The Far Bank

Twenty days before his Dawning, the heir of House Meridian was given a man to hang, and he spent the whole of breakfast looking for a way not to.

The breakfast room faced east, because Sorin’s great-grandmother had believed a person should begin the day by looking the sun in the eye. At this hour the light came through the long windows level and gold and lay brightest of all on the chair at the Lord’s right hand, which was the heir’s chair, which was his. He sat in it, as he had every morning of his life, and let the sun lie warm across his shoulders, and did not think about it once.

“A mark case,” said his father, and slid a letter across the cloth with the end of his silver letter knife. “The Lowmarket bench sits at noon. You’ll sit it.”

The seal on this one was white wax with a lantern pressed into it.

“The Order,” Sorin said.

“The Order.” Halric turned a page. “A man-at-arms off the marsh forts. He walked off the wall one night last winter, and they struck his mark for it, which is their right. Now the Watch has picked him up on the salt wharf wearing a second mark he didn’t come by honestly, which is ours. The Order would like him hanged. They’ve written to say so. Very nicely. Read the third paragraph, it’s a little masterpiece.”

It was. It said that the Order had every confidence in the wisdom of whomever the Lord of Noon might send to the bench, and had noted, with every respect, the outcome of the last two mark cases heard there. It did not say you fined them both. It did not need to.

“I fined them both,” Sorin said. “The first was a debtor with four children. The second was a girl of sixteen who’d borrowed her dead sister’s mark to get work in a laundry.”

“I know. I read the rolls.” Halric looked up at last, and his blue eyes were warm and amused and gave away nothing at all. “The law says you may hang him, Sorin. The law says a great many things. I’d like to know what you say.”

At the far end of the table, behind a book propped against the toast rack, Elodie said, “He’ll have a bad wrist.”

Everybody looked at her. She turned a page.

“Struck men always do. The iron goes deep and heals badly, and they pick at it. And then somebody in an alley paints a new mark on the other wrist with gilt and lye and lampblack, and the lye eats the skin, and by the time the Watch finds him he’s got a hand like a ham.” She closed the book on her finger. “I’ll come.”

“You’re not invited,” said Sorin.

“I’m never invited. There’s a woman on the fish market with a hand I want to look at, and I may as well look at two.”

She was twenty-two, and dark where the Meridians ran fair, and she sat at the far end of every table because that was where the House put its illegitimate children. She had been sitting at the far end of this one, being right about things, since before Sorin could reach it.

He read her without meaning to. He always had, since the day he was given his Gate.

Gate:	Noble 6 · Uncommon · the class the world gives you at twelve
Perk I:	Read the Room · Rank 4

Elodie:

Gate · Almoner · Tincturer (Uncommon) · Leechcraft 5 · a surgeon’s hand

It told him what it always told him. It had never once told him how to win an argument with her.

“Ser Aldric will go with you,” said Halric, which was like saying the sun would go with you.

Behind Sorin’s chair, a step back and to the left, where he had stood every morning for twelve years, Ser Aldric Vane said nothing. Sorin didn’t have to look round to know that one scarred eyebrow had gone up a quarter of an inch. For Aldric that was a speech, and the speech said you’re going to fine him, aren’t you.

“I haven’t decided anything,” Sorin said.

“Of course not,” said his father, and somehow all three of them managed to say it at once.

☀︎

They took the terrace way down, because it was quicker and because Sorin liked it.

Highnoon fell away below them in tiers of white and gold: the palace, the Council halls with their sun-courts, the merchant streets running straight and wide under their lamps, the jumble of the market roofs, and at the very bottom, packed against the river like silt against a weir, the Lowmarket. Below it all ran the Sallow, wide and slow and brown, under the great bridge on its twelve pale arches.

And across the river, the light stopped.

It always did. The gold ran right up to the far bank, and then, as cleanly as if someone had drawn a line with a rule, it gave way to dusk: a grey-violet country of low hills and dead trees, under a sun that never climbed. The Gloaming. On the first hill past the water stood the Castle, black against that bruised sky. A long black wall on the crown of the hill inside a lower one, with towers set all along both; a gatehouse square in the middle of the near face; and rising out of the middle of it all, just behind the gatehouse, one round tower twice the height of the rest, thin as a chimney.

No window in it had been lit since the Dawning. Nobody in Highnoon called it anything but the Black Castle, because nobody knew what it had been called before. It had been the Queen of the Sallow’s, whose herds on the far bank had not been cattle, and every child in the city had that from a nursery maid before it had its letters.

Away to the left, on a low ridge beyond the dead woods, stood the gibbet, with the thing on its arm that was not a bird. Sorin had stared at it once, on a dare, for a count of twenty, and been sick in a flowerbed. He had been not looking at it, with great skill, ever since.

The Lowmarket started where the merchant streets ran out of money. One moment the road was ten paces wide and paved and lamped; the next it tipped over the edge of the bluff and became steps, and the steps became alleys between houses whose upper storeys leaned so far out that you could have shaken hands across the street from the top windows. It was loud. It smelled of tar and fish and a hundred cook-fires.

Under his coat, at the small of his back, hilt down to the right, rode the long plain dagger Aldric had made him carry into the Lowmarket since he was thirteen. Never go down the steps with nothing in your hand, my lord. I don’t care whose son you are.

“The Order will send someone,” Aldric said, a step ahead of him on the stair, as he always walked on stairs, so that anything coming up would meet him first. “He’ll be courteous. And he’ll have done this before, and you’ve done it twice.” He didn’t turn round. “Take the ground first, my lord. Ask your questions before he can tell you what the answers are.”

☀︎

The Watch kept its Lowmarket ward house at the head of the old steps: a squat stone door with a lamp over it, and inside, a long low room with a sergeant on a stool chalking names onto a slate. The bench was a chair at the far end with the Meridian sun burned into its back. Somebody had taken the cloth off it and dusted it, and missed a cobweb under the arm.

There was a window behind the chair, small and deep in the thick wall, and through it, over a long tumble of roofs, you could see the river. And the far bank. And the Castle.

The prisoner was sitting with his back to it.

He was a big man of forty or so, gone stringy, with grey stubble and a knitted cap and the shoulders of a man who had carried something heavy all his working life. Lamp oil, Sorin guessed, up fort ladders, and salt sacks since. Elodie was kneeling by his stool with a basin, unwinding a strip of linen from his right wrist, and the smell that came up out of it made the sergeant put down his chalk.

“You’re late,” Elodie said, without looking up. “Don’t come any closer, it’s not pretty.”

Sorin came closer.

It was not pretty. On the inside of the man’s right wrist sat a small rising sun in gilt, quite well drawn, in the middle of a weeping red blister the size of a crown. The skin round it had gone shiny and tight. The gilt was cracking.

“Lye, as advertised,” said Elodie. “Whoever did this should be hanged, and I don’t say that about many people. It’ll come off. It’ll hurt. I can do it today, if the bench allows.”

“The bench hasn’t sat yet,” said a voice from the door.

The knight of the Order came in out of the light. He was a heavy, quiet man of middle years in white plate, with the Order’s brass lantern on his left shoulder and a sunblade at his hip, unlit. His face was weathered and courteous and very tired. He made the Order’s sign to the room, two fingers to the lantern and then outward, and bowed to Sorin exactly as far as a knight of the Order bowed to the heir of Meridian, and not a hair further.

“My lord heir. The Order is grateful the bench could sit so soon.”

“The Order wrote a very good letter.”

Something moved at the corner of the knight’s mouth, and was put away.

Sorin sat. It was a hard chair, made by people who had wanted the Lords of Noon to get on with it. The sergeant read a name off his slate, and the charge after it: that the prisoner, being Unmarked by lawful iron, had worn a mark not his own, contrary to the Dial and the law of the Concord, and had been taken on the salt wharf by a sergeant of this house, who had noticed it in the heat.

“In the heat?” said Sorin.

“Sweat, my lord. It was running down his hand. Gold. I thought he’d cut himself on something gilt, and then I thought, nobody on the salt wharf’s got anything gilt.”

“Show me,” Sorin said. “Both wrists.”

On the left was the man’s own Sunmark, the small bright brand every soul in the Daylands wore. Or what was left of it. Someone had laid a hot iron across it twice, in a cross, and the little rising sun showed through the scars in pieces, like a window seen through bars. On the right was the blister, and the cracked gilt in the middle of it.

Sorin got up and went to the door. “Bring him here, please, Sergeant.”

Outside, the noon was coming on, white and hard, pouring straight down into the head of the old steps so that the cobbles shone. Sorin stepped out into it and held out his own wrist beside the man’s two, palm up.

His mark woke. It did that every noon of his life: a small warmth on the inside of his wrist, a faint gold brightness that said he was alive, and counted, and whose he was. On the man’s left wrist, under the bars of the iron, something stirred too, a ghost of gold in the pieces of the old sun, like a fire under ash. The Dial would count that, and write struck beside it.

On his right wrist the painted sun lay on the blister like paint on a wall. It did nothing at all.

“Thank you,” Sorin said, and went back in.

The man did not follow at once. He stood in the full sun with his arms still held out, staring at the place on Sorin’s wrist where the mark had woken, like a man looking through a window at a fire in somebody else’s house. Then the sergeant touched his elbow, and he came back to his stool, and sat with his back to the river.

☀︎

“The Order asks for the rope,” said the knight.

He said it the way a man reports the weather. He had not raised his voice once since he came in. Sorin had the impression he never did.

“He took the Order’s pay and the Order’s bread, and swore to keep the lamps on the wall of a held fort on the dusk edge. On a winter night he left his lamp. The Rule is very old and very short, my lord heir: keep the lamp lit, the dark keeps itself. A man who leaves his lamp leaves it to the dark, and leaves his brothers with it. For that he was struck. Now he has painted himself a new mark and gone among honest people as one of them. He has broken faith twice. The law allows the rope for the second.”

It was very well put. Sorin suspected it had been put very well many times before.

“The Order’s already judged the winter night,” he said. “So the bench has one charge in front of it. The mark.”

“The bench may weigh the man,” said the knight, “as well as the charge.”

That was true, and they both knew it.

Take the ground first.

“Why did you leave the wall?” Sorin asked the prisoner.

The man looked up. He had grey eyes, bloodshot and steady, and he took his time, as if deciding whether the question wanted an answer or only wanted the man asking it to feel he’d asked.

“Does it matter, my lord?”

“It matters to me.”

In the corner, Elodie had stopped pretending to put her basin away.

“The sixth fort,” the man said at last. “On the dyke road. You’ll not have seen it. Forty paces square and eight high, two lamps to every post of the wall-walk, and nothing round it for a mile but reeds and black water. In winter the dark comes down in the afternoon and doesn’t lift till the morning’s half gone. Six knights and twenty of us, the long nights. Eight winters I did on that wall, and saw nothing in any of them but marsh birds and fog and a fox once, on the ice.”

He turned his cap in his hands.

“Last winter, on the longest nights, the reeds started moving. No wind. Like when something swims under the top of a pond and you only see the weeds going over. And then they came out.”

“What came out?”

“I don’t know, my lord.” He said it simply. “Grey. Like smoke that walked. Like men, a bit, if men had been left out in the rain for a hundred years and gone soft. Hundreds. They came up on to the dyke and over the ditch to the foot of our wall, and they didn’t climb, and they didn’t shout, and they didn’t look at us. Not once.” His hands had stopped turning the cap. “They looked at the lamps. That’s what I can’t get out of my head. They didn’t want us. They wanted the lamps, like moths, like something cold coming to a fire. They stood under the wall with their faces turned up to the light, and they made a noise. All of them the same noise. One note.”

Nobody in the ward house said anything. Outside, very faintly, someone was crying fish.

“The knights lit the beacon,” the man said. “One fire, for a tide on the wall. The captain called us to the posts. And I went down the ladder instead, and out of the postern, and ran east along the dyke road with my back to it. They found me at dawn in a hay barn.” He looked at Sorin steadily. “The fort held, my lord. It always holds, they told me after. Every winter. The grey ones go back into the reeds at first light, and nobody’s lost.”

“Then why run?”

“Because I didn’t know it would hold,” said the man. “Nobody tells you. They told me after.”

The knight shifted his weight, very slightly, from one foot to the other, and Sorin felt the little flicker at the corner of his eye that meant his Gate had seen something before he had.

Read the Room:

the word he hasn’t used

Noble. Every House child was given a Gate at twelve, at the Naming, and it said not what you could do but what you were for. His had been reading rooms for him ever since, the way a good hound reads a wood: quietly, from the edge, and long before the man holding its leash.

The knight had said dusk edge, and dark, and held fort, and the Rule. He had not said one word of what the prisoner had just said: not the reeds, not the grey ones, not the lamps. He had stood through the whole of it with his hands folded on his belt, and the one thing he had not done, Sorin realised, was look surprised.

“Grey Tide,” Sorin said.

The knight’s eyes came to him.

“That’s Corvane’s phrase. I’ve heard it in Council, from the far side of the table, for what comes out of the reeds at the marsh forts on winter nights.” He kept his voice pleasant. “They say it in Council, and everyone nods, and then we talk about the lamp tax. Sergeant, where on the salt wharf was he taken?”

The sergeant looked at the prisoner, and then at the knight, and then, with the face of a man who has chalked names on slates for thirty years and knows when he is about to be in the middle of something, at his slate.

“At the end of the wharf, my lord. Where the porters eat. He’d been talking. About the forts, and the winter.” Unhappily: “I won’t lie to the bench. It’s been going round the steps a month or more.”

Sorin looked back at the knight, and for the first time the courtesy in that tired face thinned enough to show something under it: not anger, but something nearer to a man who has carried a heavy sack a long way and has just been asked, in front of people, what is in it.

“Is it the mark the Order wants hanged?” Sorin asked. “Or the story?”

“The Order wants the law kept, my lord.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

The knight was silent for a moment. When he spoke again it was more quietly, and Sorin understood that it was the most honest thing he would say all day.

“The forts have held for three hundred years. The lamps are lit every night of the year, and men like me sit up with them, and the dark keeps itself, and the Lowmarket sleeps. A frightened Lowmarket does not sleep. It does not work. It does not pay the lamp tax that keeps the lamps lit. A man on the salt wharf telling porters that grey things stand under the walls in their hundreds, singing at the lamps, does more harm to this city in a month than the things themselves have done in three hundred years.”

“Is it true?”

The knight did not answer.

“I never said the forts fell,” said the prisoner, roughly. “Never once, my lord. They don’t fall. They just…” He stopped, and looked at his own two wrists, the barred sun and the painted one. “Ask Corvane’s scouts where the reeds started, eight winters ago. And where they start now.”

The knight closed his eyes, briefly, like a man hearing a dish break in another room.

☀︎

Sorin sat in the hard chair, aware of the window behind him and what was in it, the way you are aware of someone standing behind your chair.

The law allowed the rope. The Order asked for it, and would remember whether it got it. His father had said I’d like to know what you say, and had meant it, and would also read the rolls.

He thought about a man on a wall in the dark, eight paces up, with the light behind him and a sound coming up from below that was all one note. He did not know what he would have done. That was the plain truth, and it sat in him very uncomfortably. He had stood his ground in the barracks yard and on the boar hunts. He had never stood on a wall over the dark with nothing between him and it but a lamp, and somebody else’s word that the lamp would hold.

Nobody tells you. They told me after.

“The bench will give judgement,” Sorin said, and the room straightened.

“The Order judged the winter night and struck this man for it, which was its right, and he’ll carry that iron for the rest of his life. I won’t judge a man twice for the same night. Not from this chair.” He looked at the knight. “The bench has one charge before it. He wore a mark that wasn’t his. That’s against the law for a good reason, because the Dial has to be able to count us or none of us is safe. He’s guilty of it, and he’s fined ten silver, to the Watch.” He turned. “And the painted mark comes off. Today. If the physician will.”

“The physician will,” said Elodie. “The physician would like it noted that she’s been trying to since breakfast.”

“Noted.”

“My lord heir,” said the knight, quite gently, “with respect. The Order will ask what was gained.”

“Tell the Order the Dial counts one more honest mark than it did this morning,” said Sorin. “Struck, but honest. And tell them they lost nobody on that wall, because they told me so themselves.”

He thought that was rather good. He held on to the thought for perhaps a breath and a half, which was how long it took Elodie to stand up with her basin.

“Ten silver,” she said. “To a struck man.”

Sorin saw it a moment before she said it, and minded very much that he hadn’t seen it a moment sooner.

“Where’s he to earn it?” Not loudly. She never needed to be loud. “That’s why he painted the other wrist, Sorin. Nobody in Highnoon will hire a struck man, because the first time a reading stone goes past the stall, it’s the stallholder who has to explain. You’ve fined a man who can’t work for not working, and taken the mark off the only hand he could eat with. You haven’t hanged him.” She tucked the basin under her arm. “You’ve just made it slower.”

Behind him, a step back and to the left, Aldric said nothing whatsoever, so loudly that Sorin felt it in his teeth.

A man with a struck mark in Highnoon didn’t eat unless someone fixed his mark. It was so obvious, now that she had said it, that he could not think how he had sat through two mark cases and most of a third without once thinking it through to the end. Because he had never had to, he supposed. Because nobody had ever run a reading stone past his stall.

The prisoner was looking at the floor again, with the air of a man who had known all along how it would come out and had not wanted to spoil things by saying.

“You kept dogs,” Sorin said.

The man looked up.

“On the fort.” He had not known he knew it until he said it: something in the way the man had held his wrists out for Elodie without a flinch, the way you hold still for a hound you don’t know yet. “Every held fort keeps dogs.”

“Six couple, my lord.” Slowly. “Eight winters. They know before we do.”

“There’s a lodge in the beech woods,” said Sorin. “The Meridian lodge. The huntsman there is a man called Gaspard, and he’s been short a kennel man since the spring, and he complains about it to me at length every time I see him. Nobody in the beech woods reads marks. Gaspard only reads hounds.” He turned to the sergeant. “The fine stands. It’ll be paid out of a kennel man’s wage at two silver a week, in full in five weeks, and I’ll see to it myself.”

The sergeant looked at him, and then, very carefully, wrote something on his slate.

Sorin made himself look at the knight last. The knight was regarding him as if he were a sum that had come out in a way the knight had not expected and was not yet sure was wrong.

“The beech woods,” the knight said. “Which are a long way from the salt wharf.”

“They are. There’s no one to talk to in them but Gaspard, and Gaspard only talks about hounds. I’ve tried.”

For a long moment the knight said nothing. Then the thing happened at the corner of his mouth again, and this time he didn’t quite put it away.

“The Order will be told that the bench was merciful,” he said, “and that the law was kept.” He bowed, exactly as far as before. Then he turned to the man on the stool, and lifted two fingers to the lantern on his shoulder, and turned them outward: the Order’s sign that Sorin had seen a hundred times on the steps of the Lumen hospital, given over the beds. The blessing for the wounded.

The man looked at it as if he did not know what to do with it, and then bowed his head.

The knight went out into the noon.

☀︎

It took Elodie the best part of an hour to get the gilt off, with a pot of something that smelled like burnt honey and a little blade no longer than her finger, and the man did not make a sound from start to finish. Sorin stayed. It seemed the least he could do, having been so clever. When it was done, the man’s right wrist was bare and raw and bound in clean linen, and his left still carried its barred sun, and that was all he had, and it was true.

He flexed the hand carefully, and stood. “Thank you, my lord.”

“Thank Gaspard. In five weeks he’ll have worked out that you manage hounds better than he does, and he’ll never forgive either of us.”

The man nearly smiled. It changed his face a good deal. Then, for the first time all morning, he looked past Sorin at the small deep window behind the chair. Through it, over the roofs and the river, the far bank lay under its violet dusk, and on its first hill, the Castle.

He looked at it the way a man looks at a dog that once bit him.

“You’ll have looked at that every day of your life, my lord. Everybody up top does. They go down to the south bank on summer afternoons with a basket and look at it.”

“Yes,” said Sorin.

“From up there it’s a picture. A thing on a hill, like a painting of a thing on a hill. But you stand on a wall out in the reeds on a winter night, with the lamps behind you, and you look out into all that dark…”

He stopped.

“And?” said Sorin.

“It looks back,” said the man.

He put his cap on, and went out with the sergeant to find a carter going towards the beech woods, and did not look at the window again.

☀︎

“You fined him,” said his father.

“I fined him,” said Sorin. “And then I hired him. They’re different things.”

Halric laughed. It filled the long study over the gardens the way it filled a parade ground, and set the lamp flame jumping on the desk, and somewhere below the open window a gardener looked up from the roses. He was in the window seat with his boots on the cushions, a glass of Halcyon wine on the sill and Council papers all round him unread, and he laughed until he had to put the glass down.

“The Order will write to me at great length,” he said, wiping his eyes, “and I shall have to read all of it. Elodie tells me she had to explain the arithmetic.”

“Elodie tells everyone everything.”

“Elodie was right.” He said it lightly, but he was looking at Sorin over the rim of the glass with that warm, unbothered look that had held Highnoon through two bad winters and a Vantor war, and that Sorin had never once seen all the way to the bottom of. “You’ll learn it, or you’ll be the kind of lord who doesn’t. I know which I’d sooner leave the city to.” A sip. “Your mother would have done exactly what you did. And then sent him a cake.”

Sorin found he had nothing to say to that, and so said nothing, and his father let him say it.

Through the long windows the sun was going down towards the rim of the world. In twenty days it would not go down at all. It would sit on the edge of the world like a coin on a table, on the longest day of the year, and the whole Concord would put on its colours and come to the rite hall to watch him lay his hand on the stone. Everyone knew what it would say. It always said it.

“Father,” he said. “The man said something, at the end. About the Castle.” From the long study you couldn’t see it. Perhaps that was why his father liked it. “What was she? The Queen of the Sallow. Really.”

Halric did not answer at once. He turned his glass on the sill, a quarter turn and then another, and the lamp threw his shadow up the wall behind him, big as a bear.

“Dead,” he said. “Three hundred years dead, and her house empty, and her court with her. That’s what she was.” He looked up and smiled, and the smile was entirely ordinary. “And nobody crosses, Sorin. That’s the whole of the lesson. It’s the only one in this family I’ve never once had to teach twice.”

He went back to his papers. After a while, so did Sorin.

☀︎

He went down to the bridge at the dusk bell anyway. He couldn’t have said why.

Aldric came, of course, a step behind and to the left. The evening was long and gold and warm, and a sunbird on an ice-seller’s cart was singing its heart out, because the sun was still up. At the south end of the great bridge the Order’s men were trimming the ward lamps from short ladders, as they did at the dusk bell every evening of the year.

The watch-house stood at the bridge foot. On the side of it that faced the ridge, a plain iron lamp was already lit on its bracket, turned towards the far bank and the dead woods and the gibbet beyond them. The Order had sent knights up that ridge three times, and none had come back, and the Rule forbade it now; but the lamp was lit every night of the year, so that the knight on the gibbet could see his way.

“Every night, my lord,” said the young man-at-arms at the door, very nervous of the heir and very proud of the lamp. “Every night since the first winter. Till he comes home.”

Sorin thanked him, and walked out on to the bridge as far as the first post, and stopped there with his hands on the warm stone of the parapet and the Sallow going by beneath him, three hundred paces of it, and on the far side the light stopping.

He made himself look.

He had looked at the Black Castle every day of his life: from the terrace and the nursery window and the back of a horse, at picnics, on dares, over Seraphine Ambrel’s shoulder during long and careful dances. He had never once, he realised, tried to see it. It had always been a thing on a hill, like a painting of a thing on a hill. Dark windows. Dead woods. A ridge with a gibbet on it.

He looked at the gibbet. He counted to twenty. He was not sick.

And while he was counting, the bats came up out of the tall tower.

They came the way they came every dusk, in a long smoke that poured up out of the top of it and leaned out over the dead woods, thousands upon thousands, unravelling into the violet sky: the only thing about the place anyone had ever seen move. He had watched them since he was small. Except that tonight, for the first time, it did not look to him like a thing that happened to a castle. It looked like a house breathing out.

It looks back.

On the inside of his wrist, his Sunmark itched. He rubbed it without looking.

He had never quite stopped wondering what she had been, the Queen of the Sallow, and how she had taken it when the sun came. He wondered it now, with the whole lit city at his back, and found that for the first time the wondering had something in it that was not quite fear and not quite pity, and that he did not have a name for.

The ward lamp on the post beside him burned steady and clear in its glass, a small fierce splinter of noon.

It had nothing to say about him.

“My lord,” said Aldric, quietly. “Your father will want you at supper.”

“Yes.” Sorin didn’t move for a moment longer. “Aldric. Have you ever run?”

Aldric was silent so long that Sorin thought he would not answer. He was standing with his back to the parapet, looking up the hill at the city.

“Everyone has, once, my lord. The ones who say they haven’t are lying, or they haven’t been asked yet.”

“And then what?”

“And then you find out what you do the next time,” said Aldric. “That’s all a man is, in the end. What he does the next time.” He put a hand on Sorin’s shoulder, briefly, the way he had after every bout Sorin had ever fought, and Sorin felt it as he always had: good. Again. “Come on. You’ve twenty days of being an ordinary boy left, and I’m told your sister’s making something for your head that you’ll want the morning after the ball.”

Sorin laughed, and turned his back on the far bank, and went up the hill into the light with Aldric a step behind him, the way he always was.

Behind them the bats went on pouring out over the Gloaming in their long dark smoke, and the lamp on the watch-house burned steady towards the ridge. And across the water the Black Castle kept its windows dark, as it had for three hundred years, and waited for someone to come home.