He had not slept. He had lain in the narrow bed above the common room, boots still on, listening. When he judged the time was near, he rose carefully, mindful of any noise he might make. He went down the back stair in the dark and sat in the common room to wait. The hearth had burned to ash and the room was cold and hushed. The key to the private room was in his hand. He had filched it from the hook behind the bar while his father was locking up. He waited long enough to feel the cold steal into his shoulders before the knock came at the yard door. Three taps, spaced, insistent.
He went to the door and unbarred it. He stood aside, and they came in silently. The three. Vetch first, shadow-quiet, his eyes sweeping the space behind Sprink even as he crossed the threshold. Then broad-shouldered Hargrove, who, he could easily imagine, took his chief pleasure in small hurts. And last, Sebile.
She looked at him as she came through, and then her eyes moved on, registering nothing. Sprink felt unseen, unremarked, unmade.
Vetch put a hand on his arm, lingering a moment too long. ‘Good lad,’ he whispered.
Sprink felt what a dog must feel when it is praised for a deed it did not know it had done. He led them up the back stair.
He knew which boards to skip, and where to hug close to the wall. He took them that way now out of long habit. Vetch moved noiselessly behind him, his long knife already drawn. Hargrove followed, climbing the steps carelessly, the noise of his footfalls a problem for someone else. Sebile came last, stepping lightly.
At the top, the landing creaked and murmured under their gathered weight. In the inn's sleeping quiet, the noise roared in his ears. He began to sweat.
Sebile moved past him, and he stood at the head of the stairs and watched her walk through his house.
She went down the passage ahead of them and she went down it correctly. Two paces along she came off the middle of the floor and onto the left side, where the boards were nailed twice into the joist and held silent. She stepped over the fourth board past the linen press without feeling for it, without slowing, without looking down. Sprink had been stepping over that board since he was seven years old. He had never mentioned it to anyone in his life.
Vetch had said nothing of this. He had given her name at the granary wall, and Sprink had taken it for the reason it appeared to be, which was that she was his and went where she was sent. That was not the reason. The reason was in front of him in the dark. She had come up these stairs some night, and she had walked this floor and learned it board by board.
She stopped outside the private room and laid a finger on the doorframe. She did not turn around. She had not looked at him once since the yard.
Vetch and Hargrove came up past him.
Then they all saw it. A thin seam of light lay along the bottom of the door, dim and warm against the dark of the hall. The lamp inside was lit.
A lamp burning at this hour meant a guest awake, or a guest asleep who had left it low, and there was no way to know which from the outside.
Hargrove went to the door and put his ear against the wood. He did not move for some time, then shook his head.
Vetch did not take his eyes off the light. He was waiting for a shadow to cross it, for the light to shift, for any sign at all that someone within had stirred. It held steady. It went on holding steady. From below them somewhere in the building came the sound of old timber easing in the night, and Sprink's heart went into his throat and stayed there until the sound had finished.
Vetch held up a hand.
He held it a long while. Sprink stood four feet behind him with nothing to do and nothing to hold and nowhere to put his eyes.
Vetch dropped the hand. Sprink stepped to the door. He took the key from his pocket and turned it in the lock. The bolt drew back.
Hargrove opened the door. Slowly. The hinges were silent, and Sprink knew why, because he had oiled them that same morning at his father's asking, and the knowledge of it sat in his belly like milk gone sour.
Hargrove went in first, then Vetch. Sebile followed.
Sprink stayed in the hallway. A ghost haunting his own house. His part, done.
For a moment there was nothing. Then a sound he felt more than heard, the short solid blow a fist or an elbow makes when it finds flesh. Then a weight meeting the floor. Then voices, low and urgent, overlapping, and after them a silence drawn tight as a bowstring.
He went in.
The lamp threw muddy shadows about the room. Hargrove lay on the floor near the foot of the bed, and Cragg stood over him, waiting to see whether more was wanted. Vetch stood rooted, his knife in his hand, and Sebile was close beside him, wide-eyed, not moving.
Beyond them Valen waited. He had not dressed for sleep, and he held his own long knife loosely at his side, single-edged, its blade catching the low lamplight in a thin bright line. The sword leaned undisturbed against the wainscoting on the far side of the room, still in its scabbard, and he had not needed to reach for it. His eyes were on Vetch.
Nobody looked at Sprink at all. He wanted the floorboards he knew so well to open and take him.
Hargrove groaned. Vetch had not moved, though a pulse flickered at his temple; he had the look of a man who had not yet settled on his next mistake. Valen let him stand so, and the lamp guttered once before he spoke.
‘You meant to sell it,’ Valen said, and did not wait for an answer. ‘South, most like. The Koss road, and a buyer in Solenne who asks no questions of a blade like this.’ He inclined his chin toward Hargrove, and his eyes stayed where they were. ‘And your man here. What was his share to be? Naught. A knife in the dark, before the journey was well begun. A new life for you. No more alleyways and cellars and witless fools.’
On the floor, Hargrove drew a breath through his teeth and let it out slowly. He lay still.
Vetch looked back at him. His eyes were flat, but behind them a sum was being worked. Sprink had seen that look before. ‘You warned him,’ Vetch said. It was not an accusation.
‘He said nothing,’ Valen said. ‘Now hearken.’
He crossed the room to where Ordaelin stood against the wainscoting and drew the sword clear, and the stone in the pommel woke. The gold that had turned so quietly in its depths came up to meet the red, and the light of it filled the room past anything the one low lamp could account for. Vetch's eyes went to it. He could not help it.
Valen turned to face him. He held the sword before him, point down, the stone burning in the dim room, and when he spoke his voice had changed. It was not the voice that had talked with Sprink over supper. It was older than that, and its cadence belonged neither to Edden nor to any tongue Sprink had ever heard.
‘Anneth ndë, Vetch. Ein thindë. Vaen in ûn na Aeth.’
The words pressed into Sprink's chest. Vetch stood rigid, his eyes on the blade, on the stone, on the face of the elf behind them.
‘En maer ordaelin, orda cel esta.’
The stone flared. The shadows on the walls shifted and grew still.
‘Don ould esta na Tinglenog.’
The name of the inn landed in the elvish like a stone dropped into water. Vetch flinched.
‘Don ould esta na rûven en Tolben.’
His father's name. Sprink's throat closed.
‘Don ould esta Hildregar.’
His own name, bare and unadorned at the end of it, the last of three.
‘Noss sarn — en car noss, en vaen noss, en ein noss, en loss noss.’
Four beats, hammered shut.
‘Sur bel esta — caer noss nel, mor noss lorth.’
The stone's light did not falter, and Valen's eyes did not leave Vetch's.
Then Valen spoke in Edden, and his voice did not soften.
‘Thou art made their warden. The house thou didst covet is now thy charge. Their peace is the coin of thy life. Spend it wisely.’
Then he raised the blade once, the stone burning.
‘Vaen ould in ûn na Aeth. Na ould noss sarn.’
The stone dimmed. Not suddenly; it ebbed, the way a coal ebbs when the breath that woke it is withdrawn. The room returned to what it had been. The lamp burned low. The shadows fell back to where they belonged.
Valen reversed the sword and slid it back into the scabbard without looking, and the light went with it. The Tinglenog breathed in its sleep, unaware of any of it. Sprink thought of Tilli in the room at the end of the hall, sleeping sound, and felt all at once what he had brought into this building.
Valen stepped forward. He crossed the distance between himself and Vetch in two strides, and the movement was so unexpected that Hargrove, still on the floor, flinched back from it. Vetch did not move. He stood his ground, but the effort of it showed.
Valen leaned close. His lips moved near Vetch's ear. He said something, a word, perhaps two, that no one else in the room could hear.
Vetch went white.
It was not the whiteness of anger. Sprink had seen that. It was not the drawn stillness of a man thinking. It was the sudden emptying of a face that had believed, until that moment, that it understood the terms of its situation, and had just learned that it did not.
‘What are you?’ Vetch said. It came out almost honest.
‘He is no longer kept,’ Valen said, still looking at him. ‘You are.’
It seemed to Sprink that the darkness around Vetch closed in.
Valen's eyes came to Sprink, and there was a regard in them that Sprink had not earned.
‘Leave. Take your man,’ Valen said, glancing at Hargrove, who had begun to stir.
Vetch's grip tightened on his knife until the knuckles whitened, then eased. He looked at the blade for the space of several heartbeats, and it seemed to Sprink that he looked at it as a tool that had proved unfit for the work, and then he reversed it and slid it back to his hip.
‘Get up,’ he said to Hargrove.
Hargrove got up slowly, testing each movement before he trusted it. Cragg stepped aside to let him find his feet, but did not look away from him.
Sebile had not moved. She looked at Vetch waiting, her face composed now, the thief’s mask back in place. But her eyes still carried what the room had put in them, and Sprink saw it.
He moved to her side, and whispered, ‘Sebile.’
She turned and looked at him. Her face was blank in a way that had nothing of deceit in it. Her eyes met his and held only a question. She did not respond.
He had not known what to expect, but it was not this absence of him in her face. He opened his mouth and found he had nothing to put in it.
Hargrove had found his feet. Vetch's eyes went from Hargrove to the room, and whatever accounting he was doing he kept to himself. ‘Let's go,’ he said, and they headed out the door.
Cragg fell in behind them at a distance, close enough that the option of stopping them was present but unstated. Sprink followed last, not thinking about where his feet were going, not thinking about the boards. Vetch went ahead of them, and the others followed hard on his heels. He was diminished, but he was what they had. Sebile was the last of them to the door. She paused in the doorway, her back to Sprink, long enough that he thought she might turn.
She did not. She went on into the yard, and was lost to sight.
When they were gone Sprink stood before the door in a daze.
Cragg put a hand on his arm. ‘Bar it,’ he said.
Sprink did as he was told, and stood a while after he had set it, the iron cold beneath his palm.
‘Come,’ Cragg said. ‘Back to the room.’
In the room, Valen stood at the window with his back to them, his shoulders lower than they had been all night. He came away from it and sat at the table, and gave Sprink the penetrating look that made him feel he was standing in a room with no walls.
‘Sit down,’ Valen said. Softly.
Sprink sat on the edge of the bed, and Cragg took up a place by the door with his arms folded. When Sprink could no longer bear the floor he looked up, and Valen's gaze had not left him.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sprink said finally.
It came out smaller than he intended. He tried again.
‘I brought them here. To you. I knew what they were going to do, and I —’ He dragged his sleeve across his eyes, hard. ‘I let them in. I did it.’ His voice weakened. ‘He said — my family — and I didn't even try to stop him. Not really. I did it anyway.’
‘Cragg told me how it stood with you and the guild,’ Valen said at last.
Cragg met his eyes. ‘You were in it before you were wise enough to know what you were in,’ Cragg said. ‘That’s not nothing.’
‘What he held over you tonight was your family,’ Valen said. ‘That is not when he had you. He had you at fifteen, for the price of a purse. Every year since, the debt has grown, and you did not know you were paying on it. Tonight he came to collect.’
Sprink choked, stifling a sob.
Cragg unfolded his arms.
Sprink pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, and when he took them away he had steadied.
‘Two days ago,’ Sprink said, ‘I knew what every day would bring. Sweeping floors and wiping tables and carrying trays of food to guests. My family, each of them in their own way trying to guide me, mold me for the better. The market, the stealing and the thrill it gave me. Sebile.’ He looked around the room. ‘And now the three of us are sitting here at this hour because of choices I made. Bad ones.’
Valen considered him. ‘Vetch would have come for me in any inn in Hardown, and he would have found a way to use whoever was nearest and most easily used to do it. We are the end result of our choices. That is true, and you should not set it aside. But there are forces moving in the world that do not consult our choices, and our paths are bent by them whether we consent or not. Some of what has brought us to this room tonight was yours. Not all of it.’
Sprink sat with this. It did not absolve him and he did not think it was meant to, but it set the thing in its right proportion, and that was more than he had had an hour before.
‘What you said to him. That he was kept.’ He frowned. ‘The curse. Is it real?’
Valen held his gaze without expression.
‘What did you say to him? At the end.’
The silence held. Sprink understood that neither answer was coming, and that the understanding was itself the answer.
‘He will not trouble you,’ Valen said. ‘Nor your family, when Cragg and I have gone west. That much you may carry with you.’
Sprink nodded, and was halfway through the nod before the rest of it reached him.
‘You're leaving,’ Sprink said to Cragg.
‘Aye. Five years I've been in this city,’ he said. ‘Doing what? Mending hinges. Waiting for something I couldn't name.’ He grunted, as if the admission embarrassed him. ‘Gathering moss, my mother would've said.’ He looked through Sprink, seeing something else. ‘Valen's going toward something that matters. More than he's said to me, I think, but enough of it I could see. I'd rather be useful on a difficult road than useless on an easy one.’
Sprink nodded. The room was quiet in a way that felt unfamiliar to Sprink in his own home. ‘Take me with you,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay here. Not after tonight. I know what you said about Vetch, but I think it’d be best for my family if I left. I know what I am and what I'm not, and I—’ He pressed on before Valen could speak. ‘I've never seen any of it. The west. Anything. I've spent my whole life asking every person who came through that door what's out there and if you ride out tomorrow, I'll be standing at that same door for the next thirty years still asking.’
Valen looked at him with eyes gone suddenly distant, as though other faces stood behind Sprink's.
‘I carry enough of the dead, Hildregar,’ he said. ‘I have no wish to carry more.’
Sprink met his eyes. ‘I'm not asking you to carry anything.’
‘I've known the lad some years,’ Cragg said. ‘He's curious to a fault and as kind. He doesn't know yet what he's made of. That isn't a flaw. He doesn't know what lies ahead. Neither do I, truthfully. And you've known me for a span of hours and yet here we both stand.’ He held Valen's gaze. ‘Let him come.’
He folded his arms and said nothing further.
Valen turned to the window, to the dark beyond it, and was silent long enough that Sprink understood he was not being weighed against the question but against some private reckoning whose terms he could not see. At last the elf turned back, and Sprink met his eyes as best he could.
When Valen spoke, it was not to Sprink. It was to Cragg.
‘To Vindëlon,’ he said. ‘That is where I go first. A few weeks' riding, if the road allows it. I will see what I find. From there, he can join a caravan east to return.’
He turned with cautious eyes to Sprink.
‘That is what I can offer you, Hildregar. A road. If the road proves too much, or if what lies beyond Vindëlon is not a thing I would ask of you, we part there and you go home with a story worth the telling. Do you understand?’
‘I understand,’ Sprink said.
‘Do not agree lightly. The Greywood is not an evening's adventure. I do not think you can ride. Nor have you slept rough. You have likely never been further from Hardown than the fields beyond its walls. I will not slow the road for you. You keep pace or you do not.’
Sprink did not trust himself to speak, and nodded.
Valen looked upon him, inclined his head no more than a finger’s breadth, and turned back to the window.
Her face came back later that night, as he lay in his bed. Sebile in the doorway, her eyes moving over him without finding anything to catch on. He told himself she had been acting. She had been on a job; she had to play her part. He pressed on the thought to see if it would hold.
It struggled.
He thought of her kiss. The pieces did not fit together. He could not make them.
He lay on the bed and waited for morning.
The morning came sooner than he would have chosen. He had slept little, and when the cold light began to show under the door he rose, dressed and went down the back stair in the dark, out of habit taking the boards quietly. He hung the room key on its hook behind the bar and sat at the table in the small room off the yard where the family ate their meals. He looked at the things he knew. He looked at the worn grain of the table and the window with its ill-fitting latch his father had left unrepaired for years, and tried to reckon what it would be to leave.
His mother came down and found him there. She did not ask what he was doing up so early, which meant she already sensed something. She was like that. She moved about the kitchen getting the fire started and the water on, and eventually she sat down across from him with her tea. She looked at him over the cup and waited. He felt like a boy again, about to own up to a broken thing he could not mend.
‘I’m going west,’ Sprink said. ‘With the elf.’
She put the cup down carefully. She had always been able to wait longer than he could. Not this time.
‘West?’ she said. ‘There's nothing out there. Where exactly?’
‘I don't know.’
‘You don’t know? What does that mean? You don't know—’
‘Mother, listen—’
‘—where you're going? Hildregar!’
‘I know what it sounds like.’ He met her eyes. ‘I need you to hear me out before you say anything else.’
She held her tongue, sat back and folded her arms.
‘I'm not made for this,’ he said. ‘The inn. I — Bram is. And Elka. Tilli. They belong here. The inn is in them the way it's in you and father.’ He searched her face. ‘I love this place. I do. But it isn't in me the same way, and I've been pretending it is for a long time. I think you've known.’
His mother was quiet.
‘I don’t know what I’m made for. I’ve never known. But I know I’m not going to figure that out here.’ He looked around the kitchen. ‘This is my chance. I don’t think I’ll get another one like it.’
‘Your chance? Your chance for what? A life of vagabondery? Your head’s always been in the clouds, Hild. What will you eat? You’ve never known anything but a life of shelter and plenty. Listen to me. There’s less of this in the world than you realize. West to where? Through the Greywood? For what? To see some trees? You're daft, Hildregar.’ She made to rise from her chair.
‘You're not listening,’ Sprink said, interrupting her. ‘Every person who's ever come through that door, I've asked them where they've been. You know I have. You've told me to stop pestering the guests often enough. I can't help it. I don't know why but I can't stop and I can't keep doing this. I don't know what will make me happy but I've never been this excited about anything before in my life. Mother, I'm going.’ His voice broke on it.
She sat back down. Her eyes filled.
‘I’ve spent most of my life in this room,’ she said. ‘In this inn. I love it. I hope to spend the rest of my days here. I’ve been blessed with a wonderful husband, four healthy and helpful children, and a life that fulfills me. I have everything I could ever want. It breaks my heart to hear you say this. You could get killed.’ She said it low, and the quarrel had gone out of her.
‘I could,’ Sprink said. ‘Yes.’
Her eyes searched his. He let them, and did not turn away.
After a while she reached across the table and put her hands over his.
They sat that way. The fire in the kitchen began to put some warmth into the room.
‘You'll tell your father yourself,’ she said at last. ‘Before breakfast. Not after.’
‘Yes.’
She picked up her cup again. ‘You'll need a horse,’ she said. ‘Not that broken-down nag your uncle sold us. A real one.’
His father took it harder, and also better, than Sprink had expected. Tolben sat across from him and said nothing, and his jaw worked, and his eyes went bright and stayed so, and Sprink had never once seen his father's eyes do that.
Tolben did not argue any of it. He did not say that there was nothing out there, or ask where exactly, or put a name to what a young man without a trade eats on a western road. He did not sigh, either. Sprink had heard that sound his whole life but he did not hear it now. Then Tolben cleared his throat and said that if he was going, he was going provisioned.
The strongbox sat where it always sat, on the shelf beside the window. Tolben took the key from the place he believed nobody knew about, opened the lid with his back to the room, counted, and locked it again. Then he turned round with the coin in both hands and pressed it into Sprink’s, closing his son’s fingers over it.
‘Don't argue,’ he said.
Sprink did not argue.
The morning was given over to preparations. He had expected to go to the market himself, but Valen was already dressed when Sprink came upstairs, and it was the elf who led him out into the city, moving through the streets of Hardown with the certainty of someone who has provisioned for long roads many times and knows precisely what is needed and what is not.
Cragg met them at the horse trader's yard. He came down the street, and what he carried told a clearer story of his intentions than anything he had said in the room the night before.
He carried a long-handled axe, double-bladed with a spike at the crown, its haft worn smooth where his grip fell. He was using it as a walking stick, the spike end up. At his hip hung a heavy club, short-hafted, its head capped with knobbed iron that had seen use. On his back a pack, broad and square, strapped tight.
The dwarf stopped in front of a roan mare, ran his eye over her and nodded.
Valen helped Sprink choose his horse.
A steady grey mare, young, with an even eye and a willingness about her that showed in how she stood. The trader said she was the best animal he had sold that year, which traders always said. Valen paid him no attention. He ran his hand along the mare’s neck and looked at her hooves, and made an offer that the trader accepted after one attempt at resistance. Sprink liked her immediately. She walked to him when he came close and stood while Valen saddled her. He decided she deserved a name, but Valen told him that names wanted some road under them first.
Cragg handled the packhorses, two short thick-legged animals built for load and distance rather than speed, one with a notch bitten out of the near ear and one with a white off-hind foot to the fetlock. He walked around each of them twice and named a price that did not move. Valen took a third from the back of the yard, a brown mare the trader had not troubled to show them; he went to her without looking at anything else in the pen, put a hand flat on her shoulder and stood there a moment, then paid what was asked.
His siblings found him in the early afternoon. His mother had told them, as he had hoped she would, and they came to find him.
Bram found him in the yard trying to get his pack squared away. He took it from him without a word, undid what Sprink had done, and repacked it properly. When he was finished he clasped Sprink's shoulder hard, and that was the whole of it, which was more than most people's speeches.
Elka caught him in the passage outside the kitchen and did not slow down, and he had his arms full of her before he had finished turning round. She cried without any embarrassment about it, as she had done everything since she was small, and then she pushed back from him and dragged the flat of her hand across her face and was angry instead.
‘You'll write.’
‘I don't know that there's anywhere to write from.’
‘Then you'll find somewhere.’ She took hold of the front of his shirt. ‘Every town. Three words. I don't care.’ Her chin was quivering.
‘I'll write, Elka.’
She let go and straightened his shirt where she had crushed it, and went back into the kitchen.
Tilli found him in the yard standing beside his grey mare, arms folded, at a loss. He had never sat a horse beyond the yard and was not certain where to begin with one. The mare regarded him with a patient brown eye that suggested she was aware of this. He put his hand on her neck, a thing he had seen Valen do, and checked the girth, as he had seen done in the market yard. Now the two of them were sharing the same space and making the best of it.
Tilli stood tentatively beside him for a while. Then she took hold of his sleeve with both hands, not pulling, holding, and pressed her face against his arm.
Sprink remained fixed.
After a while she let go and looked up at him.
‘Are you going to come back?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
She nodded hard, as if that would make it so, and walked back inside.
The common room was loud with the midday trade, his father behind the counter, his mother moving between tables. He watched through the yard door until the flow of it pulled them both to the far end of the room, and then he went in through the back and up the stair quickly, head down, hoping to be unnoticed.
He went to his own room first. Beneath the loose board under his bed, where it had always been, sat the purse he had been building for five years, the accumulated proceeds of a hundred small thefts and careful savings, wrapped in cloth and tied. He sat on the floor with it, undid the knot and counted it out on the boards, which he had not done in a long while and which took longer than he expected.
Then he had to decide how much of it a road cost, and found he had no idea. He knew the price of a bed and a supper at the Tinglenog. He did not know the price of anything past the west gate. He made two piles. He moved a little from the larger to the smaller and then sat back on his heels and let it stand, aware that he had chosen by feel and that feel was all he had.
He put his own portion in the purse at his belt.
The strongbox was on its shelf. He opened it, set his father's coin back inside, and laid his own beside it. He locked the box, put the key back where it belonged, and went down and out through the yard door unseen. He crossed the yard, took the mare’s bridle and led her around to the front.
Valen and Cragg were already there, standing with their horses in the street. The three packhorses stood loaded and patient behind them, their loads strapped tight and square. Valen was at Estar's head. Cragg had the axe across his shoulder and was looking up the street with the expression of one who has been ready for some time.
Sprink brought the mare alongside them and looked back at the Tinglenog one more time. The sign with its painted cup, faded now, swinging in the light wind. The door. The windows of the common room where he had spent more hours of his life than he could count. A figure moved behind the glass and he thought it was his mother but could not be certain.
Nobody came out.
He had not known he was waiting for it until it did not happen. The door stayed shut. They had said what they had to say indoors, in the kitchen and the yard, and they were not going to come into the street and do it again in front of the neighbors.
He put his hand on the mare's neck and took the first step away from the front of the inn.
It was the same step he had taken ten thousand times. Out the door and left up the street, toward the market, toward the gates, toward the whole of his life so far. They led the horses rather than riding them. The streets were too close for it at that hour. Valen had taken Estar’s bridle without a word and started walking, and Sprink had done the same.
He was glad of it. On foot he was a man walking a horse. Up in the saddle he would have been a boy who could not ride, three feet above a city that had watched him grow.
The city did what it had done that morning. Conversations stopped as they came and picked up again behind them. Children ran alongside for half a block before they were called back. At the corner of Fishgate a cooper Sprink had served ale to twice a week for years watched them come and watched them go and never once looked at him.
They reached the west gate soon after, the great timber doors standing open, the road beyond them running out into the open summer country west of Hardown. Sprink stopped. He stood with the mare's bridle in his hand, and it came to him, all at once, to whom he had not said farewell.
‘Wait,’ he said.
Valen had already halted beside him. Cragg, a few paces on, had stopped without looking back.
‘My aunt Maren,’ Sprink said. ‘I need to say goodbye to her. Wait here.’
He did not wait for a response. He pushed the reins into Cragg’s hand, turned and ran back into the city. Back through the west quarter and across Copper Bridge, through the tangled streets of the middle city and east, all the way east, to the tanner's shop on the far side of Hardown where the smell announced itself a street away and his aunt Maren dwelt in two rooms above it. He took the outside stair two steps at a time and knocked and stood there breathing hard.
She opened the door. She had his father's eyes, and they went from pleased to concerned as she saw he was panting for breath and sweating.
‘What is it, Hil?’ she said. ‘Are you alright?’
‘I'm going to Vindëlon,’ he said. ‘Today. Now. I couldn't leave without telling you.’
She looked at him, taking in the sweat and the hard breathing and whatever was in his face, and then she stood aside and let him in.
He told her. Not all of it, not the night before, but the part that was simple. That there was an elf passing through Hardown who was going west, and that he had been given the chance to go with him. All those years of asking travelers where they had been, and now here was his own road west. He could not let it pass.
‘A dwarf as well,’ he said, the words coming faster now. ‘Cragg, you might've seen him about the city, no beard, works at Murcer's, or he did, he's coming too, and they're waiting for me at the west gate right now, Valen and Cragg, with the horses. Six of them. Three to ride and three for the packs.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I've never ridden a horse outside the yard before. Not once. She's a good horse, steady, the elf chose her, he has a good eye for horses it turns out, but I've no idea what I'm doing and we're going through the Greywood and I —’ He became aware that he had been spraying slightly and wiped his chin. ‘Anyway. One to ride, one to lead. The mare and a packhorse. That's mine to manage.’
Maren listened to all of it without once interrupting.
He had run out of words, and found that he was out of breath.
Maren went and sat down in her chair by the window. ‘I told you once that if the chance came you were to take it,’ she said.
‘I remember.’
‘I'll be honest with you, Hil. I said it the way people say a thing they don't expect to be held to.’ She folded her hands in her lap. ‘It cost me nothing. I've been handing out courage I never spent once in my life.’
‘Aunt Maren —’
‘No.’ She was not upset. She looked more pleased than he had seen her in a long while. ‘This is the best thing that has happened in this room in years and I'll not have it made small. You're going.’
‘I'm going west,’ Sprink said. ‘Today. Now!’
‘Good.’ She nodded, and would hear no more of it. Then she tapped her forehead as she sometimes did when trying to recall something, and her eyes opened wide. She got up, went to the stack of finished and unfinished clothing beside the window, and drew a cloak from near the bottom of it. She shook it out and held it up, and it fell in long heavy folds. The weight of it was the weight of something made to last.
It was deep-hooded, with a toggle of dark polished bone on a short loop of braided leather that could be worked with one hand in the dark or the rain. She held it against him, measuring.
‘It's a bit overlong for your height. I made it for a merchant,’ she said. ‘Came through last summer, said he needed a good traveling cloak, paid half up front and said he would return in a month for the rest and to collect it. He never returned. I've been looking at it ever since.’ She held it out to him. ‘It'll fit you well enough. When the water stops beading off it, rub it with beeswax. It'll last you a long time if you treat it well. You'll be grateful of it in the rain.’
He took it, and held it up, and looked at it properly, running his thumb over the toggle, the bone worn smooth, the braided leather tight and well-made. He knew her work, and this was the best of it. He could see it in the seams, in the weight of the wax, in the hang of it.
He swung it around his shoulders, fastened the toggle, and drew the hood up to try the fit of it, then pushed it back. She reached up and straightened the fold where it had caught at his shoulder, and looked at what she had made, and was satisfied.
He stood there in it and found he could not thank her for the cloak, because the cloak was the smaller thing.
‘It was you,’ he said. ‘All this wanting. It was you at that window, telling me things.’
Her face opened with joy when he said it. She put her hand on his arm and gripped it. ‘Wonders never cease. You come back and tell me what it looks like. Not what your grandfather said. What you saw. I want your own words.’
‘I will,’ he said.
She hugged him and held on. When she let go she turned to the window, and he understood he was meant to leave before either of them made more of it than she could bear.
‘Go on then,’ she said.
He walked back through the city to the west gate. He did not run.
He found Valen and Cragg where he had left them, standing with the horses in the shade of the gate tower.
They saw him while he was still some way off. Valen turned to the road and the country beyond the gate. Cragg looked him up and down as he approached. ‘What's wrong, lad?’ he said.
Sprink stopped beside the mare. He still had the cloak on. He was sweating under it before he reached them, but he did not take it off.
‘Nothing,’ he said. It was not quite true.
‘That's a fine cloak,’ Cragg said. ‘You'll cook in it.’
‘I know.’
‘Aye.’ Cragg handed him the reins.
Sprink looked at the mare and she looked back at him. He put his foot in the stirrup the way he had seen it done and swung up, and it went better than he expected. He grabbed the pommel to steady himself and sat there at what felt like an unreasonable height while the mare shifted her weight beneath him. ‘Let's go,’ he said.
Valen brought Estar alongside. ‘Heels down,’ he said. ‘She will follow your weight before she follows your hands. The rest will come.’
The saddle was harder than it looked and the motion of the mare beneath him was strange, a living shift and roll that he had not anticipated, nothing like sitting in a chair, nothing like anything he had done before. He moved his hands and she moved and it startled him and she felt it and tossed her head and then stood quiet.
They passed through the gate and out onto the westward road, and Sprink turned in the saddle to look back at Hardown. The city sat in the afternoon light behind them, its rooftops and its chimneys and the thin smoke rising from a dozen fires, the gate tower rising above the wall, and beyond it somewhere the Tinglenog, and his family inside it going about the afternoon in ways that did not yet fully account for his absence.
He faced west again, and let it go.
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