Chapter 9 - A Paid Horse

Seth straightened and let go of her shoulders. For a moment he simply stood there in the violet light with his hands hanging open at his sides, as though he had forgotten what they were for, and neither of them said anything. The dye-cloth breathed in and out around them. The fear was still there in the narrow strip of his eyes, but he had begun to fold it away, corner by corner, the way she had seen him fold a blanket.

Ursula's legs gave up first. She sat down hard on an upturned wooden tub, palms flat on her knees, and let her head hang while the ground stopped swaying. Her ears rang. Her hands felt as if they belonged to someone else, cold to the wrists and buzzing faintly, and the smell of alum rose thick around her, sharp enough to make her eyes water. Above her, a sheet of saffron yellow lifted and settled on the breeze, lifted and settled, as calm as if nothing at all had happened anywhere in the world.

Then the shouting reached them.

It came over the rooftops from the square, one voice bellowing above the rest, and the words were too far off to catch until the wind shifted. "...two hundred silver! Two hundred to the man who brings me back that beast-witch!"

The handler. He wanted the beast-witch the way he had wanted the wyvern, as something he had paid for.

"Has it happened before?" Seth asked. His voice had gone low and clipped again, all its shaking pressed out of it. "The hearing. Any animal, before today."

She stared at him. Of all the questions, it was not the one she had been braced for. "Once," she said. "A crow. At the iorphanage. It had a broken wing, out in the woods behind the orphanage, and I knew where it was hiding. It just told me." She shrugged, small inside the cloak. "I thought I was good with animals. That's what I thought it was."

"And after the crow?"

"The big kids found me with it. Then everything else."

He said nothing. The helmet turned toward the sound of the shouting, then back to her, and she could not tell what had been decided. "Not again," he said at last. "Not where people can see."

"I don't pick when it happens."

"I know." He said it so quietly that she almost missed it. "That's what worries me."

Boots hammered somewhere close, at the mouth of the lane that ran past the yard. Seth's hand came down on her shoulder and pushed her sideways into the folds of a hanging sheet of madder red, and he stepped in after her, so that the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder in a wall of wet cloth that smelled of alum and iron. Through a gap in the weave she watched two guards pound past the yard's open gate, red-faced, spears bouncing on their shoulders.

"...tall knight, old plate, cracked shoulder guard!" one of them was shouting to somebody farther down the lane. "Little squire in a hood, small! Check every stable! Check the east road!"

The boots dwindled. Ursula realized she had stopped breathing and started again, and found her hand in her pocket, closed around the little painted bird. Azul was warm from being held.

"That's us," she whispered.

"Yes."

"They know what you look like. Your armor."

"They know what the armor looks like." He was already unwinding himself from the cloth. "Walking won't do. Guards run faster than you do, and they're about to start knocking on doors." He glanced once at the sky, where the sun had slid low enough to turn the tops of the lines orange. "We need a horse."

"You're going to steal a horse."

"I'm going to buy one. Quickly."

He crossed the yard in three strides and dragged a long strip of indigo cloth off the nearest line, a bolt of it as long as her arm span, still heavy and cold with dye. Then he was back in front of her. "Cap off."

She pulled it off. He wound the cloth around her head before she'd finished, fast and neat, over her hair and around her ears and back again, tucking the last of the silver-threaded strands out of sight with two gloved fingers. His claws stayed angled away from her scalp the entire time. Blue stained the edge of her forehead where it touched. He dropped the cap back over the top and hauled the wrap up over her nose and mouth, and yanked the hood over everything.

"Hold still." He tugged the hood straight, and the world went dim and close and smelled of indigo. "No silver shows now."

"You took their cloth."

"I paid for it." He had a coin in his fingers, a bright silver, and he dropped it into the dyer's rinse bucket beside the wall, where it rang on the bottom. "Come on."

A rail ran along the back of the dye house, where the lane curved out toward the earthen bank, and tied to it stood a tall gray gelding with a saddle on his back and his nose in a feed bag. He belonged to somebody who had gone off to enjoy the festival, and the animal looked exactly as put out about it as Alderman had looked about the marigolds. He was easily the biggest creature on four legs in the row.

Seth didn't hurry. She would remember that afterward, how he seemed to slow down at the exact moment everything else sped up. He counted out silver from a pouch at his belt, more than the horse could possibly have been worth, and pinned the stack under the rail's cross-bar with a stone on top where the owner could not fail to find it.

"That's a lot," Ursula said.

"A paid horse is a smaller story than a stolen one." He untied the gelding and swung her up into the saddle before she could argue. "Nobody chases a man very hard who's left more than the horse was worth."

She gripped the saddle's high front while he hauled himself up behind her. The gelding grunted under the weight of the plate and shifted his feet in a slow, aggrieved circle, and then, apparently deciding that nothing about this evening was going to make sense to him, he began to walk.

They did not gallop. Seth kept him to a walk, then a jogging trot, through back lanes that stank of tanning pits and cabbage, past hanging laundry and shuttered windows, and the town's roar rose and fell behind them like the sea. A woman leaned out of an upstairs window with a baby on her hip and stared at the tall knight and his small squire going by, and Ursula kept her head down and counted the gelding's hoofbeats. One, two, three, four. The trick still worked, a little.

The festival was coming apart around them. People streamed the other way, toward the square, hurrying and craning and shouting questions at one another, and nobody spared a glance for a knight and his squire riding calmly out. Someone had abandoned a stall in the middle of the lane, its striped awning half torn, a tray of spiced pears spilled across the cobbles. A little girl sat on a doorstep with a paper lantern in her lap, waiting for someone to light it, and watched them pass with round, solemn eyes. Ursula looked back at her as long as she could, and the girl lifted one hand, very slightly, and put it down again.

She saw the east gate as they came around the last corner, the same timber doors as before, wedged open with stones, and not a single guard in front of it. Whoever had been left there had gone running for the square the moment the wyvern broke loose. Bells had started up somewhere behind them, a fast, ugly clanging, and under it another sound she recognized with a lurch in her stomach: the long, tearing shriek of the animal she had left lying on the cobblestones.

It was screaming again. She could not tell whether they had woken it, or frightened it, or bound it, and every part of her wanted to turn around.

"Don't," Seth said behind her, low. His arm tightened across her ribs. "Keep your face forward."

Seth drew the gelding up ten paces short of the gate and sat for three slow breaths, his helmeted head turning left, then right, then left again, checking the mouth of every alley and the shadow behind every timber post. It was the longest she had ever seen him take to decide anything. Only when nothing moved did he ride on. They passed through at a walk, the gelding's hooves ringing once on the hollow timber. Nobody called out. The road ran east from there, pale in the failing light, between low hedges and then between nothing at all, and the town dropped away on their left in a jumble of roofs and smoke and paper lanterns just beginning to be lit.

Ursula twisted in the saddle in spite of him.

Something was rising above the roofs.

It came up slowly at first, a dark shape hauling itself into the orange sky above the well-house, and she thought for a moment it was smoke. Then the shape opened. Two wings unfolded, one after another, each wide enough to have covered the whole wagon, and the last light of the sun came through their thin green-black membranes and lit them like stained glass. There were no straps on them. There was nothing on them at all. The wyvern hung above the town for one long, trembling heartbeat, and then it beat its wings once, hard, and the gust of it bent the smoke sideways and made every paper lantern on the street below swing on its string.

It rose. It rose the way she had always imagined a bird would if it forgot to be afraid, up and up and away northward, toward wherever the fens lay. Its cry came down to her thin and clear this time. It was not a scream. It sounded like something being let out of a room.

She was crying under her wrap and did not care.

"It got free," she whispered. "The last strap must've broken. It got free."

Seth said nothing.

The gelding kept walking. She watched the shape shrink to a dark speck, then a smudge, then nothing above the northern horizon, and she thought she would like to meet one of its kind again someday, out in some open place with no cages anywhere. She hoped, hard and silly, that if she ever did, it would remember her kindly.

Behind her, Seth was looking at the sky where it had been. She could feel it in the stillness of his arm across her ribs. He looked for a beat longer than the moment needed, the way a person studied a word they had read too fast, and then he shook the reins, and the gelding broke into a trot.

The sun went under the edge of the world. The moor began.

It came up around them so gradually she did not notice it arriving, the hedges thinning first, then the fences, then the last scrap of field, until there was nothing on either side of the road but dark, rolling heather and pale grass that rippled like water when the wind went through it. Bog cotton nodded along the ditches, small white tufts gone silver in the dusk. A single hawthorn stood far off, bent over sideways by a hundred years of weather. The air smelled of wet stone and peat and cold, and the horse's breath went up ahead of them in steaming ribbons.

They rode without speaking for a long time. The first stars came out, and then a great many more, thick and low and unfamiliar, and the sound of the gelding's hooves softened as the road dwindled into a track of pale turf. Curlews called somewhere out in the darkness, that long, wavering cry that sounded as though it had a question at the end of it. Black pools of water lay scattered in the heather, and each one held a piece of the sky.

The gelding balked at one of them without warning. He planted his forefeet and threw up his head, blowing hard, and the whole saddle lurched. Ursula clutched the pommel. The pool ahead looked no different from the others, a dark oval reflecting stars, but the turf at its edge was the wrong color, too green and too smooth, and as she watched, a single bubble rose from the middle and broke with a soft, wet sound.

"Bog," Seth said, very quietly. He drew the reins in and backed the horse three careful steps, and then swung him wide in a long curve through the heather, testing each stride before he trusted it. "Cover's not the only danger out here. It'll take a horse to the girth in a breath." He said nothing more about it, though the arm across her ribs stayed tight until the pale track came back under the gelding's hooves, and she understood, watching the black pools slide past in the dark, that skipping towns was not a small thing to ask of a place like this.

"How did you know?" she asked, once her heart had slowed. "About the green part."

"I've crossed a lot of moors."

"How many?"

"Enough that I stopped counting." He left it there, and she did not push, because the horse's ears had swiveled toward something out in the heather and he had gone quiet and alert behind her. It turned out to be a hare. It bolted away across the turf in long, pale bounds, and the two of them let out the same breath at the same moment, and neither one mentioned that either.

"What's his name?" Seth asked, some while into the dark.

"Whose?"

"The horse. You've been thinking about it for an hour. You're doing it with your mouth."

She had, she realized. She stopped. "I don't have one yet."

"Take your time."

She considered the gelding's big gray ears, swiveling one after another to catch the sounds of the moor, and the stolid, unimpressed set of his neck. "Bartholomew," she said.

"That's a lot of name for a horse."

"He's a lot of horse."

"Hm." It was the sound he made when he was declining to argue. A moment later she felt his chest rise and fall behind her, one slow breath, and could have sworn it was something close to a laugh.

She had known a rat called Bartholomew once, in a pile of trash, and had decided almost at once that she hated him. This one deserved the name more. It sat in her mouth better than it had then.

The cold came down as the night went on. She pulled the fur mantle closer and folded her arms inside the cloak, and the right hand she'd held out to the wyvern still felt strange, the palm cool and faintly prickling as if she had left it too long in a stream. She flexed the fingers. Nothing. It was only the aftermath, the hollow ache that came after, that had left her arms as heavy as wet sand.

She could still feel the shape of the wyvern's wanting. It had not gone when the magic went. Out, it kept saying, faint now, like the last of a bell, and she found herself thinking of the crow.

She had told Seth the truth, but only the short version. She had not told him about Matron Wren finding the crow in a shoebox under the bed, three days later, and standing very still in the doorway with a pan of scraps in her hands. Wren had not scolded her. She had looked at the crow, and at Ursula, and then she had sat down on the edge of the bed and helped her hold the wing steady while it healed. It took to you, she had said, in that soft voice of hers. Some children have a way with them. It was only a few weeks before the older boys had found her in the woods with another one.

She had thought, all this time, that it was a kindness Wren was giving her. It had not once occurred to her that Wren might have been afraid.

She did not decide to lean back. Her head dropped a little, and then a little more, until her cheek rested against the fox pelt where it lay between her and his breastplate, and the steel under the fur was cold and hard and rocked steadily with the horse's stride. She meant to keep her eyes open. She watched the stars slide sideways for a while.

Sometime later she woke with a start, certain she was falling, and found she was not. His left arm had shifted, and it lay now across her waist like a bar on a gate, holding her steady against the plate. He had not slowed the horse. He had not said anything. When she had settled again he moved his arm a fraction higher, so that the rim of the cuff wouldn't press into her ribs, and that was all.

She thought about pretending to be asleep, and then found that she was.

The stream woke her, the sound of it first, a low, chuckling run of water somewhere in the dark. The gelding had stopped. Her neck was stiff and her mouth tasted of indigo and old smoke, and beyond the horse's ears a low stone building crouched beside the track, with a single lamp burning in a window.

"Drovers' halt," Seth said. "There's a trough and a rail. He can stay here."

"We're leaving him?"

"A horse leaves a trail across a moor a blind man could follow." He swung down, and she heard the plate creak as he landed, and then he lifted her down after him and set her on her feet, and her knees promptly went out from under her. He caught her elbow without comment and held it until the ground stopped tilting. "He's had a long night. Somebody in that house will feed him."

She watched him strip the saddle and lay it across the halt's fence rail, and slide the bridle off over the gelding's ears with a low, rough murmur she couldn't make out. The gelding shook himself, mildly offended, and put his nose into the trough. Seth stood a moment with his gloved palm flat on the animal's neck. Then he pressed a second silver coin into the crack of the fence post, where a person looking for the horse's owner would find it, and turned away without saying goodbye.

"Bye, Bartholomew," Ursula whispered.

The gelding did not look up.

Inside the halt, a dog barked once, sharp and questioning. The two of them froze in the dark, Seth's hand flat on her shoulder, and the lamp in the window shifted as though someone had carried it closer to the glass. Nobody came. After a long moment the dog gave a disgruntled whuff and went quiet, and the lamp settled back where it had been. Seth let out a slow breath she felt more than heard.

They went off the track after that, up the bank of the stream and into the heather until the halt's lamp shrank to a pinprick, and then around the shoulder of a long, low hill where a hollow in the ground kept out the wind. Seth spread the blanket and lit no fire. He set the pack at the head of the hollow. Then he unbuckled the cracked pauldron from his shoulder, wrapped it in a strip of sacking, and buried it at the bottom of the pack. He handled it more gently than anything else he owned. She noticed, and didn't ask.

Supper was oat cake and hard cheese, eaten cold. He cut the cheese with his dagger and handed her the larger piece without a word, then sat a little way off with his own, the visor tipped up just far enough to let him eat, his face a shadow she could not make out. The oat cake was stale, and it crumbled in her mouth, and she ate every crumb. She noticed she had stopped being surprised by that, by how much of her day now depended on him quietly handing her things.

She remembered the socks then, still wrapped in their paper at the bottom of her cloak where she had shoved them in the square. Put them on tonight, he had said, in a lifetime that had ended about six hours ago. She pulled off her boots in the dark and worked the thick gray wool over her heels, and the grease from the little tin was cold and smelled of mutton fat and mint. It stung for a moment, and then it did not. She did not say thank you. She thought she probably should have, and she sat with that for a while too.

She lay down on the blanket and did not close her eyes. She thought about what he had said in the yard. Nobody's blood does what you just did. Weeks ago he had told her that her strength came from a parent, some mage with real power close enough in her line to keep it from thinning, and she had held that idea the whole way across the country like a coin in her pocket, warm and small and hers. It had let her picture a woman in a gray robe, or a man in some quiet valley, someone who had left her behind for reasons that made sense. Now she did not know where to put it. If nobody's blood did this, then the coin was worth less than she had thought, or it was worth something else entirely, and she could not tell which.

Above her the stars were so bright that she could see the shape of his helmet against them where he sat a few feet away, keeping watch, as still as one of the statues.

"You said you'd leave me at the first safe place," she said.

He didn't move.

"When's that? You said ten settlements. There's ten of them. I keep counting and I can't figure out which one."

For a long time she heard only the wind in the heather. A curlew called somewhere very far off, and another answered.

"There isn't one," Seth said.

"You said."

"I know what I said." His voice was flat, and rough at the bottom. "There's ten towns where nobody's seen your face, and after today, there's ten towns where somebody will have heard about it. By the end of the week, it'll be all of them. There isn't a safe place, Ursula."

She sat up. It was the first time he had said her name. In two weeks of walking and campfires and goats named for their opinions, he had called her "squire" when people were near and nothing at all when they weren't, and now her name lay there between them on the cold air like something set down carefully on a table.

"You said you weren't doing any of this because you liked me."

"I said a lot of things in that cave."

She waited. He didn't add anything to it. The silence stretched, and she understood that this was all of it, everything he was going to say about that: each word set down separately, as though it weighed something. She could have laughed. She could have cried again, and for a moment she was not sure which.

"Anyone who saw what you did today won't stop looking," he went on, in a voice gone practical again. "A child who can do that doesn't get left in a town. That's all."

"That's not the same thing."

"No."

He did not say what it was, though he did not turn his head away, either. The helmet stayed pointed at her, dark and unmoving, and she thought that for someone who had spent fifty years looking everywhere but at people, it was a very long time to keep looking at one.

He never said the word. She noticed that. He walked all the way around it and left it standing where it was.

"So what do we do?" she asked.

"No more towns." He said it at once, as though it had been waiting. "We skip the next settlement, and the one after that if I can. We live off what we carry and what the moor gives us until I say otherwise."

"For how long?"

"Until I say."

"That's not an answer." Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to, and hotter. "I don't want to just keep running, Seth. I want to know what I am. I want to know why I can hear them. I heard a wyvern think, and you're saying we should just, walk away from that like it didn't happen."

"I'm saying it can't happen again where anyone can see."

"You didn't look like you didn't know what it was." She stared at the dark slot where his eyes should be. "In the yard. You looked like you did."

"I don't know."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it's the truth." He said it without heat, almost wearily. "I've seen a good deal of magic, and I've never seen that. That's not a lie. It's the whole of what I have."

She chewed on that. It sounded honest, which was somehow worse than the alternative.

"Then why were you so scared?"

"I wasn't." The word landed hard. "I was afraid of half a town seeing you. That's all it was."

"That's a lie."

He said nothing.

The wind moved through the heather. Somewhere down the hill the stream chuckled on, unbothered, and she found she was shaking again, and did not know how much of it was cold. She thought about the strip of his eyes in the dye yard, wide and unblinking, fixed on her face as though she were something that might go off. He had said no to her twice, and lied to her once, and he had also put an arm across her waist for two hours so she wouldn't slide off a horse. All of it was true at the same time. She did not know where to put it.

"I'm still mad at you," she said finally.

His head turned very slightly.

"You won't tell me anything. You never tell me anything, and today you knew something and you wouldn't say." She wiped her nose on the back of her hand, furious with herself for needing to. "But I trust you. I'm still mad, and I trust you anyway. I don't know why. I just do."

For a moment nothing happened. Then Seth went rigid, a hard, complete stillness, like the moment after a bell has been struck and before the sound dies. His hands were on his knees, and she watched the gloved fingers close slowly around the plate there, and open again. For the first time since she had known him, he had no answer ready, and it showed in every line of him.

"Go to sleep," he said. It was so gruff that it cracked in the middle.

He turned his back to her, and sat looking out into the dark.

She lay back down, and did not answer. There was nothing that needed answering. The blanket was rough against her cheek, and the stars turned slowly overhead, and after a while she heard him breathe out, long and unsteady, as though he had been holding it since the dye yard.

She could not sleep.

Sometime later, when the moon had come up over the hill and turned the heather silver, she drew her right hand out from under the cloak, and held it up against the sky.

She hadn't decided to look. Her palm had been cold for hours, and prickling, and the feeling had grown until she could not stop thinking about it. She uncurled her fingers slowly, one at a time.

Pale lines ran across the skin, thin as hairs, branching and forking from the center of her palm out toward the base of each finger, the way frost grows on a windowpane. They glowed a faint, cold violet, like the watermarks that show when you hold good paper up to a lamp, and they were not on her skin so much as under it. As she watched, they pulsed once, slow, like something breathing.

She stared at them. She did not scream. She had thought, once, that she would.

Then they began to fade, a little at a time, sinking back beneath the skin from the edges inward, and in less than a minute her palm was only a palm again, a little dirty, a little dry, the lines on it the ordinary lines she had always had.

Beside the hollow, Seth had not moved. His back was to her, broad and dark against the stars, his helmeted head lifted toward the horizon. She lay for a long time looking at it.

She did not know why she had not told him. She turned it over and found several reasons, and none of them quite fit. He had said he was afraid of half a town seeing her, and she knew that was a lie, and if she showed him this he would have to say so out loud. He had already had a very bad day. That was one reason. The other was smaller and much harder to look at, and it was only that she did not want to see his eyes do that again.

Then she closed her hand into a fist, slowly, and slid it back under the cloak, and lay with it pressed against her chest until the sky began to gray.