The Almost

The watchtower at Callow Gap had a table in it.

Ilse had not expected that. She had imagined, when she imagined her mother up here at all, a bare stone room with a signal fire on the roof and wind through the arrow slits. There was all of that. But against the north wall, under the slit that looked out over the snow-choked pass towards the Osterran fires, there was also a table: a heavy, ugly, scarred pine table, with a bench on either side and a lantern hook above it, and a brass inkwell screwed to the corner so it couldn’t be knocked over in a gale.

“Pay table,” Casimir said behind her. “The garrison was paid here. Every week. Nobody’s moved it.”

Ilse took her glove off and put her hand flat on the wood.

It was so cold it hurt, and she left it there anyway, and looked at the inkwell, and at the bench on the side nearest the slit, which was where a Reader would sit if she wanted the light for counting. The wood of the tabletop was scored with the ghosts of a thousand coin-stacks pushed across it. Somewhere in the grain, eleven years ago, a woman had pushed a pen across it too, and written nine words, and a captain had leaned over and signed in the gutter with a tally pen.

“Place of striking,” Ilse said aloud, for the record, and got out her book, and wrote it down with her bare hand shaking. Gap watchtower, pay table, north wall. Inspected by the holder, day 15.

Then she put the book away and stood at the arrow slit beside the table and looked north, because she had come up here for the page and she found she could not look at the table any more.

· · ·Scene break

The Osterran camp was lit for the evening. From the tower she could see it more clearly than she had on the first day: the neat squares of tents, the long huts of what must be the officers’ quarters with smoke coming from real chimneys, a road cut down the valley on the far side, a forge, a building with a painted door that might, from the look of it, have been a chapel. Eleven years of an army growing roots.

“They changed regiments again this spring,” Casimir said. He had come to stand at the slit on her other side, a careful step away. “Different colours on the pennants. The new ones are younger. I watch them drill. They drill very well for men who have never fought anybody.”

“Do they think the snow will ever go?”

“I think they’ve stopped thinking about it.” He rested his forearms on the sill. “I think somewhere in Oster there’s a treasury clerk who pays an army every quarter to watch a wall of snow, and has written to his Margravine every quarter for eleven years to ask whether it might be time to stop, and been told not yet. I think about him more than I should. He’s the only man in that camp I understand.”

Ilse laughed. It came out unsteadily.

She was aware of a number of things at once. That the tower was very small. That the wind in the slit was pushing her hair across her face and she had not moved to fix it. That he was a step away and had been careful about the step for fifteen days, and that at some point in the last minute the step had become less than a step without either of them moving. That she had read her mother’s notebook aloud to him the night before, and he had wept in a chair, and she had put the pages in his hands, and that something had been set in both of them in that library that had not been set before.

He turned his head. She was already looking at him.

Neither of them said anything.

It would have been very easy. That was the thing she would remember afterwards: not that it was difficult to stop, but how easy it would have been not to. Nobody was pushing. Nobody was watching. There was no crown, no council, no Stane. There was a pay table and a lantern hook and a man looking at her as if he’d been waiting three years for her to look back, and the whole of her wanting to lean the six inches, and knowing, the way she knew a debt when she read it, that if she did it would be free.

The page in her bag was warm. She could feel it through the leather, the way she had at the ford.

Ilse stepped back.

She did it slowly and on purpose, so that he could see it was on purpose, and she kept looking at him while she did it so that he could see she was not afraid.

“Not here,” she said. “Not tonight. And I want to tell you why, so that you don’t have to guess.”

Casimir had not moved. His face had gone very quiet.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Because it would count.” She put her hand on the bag. “I can feel it. It would be free, and it would count, and the winter would break. And in three weeks that snow would be out of the pass, and those very well drilled boys down there would come down past Lowcross before Tove’s grandchildren had anywhere to go. I’m not going to do that. Not by accident. Not on a mountain.”

“No,” he said.

“And because it’s your brother’s table, and my mother’s,” she went on, and her voice did something she couldn’t stop, “and I won’t have the first thing I ever let myself want without a number on it be something that happened in a room full of other people’s grief. I want it to be ours. I don’t know how to make that true yet. But I know this isn’t it.”

For a long moment he said nothing at all, and the wind came through the slit, and the Osterran camp’s chapel bell, very faint, rang for something far below.

Then Casimir took one step back himself, to where he had been, and put his hands in his pockets.

“Thank you,” he said. “For telling me why.”

“You’re not angry.”

“I’m a great many things,” he said, “and none of them is that.” He looked at the table, and then at her. “Ilse. I’d like you to know something. I want you. Whether that page exists or not. If your mother had never written it, if Stane burned the book tomorrow, if the winter held another forty years. I’m not asking for anything. I just don’t want you ever to wonder whether the page is the reason.”

“I don’t wonder.”

“You said that before.”

“I was right before.”

He smiled, and it went all the way up, the way it had at breakfast on her first morning.

“Then here’s the only thing I can think of that’s any use,” he said. “You won’t let it happen while it costs the pass. I won’t let it happen while it costs you. So the pass has to stop being something it costs.”

Ilse looked out at the camp again.

“You mean a truce.”

“I mean a truce. Oster’s paid an army to stare at snow for eleven years. That clerk of theirs would weep for joy.” He was thinking aloud now, fast, the way she did at a ledger. “The trouble has never been whether they’d treat. The trouble is that nobody on either side would believe the other side meant it. The last truce on this border was signed in good faith by one party and broken inside a year. Every captain in my council knows that story. Varro’s grandfather died in it.”

“A truce is a record of obligations,” Ilse said slowly.

He turned.

“Both sides sign,” she said. “And when both sides have signed, a Reader can read it. A thread only runs from a party who meant what they undertook when they signed.” Her heart was going very fast. “If they sign and don’t mean it, there’s no thread from their seal. If you sign and don’t mean it, there’s none from yours. You’d both know. In the room. Before anybody took the snow out of anything.”

Casimir stared at her.

“You’d be proof,” he said. “Standing in the room.”

“I’d be a Reader, reading. That’s all I’ve ever been.”

“That,” said Casimir Vael, “is the least true thing you’ve said since Brennock.”

· · ·Scene break

They went down the tower stair in the dusk with the lantern between them. At the bottom, where the trench in the snow began, Rurik was waiting with the horses and a face like a closed ledger.

“You were a long time,” he said.

“The Reader was inspecting the place of striking,” said Casimir.

“Hm.” Rurik looked from one of them to the other. He looked for a while. “And?”

“And we need the old march charter,” Ilse said. “The one that says who may treat for a truce on this border. Tonight, if you can find it.”

The steward’s eyebrows went up into his hat.

“Can find it,” he said. “Know where it is. Know what it says, too. Says the Warden may treat for the Gap and nobody else may, not even the crown, because the crown wasn’t here when the Gap needed treating for.” He swung up onto his horse. “Varro’ll have a fit.”

“Varro carried eleven of Lowcross into the ice-house this year,” said Casimir. “She’s entitled to a fit.”

“Aye. And who’s going to go down there and ask Oster whether they’re tired?”

Nobody answered him. He looked down at the two of them from the saddle, in the blue dark, with the Osterran camp’s chimneys smoking far away behind the snow, and his face changed slowly into something Ilse had not seen on it before and could not immediately name.

“Hm,” said Rurik Bane. “Thought so.”