3 · The Back of the Letter

chancellor: he had seen him kneeling in a hospice, changing a dressing the physicians dared not touch. His daughter had died there of fever nine years earlier. He did not smile when the poor were near; he worked. That was harder to reconcile with a conspiracy than a tyrant from a sermon.

Neris explained that her grandmother never sang Madruga's escape the same way twice. She changed the skirt's colour and the number of steps. When the family tried to correct her, she replied that stairs in a memory did not wear on the same side as stairs of stone.

For years, the gnome thought it an artist's licence. Later she discovered that her grandmother had sold half a testimony to buy food one winter. Her voice became entertainment at the very point where her mother had wanted to leave a warning.

“They used to get angry with each other,” she said. “My grandmother said a story no one wants to hear dies just like a lost one. Her mother

said that if you had to change everything to get it heard, it was dead already.”

Lina stopped pretending not to listen.

“Who was right?”

“Both, when they argued with the other. Neither, when she wanted to rule alone.”

Teren examined Iven's letter. A line had been added at another time, in different ink: “I don't know if this is what I should do.” Beneath it was something he had crossed out until the paper almost tore. The cleric tried to read it against the light. Neris covered it with her hand.

“Not everything he chose not to tell us belongs to us.”

“It could be evidence.”

“It could be something cruel he wrote in anger.”

He let go of the sheet. It seemed she was putting discretion above other people's lives. Then he imagined someone reconstructing his faith from words he had once written down so he would not shout them.

Neris put the love letter aside and left the plan visible.

Serik, beside the door, heard only the

end of the argument. He did not want to join it. On his first posting, a commander had read a deserter's private letter aloud to prove the man was a coward. The man was dead. The soldiers laughed because their commander expected them to. Serik did not laugh, but he stayed.

He had never allowed himself to use that tiny difference as an excuse.

The wind had risen outside. Every seven turns, the mill wheel made an irregular knock. Lina said a paddle needed replacing before the heavy rains. While they spoke of the Pact, she was still hearing a fault that could leave the valley without flour.

Teren wanted to tell her to rest. He saw her look at the roof, alert to every creak. She was not there to hear travellers' adventures.

It was her home that sheltered them.

Elyen tapped the window with two fingers.

“Six coming. By the weir.”

The first missiles pierced the door while Teren was still folding the plan. The pot broke and

steam smothered half the lamp's flame. Elyen pulled Lina to the floor. Neris crawled under the table with the bandurria clasped to her chest.

Teren picked up the sack hook. The man who came through the window wore grey linen over his face. He searched for the cleric's pocket before raising his knife. Teren struck his wrist, and the point sank into his own thigh.

Pain gave him a horrible clarity. He remembered where the artery ran. He remembered he should shout for help. Instead, he shouted Lina's name.

Serik burst through the back door with his shield raised. He drove the attacker back against the gear wheel. A second man fled at the sight of his insignia. The first, trapped, tried to tear something from his neck. Elyen pinned him with a foot.

It was a copper token. It bore the same door and five strokes as the tin.

“Who commands you?” Serik asked.

The man spat blood and looked at Lina.

Teren pressed both hands against the wound

in his leg. For the first time he wished he could perform a miracle that had nothing to do with healing: he wished he could force someone to tell the truth.

“We have no time,” Elyen said.

Outside, the granary's thatched roof was burning.

The wounded apprentice came out of his house to help raise a ladder. His bandaged hand rested against his chest; the other gripped a rope. Teren saw him through the smoke and wanted to send him back to bed. The boy was already climbing.

Lina ran to the mill wheel to stop the feed into the granary. If the shaft kept turning, it would carry burning dust into the stone chamber. The lever was in the shed the arrows had just pierced.

Teren tried to follow and fell on his open wound.

There was nothing heroic about the fall: he had stepped badly, there was blood inside his boot, and his body refused to hold him. The girl saw him fall without stopping. A moment later,

the wheel ceased to turn.

Elyen dragged him to a wall.

“I don't need you to save me,” the cleric protested.

The hunter left him sitting on a heap of gravel.

“Good. Because now I have to find the others.”

Serik cut the cart's lashings to take it to the cistern. The neighbours had formed a bucket chain. Neris ran from one end to the other, repeating orders lost among the shouts. Her high voice found passages where deeper voices dissolved in the noise.

Teren pressed his wound and treated those who could reach him. A man had breathed too much smoke. He made him sit leaning forward. A girl had a burn on her arm; he cooled it with water while her father tried to cover it in grease.

The apprentice came down the ladder with his hand covered in blood. He had lost his bandage. He looked at the cleric as though wanting to apologise for ruining the morning's work.

Teren sat him down beside him.

“What about

the plough?” he asked, to keep him from looking at his fingers.

“I gave it a name.”

“What name?”

The boy's answer was so obscene that the burned girl began to laugh. Laughing hurt, and she had to stop. Then she tried again.

Teren knew he would remember this too. Horror had no right to keep every image of the night.