The fire went orange, and then red, and Brakka was on her feet.
“Up. All of you. Up. Oswin, light, everything—”
“They’ll drink it—”
“Then let them choke.” She had Auntie in both hands. “Seven. How many?”
“I do not know.” Seven stood with its back to the oak and its face turned to the mist, and the wet-earth smell came off it in waves. “More than one. They came for Greystep. For what the boy did in the hollow. I am sorry, little flame. I should have said. Ember and Loam together, in the open, in the dark. It is a loud thing to do.”
Wick had the song-stone in his fist and it was so cold it burned. He had Aldo’s knife in the other hand. He could not remember taking it out.
Skritch was awake and up the oak in one movement, and from ten feet overhead his voice came down in a thin whistle: “Big one. Big one, in the tents, with horns—”
It came out of the mist between two of the rotted tents, and it was a stag.
Or it had been. It was the size of a horse and its antlers went up into the dark like a dead tree, and it was grey from hoof to tine, smoking at the edges, and it walked through the ruined camp without a sound. The canvas rags did not stir as it passed. The mist did not move. Frost went out from its hooves across the leaf-litter in rings. Its eyes were two wet slates, and they were fixed on Wick, and nothing else in the world.
Behind it, low, in the white, came the wolves.
Four. Thornwolves, quill-backed, but the quills were grey and did not rattle. They drifted, in a loose line, with their heads down, and Wick understood that these were the four from the hollow, and that the Murk had found them in the wood, cold and scared and burned, and had taken them, and that it was his fault.
“Steady,” said Brakka.
And then, on the far side of the ring, behind the cairn, the mist lit up gold.
Torches. A line of them, coming through the briar: eight, ten, twelve, bobbing, and under them the shapes of men in long dark coats, and in the middle of the line a figure taller than the rest with its hands held out before it, bare, and from the fingertips of those hands came a light that was not torchlight. It was the colour of iron in a forge.
“Oh, stars,” said Oswin. “It’s her.”
Veyra Sel walked into the Grey Hounds’ camp with twelve Ashborn at her back and her thimbles in her pocket and her bare hands burning, and stopped dead, because between her and the Lantern Company stood a stag made of ash.
The torches dimmed. Every one of them, all along the Ashborn line, went from gold to copper to a dull sullen red, and the company’s fire sank to embers, and the only real light in the ring was the forge-glow at the end of Veyra’s fingers, which did not dim at all.
“Captain Ironsong,” said Veyra, across the stag. Her voice was perfectly level. “You are in my way.”
“Your way?” Brakka’s roar shook leaves out of the oak. “You’ve brought twelve men into my camp in the dark, Ashborn, and you’ve a nerve—”
“I have brought twelve men to take the boy out of your camp before this happens. I see I am late.” The Ashborn woman’s eyes went past the stag to Wick, and her veins, under the bronze of her throat, were glowing. “Child. Walk to me. Now. Slowly.”
“He stays where he is.”
“Then he dies where he is. Look at what is looking at him.”
Ilsa had a knife in each hand and her back to Wick’s. Dace and Toren, on either side of Veyra, had drawn long curved blades that caught the red torchlight. Twelve Ashborn, four Lanterns, a Skitter in a tree, and between them the Quiet, who did not care in the least who held the contract.
The stag lowered its head.
“DOWN,” Brakka bellowed, and the ring came apart.
It was not a fight. It was a dozen fights in a bowl of mist, and Wick saw them in pieces.
He saw the stag come at him and Brakka step across its path and swing. Auntie took it under the jaw and the head went sideways in a burst of grey and the body kept coming, headless, two more strides, and fell at Wick’s feet in a drift of ash that was cold as snow.
He saw a wolf go up the oak after Skritch and Skritch go out along a branch and drop onto its back and off the other side, and Ilsa’s knife go in behind its ear, and Ilsa yell “Move, rat!” and the rat move.
He saw a torch go out, and the man holding it scream, and the Ashborn line bend inward round something low and grey among them, and Toren’s blade come down twice and the screaming stop.
He saw Oswin on his knees behind the handcart with a flash-egg in each hand and his eyes shut, throwing them blind over the top at anything that came near, crack, crack, so that the mist went yellow in gouts and every grey shape in it flinched.
And he saw Veyra Sel burn.
She did not throw fire. That was what he had expected, something like Oswin’s eggs. She simply opened her hands, and the forge-glow at her fingers became a sheet, a curtain of red-gold fire that stood up out of the ground in front of her as high as her head and ran along the Ashborn line like a wall, and the two wolves that had been going for her men hit it and came apart like paper. The heat of it reached him across the ring. It smelled of hot iron, so strong his eyes watered, and the air shimmered gold.
Ember, and not a thread of it. A river.
The whole air was thick with it, pulling at his hands. And the fourth wolf was coming out of the mist at Seven.
Seven had its back to the oak and both hands up and white at the edges, holding the camp-fire white and high so the rest of them could see, and it did not see the wolf until the wolf was on it. The grey shape hit it low and knocked it down. Seven’s left arm came up. The wolf’s jaws closed on the forearm with a sound like a branch breaking in frost.
Wick reached into Veyra’s wake and took it.
It was like putting his hands into a forge. The gold-red thread was not a thread, it was a rope, it was too much, and he grabbed it anyway and it went up his arms like scalding water and he threw it at the wolf with no form, no word, nothing but get off.
A bar of fire went across the ring, waist-high, red as the Ashborn torches. It hit the wolf broadside and the wolf came off Seven’s arm and rolled, burning, and did not get up. It lay in the leaf-litter and went to ash from the middle out, and the ash blew away, and that was all.
His hands were white and shaking and the skin on the backs of them was hot.
He looked up. Across the ring, through the thinning mist, Veyra Sel was looking at him over the dying wall of her fire. She had seen the thread. He knew she had. Her mouth, in the red light, came open a little and shut again, and she drew a breath that steamed.
“A Kindler,” she said, under it, to nobody. “Of course. That is what he wanted.”
The mist was still full of ash when the two companies faced each other across the dead fire.
The Ashborn had lost one man, and were standing round him with their faces closed. The Lanterns had Seven. It sat against the oak with its left arm across its knees, and Oswin was crouched over the arm with Pip’s glow-cell held close, and the glow-cell showed a bite: two rows of punctures through the pale-green bark, and the bark around them had gone grey. Not bloody; grey, like Petrie’s neck, like the logs in the pyre.
“It does not hurt,” said Seven.
“That’s not the reassuring thing you—” Oswin’s frill was flat. “That’s not reassuring.”
Brakka stood between the company and the Ashborn with Auntie on her shoulder, and Veyra Sel stood ten paces off with her thimbles back on and her hands folded, and the two of them looked at each other like dogs over a bone.
“Who holds your contract, Captain?” Veyra said at last.
“You know whose seal is on it. You’ve been asking all over Saltmire.”
“I know the seal. A seal is wax. I asked whose purse was behind it and I was not answered; the Compact is very discreet about its own.” Her eyes did not leave Brakka’s. “I am asking you.”
Brakka shrugged. “The Archive’s. The Compact Archive, and the Keeper himself. It’s the Compact’s seal on the paper and Quill’s purse that pays, and it’s six hundred marks on the Sprat’s head because he can read, and I’ll thank you not to—”
Veyra’s face closed.
Wick saw it happen. It was like a shutter going across a window. Whatever she had been about to say, she did not say it. She stood very still, and the glow under her skin, which had been fading, came back, and she said in a voice with no expression in it at all:
“Then you are his creatures. Knowing or not.”
“Whose—”
“Your employer wants the boy, Captain. Not the records. Not the dead. The boy. He has wanted the boy since before he wrote your contract.” She looked at Wick, and her eyes went to his hands and stayed there a breath too long, the way they had at the gate. “You have walked him into the one place in the world he should not be.”
“Ashborn poison,” said Brakka flatly. “That’s what that is. We found the Grey Hounds’ journal today, Sel. Want to know what it says? Client comes in a hood. Never shows his face. Pays in old crowns.” A pause, heavy as a hammer. “Smells of camphor.”
Veyra Sel did not move.
“I have never paid a man in old crowns in my life,” she said. “No Ashborn would. They are cursed metal.” Her lip curled. “And I did not come into this wood to argue the price of a boy with a whaler. I came to take him somewhere safe, and I will. Child—”
“He stays.”
“Captain, I am trying very hard—”
“He stays. I’ve twenty years of Ledger says I don’t hand a child to a stranger who tried to sack him on the Old Road, and you can burn me to the ground before I change my mind.” Brakka’s tusks were out. “Take your dead and camp where you like. Fifty paces off. If one of your bronze-faced boys comes within ten of this fire tonight I’ll break him over my knee, and that goes in the Ledger too.”
The Ashborn woman looked at her, and at the eleven men she had left, and weighed it.
“Fifty paces,” she said. “Dace. Toren.” And she turned and walked back into the mist, and her men went after her with their torches burning gold again, and the dead man between four of them.
Wick stood by the embers with his hot white hands and watched her go.
He has wanted the boy since before he wrote your contract.
He. A hood in a carriage. A man who asked if any of them were weavers. Wick put that away too. The box in his head where he put things was getting full.
He woke because something had its paw over his mouth.
A paw, small and webbed and cold, pressed hard, and Skritch’s whiskers were against his ear and Skritch’s voice was a thread of a whistle.
“No-no. No-no. Big-folk coming. Bronze ones. Quiet, quiet, quiet.”
He was in the lean-to. Oswin had rigged it out of the one Grey Hound tent whose canvas had held, at the edge of the ring, and Brakka had put him in it and Oswin beside him and said sleep. Oswin was not beside him. The space where Oswin had been was empty and the canvas flap was open and the mist outside was grey with the first thought of dawn.
He could hear nothing at all.
Then he could: a boot, very carefully placed, in leaf-litter. Another. Close. On the outside of the lean-to, where the tent backed onto the briar and nobody should have been.
Skritch took the paw away. Wick did not breathe.
The canvas at the back of the lean-to went taut, and a blade came through it, slow and silent, and opened it from top to bottom like a letter.
A hand came through the slit. A bronze hand, steaming in the cold. It felt along the blankets where Wick’s feet had been, and Wick was not there any more, because Skritch had him by the collar and was pulling him backwards out of the front flap on his elbows into the mist.
“Here—”
Ilsa. She was flat against the tent’s outside wall with a knife in her hand and her face a white smear in the grey, and she got him by the arm and yanked him upright and they ran.
They did not run far. There was nowhere to run. The ring was thirty paces across and the briar walls were a maze and the mist was in everything, and behind them a voice said, “Toren—” and a second voice said, “Gone. Out the front,” and then there were two shapes in the grey coming round the lean-to fast, with blades, and no torches.
Ilsa pushed Wick down into the leaf-litter behind the cairn.
“Don’t move.”
She was gone. Skritch was gone. He lay with his cheek on a stone and his hand round the song-stone, which was humming warm, not cold, and that was something, and he counted. One. A boot in the litter, four yards off. Two. Breathing, slow, steaming; he could hear the steam. Three. A knife went past overhead, Ilsa’s, end over end, and hit something that said “Hah” in surprise and swore in a language full of consonants.
Four, and the fourth thing was Brakka.
She came out of the mist like a ship out of fog, Auntie up, and she did not shout. She said, quite quietly, “Ten paces, Sel. I said.” And the two bronze shapes went very still, and from somewhere beyond the dead fire Veyra Sel’s voice said, clipped and cold:
“Dace. Toren. Enough.”
They went. Just like that, backing off into the grey with their blades low, and the last Wick saw of them was Dace’s face turning to look at the cairn, straight at where he lay, as if he could see him through the stone.
“They knew.”
He said it to Ilsa, because she had hauled him up out of the leaf-litter and was now sitting beside him on the cairn with Burl’s knife across her knee, wiping it. Oswin had been with Seven, it turned out, changing the salve; he had left the flap open for the light. He was apologising to Brakka about it now, at length, across the ring.
“They went straight to the lean-to. Not Brakka’s. Not the cart. Mine. The back of it. Through the briar, where nobody would be.” His voice was shaking. “They knew exactly where I was.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
She did not look up. “They’ve had two outriders on us since the Old Road. Five days. You think they can’t count tents?”
“There were no tents till tonight—”
“Then they watched Oswin rig it. Watched Brakka put you in it. It’s not hard, Saltings boy. It’s just looking.”
He looked at her. The scar through her eyebrow. The knife on her knee. And the thing he had been holding in the box in his head, since the landward gate, came out of the box on its own.
“What did he give you?”
She went still.
“At the gate. The twin. Dace, Toren, whichever. He leaned down off the box and he put something in your hand and you put it in your pocket and you’ve never said. And now they walk straight to my tent in the dark.” He heard his own voice going high and could not stop it. “What did he give you, Ilsa?”
She stood up.
She did it slowly, and she put Burl’s knife away, and when she looked at him her face was the face he had seen on the pier stair with a knife at a Skitter’s throat. Flat. Shut. Nothing in it at all.
“You think I sold you.”
“I didn’t say—”
“You think I took Ashborn silver to tell them where you sleep.” Her voice was very quiet. “You think that. After the hollow. After I held your hand all night on the river so it didn’t drop off.”
“Then tell me—”
“No.”
“Why—”
“Because I don’t have to.” She stepped back. “I don’t have to tell you anything, Saltings boy. You’re not my captain, you’re not my brother, you’re a bucket somebody filled up by accident and I’ve been keeping you alive for five days because Brakka says so. Think what you like. Think what you like.”
She walked away into the mist, and did not look back, and Wick sat on a dead woman’s cairn with his hot white hands in his lap and felt as if he had swallowed the song-stone.
The grey had spread.
He saw it when the light came. Seven was sitting where it had sat all night, against the oak, with its left arm laid along its knee as if it belonged to somebody else, and in the dawn there was no hiding it. The bite was a dark double row of marks on the forearm. And from the marks the grey had crept outward under the bark, in a line, a thin grey vein running up toward the elbow, with little branching threads coming off it like the frost-ferns on the river.
Oswin had changed the salve twice in the night. He was Pell; he had a salve for everything. It had done nothing.
“Seven,” Wick said. He did not know what else to say. “Seven, it’s—”
“I know what it is.” The Lumen did not look at the arm. It looked at him, with its still dark eyes, and the smell that came off it was not wet earth, for once. It was cut grass. Faint, and green, and so out of place in the ruined camp that he nearly wept. “Little flame. Look at me. I am three hundred years old. I have gone copper and gold every year of them. I have shed in rain and I have shed in snow, and there has always been a spring after. And before me there was the seed I grew from, and it had its springs too, and left me a little of them. We are not so easily finished as that.”
“But this isn’t—”
“No.” A leaf came loose from its shoulder and fell on the grey arm, and lay there, bright gold. Seven looked down at it. “No. This is something else. But it is going slowly, and I am going slowly, and we will see which of us gets there first.” It lifted its good hand and laid it, very lightly, on his hair, the way Hettie did. “It is only autumn, little flame. Do not look at me like that. It is only autumn.”