2 · The Generous Hand

no body.”

“Did you know his errand?”

“Letters. Lists of the dead. What we all carry now.”

He closed the eyelids more carefully. Then he asked permission to bury him. Teren accompanied him to the cemetery beneath the great oak. Serik dug with a borrowed spade, took off his gloves and accepted the blisters without comment.

“The men who attacked him weren't bandits,” Elyen said as evening fell. “They left the silver.”

Serik kept digging.

“There are wars for which silver weighs too much.”

Teren waited for the hunter to move away.

“In Dawnrock, what do they do with people who return?”

“Food. Rest. Questions.”

“Can they leave?”

The spade stopped striking.

“With an escort, if their family claims them.”

“That wasn't what I asked.”

The paladin drove the spade into the earth.

“I don't write the laws either.”

During the flour distribution, old Arven joined the queue twice in different hats. Serik recognised the way he dragged one leg. He blocked his path, asked for his token and saw

that the first time he had collected only half a ration.

“There are four of us at home,” the man said.

The register said three. His eldest daughter had married into another neighbourhood and, according to the accounts, should no longer eat there. She had come back after her husband beat her. Oren had not yet found a way to explain that in a box on a form.

The cart's overseer said he could not change the list without permission. If they gave out too much, someone at the end would get nothing. Arven replied that he was always the one at the end. The neighbours began talking all at once.

Serik lifted a sack and asked for scales.

He weighed it in front of everyone. Then he weighed the other nine in the first cart. One held less than declared. Two were wet underneath. The difference was not enough to solve the problem, but it showed that the figure over which they were arguing was already a fiction.

“Who

owns these carts?” he asked.

“The Hand depot,” the overseer replied.

“Then the depot will receive a corrected account.”

He ordered them to open a reserve sack. The overseer warned him that regulations allowed the difference to be charged to the officer who chose to do so.

Serik gave him his full name.

Teren watched him sign: like someone used to paying for small exceptions out of his own pocket, without ever asking who had made them necessary.

When the queue began moving again, Arven tried to take two full measures. The paladin caught his wrist.

“One more for your daughter. Not two.”

The old man insulted him. Serik waited until he had finished and handed him the measure he was owed.

Teren approached afterwards.

“You could have let it go.”

“Yes. And the next man would have needed another daughter.”

“Don't you trust them?”

Serik looked at the empty sacks.

“I trust that they're hungry. That's much safer than trusting they'll be good because I'm watching.”

The cleric did

not like the answer. Later, when he found the map and the copper tokens, he had to admit he was still thinking about it.

In the cemetery, Serik found a loose stone among the roots. It bore a name Teren could not read. The cleric wanted to turn it over so it would stop wearing away face down; the paladin asked him to leave it where it was for a moment.

The soldiers in his company did that before burying their own: they looked for an earlier name so no one would believe themselves the first dead person in an empty land. The custom did not come from the Armada. Serik had learned it from a woman who went from hunter to soldier after losing her village.

“My teacher said we shouldn't mix customs,” Teren told him.

“Mine said we shouldn't perform rites that took more time than the living needed.”

The cleric smiled. Serik was not mocking prayer. He knelt when Teren began preparing the body, held the cloth

and waited for him to finish.

Teren read the courier's name from the travel register. He was surprised that writing it cost him more than saying the entire prayer. Until then he had given the man a designation: dead man, messenger, victim. The name returned him to a life Teren did not know.

Serik placed a small stone on the grave. It came from another road.

“So he has somewhere to go on from,” he explained.

“Do you believe he goes on?”

The paladin took his time.

“I believe my father needed to do it when my mother died. I didn't want to take that from him too.”

If he pressed, he would get a prouder answer and a less truthful one. Teren stayed quiet.

Arguments over the distribution reached them from below the cemetery. The cart overseer had recorded the extra grain and was still demanding a signature. Serik called him over, laid the paper on a gravestone and signed. Teren was about to point out that it was

not a desk. Seeing the paladin's hand pause to avoid rubbing away the carved name, he decided disrespect would have been something else.

A neighbour brought squash flowers. She had no others. She laid them beside the fresh earth and went straight back to work.

It was a small burial, with no sign from the sky, no answer beneath the ground and no bell. They did it with care, and that was all.

As they were leaving, a gnome woman climbed onto the cemetery wall with a bandurria and announced that her name was Neris, that she was hungry and that she knew an appropriate song. Oren tried to send her away. She began singing before he could reach her.

The song told of a copyist who hid a metal sheet in flour. There were deliberate errors: a city stood on the wrong mountain; Hara was an old man; the knife belonged to the woman who had received it. Teren noticed that whenever she got a name wrong, Neris watched

their faces.

By the time she finished, the neighbours had left bread in her hat.

Teren found her eating behind the oak.

“Who taught you that?”

“A grandmother who couldn't read. Have you found the half already?”

He looked towards Serik. The paladin was watering his horse.

“Tonight,” Neris said, “when everyone's asleep, come to the mill. And bring the paper from the love letter. Sometimes love is the best way to get something through customs.”