Chapter 4

Adrian’s POV

Owen had counted the bolts twice and found two missing each time. The men in the yard were still standing in the cold when I arrived.

Owen was usually careful with a count. He stood at the end of the sacking with his arms folded and his jaw working.

When he saw me coming down the steps, he said, "This crate is short. Forty-one on the manifest and thirty-nine on the ground. I've had two men count them."

The bolts lay in rows on sacking spread over the frozen mud.

The quartermaster held his board against his chest while two of my men levered the lid off the last crate.

The straw had gone brittle with frost. When I crouched beside the open crate, I could smell rust and wet wood.

I picked up a bolt and rolled it along my palm.

The feathers were cut short, the way our own fletchers cut them. Near the base of the iron head were three notches, the mark my grandfather had used at the forge.

I scraped soot from one of the grooves with my thumbnail. The notch was cut into the metal.

The third notch was uneven. I had seen the same flaw on bolts in our own stores.

The second crate held sixty bolts with the same mark.

"Perhaps stolen," the quartermaster said. "Out of the store and sold down the road. It happens, Captain, with the roads so busy—"

"Then find me the man who stole it." I stood up. "The escort ledger for four months, and every name that signed for a wagon, on my table before noon."

I turned my back on him. "Owen. When did these leave the store, and through whose hand?"

He gave me the name of the man who had signed them out. The man had been transferred six months ago, and no one in the yard knew where he had gone.

He waited while I looked at the bolts. Then he took a knife out of his coat and held it to me flat across his palm.

"Hers. She dropped it two days ago." He jerked his chin at the grip.

The grip was wrapped in a strip torn off a hem, wound the wrong way over itself, and my thumb caught on a loose edge.

"Get the ledger."

He turned to go. I tucked the knife into my belt, then called him back before he had gone three paces. "How is she?"

"The healer says she can answer questions," he said. I remembered her demanding three horses when she could barely stand, then gripping my sleeve before she fell. I wanted to hear what she would ask for now. "I'll see her myself."

The west corridor never got warm, whatever the season. Light fell through the high windows in thin bars, with dust moving through it.

The two men at the end of the passage came off the wall; I put my hand up, and they stayed where they were.

The door was not quite shut. I could have pushed it.

"You have to drink all of it," a woman said, and the voice was tired and bad-tempered. "Half of it and it doesn't work, and we do it again tomorrow. Do you want to do it again tomorrow?"

"Right. Fine." A pause, a cup set down. "Drink that, and I'll tell you about the stupid cavalryman. The one with the shaved head who fell into the horse trough."

A rustle of cloth. "There. All of it. Gah, you're slow."

I heard the last of a jug of water being poured, then another woman's voice. "You didn't have a bite of it yourself."

"She needs the honey more than I do. Give it here."

Standing there, I thought of a room at Blackwood when I was seven, and my mother on the edge of the bed with a spoon and a pot of honey, arguing with me in that exact tired voice about nothing at all.

I stayed by the door a moment longer, listening to her coax the child. Her voice was different from the one I remembered on the road. I wanted to see her face.

I knocked.

She was sitting up with the blanket across her knees and the child's feet under it.

Her smile was gone before I had both feet in the room.

Her hand came off the blanket and went to her side, low.

The healer's wrapping showed above the collar of her shirt. At its edge, I could see red skin around the old silver sore on the left side of her throat.

She did not get up.

"You're safe here," I said. "The escort that took you. Where did they change horses?"

Something moved in her face and was put away.

"I'm not answering your questions for nothing."

I brought the chair over from the wall and sat down in it. "Then tell me what it costs."

Her fingers kept turning a fold at the edge of the blanket. "Three things. Tessa's papers and the little one's, in her hand. Give them to her. Don't keep them for us."

She took a breath. "We go when we want to, and nobody stands at the door when we do. And a paper with your seal that says Blackwood brought us out, that we were never Blackwood's property, and that we're not owed to anyone who comes asking."

The third one I had not expected, and I suppose it showed. "Why the paper?"

"Paper's worth more than a man's word. I've had a lot of men's words."

I nearly laughed and stopped it, and she saw me stop it.

"The papers can be written and put in your hand," I said, "when you've given me something I can use. The road out is yours, and I won't put a man on it. But before you go, I want the names of the people you knew on that road."

Her chin came up. "So I tell you, and then you give me."

"Yes."

She gave me good work.

There was a fork where the road split for the salt track and the water, and at the fork a walled yard with a well and a lean-to, and the escort had changed horses there twice in one month.

"What did the man look like? The one who took the money."

"I don't remember his face. It was dark."

She had given me the hours, the order of the wagons, the drunk at the second stop, and a red mark on a man's jaw that was not a scar and a coat that had been good two winters past.

Now she did not remember the face.

Her eyes darted away as she said it. After the details she had already given me, I suspected she was keeping something back.

I let it go. Pushing her would cost me the rest of the hour, and I still had half a road to learn.

Out in the yard, a man called out a count and another answered. She turned toward the shutters and sat for a moment watching the pale light between the slats.

"Where does it end?"

"When the paper's in my hand."

By the time I stood, the light through the shutters had faded.

At the door, I looked back at her hand, still working at the blanket.

"Your knife is with me. When your hands stop shaking, come and get it."

She did not answer.

I shut the door and stood in the corridor a moment with my hand still on the latch, then went down.

The study was cold, and the lamps had not been lit. My shadow stretched across the floor ahead of me.

Owen came in with the list and stood at the corner of the desk while I gave him his orders. Six men were to search that yard before dark. If the man with the mark on his jaw was there, they were to bring him in; if not, I wanted his name. The transferred man's papers were to be on my desk by morning.

"And the woman?"

"A room with a lock and the key in her own hand. Move all three of them tonight. Have the papers prepared. She gets them when this is done, not before."

Owen's eyes went down to my belt, where the wrapped handle was, and came back up.

"What," I said.

"Nothing, Captain."

Before Owen had shut the door behind him, one of my father's men knocked on the frame. He stayed in the doorway.

The Alpha wanted me. About the bolts.

Four hours since the crates came open. I had not yet had an answer from my own quartermaster.

I stood a moment with my hand on the drawer, then took the knife from my belt and laid it on top of the ledgers inside. The pale strip of cloth around the handle showed against the black leather. I pushed the drawer in until it stopped.