They buried Bertram Ault on the hill at first light.
The ground was wet and full of stone and it took four men two hours. Osric could have opened it in about nine seconds and did not offer to, and nobody asked him why, because everybody understood.
Sito helped. He was given a shovel that was too big for him and he used it anyway, and after the first half hour nobody tried to take it off him.
Marcus said the words. He did it from memory, without notes, and Sito noticed that he did not once say 'loyal servant of the Crown' or any of the other things Sito had heard said over dead men in the capital.
What he said instead was that Bertram Ault had been thirty-one years old, and had come from Whitbury, and had been the third-best shot with a crossbow in the Royal Guard, and had been extremely bad at cards.
Then he said that Bertram had died standing in front of four people he had known for six weeks and did not particularly like, with his sword up, doing exactly what he had been told to do, and that this was the only thing anybody could reasonably ask of a man.
Ramsey cried. He did not try to hide it.
Willem did not cry. He stood very straight, and did not blink for a long time.
They put a cairn over him because the ground was too thin to be trusted, and Osric set the last stone by hand rather than with his affinity, which took him a while, and which nobody rushed.
---
The core came out of the hollow's throat and into a leather bag, and Osric carried it down the hill himself.
Nobody wanted to touch it.
"The purse goes to Whitbury," said Osric, on the road, in a voice that was not a suggestion. "Every mark of it. Bertram's mother's still living and she's seventy-one. She's in a two-room house behind the tannery, and I've been in it."
Marcus did not even slow his horse.
"Obviously," he said.
"My lord, I truly appreciate it, but…" Osric hesitated. "But are you sure you want to agree to this? A hollow core that's eaten eleven beasts is—"
"Osric."
"—it's a great deal of money, is all I'm saying, and there'll be clerks in the capital who'll want to know why the Crown's share—"
"Then the clerks in the capital may take it up with me personally, in writing, and I will read every word of it and then I will do exactly nothing about it." Marcus looked across at him. "The Crown's share of a kill it did not make is nothing. That is not generosity, captain. That is fact."
Osric rode on for a bit.
"Aye," he said. "Well. Good."
---
They stopped just short of Greymarch and Marcus turned in his saddle and looked at all of them.
"Before we go in," he said. "One thing, and then I will not raise it again."
The column came to a halt.
"Last night the Prince of Epiria left cover in the middle of a beast engagement and made the kill possible. Every man here saw him do it." Marcus's voice was perfectly level. "It does not leave this road."
Nobody said anything.
"I am not asking you to lie. If a man asks what happened, you tell him a hollow came into our camp and we killed it and it cost us Bertram, and every word of that is true."
Marcus looked down the line, at each of them in turn, and he took his time about it. "But the boy was in the wagon. That is where he was. That is where he stayed."
"My lord." One of the other soilders named Leric voiced. "Begging your pardon. Why?"
It was a fair question and Marcus treated it as one.
"Because he is eight years old and he has five years before his Rite, and in those five years the single most valuable thing he owns is that nobody outside this kingdom's council has the faintest idea what he is."
Marcus paused. "And because the story a tavern tells about a child gets bigger every time it's told, and by the time it reaches a border it will have become something that other kingdoms want to look at more closely. I would rather they did not."
He turned back to the road.
"Also," he added, "if it reaches his father through a guild clerk rather than through me, I will be having a much worse winter than I am already going to have."
Ramsey snorted.
"He was in the wagon," said Osric.
"He was in the wagon," the line agreed, more or less in unison, and that was the end of it.
---
The guild hall smelled the same and sounded completely different.
The noise dropped by about half when eleven royal guards came through the door, and then dropped the rest of the way when Osric put a leather bag on the clerk's counter and it landed with a weight that was audible.
"Beast division," he said. "Eighteen-day notice. The hollow."
The clerk was a narrow man with ink on three fingers and he looked at the bag and then up at Osric and then at the bag again.
"You're not guild."
"No."
"Then I can't pay a—"
"You can pay it to the family of a dead man, which is in your charter, chapter four, and I'd like it in coin and I'd like it sent to Whitbury." Osric leaned on the counter. "Get somebody senior."
The one-handed man was already coming across the room.
He did not go to the counter. He went to the bag, and he put his remaining hand flat on the leather without opening it, and he stood there for a moment like a man taking a horse's temperature.
Then he opened it.
He looked inside for a long time.
"Ah," he said, very quietly.
He took it out and set it on the counter in the middle of the hall, and the room came over to see, and nobody in that room said anything at all for some while.
"Eleven," said the one-handed man.
"Twelve," said Osric. "There's a man's in there too."
"Aye. There would be." He turned the mass over with two fingers, the way Osric had under the lantern. "Elk. Hog. And that lump in the middle's the pack."
He looked up.
"What was it when you got to it?"
"I couldn't tell you," said Osric.
"Try."
Osric thought about it.
"It came through a twenty-foot wall of moorland like it wasn't there," he said. "It took a Third Circle blade four inches deep in the shoulder and shut the wound inside a minute. It changed direction twice inside a half second, at speed, more than once. And it was faster at the end than it was at the start."
The hall was extremely quiet.
"How many of you?"
"Eleven guards, a captain, and Lord Marcus Benedictus."
"A Master," somebody said, from the back.
"A Master," Osric agreed, "and it still took eleven minutes and cost us a man."
The one-handed man let out a long breath through his nose.
"Gold," he said, and laughed, and it was not a happy sound. "We put gold on it. I stood in this hall eighteen days ago and looked at that notice and thought, well, that's a nasty one."
He turned to the clerk.
"Take it off the board. Take it off now, in front of everybody, and write on the day-book that the hollow is closed." He rubbed his face. "And write beside it what it was when it died. Not what we graded it. What it was. Write down eleven cores and a Master. Somebody'll read that in ten years and it might keep them alive."
The clerk wrote.
The one-handed man looked around the hall at sixty adventurers, mostly copper, and at the four teenagers who had signed their first contracts two days earlier and were standing at the back with their eyes enormous.
"Right," he said. "Now everybody get a proper look at that thing on the counter, because that is what days of not going out after something turns into. And the next hollow notice that goes up on that wall, we go on day one, at whatever it costs, because the price never comes down. It only ever goes up."
---
They were supposed to ride on that afternoon.
It was Ramsey who broke first, which surprised nobody.
"My lord," he said, in the yard, with the careful voice of a man who has rehearsed something. "Permission to say a thing you won't like."
Marcus, who was checking his horse and had been awake for thirty-one hours, said: "Go on."
"We've not slept. Not a man of us. We fought that thing for twenty minutes and then we sat up the rest of the night watching the dark in case there was another, and then we dug a grave for two hours, and now you want us on a horse for nine more."
"I want us home."
"Aye. And I want us home with everybody still on a horse instead of under one." Ramsey shrugged. "Osric's nose won't stop. Willem's got a back like a barn door from being thrown into a wagon. You couldn't light a candle right now, my lord, no disrespect meant, and if something comes at us on the road tonight we're eleven tired men with swords."
Marcus straightened up slowly.
He looked across the yard, where Willem was standing very upright in the way of a man whose back hurts a great deal, and where Sereth was asleep sitting against a wall in broad daylight with his mouth open.
"There's an inn," said Ramsey. "It's a good one. I asked."
"You asked."
"I asked about four hours ago," Ramsey admitted.
Marcus put his forehead against his horse's neck for a second.
"One night," he said.
---
The Crook and Candle had thirty rooms, and by suppertime it had eleven royal guards, four elves, a Master of Epiria and a prince in it, and every drinker in Greymarch had decided that this was the place to be.
Sito had never been in a tavern.
He had read about them. Of course he had. He had read the excise law on them and could have told anybody at that bar precisely what fraction of their ale money went to the Crown, and he had absolutely no idea what to do with his hands.
It was hot. It was extremely loud. There was a dog under a table that had licked his knee twice. Somebody had put a plate of something in front of him without being asked and it was the best thing he had eaten in four months, and three separate people had ruffled his hair on the way past, which had never in his life happened to him before.
He loved it so much he thought he might come apart.
"You're grinning like a fool," said Willem.
"Yeah."
"Don't stop on my account."
---
The innkeeper was a wide woman named Bel with forearms like a smith, and she spotted the rook at about the third hour.
It was leaning against the bench by Sito's leg, because he took it everywhere and had stopped noticing that he did.
"That yours, love?"
"It is."
"You play it or carry it?"
"Both."
She smiled. "Any good?"
Sito considered the question honestly, which was a thing he did, and which the woman was not expecting.
"I'm better than most people who've been playing four years," he said, "and worse than anybody who's been playing twenty. And I'm short, so the reach on the high end's wrong for me, and it'll be wrong until my hands grow."
Bel stared at him.
Then she started laughing, and put a hand on his shoulder, and hauled him bodily up onto the end of the long table by the fire.
"Right!" she bellowed at the room. "Right. Shut up, the lot of you."
"Oh no," said Sito.
---
He played one of his own first, because it was the only thing he could think of to do and because everything else in his head had gone white.
It was new. He had been picking at it since the fenback valley and had not finished it, and he decided somewhere between the table and the first chord that he was going to finish it now, in front of forty strangers, which was a genuinely stupid decision that worked out.
I've a horse that won't be ridden
and a coat that won't stay dry,
and the road goes on forever
and it's nine more days to Rye.
But there's bread in every village
and a fire in every town,
so I'll walk until I'm wanted
and I'll sit when I'm sat down.
The room got it by the second verse. It was a simple thing and the last line went nowhere clever and that was exactly why they got it.
By the third time round, forty people in a border tavern were shouting "and I'll sit when I'm sat down!" And banging the tables on the last four beats, and Bel had stopped serving to listen, and Ramsey had his arms in the air like a man at a hanging.
Somebody shouted for it again.
They did it again.
"Who taught you that one?" a carter called out.
Sito, who had learned in about ninety seconds that he very much enjoyed performing for a tavern crowd, said the truth before he thought about it.
"Nobody. I made it up."
There was a pause.
Then the noise got considerably worse, and somebody bought him something he was not allowed to drink, and Willem took it off the table with the smoothness of a man who has done that before.
---
He played five more, and then Bel climbed onto the bench beside him and put two fingers in her mouth and whistled the room quiet.
"Kazer," she said.
The room made a noise like a church congregation being told which hymn.
"Do you know it, love?"
Sito looked at her.
He had been raised in a castle, on the correct histories, by tutors who had made him memorize the founding of the Epirian Kingdom in the proper order with the proper dates.
He knew that Kazer Meridius had come out of the eastern hills with fire in one hand and the earth in the other. He knew the year. He knew the treaty that followed it and the six houses that had sworn to him and the names of all six.
He had never once heard it sung.
"Play it and I'll pick it up," he said.
So Bel sang the first verse unaccompanied, in a flat, strong, entirely untrained voice, and the whole room came in underneath her on the second line without being asked.
Kazer came down from the hill in the morning
with fire in his hand and the stone at his back,
and he said to the river, you'll carry my city,
and the river said, aye, but you'll carry me back.
Sito had the shape of it by the third line and was playing under it by the fifth, and by the second verse he was carrying the whole room.
Nobody cared. Nobody in that room had ever seen the archive and nobody in that room ever would.
And there was Sito Meridius, sitting on a table in a border town, playing his own ancestor's song for forty people who had no idea who he was, and getting the sixth verse wrong along with the left half of the room because he had decided that was the side he was on.
He had never been happier in his life.
Not once. Not in either of them.
---
"That's a noble's boy," said the carter to Bel, later, watching him.
"Obviously it's a noble's boy."
"No, look at him. Look how he talks to people." The carter was on his fourth drink. "My sister's in service up at Coldren. She says the little ones up there don't look you in the face. They look at your chest, so they don't have to see you."
"He's somebody's third son," said Bel. "Merchant, more like. Big house. Twelve guards for a merchant's boy is a lot, mind you."
"Big merchant, then."
"Aye. Or the tall one with the silver hair's somebody and the boy's just along." Bel wiped the counter. "Whoever he is, he's a lovely child and he's got a set of manners on him I've not seen in thirty years, and he's about eight."
"He's very polite for eight."
"He's very polite for any age," said Bel. "That's what's odd about him. He listens. Eight-year-olds don't listen, they wait."
---
They made him do one more at the end, when the fire had gone down and half the room had gone home and the rest had gone quiet.
He played the sparrow song.
Count the sparrows on the wall, my love,
count them one and two.
When the dark comes up the hill, my love,
I'll be counting too.
It did the thing it always did.
It had done it at a border camp with nine elves standing in the treeline.
It had done it on a terrace in Thelvarion with a king's daughter studying the floorboards.
And it did it in the Crook and Candle in Greymarch with about fifteen people left in the room, and Bel stood behind her own bar with a cloth in her hand and did not move until it was finished.
Nobody clapped when he stopped. They just sort of sat there.
Then Ramsey said, "Right, off to bed, your— " and caught himself, and said, "— right, off to bed, lad," and the room started moving again.
---
The crystal lit at about the second hour after midnight.
"You did not call," said Naeva.
"It's the middle of the night."
"You are awake."
"How do you know I'm awake?"
"Because you answered," said Naeva.
Sito lay back on an actual bed with an actual mattress for the first time in eleven weeks and looked at the ceiling.
"Something happened," he said.
"Something good or something bad?"
"Both. Bad first."
So he told her.
He told her about the notice with the enormous date on it, and about the hollow with no eyes that had come into their camp without making a sound and killed a horse, and then killed Bertram, who had cut down her people's tree and had been about to be shouted at by Thaen.
He told her about lying in the heather with his face in the dirt nine feet from the thing's path, and throwing once, and not moving.
Naeva was quiet for a while afterward.
"You were not frightened?" she asked.
"I was. While it was happening." He turned the crystal over. "But it's done, and I'm here, and there's no sense carrying it around after. I don't know. I've always been like that."
"That is not normal."
"No."
"I would be frightened for a month," said Naeva. "I am frightened now, and I'm hundreds of miles away and asleep."
"Sorry."
"Do not be sorry, be… just be careful." A pause. "The knives worked, then."
"The knives worked."
"Good. I am going to tell Ithriel and she is going to pretend she does not care, and then she will care for about four days." Another pause, and when she spoke again her voice had changed. "What was the good thing?"
Sito smiled at the ceiling.
"I played in a tavern," he said.
"A what?"
"An inn. Downstairs. There were forty people and the innkeeper picked me up and put me on a table."
"On a table?"
"On a table. And I did the new one, the one you were helping me work on about the horse, and they all had it by the second verse and they made me play it four times.Then they taught me a song about my great-great-however-many-times grandfather that's got all the words wrong, and nobody down there has any idea who I am."
He could hear her breathing on the other end.
"Naeva, they didn't know who I was," he said. "They just liked it."
"Yes," said Naeva slowly. "That is how it works, when they do not know."
"I've never had that."
"I know."
Neither of them said anything for a bit.
"Sing me the horse one," said Naeva.
"It's the middle of the night. There are eleven guards asleep on this floor."
"Sing it quietly."
So he sang it quietly, to a crystal, in the dark, in a room over a tavern in a border town, with his boots off and his ribs aching and a dead man on a hill four miles behind him.
She made him sing it twice.