They stopped an hour before dark, in a hollow where an old oak had come down in some storm and torn half the hillside up with its roots.
Aros chose the place. He walked its edge twice. He looked at the slope, at the fallen trunk, at the angle of the road below, and at the line of grey light where the trees ended a mile further on. Only when he was sure that a small fire at the bottom of the hollow couldn't be seen from the road, or by anyone standing at the forest's edge, did he nod and let Broko drop the packs. Past the trees the road ran down into open country, toward the marsh and toward a circle on a map, and he was not going to walk into that at dusk.
He had read the map four more times on the way. It hadn't told him anything new.
A road. A forest. A stream. A stretch of marsh drawn as little tufts of grass, and at the edge of it, beside a small square that might have been a ruined house, a circle. Slow them down. A date on the back. Tomorrow.
He didn't know the hand, but he knew the kind of man it belonged to. Someone who held a pen the way he'd hold a knife he didn't trust. Who pressed too hard. Who had drawn the circle in one stroke and then gone over it again, to be sure. A soldier who had learned his letters late and did not enjoy them.
The same man, Aros was almost certain, who had stood on a pier at Calad with his sword raised to his brow while the skiff pulled away, and had not called the archers.
He wanted to do it himself. Aros had understood that much on the water. What he hadn't understood until today was how patient the young man was. Lukas had worked out how fast five people and two mules could walk on a wet road. He had worked out how long a fight in a ravine would cost them, and where that would leave them at the end of tomorrow. Then he had paid nine men to make sure of it, and gone ahead to wait.
Aros had drawn maps like that himself, years ago, for men he wanted dead. He had never once been on the wrong side of one. He found he didn't like it.
"You're doing it again," Gemma said.
She was sitting on the oak trunk with her knees drawn up, watching him.
"Doing what?"
"Staring at that paper like it owes you money."
"It does," he said, and folded it away.
Broko came back up from the road with a sack over his shoulder and blood to both elbows.
"Don't look at me like that," he said, though only Diana was looking. "She was already dead. She'd want to be useful."
"She didn't even have a name," Diana said.
"She does now." He dropped the sack beside the fire pit and wiped his arms on the grass. "Patience. Because she never had any, and because that's what it's going to take to chew her."
Gemma laughed. It surprised her, Aros could see it; she put her hand over her mouth as if to push the sound back in. It was the first noise she'd made since the ravine that wasn't an answer to a question. He decided Broko could have whatever he wanted for supper.
What Broko wanted was a fire. What Aros gave him was a fire no bigger than a hat, down at the very bottom of the hollow, fed with the driest sticks they could find so it wouldn't smoke.
"I've cooked on candles bigger than this," Broko said.
"Then you'll manage."
He managed. The meat was tough and stringy and tasted of the ravine where the mule had died, and they ate all of it. Diana made a broth from the bones and a handful of something she'd picked by the roadside, and it was better than it had any right to be. Above them, in the branches, the last light went from grey to blue to nothing.
Candriela didn't come down into the hollow. She sat at the lip of it with her back to them and her sword across her knees, facing the road. When Diana carried a cup of broth up to her she took it without a word, and an hour later the cup was empty on the ground beside her, and Aros hadn't seen her drink.
It was Gemma who started it. She'd been watching Broko's hands while he picked at a bone, and finally she said, "How did you meet Talon?"
Broko didn't answer straight away. He turned the bone over, looking for something he'd missed.
"He found me drinking by the docks in Calad," he said. "Which isn't much of a story. Half the men in Calad could tell it." He tossed the bone into the fire. "You want the part before that?"
Gemma hesitated. Then she nodded.
"I used to lock people up." He said it the way another man might say he used to fish. "In the Priesthood's cells, under the old customs house. The Light said doubt was a crime, and I was a loyal man, so they gave me a ring of keys and told me to keep the world safe from questions." He poked at the dirt with a stick. "I was good at it. You'd be surprised how much of the job is just being the one who doesn't listen."
Nobody said anything. The fire ticked.
"My boy got taken one morning. Fourteen. Someone said he'd laughed during a sermon. Maybe he had, he laughed at everything. They put him in my block." Broko smiled, a thin, uneven thing that didn't reach anywhere. "Funny, them doing that. I've thought about it a lot since. I think they wanted to see what I'd do."
"What did you do?" Gemma whispered.
"I left his door open. That night, at the end of my watch. Figured faith could decide the rest." He looked up at the black branches overhead. "By dawn the Light had found him floating in the canal."
Gemma's face crumpled. Diana reached over and laid a hand flat on Broko's knee and left it there, and he let her.
"Talon said guilt makes good soldiers," Broko said, after a while. "He was right. That's the trouble with Talon. He usually is." He picked up another bone. "Anyway. Patience was a good mule. Somebody should say a few words."
"She was very patient," Diana said gravely.
"She was not," said Broko. "That's the whole point of the name. Weren't you listening?"
Aros watched the girl wipe her face with the heel of her hand and laugh again, and he thought that Broko had told that story before, at many fires, and had learned exactly where to put the joke so the people listening could breathe. It was a kind of skill. Aros had known soldiers who had it. He had never been one of them.
Afterwards, Diana got out her maps.
She didn't need them. Aros knew that. Some people reached for a pipe or a string of prayer beads; Diana reached for her maps. Something for the hands. She unrolled them on a flat stone by the fire, weighted the corners with pebbles, and leaned over them until her nose almost touched the paper.
"The road's the only way to Bondrea," she said. "On my maps."
"And off them?" Aros said.
She looked up.
He had been waiting all evening to ask her. He had a feeling she'd been waiting to be asked.
"There was a causeway," she said slowly. "Old stone, from before the Order. Pilgrims used it to cross the marsh to the shrine at Bondrea. Half a day shorter than the road, if you knew where to put your feet." She was quiet for a moment. "The Priesthood took it off the maps after the Purge. With everything around it."
"Do you remember where it ran?"
"I remember scraping it off." She drew a sheet from the bottom of the pile. It was older than the others, yellowed, not paper but thin calfskin, soft as cloth at the edges. Most of it was drawn in faded brown ink: hills, a coastline, the fat snake of a river. But in the middle, where the marsh should have been, there was nothing at all. Only a patch of skin smoother and paler than the rest, like an old burn.
"You can't really scrape vellum clean," Diana said. "Not all the way. The pen cuts a little groove, and the groove stays even when the ink is gone. In the right light you can read it. Low light, from the side. Like the sun at evening." She glanced at their fire, which had shrunk to a red knot of sticks. "That isn't light. That's a rumor."
Aros said nothing. He was not going to build up the fire, and they both knew it.
"I can do it," Gemma said.
They looked at her.
"Light," she said. "Low, from the side. Like the sun at evening." She held up her right forefinger. "I can do that."
Every part of Aros that had kept him alive for ten years wanted to say no.
He knew so little about what she did, or what it cost. He knew it made her nose bleed. He knew that on the morning in Calad, when the condemned man's flame had leaned toward her, the young Custodian on the platform had turned his head and looked straight at her through a crowd of a thousand people, as if someone had called his name. He didn't know if those two things were connected. He didn't like not knowing.
But he knew the look on her face. It was the one she'd worn at the crossroads, when she told him she got to choose.
"Small," he said.
"Small," she agreed.
She sat cross-legged by the stone and closed her eyes. Aros watched her breathe: in, all the way down, until her shoulders rose, and out, slow, slower. Nothing happened. She did it again. On the third breath a point of light appeared on the tip of her finger, so small and white that for a moment he took it for a spark from the fire. It trembled. It stretched. It bent, and closed, and became a ring no bigger than a coin.
He had seen her make a ring four times now. It was the first time he'd seen her do it calmly, with her eyes half open and her face still, and something in him went very quiet and watchful, the way it did on a road that was too easy.
"Lower," Diana said softly. "Lay it down flat. Flatter. Now away from you, toward the edge. Tip it. Like that."
Gemma tipped her finger. The ring tilted with it until it hung almost edge-on to the vellum, a hand's width above the stone, throwing a thin, cold, sideways light across the blank patch in the middle of the map.
And the blank patch was not blank.
It came up out of the skin the way frost comes up on a window: faint at first, then all at once, a web of fine grooves, each one casting a hair of shadow. A coastline Diana had never redrawn. The tufts of the marsh. And through the middle of it, from the edge of the forest to the far shore where Bondrea would be, a line of tiny paired marks like the stitches on a wound. The causeway. Small crosses along it where the shrines had stood. And near the forest end, a cluster of little squares that could only be a village, with letters beside it, scraped deeper than anything else on the page, as if someone had gone at them with the point of a knife.
Diana leaned in until her breath stirred the vellum.
"Velde," she read.
Nobody asked what Velde was. They could all see it on her face.
The ring flickered. Gemma's breath had caught. "Keep breathing," Diana said, without looking up. "Please. Just a little longer." She took a stick of charcoal from her case and began to copy the line of stitches onto a clean sheet, fast and sure.
He watched the ring, not the map. It held. It didn't tremble. Gemma's eyes were half closed and her lips moved a little, and after a moment he understood that she was listening to something. And at the bottom of the hollow, the red knot of their fire had begun, very slightly, to lean. Not with the wind. There wasn't any wind. Toward her.
Aros said nothing. He kept his eyes on it until Diana sat back and said, "There," and Gemma let out the breath she'd been holding, and the ring was gone.
The fire straightened.
Gemma rubbed her temple. No blood; he checked. "They get closer," she said, to no one in particular, "when I hold it long."
"Who does?" said Broko.
She didn't answer. Diana was rolling up the vellum very carefully, and when she spoke her voice was perfectly steady, and her fingers weren't.
"I was a mapmaker for the Priesthood," she said. "Before. After the Purge they needed new borders. Holy lines, they called them. Places too impure for the Light to enter." She tied the vellum with a strip of leather and pulled the knot tight. "They'd send me to a place and I'd draw it. Every road, every well, every house. I was very good. I was so proud of how good I was." The knot was already tight. She pulled it again. "A week later they'd go in with the map. Mine. So they wouldn't miss anything."
The fire ticked.
"Velde was the first," she said. "Two hundred people and a shrine to a saint nobody remembers. When I came back to correct the map, they gave me a scraper and told me to take it all off. The village, the causeway, the shrines. I think they wanted me to do it myself." She looked at Broko. "Like your boy. They like it when you do it yourself."
Broko didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
"Now I draw for myself. Roads, rivers. Places that aren't there anymore." She slid the vellum into its case and closed the lid. "It's easier to remember them than to forgive myself. That's the whole story. It's not as good as Broko's. There's no mule in it."
She turned to Aros. Her eyes were bright, but her mouth had found its wry corner again.
"Your turn, hero."
He had known it was coming. He had been sitting with his back against the oak root for an hour, knowing it.
"Everybody knows mine," he said.
"Everybody knows a song about yours," said Broko. "There are four. I know three of them. In one you kill the king with a spoon."
"Then sing that one."
Broko grinned, and didn't. The grin faded when Aros didn't return it. For a while nobody spoke, and Aros looked at the fire and let them look at him, and he thought, as he let himself think perhaps once a year, about a door painted blue, in a house by an orchard that wasn't there anymore. He thought about it until he could feel it in his teeth. Then he put it away, the way he'd put away the map.
"Not tonight," he said. It was the second time in three days he had said it, and the second time Gemma had heard it.
Diana looked at him a moment longer. Then she nodded, as if he'd given her something after all, and turned to Gemma. "And you, little one? Or are you going to say not tonight too? He's a bad influence."
Gemma smiled a little. "There isn't much. I'm from Seborn." She stopped. "I was."
"Was?"
"It burned. A year ago." She drew her knees up again. "I remember everything before. My mother, the bakery, the dogs in the square. I remember going to bed that night. Then I remember Aros, and nothing in between. He found me sitting in the ashes, holding a horseshoe. He says I wouldn't let go of it."
"She wouldn't," Aros said. "It was bent nearly in half. I never worked out how."
Diana was frowning. "Seborn," she said. "That's north of Calad. On the old salt road."
"Yes."
"That's strange." She said it slowly, like someone turning over a coin she didn't recognize. "I drew the holy lines north of Calad for five years, and the girl who took my place still writes to me. Seborn was never on one."
Gemma looked up. "So?"
"So the Priesthood didn't burn it." Diana shrugged. "Or if they did, nobody told the mapmaker. And they always told the mapmaker. They needed the map."
Aros felt Gemma turn to look at him. He kept his eyes on the fire.
"Fires start on their own," he said. "Sometimes."
It was true. It was the kind of true he had been telling for a long time.
"The Light likes to collect its mistakes," Broko muttered eventually, to no one. "That's what we are. A collection."
From the lip of the hollow, Candriela spoke without turning around. It happened so rarely that all of them looked up.
"Not all of them," she said. "Some it keeps."
She didn't explain. A moment later she stood, picked up the empty cup, and walked off along the ridge toward the road, a tall shape against the darker trees, until they couldn't see her anymore.
Diana didn't lie down right away. She took a clean sheet from her case and, by the last red light of the coals, drew the island in a few quick strokes: the coast, the hills, the marsh, the dot of Calad. Then she made a small cross and wrote a word beside it.
"What's that?" Broko asked.
"The cider houses at Kesten. You told Talon once you'd never been." She made another mark. "Somewhere each of you should see someday. It's a mapmaker's habit. Don't laugh."
Broko didn't laugh. He looked at the little cross, then away, and cleared his throat twice.
Diana drew the next one right where they were sitting, in the middle of the forest, and turned the sheet toward Aros. "That one's yours."
"There's nothing here."
"That's the point. You should practice staying somewhere."
Then she looked at Gemma, and hesitated, and finally moved the charcoal out past the coastline, past the jagged line of the Reef, into the blank part of the paper, and made a very small dot.
"That's heresy," Gemma whispered.
"So are you," said Diana. She folded the map in four and put it in Gemma's hands.
The fire burned down to embers. Broko slept the way he did everything, loudly. Diana slept with the map case under her head like a pillow and one hand on the lid. Gemma lay closest to the coals, curled on her side, and Aros thought she was asleep until she spoke.
"Aros."
"Go to sleep."
"Did the Priesthood burn Seborn?"
He was quiet for long enough that she might have drifted off. She hadn't.
"Go to sleep, Gemma."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed.
After a while her breathing slowed and deepened, and he got up.
He climbed out of the hollow and up the ridge, to where the oaks thinned and the ground fell away toward the end of the forest. At dusk he had stood in the same place and looked out over the marsh, and there had been nothing out there but grey: grey water, grey reeds, grey mist lying flat over all of it like a sheet over a body.
There was a fire there now.
Far out, miles off, where the road ran down out of the trees and met the reeds, beside a dark shape that might have been a ruined house. Not a hat of a fire, like theirs. A big one, built high and bright, built to be seen.
So much for tomorrow.
The date on the map hadn't been for Lukas. It had been for the men he'd paid. He had never meant to wait for anything.
Aros tried to think when it had been lit. Not at dusk; he had looked. Some time after. An hour ago, perhaps. Perhaps while a ring of light hung over a map at the bottom of a hollow, and a small fire at its feet leaned toward it like a dog toward its master's voice.
He didn't like that thought. He kept it anyway.
There were shapes around the fire. Even at that distance he could make them out against the glow: a dozen or so, sitting in a ring, and one standing apart from the rest, between the fire and the forest, facing the trees. Facing him.
Aros watched them for a long time. The standing one didn't move. The ones in the ring didn't move. Nobody got up to stretch, or to piss in the reeds, or to throw on more wood.
In all the hour he stood there, not one of them moved. And the fire, which nobody fed, never once burned any lower.