Brackfoot had ninety-one people in it. Elliot counted them in an afternoon, and that told him most of what he needed to know before anybody spoke to him.
It sat in a bowl at the mouth of the Brack, where four streams came together. It was the poorest place he had ever seen. Hollowmere had been poor the way a small farm is poor, thin but with butter in it somewhere. Brackfoot was poor the way stone is poor. Turf roofs. No glass anywhere. Forty goats that the whole village owned in common and argued about. One street, if you were generous, and the street was mud.
They came down into it at dusk on the fourth day out from the drowned valley, and the village fed them.
That was the first thing. Not sheltered them, not tolerated them. Fed them, at once, without being asked, with food they plainly did not have. A woman called Mem Arrow took them into a turf house that already held eleven people. She put a pot on and emptied most of a sack of barley into it, and when Adam tried to pay her she looked at the coin in his hand as though he had offered her a dead bird.
"You've come over the Ladder," she said, as if that settled it.
"Still."
"You've come over the Ladder in the spring, with a girl and a cripple." Kael, who was not a cripple, said nothing at all. "And you're going into the Brack in the morning. If you think I'll take money off you as well, then you've been somewhere that's made you strange."
They ate. The eleven people in the house watched them do it with frank enjoyment, the way you watch a fire.
A man came to the door halfway through the meal and stood there without coming in. A goat man of about forty-five, with a hard mountain face and four children hanging off him in various sizes. Mem called him Deggan. He asked whether the strangers had come over the Ladder and was told that they had. He looked at them for a moment with an expression Elliot could not read, then wished them a good night and took his children home.
It was the best night the four of them had had since Serenia. Elliot went to sleep on a turf floor feeling something he had not felt since Hollowmere, which was that he was in a place where nothing wanted anything from him.
Adam worked it out on the second morning, because Adam talked to everyone and remembered all of it.
He found Elliot at the stream, washing, and stood on the bank with his arms wrapped round himself and said nothing for a while.
"How many people have asked you to stay another night?"
Elliot straightened up. "What?"
"Since we got here. How many?"
Elliot thought about it. "Three. Mem, and Elder Ross, and the one who does the goats."
"Nine," said Adam. "Nine for me. In a day and a half." He was very pale. "And it isn't the same three being friendly, Ell. It's all of them. I've been round this village twice. I've talked to about sixty people and every single one has found a reason we should still be here tomorrow."
"They're being kind."
"They're poor." Adam's voice cracked on the word. "Poor people are kind for a night. Nobody's this kind on the second day with four days of barley in the sack. And nobody's asked us for anything. Not one person. Nobody wants a roof fixed or a load carried or a wolf killed. Four strangers come down out of the mountains, a whole village wants them to stay, and not one of them has a job for us."
Elliot stood in the cold stream with the water going numb around his ankles.
"They're waiting for something," he said.
"They're waiting for something."
They are waiting for a rider, said Etreuf.
He said it at once, without hesitation, the way you would answer a sum.
You knew.
I suspected it last night. I have been sitting with it since, because I wanted to be certain before I ruined your evening. The demon's voice was entirely level. Boy. That paper is on every board between here and the sea. You saw the number and you could not make it mean anything, because you have never had money. So let me tell you what it means to people who cannot make it mean anything either, which is a very different problem.
Don't.
It means the goats, said Etreuf. Every goat in that pen, and every goat their grandchildren will ever own. The roofs. Glass in the windows. Their children's teeth. Never again watching an old woman decide which of the young ones eats. There was a pause. It is not wealth to them, Elliot. It is the end of the only fact their lives have ever had.
Elliot got out of the stream and put his boots on with hands that had stopped working properly.
"We have to go," he said.
"Now?"
"Now."
They did not get out that day. Elliot understood afterward that this was the whole of it. The village never had to lift a hand, because four tired people in a warm place will always find a reason to leave tomorrow.
Mem Arrow's granddaughter was ill. That was the reason. She had been ill three days and had got worse in the night, and when Lyssara looked at her she said it was a chest fever, and that it would break or it would not, and that moving the house around the child would help nothing. She knew field medicine the way she knew everything, brutally, and from somewhere she did not discuss.
She spent the day with her. She did not explain why to anybody, and nobody asked.
So they stayed. Adam went round the village a third time and came back grey. Kael sat in the doorway of the turf house all day with his back to the wall and the mask on, watching the road out of Brackfoot. In the middle of the afternoon Elliot went and sat down beside him.
"Two riders," Kael said.
"What?"
"One went east before dawn. One went east about an hour ago." He did not move. "I've been counting since we got here. The east road is the broker road. Velt, and the coast. There's no reason for a village of ninety people to send two riders to a broker's house in two days."
"It could be anything. Goats."
"It could," Kael agreed. "It isn't."
He was quiet a moment.
"I've done this," he said. "I want you to understand that I'm not guessing. When I had my ground, if I wanted a man, I didn't send people after him. I put paper in villages and then I sat still, because the villages always do it." His gloved hands hung loose off his knees. "That's what the money is for, boy. It isn't to buy a hunter. Hunters are cheap. It's to buy everybody who isn't one."
"They fed us," Elliot said.
"Yes."
"Mem emptied her sack. She's got eleven people in that house."
"Yes," said Kael Morvaine. "Both of those things are true, and they'll go on being true, and that's exactly why it works." He turned his head very slightly. "They're not wicked. Nobody in this place is wicked. They're ninety-one people who have been shown a number, and the number is her, and all they have to do is be kind for one more day."
The rider that mattered came back at dusk on the third day. The village found out at the same moment the party did, and that was the part that broke it.
He came down the east track at a canter on a borrowed pony. A man of about thirty named Herrick, who had a wife and two boys and had gone before dawn on the first morning. He came into the bowl shouting, and what he was shouting was a warning.
"They're coming. Two days. They're coming."
He had gone to Velt. He had gone to the broker's house with the description in his head and the paper's words on his tongue, and he had stood in the doorway for an hour, and then he had not done it.
And then he had ridden sixty miles in two and a half days to say so.
The village came out into the mud street.
"I couldn't," Herrick said. He was still on the pony. He had not got down. He looked at nobody. "I got to the door and I couldn't. And then I thought, Ross will have sent someone. So I came back."
Every face in Brackfoot turned to Elder Ross.
Elliot would remember that turn for the rest of his life. Ninety-one people in a mud street in the blue dark, and the slow, terrible, unanimous swing of their heads. Nobody accused anybody. Nobody had to. They simply knew, the way a village knows everything, and the knowing came to rest on one old man in a doorway whose hands had begun to open and close.
"I didn't take money," said Elder Ross.
Nobody said anything.
"I didn't take money." His voice went up. "I sent word. That's all I sent. They'd have come anyway. They were always going to come, and if they come and we've done nothing, then they'll." He stopped. He looked round at the faces. "There's a number on that paper and it isn't for me. It's for the village. I'd have put it in the common."
"Ross," said Mem Arrow.
That was all she said. His name. The old man stopped talking and stood in his doorway with his mouth still open, and something went out of Brackfoot in that moment which Elliot knew, with total certainty, was not coming back.
They had not been burned. Nobody had been hurt. Nobody had even taken the money.
And it was over anyway. They would all still live here. They would still own the goats in common and argue about them. And in ten years, every person in that street would know exactly who had sent the rider, and exactly how long it had taken the rest of them to stop being sure they wouldn't have.
That, said Etreuf quietly, is what I meant.
They left within the hour, in the dark, with the village helping.
That was the last unbearable thing. They helped. Mem Arrow packed food they could not spare into Adam's arms and would not be refused. Two men went ahead with lamps to put them on the Brack track. Herrick, who had ridden sixty miles and ruined himself doing it, stood at the edge of the village and would not look at any of them, and said, to the ground, "I'm sorry."
"You rode back," said Elliot.
"I got to the door."
"You rode back," Elliot said again, and found that his voice was not steady.
It was at the last house on the track that Deggan came out with the axe.
Elliot knew him at once, which somehow made all of it worse. The goat man from the doorway on the first night, with the four children in their various sizes. He had a wood axe in both hands, held as though he had never once considered how a man holds a thing like that when it is meant for a person. He came out of his own door and put himself in the middle of the track in front of Lyssara.
"Just her," he said.
Kael moved. Elliot got there first.
He did not draw. He would think about that afterward and never entirely understand it. His hands had spent two days learning to throw a dagger at the first excuse, and they did nothing at all. What he did instead was step into the gap, put his shoulder into the man's chest, and take the swing on his arm.
The axe head caught him high on the left forearm. It hurt in a way nothing had ever hurt before, a bright white shocking wrongness. Then the man was on his back in the mud with Kael's boot on his wrist, and it was over.
"Deggan," a woman was screaming from the doorway. "Deggan, no. No."
The man on the ground was crying. He made no attempt at all to get up. He lay in the mud of his own street with a stranger's boot on his arm and wept like a boy.
"She's worth the village," he said. "She's worth the whole village. I've got four. I've got four."
"Let him up," Elliot said.
"Elliot."
"Let him up."
Kael let him up.
Nobody struck anybody. Deggan got to his feet and did not look at Lyssara, or at any of them, and went back into his house and shut the door. Elliot stood in the mud holding his own arm with the blood coming through his fingers, and realized that the entire village had come out and was watching from both sides of the track in absolute silence.
They went up into the Brack.
Lyssara put him on a rock two miles up the track and cut his sleeve off.
She did it by lamplight, with Adam holding the lamp and Kael standing ten feet out watching the way they had come. She did it without one word of comfort, which was, Elliot found, exactly what he wanted.
"It's not deep. He hit you with the flat and the corner." Her fingers moved along the bone, hard, checking. "Nothing's broken. You'll lose the use of it for a week, and then you'll get it back badly, and I'll make you work it."
"Wonderful."
"Hold still."
She cleaned it and it was appalling, and he made a noise he was not proud of. Then she threaded a needle by lamplight and put eleven stitches in his forearm. She did it quickly and evenly, without any hesitation at all, and Elliot sat very still and watched the top of her head and tried to think about something else.
It was quiet for a long time. Adam had gone carefully deaf.
"You stepped in front of an axe," Lyssara said, on the seventh stitch.
"Yes."
"You have a weapon that lets you be somewhere else."
"I know."
"You didn't use it."
"I know."
She tied off the seventh and began the eighth. Her hands were completely steady. When she spoke again, her voice was not.
"Don't do that," she said.
"Lyssara."
"I've had people stand in front of me before." She stopped, and started again. "It was their job. It's a job. It's a thing people are paid for and trained for, and they're good at it, and some of them died doing it, and I have never once." Her jaw worked. "That man had an axe and four children, and you stepped into it with your arm."
"He was going for you."
"I know he was going for me. That's the point." She looked up, and Elliot was startled to find her furious. "He was going for me because there's a number on a board with my face described on it, and there's a number on a board because of who I am. And who I am is not a thing you can stand in front of." She looked back down at his arm. "You can't put your body between me and my own name. It isn't that kind of hurt. And you're going to try, because you're you. And one day you'll do it somewhere it works, and it will kill you, and I'll have to stand there and watch it happen for a reason I can't even explain to you."
The lamp hissed.
"Then explain it," said Elliot.
"No," said Lyssara.
She put in the last three stitches without speaking. Neither of them was breathing normally by the end of it, and both of them knew it, and neither said a word about that either.
Etreuf waited until Elliot was alone, which took until the small hours.
May I speak.
You always do.
Not tonight, I think. A pause. Tonight I would like your permission, because I am going to say a true thing and you are going to hate me for it, and I would rather you hated me on purpose.
Elliot lay in the dark with his arm throbbing against his chest.
Go on.
You did that, said Etreuf. Not by cruelty. By passing through.
Elliot said nothing.
And it will happen at every village. Every one, boy. Eleven of them up this range, and however many beyond it, for as long as you walk among people with that paper travelling ahead of you faster than your feet. A pause. So. There is a valley two days north of the Brack with a door in it that nobody has opened in an age. I have been asking you to go there for eleven days, and you have been putting me off, and you have never once asked yourself why I keep asking.
You want out.
I want out, Etreuf agreed, without a flicker. I have never pretended otherwise and I never will. I want a door, and I want to go through it, and I want my own realm and my own hands and my own name back. And then, very quietly: And also, this once, the two of us want the same thing. Because there are no villages at the door.
Elliot lay in the dark for a long while.
That's the first time you've used it, he said at last.
Used what.
Them. He turned his head. You've been asking for eleven days and you have never once said it like that. You waited until Brackfoot.
The silence that followed was the longest Etreuf had ever given him.
Yes, the demon said.
And nothing else, for the rest of the night, which was as close as a creature like that would ever come to being caught.
Sixty miles east, in a village on the Velt road, a man named Solvar Rill was two days from taking them and had been paid for it in advance.
He was forty-four. He had been doing this for eighteen years and he was, by a considerable distance, the best of the nine people working the commission. He had managed it by never being in a hurry. He had the descriptions. He had the girl's gait from a stablehand at Hallow Deep. He had the group's likely pace over the Brack track to within half a day, and he had a plan that did not involve fighting anybody, which was how he had lived to be forty-four.
He stopped at an inn at the crossing because it was raining, and there was a man at the fire.
Nobody afterward could agree on what he had looked like. The innkeeper said a traveller. A carter said a soldier, from the sword. A girl clearing the tables said only that he had thanked her by name, and that she did not remember telling him her name.
He did not draw anything. He did not stand up. When Solvar Rill came in out of the rain, the man at the fire looked over at him and said one sentence, quietly, and went back to the fire.
Rill stood in the doorway a while.
Then he went out, and got his horse, and rode east, the wrong way, the way he had come. He rode all that night in the rain. He did not stop at the crossing town and he did not stop at Velt.
He returned the money. All of it, at the broker's house, in front of witnesses, which nobody in the trade had ever heard of a man doing. When the broker asked him why, he said that he had changed his mind. The broker pressed him. Rill said it again, in exactly the same words, four times, and then he left.
He never took another commission. He bought a ferry on the lower Sarrow with the last of his savings and worked it for eleven years, and was, by every account, a quiet and reliable man.
He was asked twice more in his life what had been said to him at that fire.
The first time, he said he did not remember.
The second time was much later, much older, to a daughter who had heard the story from someone else and wanted to know whether it was true. He was quiet for a while. Then he said that the man had known his name, and had known his mother's name, and had told him, without any unkindness at all, precisely how and where he was going to die if he went north.
And that the worst of it, the part he had never told anybody, the part that had put him on a ferry for eleven years, was that the man had sounded sorry about it.
As though he had read it somewhere. As though it had already happened.