They were violet, and they had a light of their own behind them, and he had seen them in his father's cracked shaving-glass every morning for two years."There you are," she said, and shut the book on her finger to keep the place. "Oh, you're young. I had thought you would be older. Come in out of the door, all of you. It lets the singing in and it gives me a headache."Nobody moved. Tobiah was making a small noise in his throat.She was an elf. He had known that she would be, and had still not been ready for it, because there were none left in Brannoch and he had only ever seen them carved over church doors, being trodden on. She was no taller than Pim. Her ears came to points through hair that was white with a green cast in it, like the down on a reed, and it had grown past her waist and been plaited by somebody who could not see the back of her own head. She wore a shift of unbleached linen, much darned. She was so thin that the unlit glow of the room came a little way through her

"You hold them as a drowning man holds a spar," Aenwyl said. "No wonder they come up into your mouth."That was the first lesson, and it took most of a day.She made him sit on the floor with his back to the lead box and name the dead he kept, one at a time, aloud. Not their ranks or what they could do. She wanted the term each had asked. A queen under a city. Eight locks a month to a sister, for a boy. A lamp, and four bits a day to a mother in Hide Street. Hens. As he said each one she had him loosen something in his chest that he had not known was clenched, a finger at a time, until the line ran out from him slack and easy, like a painter to a moored boat, where before it had been wound three times round his fist."They won't go," she said, when he balked. "They gave their word. You are holding shut a door that nobody is pushing."By evening the noise in his head had dropped to a murmur. He opened the Writ, and the line read Bleed 39%. He stared at it. He had not shifted it by so m

They came back into Greywater the way the drains leave it, on their bellies, at the dead low of the night.The outfall under the Ninth Lock was running a foot deep and cold enough to stop the breath. Ravel went up it with his splinted arm held out of the wet and Odran's hand in his belt. Above them the lock chamber had been filled again. He could hear the weight of it through the stone, and somewhere in that black water, among the eel-pots and the old iron, lay a greysteel sword that he had named for his father.The gauge-house was as Marta had left it, with the nails numbered. The chalk table was still on the back wall, nine columns by twelve rows, in a square patient hand.Two people were waiting under it with a dark lantern."You look terrible," said Nessa, and burst into tears, and was furious about it.Emeric did not say anything. He had stood up too fast and cracked his head on the low vault, and he stood rubbing it with a foolish look. He was thinner. The knight's belt had been

Castor Vey had been taught to draw a sword before he was taught to read, and he had never until that night drawn one without knowing what it was for.The order had come at supper. His father had read it out from the head of the table, in the voice he kept for the accounts, and had then folded it and looked at the salt. The Sunblades of House Vey will enter the ward of Lowlock at the first bell and clear the square at the fish stair, where the people are obstructing the Rite. They will drive them to their houses and keep them there. It bore the High Canon's seal. House Vey had not refused the Canonry in four hundred years."You will lead," Lord Hadrian had said. "It is thought fitting.""By whom?""By those who wish to see whether you will."So he had led. He had brought forty men over the High Quay bridge in column of fours, with the hawk above them. He had come through the gap in the new stonework at the double and into the square, and there he had halted them with a lifted fist, bec

"Don't," Maren said. She had him by the good arm. "She'll kill you. I had my whole weight behind a cut and she moved me aside as you'd move a chair.""She won't kill me. She wants me in a court." He said it with more certainty than he felt. He put her hand off gently. "If I'm talking to her, she's looking at me. Keep them ready. If the gate clears, they run.""And if it doesn't clear?"He had no answer to that one yet. He stepped up onto the lower gate.It was two planks wide, with a handrail on the downstream side only. He had run across it a thousand times as a boy, carrying his father's dinner. He went slowly now, with his splinted arm against his chest. The lock lay brimming on his left, twenty feet of black water, and on his right was the long drop to the tail-race. Behind him two thousand people had gone so quiet that he could hear a baby hiccup. His mother was among them somewhere. He had seen her white cap. He did not look for it again.He stopped six paces from Sabine Kell. I