The carriage was black, lacquered, and parked across the landward gate as if it owned it.
Wick smelled it before he had worked out what it was. Camphor, sharp and clean and strange, drifting down the muddy road on the morning wind and cutting through the ordinary Saltmire stink of coal and fish. It came from a line of chests strapped to the carriage roof, dark red wood with brass corners. Two horses stood in the traces, steaming. Two men stood beside the door, identical, tall, bronze-skinned, in long dark coats, with their hands folded in front of them in exactly the same way; and when the Lantern Company came trudging up the road with its chest on a handcart and Wick at the back with a pack as big as himself, one of them opened the carriage door without a word and a woman got out.
She was Ashborn. Wick had seen Ashborn traders on the Wharves but never close. She was tall and very straight, in a dress of some dark heavy stuff with a high collar, and her skin had the sheen of polished bronze, and when she breathed out her breath steamed in the cold air, thick and white, as if she had a furnace in her somewhere. On the tips of her fingers she wore silver thimbles. Every one. They caught the light when she moved her hands.
“Captain Ironsong,” she said. Her voice was clipped and precise and had no warmth in it at all. “I am Veyra Sel, of the house of Sel. I will not keep you long.”
“You’re keeping me now,” said Brakka.
“Then I will be brief.” Veyra Sel looked along the company, at Oswin peering over the handcart, at Ilsa with her thumbs in her belt, at Seven, and at Wick, and her eyes stayed on Wick for a moment longer than on anyone else. “You hold a contract under the Compact’s seal to walk the Grey Hounds’ road into the Thornwood. Whose purse is behind the seal I have not been told. I will pay you four hundred marks, this morning, in silver, to tear it up and stay in Saltmire. My men have the coin in the carriage. You need not go further than this gate.”
There was a silence in which the horses shifted.
“Four hundred,” said Oswin faintly. “That’s — I mean, arithmetically—”
“Oswin.”
“Shutting up.”
Brakka walked up to the Ashborn woman until she was close enough to look down at her, which took some doing, because Veyra Sel was tall. “Why?”
“Because some doors are closed for good reasons, Captain.” The Ashborn did not step back. “Take your gold and go home. Especially the boy.”
Brakka’s eyes narrowed. “What do you know about the boy?”
“I know that somebody wants him in that wood badly enough to pay for it, and that whoever it is has hidden their name under a seal. Ask yourself why, Captain.” Veyra turned her head and looked at Wick, and he felt it like heat on his face. “Child. Come here.”
He did not want to. He went anyway, because Brakka had not said not to, and the Ashborn woman put out one thimbled hand and took his chin and turned his face to the light, and her hand was hot. Not warm. Hot, like a cup of tea held too long; it made him flinch. She looked at his eyes. She looked at his hands, and her mouth tightened, and she let him go.
“Go home,” she said to him, low. “Whatever you have been promised. Go home.”
“My brother’s out there,” Wick said.
Her mouth opened a fraction, and shut again, and the thimbled hand that had let go of his chin closed at her side.
“Here’s where you can put your four hundred, Ashborn,” Brakka said, and told her, in some detail, and Oswin covered Pip’s glow-cell with his hand as if the moth should not hear it. Veyra Sel listened without expression. When Brakka had finished, she inclined her head a precise inch.
“Then you are warned, Captain. I will not say I did not warn you.” To the twins: “Dace. Toren.” She got back into the carriage.
The twins climbed up. As the carriage pulled aside to let the handcart past, Wick, who noticed things, saw one of the twins on the near side lean down from the box as Ilsa went by, and saw something small pass from his hand to hers, and saw her pocket it without breaking stride or turning her head.
She saw him see. Her face did not change at all.
“What was—”
“Nothing,” said Ilsa. “Walk.”
The Old Road ran inland from the landward gate as straight as a ruled line, because the Carrovans had built it and the Carrovans had not believed in bends. It was cracked now, and grass grew in the cracks, and every mile or so a stone marker leaned by the verge with its lettering worn to nothing. The land on either side was flat wet pasture and then rising heath. By the middle of the morning Saltmire was a grey smudge behind them and the fog had thinned to a high white sky, and Wick’s pack straps had found the two places on his shoulders where they meant to live for the rest of the journey.
He learned a great deal in the first day.
He learned that Oswin’s coat had forty pockets and that Oswin could tell you what was in every one of them, and would, if you walked beside him; that the lower left-hand ones were the ones you did not jostle; that the camphor smell that came off him was the solvent for his glue-pots, and he was sorry about it, it was in the leather now and would not come out. He learned that Oswin talked to Pip, constantly, in a low voice, as if the moth were a nervous dog. There, Pip. Only a crow. Nothing to see.
He learned that Brakka sang.
“Forty tusks upon the shore, and forty more to come — oh, FORTY tusks upon the shore—”
It was not singing in the way Wick understood the word. Varr songs were meant to be heard through the hull of one ship from the deck of another, across a mile of water, and Brakka sang at that pitch on a quiet road in the middle of nowhere, with her head back and her eyes shut, so loud that a hare went up out of the heath a hundred yards off and ran for its life.
“How many verses are there?” he asked Oswin.
“Nobody knows. She’s never got to the end. She says her grandmother knew.” Oswin winced as Brakka hit a note that was not, strictly, a note. “Verse eleven is about a ship’s cook. Verse twenty is about the same ship’s cook. I have theories.”
He learned that Seven walked at the back, slowly, and shed. Little gold and copper leaves fell from it every so often and lay on the road behind them, and once he looked back and saw their trail stretching away down the Old Road like a line of coins, and felt something that he did not have a word for.
And he learned that Ilsa Quire could walk all day ten yards ahead of everyone and never once look round.
He did not tell any of them about the nine scratched marks on the cellar stair. He meant to. He had the words ready twice, walking beside Oswin, and both times something else came out instead, and by noon it had become one of those things that gets harder to say the longer you carry it. The Skitter were leaving the Low Streets. The Lanterns were leaving Saltmire. It would keep.
He tried to kindle alone in the afternoon, because he was an idiot.
They had stopped at a stream, and he went a little way downstream round a bend, where nobody could see, and crouched on a flat rock, and reached for the air over the water with everything in him, in case the roof had been a bad morning. It had not. The cold went down his arms and his fingers went white and nothing came, and when he opened his eyes Ilsa Quire was standing on the bank above him with her arms folded.
“So,” she said. “You’re special.”
“I’m a bucket,” Wick said, and put his hands in the stream.
She waited, as if there might be more. There was not. She turned and went back up the bank. But she had not laughed, and he turned that over for a long time afterward and could not decide what it meant.
They made camp at dusk in the lee of the first waystation: a square of broken imperial wall with a hearth still in it, and a roof of nothing. Brakka built the fire. Oswin cooked, which turned out to mean that he put things in a pot and talked to them anxiously until they were done, and it was better than it had any right to be: salt pork, onions, a hard Pell sparkbread that he broke over the pot so that the toasted salts on the crust went pop in the steam. Wick ate until he could not move. Then Brakka wiped her bowl with her finger and said, “Right. Sprat. Lesson,” and he sat up.
“Seven told you about the wake.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve done the thing where you reach and there’s nothing. Good. That’s the first lesson and it’s done.” Brakka held up one enormous hand with the fingers spread. “Here’s the second. A weaver draws a form, and it tires you a bit, and you can draw all day. But a form can be snapped. You put everything into it at once and it does ten times what it should, and then it’s gone till you’ve slept. Snap too many in a day and you go slack. Like you were on Hettie’s floor last night.” Her face was serious in the firelight. “And slack is the one thing the Murk can smell. So don’t snap on the first door. Old saying. Means save it.”
“But you’re not a weaver,” Wick said. “You fight.”
Brakka laughed, and the fire jumped.
“Every living form carries a Current, Sprat. Every one. Weavers draw them through words and shapes and we draw them through this—” she slapped her own thigh ”—and the mercenaries’ word for a fighter is weaver of the body. Mine’s Loam.” She put her hand flat on the ground and the ground hummed, a low grit-buzz Wick felt in his back teeth, and a ring of dust jumped round her fingers. “Earth. Stone. I’m a Varr, I’m made of it. My war-cry’s a Loam form. Snapped it once, at a cliff. The cliff lost.”
“Gale,” said Ilsa from the other side of the fire, without looking up from the knife she was cleaning. “Air. It’s in the throw.” She flicked the knife and it went end over end into the dark and thocked into something, and a stir went through the air by Wick’s cheek that lifted his hair. “Every weaver of the body’s got one. Don’t make it a thing.”
“Ember,” said Oswin, apologetically. “Fire. Which you would think would be useful, in my line, and it is, mostly, except when it’s in the wrong pocket.” His frill flickered. “Pip’s Gleam, technically, but Pip’s not alive. We’ve discussed it.”
“Rime and Gleam,” said Seven, from the shadows beyond the firelight, where it stood with its face turned up to the stars. “Cold and light. Both. That is uncommon. I was grown that way.”
Wick looked round at them all. The fire spat. He thought about the little rainbows hanging where the bottle had been, and the warm shimmer off Oswin’s flash-powder, and the white at the edges of Seven’s hands, and understood something.
“So if any of you snaps a form—”
“There’s a wake,” said Brakka. “A big one. Everything snapped goes somewhere.”
“Everything snapped goes somewhere, little flame,” Seven agreed, in its slow deep voice. “Even a thrown knife leaves a breath of Gale.”
Ilsa got up and went to fetch her knife out of the dark. When she came back she sat down, not where she had been sitting, but on Wick’s side of the fire, a yard off, and began cleaning it again. She did not say anything. After a while she held out the sparkbread without looking at him and he took a piece and it popped between his teeth.
“Pity you’re a bucket,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Buckets are useful, mind. If somebody’s got something to put in them.”
He looked at her. The scar through her eyebrow was pale in the firelight. She was not smiling, but she was not not smiling, either, and he decided that was the best he was going to get and that it was, actually, quite a lot.
He woke in the dark because something was looking at him.
He lay still. The fire had burned to embers and Oswin was snoring in a complicated way and the stars had wheeled round. Beyond the broken wall, the heath was a flat black nothing, and at the edge of the nothing, where a stand of thorn trees grew along the stream, something glinted. Small. Low to the ground. A single point of light, as if a coin were catching the last of the embers.
Then it moved, and he saw the shape round it for a breath: child-sized, sleek, a head turning. The glint was a tin button on a string.
It was gone before he could sit up. He lay there with his heart going and told himself that it had been a fox, and knew it had not. Skitter did not leave the city. Everybody knew that. Skitter did not leave the water.
He did not sleep again.
Brakka saw the riders at dawn, from the top of the waystation wall, and looked at them until the sun was clear of the heath, and then said, “Huh.”
Wick climbed up beside her. The Old Road ran back the way they had come, dead straight, a pale line across the heath to the smudge of the city, and on it, perhaps a mile behind, were two riders on dark horses. They were not hurrying. They were not trying to hide. When the sun came over the heath behind them, it struck something at their shoulders that was not a Tidewatch blue nor a Gilded Blades gold, but the dull bronze of long dark coats, and Wick saw their breath go up in the cold air, thick and white and steaming.
“Ashborn,” said Brakka. She did not sound surprised. “Well. She did warn us.”
She climbed down, and picked up Auntie, and said, “Forty tusks upon the shore—” at a volume that would have reached the riders perfectly well, and the company broke camp and walked on into the morning with the Ironbacks blue on the horizon ahead and the two dark horses pacing them, a mile behind, all day.