The Summer Line

On the third day out of Brennock, Rurik Bane spoke to her for the first time.

“You’re sitting that horse like it owes you money.”

Ilse kept her eyes on the road. It ran north between hayfields, white with dust, and the sun had been on the back of her neck since dawn. “I’m told that’s a professional hazard.”

“Hm.” Casimir’s steward was a broad, grey man with a beard cut square and a sword he never touched. He had ridden beside her for three days as though she were a parcel he’d been told not to drop. “Loosen your knees. The mare’s done nothing to you.”

She loosened her knees. The mare stopped jolting. Ilse resented that more than she could reasonably explain.

Ahead, Casimir rode with the two march soldiers who made up the rest of the party. He had kept a courteous distance since the Northgate. At meals he asked whether the inn suited her. At night he made sure her door had a bolt. He had not once mentioned the ledger in her saddlebag, and she had not once stopped feeling it there, a patch of cold against the mare’s flank like a stone out of a river.

Yara had walked her to the gate in the grey before sunrise. She had not argued. She had only held the mare’s bridle a moment longer than she needed to and said, Know which kind of Reader you are before you get there, Ilse. The one who wants it collected, or the one who’s frightened of collecting it wrong.

Ilse had said there was only one kind of Reader. Yara had let go of the bridle without answering, which was worse.

“He’s told you nothing, I suppose,” Rurik said.

“About what?”

“About anything.” The steward spat into the dust. “Eleven years I’ve kept his house. I know when he’s carrying something. He’s been carrying something since your city, and he’s riding half a mile ahead so he doesn’t have to carry it near you.”

“If Lord Vael wants you to know his business, he’ll tell you.”

“And you’d tell me if he didn’t?”

“No.”

Rurik looked at her for the first time. It was not a friendly look, but it was an honest one. “Good,” he said, and kicked his horse on ahead.

· · ·Scene break

They reached the summer line in the afternoon.

Ilse had read about it. Every child in Brennock had. She had not believed it would look so ordinary. The road ran up a long rise between hedges full of dog-roses. At the top the hedges stopped. The roses stopped. The road went on, and six feet further along it was white.

Not snow, at first. Rime. Every stone in the road wore a crust of it. Beyond the rime the snow began, low and hard and glittering, and it went on as far as she could see, over fields that should have been standing with barley.

The mare stopped dead.

“She’ll not like it,” Rurik said. “None of them like it.”

The march soldiers were already unbuckling furs from behind their saddles. Casimir had ridden back to the line and sat his horse on the green side of it, waiting. The air coming off the snow moved against Ilse’s face like breath from a cellar.

Rurik tossed a bundle into her lap without looking at her. A fur cloak, old and heavy, smelling of woodsmoke and horse.

“Put it on before you cross, not after,” he said. “People who wait till they’re cold don’t get warm again.”

She put it on, and her fingers were already too stiff for the buckle, so Casimir leaned from the saddle and fastened it for her, quick and impersonal, and drew back before she could thank him.

“Walk her,” he said. “Don’t ask her to trot. The ice under the rime is smooth as glass.”

Ilse walked the mare over the line.

The cold took her like water. It went through the fur and through her riding coat and closed on her ribs, and for a moment she could not breathe. Behind her the dog-roses nodded in a warm wind. In front of her nothing moved at all. In the saddlebag, against her knee, the ledger went from cold to cold enough to feel through leather.

“There,” Casimir said beside her. “Now you’re in my march.”

“How far does it go?”

“Forty miles to the keep. Sixty to the Gap.” He looked out over the white fields. “It’s not so bad for the first ten. Folk down here have coal.”

She did not ask what the folk further up had. She had read his returns. She knew.

· · ·Scene break

They stopped that night at a frost-house. It sat alone beside the road, stone-built and low, with a chimney smoking and nobody in it.

“March law,” Casimir said, when she asked. He was stacking wood on the hearth himself while Rurik saw to the horses. “Every house on a road keeps a fire lit and a door unbarred for strangers. The crown pays for the wood.” He set another log on. “The crown believes it pays for the wood.”

“And who pays for it?”

He didn’t answer. She hadn’t expected him to. The levy in her tray had been forty crowns in thinning gold and heavy copper, and there was no line on his returns for firewood at all.

Supper was bread and hard cheese and a stew one of the soldiers made out of a jar. Afterwards the soldiers and Rurik took the second room and left the fire to the two of them. Rurik made a point of leaving the door between the rooms open.

Casimir sat on the settle with his left hand held towards the flames. The fingers were pale at the tips and did not seem to warm.

“Ask,” Ilse said.

He looked at her.

“You’ve wanted to ask since the Registry,” she said. “You’ve ridden half a mile ahead of me for three days so you wouldn’t. Rurik noticed. Ask.”

“Why did you seal it?” His voice had lost the public edge entirely. Out here it was just a man’s voice, low, a little rough with cold. “You could have read it to me and let it go on the abstract as it was. That was your whole duty. You’d have been done.”

“An unwitnessed page is an incomplete record. Incomplete records are sealed for inquiry.”

“That’s what the rule says. I asked why you did it.”

Ilse looked into the fire. It was easier than looking at him.

“Because I don’t know where it came from,” she said. “My mother wrote three lines at least on every debt she ever held. Who, why and when. She wrote nine words on this one and never touched it again. That isn’t how she kept a book. So either she didn’t know what it meant, or she knew and didn’t want anyone else to.”

“And you want to know which.”

“I want the account to be true.”

He was quiet for a while. The fire settled.

“I don’t remember much of that winter,” he said at last. “Emeric held the Gap. My brother. Oster came through the pass in the autumn, and he held it with two hundred men for nine days, and then he didn’t. I was at the keep. When I got to the Gap it was over, and he was dead, and I did what the Vael line does. I called the winter down.”

“All of it. At once.”

“All of it at once.” He turned his cold hand over and looked at the palm. “I was out of my head for a month after. Frostbite and fever and the rest. I remember a woman’s voice in the sickroom, reading. I think it may have been your mother. She came north that autumn to audit the war levy, and she was still at the keep when it ended.” A breath. “I’ve always assumed that page, if it existed, was the price of something I did. Something I owed for Emeric.”

“Debts aren’t punishments, my lord. They’re agreements. Somebody asked for something and somebody said yes.”

“Then I’d very much like to know what I said yes to.”

The door to the other room was still open. Rurik was snoring in a way that didn’t sound entirely convincing.

· · ·Scene break

In the morning they came to the Hallow ford.

The river there did not run. It had frozen in its bed eleven years ago and the snow had never covered it, because the wind off the hills scoured it clean. It lay across the road like a sheet of dark glass, forty yards wide.

The soldiers led their horses over on foot. Rurik led his. Casimir went last but one, and turned on the far bank to watch Ilse come.

She was two-thirds across when the mare’s hind foot went out from under her.

It happened slowly and all at once. The reins jerked in her hands. Her boots skidded on nothing. She threw out an arm and there was nothing in the world to catch, only glass, and then there was a hand closed hard around her wrist, and Casimir had her. He had come back out onto the ice without her seeing him move. He took the mare’s weight on the reins with his other hand and held them both until the horse found her feet.

“Steady,” he said. “I’ve got you. Steady.”

Ilse stood very still with her wrist in his hand. His fingers were cold even through her glove. She was shaking, and not all of it was fright.

She was glad he had come back. That was all. It was a small, ordinary, unguarded gladness, the kind a person felt a hundred times a year and never wrote down.

In the saddlebag against the mare’s side, the ledger went warm.

She felt it through the leather. So did the mare, who snorted and sidestepped. A thin breath of steam rose from the buckle of the bag and vanished in the cold air.

Casimir saw it. He looked at the bag. Then he looked at her face, and whatever he saw there made him let go of her wrist as though it had burned him.

They did not speak until they were off the ice. On the far bank, while Rurik checked the mare’s legs, Ilse turned her back to the others and opened the saddlebag. She unwrapped the ledger and found the page.

The seal was intact. The entry was still nine words. But the frost that had lain over her mother’s writing since Brennock had melted away from one of them, and the ink of that word was dark and wet, as if it had just been written.

Freely.

Casimir stood beside her. He read it over her shoulder. He did not need to be a Reader to understand.

“It answered,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I was only glad you were there.”

“I know.”

“And it almost counted.” She closed the book. Her hands were not steady now. “My lord, if a thing that small can move it, then any kiss would count. Even a stupid one. Even one we didn’t plan.”

“Then we’ll be careful,” he said.

It was the kind of thing people said about ice. It sounded very different said about the two of them. She heard it land, and she saw him hear it too, and neither of them could take it back.

“Yes,” Ilse said. “We’ll be careful.”

He moved a full step away from her. She was grateful. She hated how grateful she was.

· · ·Scene break

A guild courier caught them at the last inn before the keep. He had ridden three horses to death, he said, which Ilse doubted, and he had a letter for Reader Rooke under the Registry’s seal.

It was from Yara. It was short.

Stane read the abstract the same night. He has gone to the Lord Justice for a writ of calling on the grounds that the holder of the page is compromised. He has told the Justice you are known to favour the debtor. Somebody told him that, Ilse, and it was not me. The Justice has refused the writ for now, but granted him a hearing at the place of inquiry. Justice Kellow rides north with a treasury party. By my count they will reach the keep twenty days after you. When your inquiry closes, certified or not, she will have the power to call it herself. The hearing was granted only today, and a Justice’s party travels at a Justice’s pace, which is the only reason you have twenty days at all.

Whatever you are keeping from me, keep it better.

Ilse read it twice, the way the guild taught. Then she folded it and put it in her coat and went out into the yard, where Casimir was talking to the innkeeper about hay.

He broke off when he saw her face.

“Twenty days,” she said. “A Justice of the crown is coming to your keep in twenty days. And somebody in Brennock has told Stane that I favour you.”

He went very still.

“Do you?” he asked.

Ilse had a vow against lying about a debt. She had never taken one about anything else. She found, standing in the snow with his steward watching from the stable door, that it made no difference at all.

“Twenty days,” she said again. “We should ride.”