I hovered. Emeric took the other side. He did not speak. The lamp burned down. Below us, the camp was clearing wreckage, and I could hear Hesper giving orders in a voice like gravel.

They had questioned the scout Rhys held. He had given them one thing before he spat blood and went quiet. Thorne wants the girl alive. Burn the rest.

That was it. That was the order.

I looked at her face. She was sleeping, finally, with her mouth slightly open and her hand curled beside her cheek.

Marga came and stood at my shoulder. She looked at Isolde for a long moment, then reached down and lifted a strand of hair from her temple.

It was white.

Not silver. Not gray. A single streak, as broad as two fingers, running back from her left temple into the dark. The line was clean and sharp, as if it had been drawn there.

"It wasn't there yesterday," I said.

"No." Marga's voice was careful. "It wasn't."

"What is it?"

"It's what the gift costs." She let the strand fall. "I'll tell her myself when she wakes. And I'll tell Rhys. You should be there, both of you." She looked at Emeric, then at me. "I'd put it at one year. Maybe a little more."

One year.

She had done it for us. For a camp that had been ready to throw her out three weeks ago. She had stood in a doorway in her bare feet and called out the positions of six men like a general, and it had taken a year of her life, and she had not even known.

Emeric put out one hand and rested it very lightly on the blanket over her ankle. His face was as unreadable as ever. But his knuckles were white.

I thought about the first time I had seen her, white-faced in the ice, her fist closed around a bundle of paper. I thought about how she had counted every last thing in this camp. I thought about how I had told her I was not keeping a ledger.

I was not. But I had started to understand what it would cost me if someone else did.