(Speaker: same full moon, second invoice. the pact took its meat. the biology would like a word as well.)
sivan worked it out before either of them did, because sivan worked everything out first and told people second.
"the moon that called the pact also called the other thing," they said, at dawn, with their hand flat on kael's sternum and their tongue going in and out. "he has about eleven hours. drayn has perhaps a day and a half behind him. emberborn run late and hot."
"how bad."
"for them, unpleasant. for the settlement—" sivan straightened up, and looked at the walls, and did the arithmetic out loud because it was the only honest way to hand it over. "your two strongest are about to be non-functional for four days. one is your gate. one is your forge. there is a scout on that ridge who has counted our heads twice this week, and the new moon is thirteen days out."
"so we're thin for four days."
"you are paper for four days," sivan said. "and i am going to tell you the part you will like least."
"say it."
"it is worse when you are in the walls." their slit pupils didn't move. "you are what the rut is for, alpha. every hour you are inside these gates, both of them will be working against their own bodies to not come through a door. take yourself out and they sleep and shake and get through it. stay, and one of them puts a hand through a wall, and the other one takes it as a challenge, and then you have two of them in the yard and one of them dies."
meera stood in the grey light and understood she was about to be evicted from her own settlement.
tor built the rooms.
that was the thing she carried out of that morning. he'd been barred from her escort for eleven days, off the road, off the point, off anything that let him stand between her and the world — and he took a hammer and two apprentices and turned the old supply cave into two stone rooms with a wall between them thick enough that neither man would hear the other breathe.
he did it in five hours. he did it with a hip that ground when he knelt.
"they need to not smell each other," he said, when she came to look. "that is the whole engineering problem. stone does not carry scent. wood does. so: stone, and a bend in the passage, and the doors face away." he set a last brick. "i cannot walk the road with you. i can build the room that stops your two men killing each other while you are gone. i have decided this counts."
"it counts."
"i know it counts. i am telling you i decided it, which is different." he didn't look up. "a man who cannot be present has to find things to be."
they did the handover in the yard, in the open, because everything in this settlement happened in the open now.
sarika got the stores and the tier rota. arin got the walls. rion got the sky and the ridge and the scout. lyra — three days back from the dark and steady enough — got the north wall watch because she had asked for a job with a fence in front of it. zira got the gate. sivan got the two rooms and absolute authority over both doors, which nobody argued with.
"and the alpha," vek said, "goes where?"
"the grove. i owe the machine nine labour-days. i'll take four of them now."
"alone."
"tor's barred by my ruling. kael and drayn are — " she gestured. "sivan won't leave the doors. rion's flying the ridge. arin's got the walls."
"so, alone," vek said. "with a man on that ridge counting us, and a road west that opens in thirteen days, and the one person the whole yard is arranged around walking out of the gate on her own." he wasn't arguing. that was the maddening thing. he was reading it back to her, correctly, the way kerra read a ledger. "put it in the book."
"kerra's already writing it."
"good," said vek. "i'd like it in the book that we all watched you do it."
the grove in the twelfth week of the year smelled like fruit going over — figs split on the branch, that thick brown sweetness with wasps in it — and cold stone from the channels, and under everything the flat metal of the machine.
she worked. that was all she did for four days, and it was the most peace she'd had since the ford.
"labour-day two of four, logged," the machine said, on the second evening. "output: below builder-grade. above raider-grade."
"i'll take it."
"query." the eye-ring cycled. "you are absent from the settlement during a defensive vulnerability window. this is inconsistent with prior observed behaviour."
"my presence makes the vulnerability worse. the biology's stupid, but it's real."
"logged." a pause. "supplementary: this unit observed a rider on the western ridge at midday, stationary, four hours. range twelve hundred paces. he did not approach the orchard."
meera stopped digging.
"you can see the western ridge from here?"
"this unit cannot turn its head," the machine said. "the survey-maker's map corrected for that. channel nine's outfall faces west. visual data: partial, via reflection."
she sat down on the channel wall and laughed until she had to stop, because kerra's eleven days of chalk and mud had accidentally given a headless war machine a mirror.
on the third night she dreamed about a woman kneeling in water and woke up with her wrist burning.
the bond-scar was doing the thing it did when she felt something strongly, glowing faint and green-gold under the skin — except she hadn't been feeling anything, she'd been asleep. she lay in the dark with her arm across her chest, three miles from the settlement and every person in it, and thought: sivan's awake. sivan's felt something. that's their end of it, not mine.
she thought about the shape of that.
then she thought about the fact that she had asked sivan a direct question at the wall and been told no, and that she had let it go, and that here was her own wrist telling her the healer was awake at some cold hour with something running through them hard enough to cross three miles of rock.
ask again, she thought. when this is over. properly. ask again and mean it.
she wrote it on her arm in charcoal so she would not let herself forget by daylight.
they came out of it on the fourth evening, one at a time, the way sivan had said they would.
kael first: grey, shaking, mortified, and unable to look at anybody for about an hour. he came out of the stone room and sat down against the wall of it and said, "did i—"
"no. door held. nobody came near you."
"good." he put his head back against the stone. "i've done that in a hole in the ground for three years running. a room with a door is—" he stopped. "tell tor."
"tell him yourself."
"i will," kael said, and did, that night, badly, in about nine words, which from him was a speech.
drayn came out at dusk with the smell of the forge on him even after four days away from it, cinnamon and cold iron, and he went straight past the fire and past the people and into the forge and lit it.
meera found him there an hour later.
he'd made the brand months ago. she had never seen it and had always known it existed, the way you know about a door in a house you live in.
it was small. that surprised her most. a palm-length rod with a shape at the end no bigger than a thumbprint, and the shape was not a claim-mark or a clan sigil — it was a stylised thing she needed a second to read, and when she read it, it was rain falling on stone.
"tor told me what you smell like to him," drayn said. "years ago. first month. i thought: that's the best one. i'm never going to do better than that." he turned it over in the tongs. "so i made yours out of his."
"drayn—"
"i'm putting it back."
he did it while she watched. he put the brand into the heart of the fire and pumped the bellows and held it there, and the shape went soft and then went shapeless and then went into the crucible with the scrap, and it took about four minutes, and neither of them said anything for any of it.
"say why," meera said. "in your words. not the noble version."
"there isn't a noble version." he set the tongs down. "four days ago i sat in a stone box because if i'd been out here and you'd walked past me i would have taken you, and i would have been glad, and you would have said yes, because sivan says the pheromones do that to a human body, and afterwards it would have been a thing that happened to you and not a thing you chose." his jaw was iron. "and i'd have had the brand in the fire that same night and put it on you while you were still saying yes to anything."
"that's not—"
"don't." he held a hand up. "here's the part i actually came in here to burn. don't call this patience. patience is a virtue, and people get soft about it, and i won't have it." he looked at her properly for the first time. "i'm not a patient man. i'm a man who knows exactly what he'd do with permission and who has watched himself for four days from inside a locked room. this isn't me being good. this is me not trusting me. those are different, and if you ever confuse them i'll have gone and married the wrong version of myself in your head."
meera stood in the forge-heat with nothing to say for a while.
"so when," she said eventually.
"when you ask." drayn banked the fire. "not when i'm burning. not when you're grateful. not when somebody's dying and you want something to hold. you'll ask on an ordinary day when nothing's on fire, and i'll say yes so fast it'll be embarrassing, and then i'll make another one." he shrugged. "i know the shape by heart now. took me one try to learn it and four minutes to unlearn it. the unlearning was harder."
"bas," meera said, which was all she had. "bas. okay."
"okay."
she got the rest of it on the fifth morning, at the gate, from zira, in about forty words, because zira had decided in advance how many words it was going to take.
"two riders, second night, four hundred paces. walked the length of the west wall twice."
"and."
"and i didn't sound the horn." zira's face didn't move. "the horn puts twenty-nine people on a wall in lamplight to be counted. that's what they came for. so i sent the boy round the fires — sit down, stay down, no lamps — and stood on the parapet on my own with the wing out."
meera worked out what that meant and had to stop walking.
"one silhouette."
"one shape that could be anything. they went twice and left with nothing." zira was already moving off. "they were counting response, not heads. how fast the horn goes, where the lamps are. i've done it to other people's walls; you learn more from the answer than from the fight." over her shoulder: "we gave them nothing. don't make a thing of it."
meera did not make a thing of it out loud.
she made a thing of it in the ledger, in her own hand, which was rarer: zira held the west wall for four days and denied a count without spending an arrow. she is the best scout in this settlement and i have been using her as a spear.
kerra's ledger, that night, in the second column, in her small square hand:
alpha absent from the walls four days, by her own decision, during a defensive vulnerability. riders observed on the west wall, second night, four hundred paces, denied a count. four labour-days worked off; five remain.
and underneath, because kerra had started doing this and nobody had told her to stop:
noted by vek.
nine days to the new moon.
on the walls that night meera could smell the grove on her own hands — figs and cold stone, the smell of a place that fed them and did not belong to them — and out west, past the ridge, one small fire where a man sat and waited for a road to open.