1 · A Man Without a Bell

might seem something she could buy outright, with her savings and her dignity, rather than beg for.

He handed back the basket.

“I need clean cloth. Bring whatever you can boil. The hen can lay eggs for you.”

The boy sat on the table, watching him without daring to cry. He would be about fifteen. Teren touched his arm to stop him following his mother's every movement.

“What's the plough called?”

The child frowned.

“It doesn't have a name.”

“A bad sign. Things we name tend to treat us better.”

“The horse is called Jaro, and he's bitten me twice.”

His mother gave a brief laugh. Then she asked the cleric's god to spare her son's hand. Teren said he would do everything he could. It was not the same answer. All three knew it, and all three pretended otherwise.

When he was alone, he opened the offerings cupboard. There was a cheap necklace, three coins and two figures of Ilyndra made from stale bread. No caravan would take those

in exchange for medicines. Too often, the valley had traded its neighbours' wealth for the right to go on being cold.

He went to the mill to ask about the cart.

Oren intercepted him in the square. He had a list of families and an unfinished argument with the baker, who refused to give flour in exchange for the council's promises.

“Keep a count of the bandages you use,” the governor told him.

“I do.”

“And the blessings.”

Teren thought he was joking until he saw the sheet. The council had promised Dawnrock's hospice a number of services in return for keeping the cleric in the valley. They had explained it when he accepted the post. He had imagined a way to guarantee care for those who could not afford it. Now he saw Oren trying to decide whether blessing a field equalled two burials or half a birth.

“Don't count them,” he said.

“Someone counts them anyway. I'd rather know what the village owes before they come to collect

it.”

Teren kept to himself the answer he had been taught about the gift beyond price. The formula seemed written for people who had never had to decide who should receive the last sack.

At the mill, the miller's daughter was looking for a knife she had lost among the stones. She asked him to help move a board. As he bent down, Teren saw the fish caught in a boot.

The courier had come to rest sitting in the irrigation channel, his boot snagged on a root.

The water reached his chest. He wore the livery of the eastern couriers and had a broken arrow beneath his arm. Teren left his medicine bag on the bank, waded in to his knees and supported the man's head. He was still warm.

“You're too late,” the girl said from the wheel.

Her name was Lina, and she had a habit of counting bell strokes on her fingers, as though afraid one might escape. That morning, Lindvale's bells had not rung. The

governor reserved them for attacks and burials where the body had been identified. Both had begun to grow scarce.

“Help me get him out,” Teren asked.

She did not move.

“If he comes back while you're touching him, is it because of you?”

Teren had learned eight answers to that question. At the hospice in Dawnrock, beneath Ilyndra's mosaic, the young clerics had been made to repeat them. Death was a passage; return, a gift; the gift demanded service. There, with mud sucking at his ankles, none seemed honest.

“I don't know why anyone returns,” he said. “But I know what a wet man weighs.”

Lina came down.

They laid him on a door. The courier clutched a leather cylinder against his belly. Teren could not prise it from his hand without breaking two fingers. He covered the man's face first, angry with himself for that late courtesy.

Inside were a grain permit, an unfinished love letter and a piece of tin wrapped in wool. The fragment bore just four

words: “shall belong to none.” Another, much more recent hand said: “Ask for the copyist. Do not give this to the Council.”

Teren recognised the drawing in the margin: a door crossed by five strokes. He had seen it behind Dawnrock's altar, scraped away and covered with plaster.

A dog began barking on the far side of the stream. Then it fell quiet. Birds pecking in the kitchen garden left the furrows and flew towards the hill.

Elyen appeared among the hazels with his bow unstrung. The elven hunter had one ear bandaged and dried blood on his neck.

“Get him inside. Now.”

“What's coming?”

“Men who make the animals get out of their way.”

Teren looked at the corpse. He had served six months in that valley, tended fevers, blessed seed, argued with mothers about drinking water. He had never decided anything that endangered everyone.

Oren Linde came from the square with four neighbours and an old spear. His belly strained his governor's waistcoat; fear made his eyes look

small.

“Give me what he was carrying,” he said.

Teren closed the cylinder.

“We'll read it together.”

“You were sent to tend the sick.”

“This man arrived sick with something that concerns us.”

Neighbours began coming out of their houses without knowing what danger they were looking at. A woman carried a spoon. Another person held a freshly sharpened hoe. The baker's son put on his apron as though it could defend him, then took it off, ashamed that someone might have seen.

Teren was about to order them to take the children to the church. Oren spoke first.

“To the bakehouse,” he said. “The church has two doors. The bakehouse has four.”

The cleric knew more about the defensive advantages of temples in stories than the shape of the actual building. He stood aside.

Lina went to fetch the apprentice's mother. She found her trying to finish some sewing. The woman did not want to abandon a shirt for which she had been paid in advance; if she failed

to deliver it, she would owe flour they had already eaten. Lina took the garment, draped it round her own neck and carried a basket so the woman could support her son.

Arven reached the channel and recognised the courier. He had passed that way before. He always let his horse drink before asking how far he still had to go.

“He wasn't a man who hurried by habit,” he said.

Elyen went back over the tracks. The blood began some distance away, beside a willow. The courier had managed to dismount after the attack and drag himself along the bank to stay out of sight. The current had carried him the final stretch. The hunter pointed to a mark leading out of the water: Iven had tried to get up.

Between the arrow and the mill, Iven had made decisions no one would ever know. Teren thought of the four words on the tin and pressed the cylinder against his body.

Oren asked him to take it to the

council house.

“If we have to give it up, we'll decide with other people.”

“What if they come for it without deciding?”

The governor looked at the spear. He held it the way one holds someone else's broom.

“Then at least I won't be able to tell myself afterwards that I was alone.”

Teren was ashamed of mistaking the man's fear for a lack of courage. He followed him to the council house, where they put the body in the shade. The woman with the spoon came in behind them and placed a glass of water beside the dead man before remembering he could no longer drink.

No one took it away.

A horn sounded on the road. Lina backed towards the mill wheel. Under the cloth, the dead man did nothing extraordinary. Suddenly, that seemed to Teren the most terrible thing about the morning.