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Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Rescued
The prison column was Rook's idea, and the information was Sefa's."Six wagons, barred," the scout said, crouched in the frozen bracken above the Banner Road with her chin on her fists. "Twenty living guards, riding. No dead. They go to the Grave Road at the new moon, and what goes to the Grave Road doesn't come back." She chewed a bit of straw. "There's a fellow in the fourth wagon they keep apart. I heard the sergeant say Verrin. Say it like a curse.""Why?" said Kael."Because he's an officer, captain of a banner, for the third. They don't put captains in the wagons, Captain." She grinned at her own joke and let it fade. "I think he said no to something."Rook had gone very still beside him. She had been that way since Sefa began, with a look in her slate eyes that Kael had seen on men who were about to be asked to forgive something. "A Red Host captain," she said, "who's been arrested by his own lord. That's a man who knows how the army's put together. And he's got a reason to hat
Chapter Thirty-Six: Fractured Sight
Serai had not dreamed in twenty-two years, and so for a moment she did not know what was happening to her.They had left Harth the morning after the renewal, in the grain carts, with Rook driving and nobody speaking. By nightfall they were camped in a fold of the high country with a stream at their backs and the Banner Road a grey thread below. Someone had made a fire. Someone had cooked. She had eaten and said goodnight and lain down in her blanket between Kael and the Clerk with her eyes closed, listening to the Lanterns settle into sleep around her one by one.Then the light came.It was not like the old sight. The old sight had been a window, a clean wide pane through which the world and its futures lay laid out in order. This was a crack. A single sharp line of brightness, as narrow as a blade, that went through the middle of the dark and showed her, for the space of a heartbeat, a thing.A lantern in a window. A hand, closing over the flame.It was gone before she could breathe.
Chapter Thirty-Five: What Molgraeth Believes
The Renewal took place at noon, and Kael stood at the back of the crowd and said nothing.The Chainhouse was a long hall of grey stone with a black iron door, and on the day of the vote every household in Harth filed through it, one by one, and set a pebble in one of two urns. White for yes. Black for no. The baker with the thin ring went in with her husband and her daughter, and Kael watched her set a white stone down as lightly as a woman putting a coin in a plate. The chain-revee stood on the steps in her grey and called the tally at dusk."Nine in ten," she said, and the square roared.It was a good roar. There was nothing in it that had been ordered. People embraced. Children were lifted onto shoulders. The old woman from the bakery found him in the press and pressed a piece of cake into his hand without knowing who he was.He had read the margin of a ledger two nights earlier. He had stood in a dark room and known that the compact they were celebrating had already been rewritten
Chapter Thirty-Four: The Loyal Kings
The three kings came to Harth for the Renewal, as they came every midwinter, and the city dressed itself to receive them.Banners went up along the Banner Road. The chainhouse steps were swept, then swept again. By the second morning the streets were lined with the retinues of three crowns, plumed and polished and a little ill at ease in the presence of a city that did not seem to need them, and Kael, who had spent a week trying to understand what Molgraeth had built, found that the quickest way to see it whole was to watch the people who had sworn to it."We want the gallery," said Rook."We want the kitchens," said Bram. "Nobody looks at the kitchens."They got both. The Lanterns had hired themselves out for the feast, as cooks and carvers and pot-boys, with the two singing brothers, Hob and Tam Harker, engaged as the evening's minstrels for a fee that would have embarrassed a lesser company. Kael carried wine. Serai, veiled, sat in the minstrel's gallery with a lute she could not p
Chapter Thirty-Three: The City That Chose Its Chains
Harth had no guard on its gate, and that was the first thing that frightened Rook."Nobody's watching the road," she said, low, from the front bench of the lead grain cart. She had her cropped hair under a cataract's hood and a whip across her knees, and she was looking up at the city walls like a woman checking a ledger she suspected of lying. "Head of the Banner Road. Richest granary city in the Marches. Portcullis up, barbican empty. I've never seen it. Not in twelve years of contracts.""Maybe they trust the Hosts," Kael said."Nobody trusts the Hosts."The carts rolled in under the arch. There were six of them, loaded with sacks Rook had bought with the last of the company's silver, and in them, between the sacks, rode the people she had chosen for a city: Bram to count, Sefa to climb, Iven for his steady hands, and the rest of the crew as drivers and porters. Kael sat in the third cart with a sack for a pillow and a hood over his face. Serai sat beside him with her hair covered
Chapter Thirty-Two: Three Names on a List
Rook laid the map out on the head of a drum, and for the first time in two months Kael saw what he was up against as a shape.It was a plain map. A trader's chart, with a river down the middle and the marshes spread across it like a hand, but Rook had worked on it for four nights with a stub of charcoal, and now it was a different thing. Three black roads ran east from the river into the high country, and where each of them ended, she had drawn a small square."Granaries," she said. "Not his. Nobody's, strictly. The villages bring the tithe grain in, and the hosts draw from it. But everything the War God's living armies eat comes through one of these three." Her finger moved. "Here, in the north, the Banner Road. Here, in the center, the Red Road. Here, in the south, is the Grave Road, which feeds the dead. They don't eat, but his priests do, and the priests are how the dead are made to march. Cut all three, and the hosts go hungry in six weeks. They don't break. They scatter. And a g
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