16 · A Song's Accounts

promise no one will be lost. We know men are using those who returned to compel their families. And that, before they opened that door, someone wrote that no return would have an owner.”

“Then say that,” the man replied. “Not that you're coming to save us all.”

Neris bowed her head.

After the song, three men approached to correct names.

One was right. The girl killed in the overflow was not called what the list said. Another claimed his cousin had not been among the guards, though two neighbours recognised him. The third wanted a soldier removed from the roll of the dead because he was an enemy and did not deserve breath wasted on him.

Neris brought all three to a table. She asked the first family to write the right name or dictate it to someone who could. She told the second they would add his statement without erasing the others. She asked the third who would return the body to its mother if they stopped saying

he had died there.

“He didn't come to give anything back to us,” the man replied.

The gnome nodded.

“Then we write that too.”

He thought she was mocking him. He left, insulting her.

Teren looked at the sheets and felt a fear different from the tunnels'. They could find an original inscription, prove a payment false, preserve a seal. No object would stop people choosing the account that placed them in the best light.

Ivara took a chair.

“Every version doesn't have to be worth the same,” she said. “People have to see why we believe one.”

They prepared a column for the witness's name and another for what that person had observed directly. Suppositions would go separately. It would not make everyone honest. At least it would make it harder to lie without someone being able to ask again.

Neris thought of her grandmother. She had made a living mixing versions, and now her granddaughter was inventing boxes to separate them. She would have thought it a betrayal

of music. Perhaps it was. Respect for a dead person did not require keeping every habit intact.

Lina brought candles. She sat to tell what she had seen at the mill: the lamp, the oil, the guard who helped her father. She did not know whether the fire was deliberate. The surviving scribe would surely present that doubt as absolution.

The girl knew it and did not change her account.

Teren heard her to the end without interrupting her once.

When the last candle went out, they did not have a single history. They had something a later arrival could begin to dispute without erasing everyone who came before.

At dawn, the news was already travelling towards Bridgebasin in carters' mouths. It would change on the road. Ivara sent written copies by three routes, including her formulas and signature. Beran sent the mine plan to a guild that had expelled him. He did not ask for his post back: he asked them to inspect the water outlets before the thaw.

The stag box he sent separately, still closed, to Tavo's mother.

Serik wrote to Ysara Venn. He used her full title, commander of the Armada, and no insults. The letter ended with a question that cost him half the night: “Whom does an order protect when it prevents its victims from testifying?”

Maera said goodbye to Darven beside the empty carts. He wanted her to return south with his men.

“If I die far away, you won't be able to recover me,” she told him.

Darven looked angry.

“I didn't send you to die well.”

“Then we still agree.”

Neris left the others for an afternoon to deliver Iven's letter.

The recipient lived in a potters' village beyond the hill. Her name was Sura, and she had spent a week seeking news among Bridgebasin's carts. When she saw the gnome with the cylinder, she set the pot she was shaping on a board.

“Say it first,” she asked.

Neris said it.

The woman wiped her hands on her apron. She

wiped them again, though the clay was gone. Then she invited the gnome to sit and put water on the fire. She did not ask how he died until she could busy herself with the pot's noise.

Neris told what she knew and separated it from what they had only assumed. Iven had an arrow in him; the attackers sought his papers; they did not know whether he reached the mill alive. They had buried him beneath Lindvale's oak. The grave had not suffered in the flood.

Sura held the letter a while without opening it.

“I told him not to go,” she admitted. “He spoke as though all I wanted was a quiet life. He left angry. I waited for him to come back so I could be angry.”

Neris knew that kind of ending. Songs tended to correct it: the last farewell became a perfect phrase, a promise or an embrace that gave the rest meaning. Now before her sat a woman whose last words to the dead

man had been an insult she did not want to retract.

“You can stay angry,” she said.

Sura opened the letter. There were six lines of love, three about the price of a room near the bridge and an argument continued in gentler terms. At the edge of the last page, Iven had drawn a crooked cup. It was one of the first she sold him. He kept it because it did not retain heat well, so he would not burn himself when leaving in a hurry.

The woman laughed at the sight. Then she ran out of breath. Neris brought a chair closer and waited without touching her.

When Sura could speak, she wanted to know whether Iven's death had been useful.

The gnome had an immediate answer: thanks to him they found the archives, discovered the network, brought workers out of the mines. She was already opening her mouth when she realised none of that was a measure of the man.

“He helped us see,” she said. “I

still don't know what we'll be able to do with what we saw.”

Sura nodded, tired.

“Tell them he was afraid. Don't make him a brave man who doesn't resemble him.”

She gave her two cups and a wrapped piece of clay to leave at the grave. Neris took it to the oak before returning to her companions.

Teren waited on the road. He did not ask her to repeat the conversation.

“Anything for me?” he asked.

She gave him one of the cups.

“This burns everywhere. Use it carefully.”

They set out for Dawnrock to demand access to the hospice records. Afterwards they would have to reach the hollow oak in the Barrows. Between the two lay soldiers, flooded fields and people who might prefer the chancellor's promise to seven travellers' incomplete truth.

Lina gave them bread for the first day.

“When you come back,” she said, “perhaps we'll have a mill.”

Teren accepted the bread without promising to return. She seemed grateful for it.