The Winter Lord’s household ate in the kitchen, because the kitchen was the only room in the keep with a fire that went all night.
Ilse learned this on her first morning, when she came down the tower stair in her riding coat and found the great hall dark and the tables stacked against the walls. The cold in there was the cold of a church in February. Her breath smoked. Somewhere a door banged, and the sound went on too long.
She followed the smell of bread down a passage to a long, low room full of people. Guards, maids, a farrier with his sleeves rolled, two children doing sums on a slate. A cauldron of porridge hung over a hearth big enough to stand in. Everybody was talking. Nobody stood up when she came in, which she liked.
Casimir sat at the end of the table with his coat off and a boy of about ten showing him a splinter.
“Hold still,” he was saying. “No, still. That’s it. There.” He held up the splinter between finger and thumb. “Now go and tell your mother you were brave, and I’ll say nothing about the screaming.”
The boy fled. Casimir looked up and saw her. For a moment he looked pleased, nothing more. Then he remembered, and she watched him remember, and his manners came down over it like a shutter.
“Reader Rooke. I hope the tower wasn’t too cold.”
“It was freezing, my lord.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s the warmest room we have above the ground floor. We burn what we save up there down in the villages.” He moved a bowl along the table towards the empty place beside him. “Sit. Rurik will glare at you whatever you do, so you may as well be fed.”
Rurik, at the hearth, glared at her.
She sat.
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She had meant to begin the inquiry that morning. She had a list. The keep’s own records of the winter eleven years ago; the names of anyone who had been in the sickroom; the route her mother would have taken north. Casimir heard the list out over porridge and then said, “Tomorrow. Today you should see what you’re inquiring into.”
“I’ve read your returns.”
“You’ve read them better than anyone alive,” he said. “Come and see them anyway.”
They rode out an hour later with Rurik and a sledge of sacks. Lowcross was four miles up the valley. On the ledger it was a village of two hundred and six souls, a mill, a chapel, and a levy of three crowns, which the Lord Warden had paid out of his own purse for the last five years.
In the snow it was twenty roofs and a line of smoke.
The mill wheel was frozen solid in its race, with ice hanging off it in long green teeth, and the chapel roof had been shored with timber from somewhere else, and the timber had been shored with more. The lane between the houses had been dug out so often that the snow walls on either side stood higher than Ilse’s head.
People came out when they heard the sledge. They did not bow. A woman with a baby wrapped inside her coat said, “My lord,” the way she might have said neighbour, and a man with no fingers on his left hand took the other end of the first sack before Casimir could lift it alone.
“Oats,” Casimir said. “And salt, and the lamp oil Dame Tove asked for. The coal comes Thursday if the Hallow road stays open.”
“It’ll stay open,” the fingerless man said. “It’s been too cold to snow.”
Ilse got down from the mare. She knew she was being watched. A woman in a guild-grey coat, from the city, with a book in her saddlebag. News moved fast in a valley this small.
An old woman came down the lane on two sticks and stopped in front of Casimir. She was so wrapped in shawls that only her eyes showed. They were very blue and very angry.
“My Jory died in the ninth month,” she said. “His feet went black, and then the rest of him.”
“I know, Tove,” Casimir said. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry.” She spat into the snow at his feet. It froze where it landed. Nobody moved. Rurik’s hand went to his belt and Casimir lifted two fingers and the steward’s hand came away again.
“He’s in your ice-house up at the keep,” the old woman said. “With the others. Eleven of them. We can’t dig the ground to bury them. We can’t dig it because of you.” Her voice cracked. “And you bring us oats.”
“Yes,” Casimir said. “I bring oats. And Thursday I bring coal. And in the spring, if there is a spring, I’ll dig Jory’s grave with my own hands, and you can stand over me and tell me I’m doing it wrong.”
Tove looked at him a long time. Then she took the lamp oil out of the sledge herself, and put it under her shawl, and said, “Thursday, then,” and went back up the lane.
Ilse found she had been holding her breath.
“She’ll be at the keep gate in a month,” Rurik said beside her, low. “With a pie. She does it every year after she’s spat at him. It’s how Lowcross says thank you.”
“She blames him.”
“She’s right to. And she knows why he does it.” He hefted a sack. “You wanted to see the returns, Reader. That’s the returns.”
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In the afternoon Casimir took her up to Callow Gap.
It was not a long ride, but it climbed, and as the valley narrowed the snow deepened until the horses were walking in a trench cut for them between white walls higher than their riders. At the top of the trench stood a watchtower of grey stone with a signal fire laid ready on its roof, and beyond the watchtower the world ended in a wall of white.
“Forty feet,” Casimir said. “More, at the saddle of the pass.”
They climbed the tower stair. At the top the wind cut like wire. Ilse pulled Rurik’s old fur round her face and looked north over the parapet.
The Gap was a notch between two mountains, filled to the brim with snow as a cup is filled with milk. On the far side of it, a long way down, there were fires.
Hundreds of them. Pinpricks of orange in the blue dusk of the Osterran foothills, laid out in neat squares. Tents. A road. Smoke from what might have been a forge.
“They rotate the regiments,” Casimir said. “Every spring. They build a little more each time. There’s a bathhouse now. I’m told the officers have brought their wives.” He rested both forearms on the stone. “Eleven years they’ve been waiting for the snow. They’re very patient. So am I.”
“And if the winter ends?”
“Then the snow goes out of the Gap in three weeks. Four, if the spring’s cold. And they come down that valley past Lowcross before the crown’s garrison has finished arguing about its pay.” He said it evenly. “Stane knows that. He thinks it would be worth it to have the march on its knees and asking for troops. He may even be right, in his ledgers. Tove’s grandchildren wouldn’t be in his ledgers.”
Ilse looked at the fires. Then she looked at his hands on the parapet.
He had taken his gloves off to point. The fingers of the left hand were white to the second knuckle. The tips were darker than that. Not black. Not yet.
“Casimir,” she said.
It was the first time she had used his name. He turned his head.
“You asked me in Brennock what the winter does. You’d itemised every death on your returns.” She did not look away from his hand. “You didn’t put yourself on the list.”
For a moment he looked as though he might lie. Then he put his gloves back on, one finger at a time.
“The Vael line holds the winter,” he said. “It has to be held somewhere. It’s held here.” He touched his chest, just under the collarbone, where the thread from her mother’s page had frosted his coat. “It goes a bit further every year. My grandfather held one for six winters in the old war and lost both hands. I’ve done eleven. I have perhaps four more before it takes something I’d mind losing.” A pause. “That isn’t self-pity. It’s a return. You like returns.”
Ilse thought of the page in her saddlebag, going cold in her lap for five days. It’s killing someone, she had told Yara, before she knew anything. Slowly. I can feel it.
She had not known then who she meant.
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He asked her to leave that evening.
It happened in the tower room they had given her, because it was the only room where Rurik was not. Casimir knocked, and came in when she said so, and stood by the door with his back to it.
“Take the page back to Brennock,” he said. “Tomorrow. I’ll send two riders with you. Surrender it to the treasury and tell Justice Kellow you couldn’t find the origin. It’s true. You haven’t.”
Ilse was sitting on the bed with the ledger open on her knees. She closed it.
“If I surrender an open page, the crown collects it.”
“The crown can’t collect it. It says freely.”
“The crown can try. You said that yourself. People get hurt when men like Stane try things.” She stood up. “And you’ll be the one standing in front of them when they do.”
“Better me than you.” The plain voice was hard now, and very tired. “Ilse. You’ve seen the Gap. You’ve seen Lowcross. If Kellow calls that page in this keep, with Stane at her elbow, there’ll be a crowd and a clerk and a crown seal on it. A holder who presents a called debt stands beside the debtor while it’s paid. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong on both of you. I won’t have you standing in that.”
“You won’t have it.”
“No.”
“You don’t decide that, my lord.” She heard her voice go precise, the counter voice, the one she used for Master Obry and his floods. She let it. It was all she had. “It’s my page. I hold it. I sealed it. I certify it or I don’t. You pay your levy in full every quarter and you’ve never once tried to talk me down, and I’m not going to let you start now by talking me out of my own book.”
“This isn’t a levy.”
“Everything is a levy.” She came across the room. She stopped a full step short of him, because they had agreed to be careful, and she could feel the ledger on the bed behind her like a held breath. “You’ve carried eleven years of this alone and called it paying. Let someone else read it. That’s all I’m asking. Twenty days. Let me read it.”
He looked at her for a long time. In the candlelight his face was all planes and shadow, and she could not read it at all. She had never met a debt she couldn’t read.
“Nineteen,” he said finally. “It’s nineteen days now.”
“Then I’d better start.”
He went out. He closed the door very gently, as if it might break.
Scene break
Ilse did not sleep. She sat up with the candle and her mother’s ledger and went through the page again, line by line, the way the guild taught. Paper. Ink. Hand. Seal. She knew all of it by heart.
It was past midnight when she noticed the cold.
The page had been cold since Brennock. This was different. Near the gutter of the book, where the page met the binding, the frost had thickened into a white crust. It was thicker there than anywhere else, as if the page were colder at the fold. As if something were written there that the frost wanted to cover.
She held the page close to the candle, close enough to soften the frost and no closer. The room itself was so cold that her breath smoked over the paper.
The crust thinned. Beneath it, very small, in the gutter where no one would look unless they were looking for it, there was a witness mark.
Every debt in the Registry needed one. A second signature: someone other than the holder and the debtor, who had been there when the agreement was struck and would swear to it. Ilse had searched this page for one for nine days in Brennock and five on the road. It had not been there.
It was there now. Here, forty miles into the winter, in a hand that was not her mother’s and not Casimir’s.
Witnessed. E. Vael.
Emeric Vael, who had held Callow Gap for nine days, eleven years ago, and died on the ninth.
Ilse did not move. The candle guttered. Down in the kitchen, the fire that never went out cracked and settled.
Whatever her mother had written on this page, she had written it beside a man who would be dead by morning.