Twenty years before the story begins.
The Road Down
The rain had stopped an hour before dawn, but the road still remembered it.
It was a narrow road, made of packed brown dirt and loose stones, and it wound down the side of the hill like a ribbon someone had dropped.
Every footprint in it held a small cold puddle.
Every wheel rut was a little brown stream.
The column of soldiers marching down it had turned the whole thing into soup, and the soup sucked at their boots with every step, so that the sound of the army was not the sound of drums or trumpets.
It was the sound of three hundred people pulling their feet out of mud.
Shlup.
Shlup.
Shlup.
Kaelen Ashford had been listening to that sound for four days.
He thought he would hear it in his sleep for the rest of his life.
He was twenty years old.
He was tall and too thin, with dark hair that his mother said needed cutting and gray eyes that his mother said were too serious for a boy his age.
He did not feel like a boy.
He had not felt like a boy since the recruiting officer had come to his street in Veridia eighteen months ago, with a drum and a list and a smile that never reached his eyes.
He wore the long gray coat of the Ministry’s Field Regiment, with its brass buttons and its high stiff collar that rubbed a raw red line around his neck.
He wore a short sword on his hip that he had used exactly twice.
He carried a pack on his back that weighed as much as a small child, and a rifle-pike on his shoulder that weighed as much as a larger one.
And he was whistling.
Very softly.
Under his breath.
An old tune his mother used to hum while she kneaded bread, about a fisherman who caught the moon in his net and had to let it go.
He did not know he was doing it until the man marching beside him poked him in the ribs.
“Ash,” said Tobin.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“The moon song.
Sergeant’ll have your tongue.”
Kaelen stopped.
He had not noticed.
He never noticed.
His mother used to laugh about it.
You whistle the way other people breathe, my love.
You’ll whistle at your own funeral.
Tobin Reed grinned at him.
Tobin was shorter than Kaelen and twice as wide, with a round red face, a broken nose that had healed crooked, and hair the color of carrots that stuck out from under his gray cap in every direction.
He had been a baker’s boy before the war.
He still smelled faintly of flour, somehow, even after eighteen months in the field.
Kaelen did not know how.
Maybe it was in his skin.
“I don’t mind it,” said Tobin.
“Better than the mud.”
“Nothing’s better than the mud,” said a voice behind them.
“The mud is honest.
The mud doesn’t pretend to be anything but mud.”
That was Sergeant Dunmore.
Old Dunmore.
He was fifty, or sixty, or a hundred.
Nobody knew.
He had a face like a walnut, all lines and folds, and a gray mustache that hung down past his chin on both sides.
He had fought in the Ministry’s wars since before Kaelen was born.
He had burned so many memories for so many spells that there were whole years of his life he could not find.
He did not seem to mind.
He said a man with fewer memories had fewer things to be sad about.
Kaelen did not believe him.
He thought Dunmore said it the way people whistle in the dark.
The Valley
The road came round a last shoulder of the hill, out of a stand of wet black pines, and the valley opened up below them all at once.
Kaelen stopped walking.
He did not mean to.
His feet simply stopped, and the man behind him bumped into his pack and swore, and Kaelen did not hear him.
The valley was green.
Not the tired, sooty green of the parks in Veridia, where the grass grew gray at the edges from the smoke of the factories.
Not the trampled, muddy, burned green of the fields they had marched through for eighteen months.
This was a deep, wet, shining green, so bright after the rain that it almost hurt to look at.
Long grass, moving in the wind like the fur of some great sleeping animal.
Wildflowers scattered through it, yellow and white and a soft pale purple, thousands of them, like someone had thrown a handful of colored sugar across the hills.
A river ran down the middle of the valley.
It was not wide.
A strong boy could have thrown a stone across it.
But it was fast and clear and full from the rain, and it caught the early sun and turned it into a long silver thread that wound back and forth across the valley floor, as if it were in no hurry to leave.
And beside the river, there was a village.
It was small.
Perhaps forty houses.
They were built of gray stone, with roofs of dark slate and thick yellow thatch.
Smoke rose from every chimney, straight up into the still morning air, thin blue lines that leaned a little to the east and then faded.
There was a stone bridge over the river with three round arches.
There was a mill with a great wooden wheel turning slowly in the water, dripping and creaking.
There was a small square with a well in the middle of it and a tall old tree beside the well, its leaves just starting to turn gold at the edges.
Behind the houses there were gardens, neat green rows of cabbages and beans, and low stone walls, and a few brown cows standing in a field with their heads down.
On the far side of the village, set a little apart on a low rise, there was a long stone building with a bell tower.
A school, Kaelen thought.
Or a chapel.
Or both.
The bell was silent.
And beyond it all, at the far end of the valley, the hills rose up again, steep and dark with pine, and behind them, very faint and very far away, Kaelen could see a line of smoke along the horizon.
Gray smoke.
Lots of it.
Not chimney smoke.
The other army.
The Free Valleys.
The rebels who refused the Memory Tax.
They were coming.
“Oakhaven,” said Sergeant Dunmore.
He had stopped beside Kaelen and was looking down at the village with his walnut face very still.
“Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Kaelen.
“Don’t get fond of it.”
Kaelen looked at him.
Dunmore did not look back.
He was looking at the line of smoke on the far horizon, and then at the ridge on the near side of the valley, the high bare ridge to their left, where Kaelen could see something being built.
Tall dark shapes.
Wooden towers, three of them, with something on top of each one that caught the sun and glittered blue.
Crystals.
Huge ones.
Bigger than a man.
“What are those?” said Tobin.
“Engines,” said Dunmore shortly.
“Ministry engines.
Came up from the capital two nights ago on the big wagons.” He spat into the mud.
“They’re not for us to worry about.
Move on.
Column’s leaving you behind.”
He walked on.
Tobin looked at Kaelen and raised his eyebrows.
Kaelen shrugged.
They walked on.
But Kaelen kept looking back at the towers on the ridge.
At the cold blue glitter on top of them.
He did not know why.
Something about them made the back of his neck feel cold.
The Boy at the River
The road went down the hill in long lazy loops, back and forth across the slope.
On the third loop, it came close to the river, where the water ran down out of the hills in a series of small brown waterfalls and wide still pools.
There were children in one of the pools.
Kaelen heard them before he saw them.
A high bright shriek of laughter, and a splash, and a voice saying very seriously, “No.
No.
You have to be quiet or they won’t come.”
He looked down.
The pool was just below the road, perhaps thirty paces down a steep grassy slope.
It was a wide, shallow, round pool, with flat gray stones around its edge, and the water in it was so clear that Kaelen could see every pebble on the bottom.
Willows leaned over it from the far bank, trailing their long green fingers in the water.
Dragonflies hung over it, blue and green, darting and stopping and darting again.
And on the flat stones at the edge of the pool, there were two children.
The older one was a boy.
Seven, perhaps.
Eight.
Thin, with dark hair that fell into his eyes and a serious, narrow little face.
He was kneeling on the edge of the pool with his sleeves rolled up to the shoulders and both arms in the water, very still, staring down into it with the kind of fierce, frowning attention that Kaelen had only ever seen on the faces of old men playing chess.
The younger one was a girl.
Four, perhaps.
She had the same dark hair, but hers was in two short untidy braids that stuck out from the sides of her head like the handles of a jug.
She was standing in the shallow water up to her knees, with her skirt bunched up in both fists, and she was laughing.
She was laughing so hard that she was bent over, and when she laughed, Kaelen could see that she had a gap in her front teeth, right in the middle, big enough to whistle through.
“Elara,” said the boy, without looking up.
“I mean it.”
“But it tickled,” said the girl, and laughed harder.
“That’s because it’s a fish.
Fish tickle.
You have to stay still.”
“I can’t!”
“Then go and sit on the bank.”
The girl stuck her tongue out at him through the gap in her teeth.
Then she took one big careful step backward, and another, and stood very still in the water with her lips pressed tight together and her eyes enormous, holding her breath as if that would help.
The boy went on staring into the pool.
Kaelen had stopped walking again.
He did not know why.
Tobin had walked on a few steps, and then come back, and was standing beside him, looking down too.
“Tickling trout,” said Tobin softly.
“My grandad used to do that.
You put your hands under them, real slow, and you stroke their bellies, and they go all sleepy.
And then—”
The boy’s arms moved.
Very fast.
Water flew up in a shining sheet, and there was a flash of silver-brown, and the boy was sitting back on his heels on the flat stone with a fish in his two hands.
A brown trout as long as his forearm, thrashing and twisting, its speckled sides shining wet.
The girl screamed with delight.
She came splashing out of the pool and threw herself on her brother so hard that he nearly dropped the fish, and the two of them were laughing now, both of them, the boy too, his serious little face cracked wide open into a grin.
“You did it!
You did it, Cor!”
“I told you.
You have to be quiet.”
“Can I hold it?”
“No.
You’ll drop it.”
“I won’t!”
“You will.” He looked at the fish for a moment, struggling in his hands.
Then he did something that Kaelen did not expect.
He leaned forward, over the edge of the pool, and opened his hands, and let the trout slide back into the water.
It hung there for a moment, stunned, and then flicked its tail and was gone, a brown shadow darting away under the willows.
The girl stared at him.
“Why did you do that?”
“Because Mother said we’re not to bring anything home today.” The boy wiped his wet hands on his trousers.
“She said to come straight back if we see the soldiers.”
And he looked up.
Straight up the slope, over the grass and the yellow flowers and the wet gray stones, to the road.
To the long gray column of soldiers marching past.
To one young soldier standing still at the edge of the road with his pack on his back and his pike on his shoulder, looking down at them.
Their eyes met.
The boy’s eyes were dark.
Very dark, almost black.
They did not look frightened.
They looked careful.
The way a cat looks at a stranger in the doorway.
Measuring.
Thinking.
Deciding.
Kaelen did not know what to do.
He did not know whether to smile, or nod, or look away.
He was a soldier of the Ministry, in a gray coat, marching into this child’s valley with three hundred other soldiers and a line of glittering engines on the ridge.
He did not think there was anything he could do with his face that would be the right thing.
So he did nothing.
He just stood there.
And the boy looked at him for a long moment, frowning, measuring, deciding.
Then the boy lifted one wet hand and waved.
It was a small wave.
Just the hand, lifted shoulder-high, and moved twice, side to side.
The kind of wave you give to a neighbor across a lane.
The kind of wave that says I see you.
Hello.
You are a person, and I am a person, and here we both are.
Kaelen felt something turn over in his chest.
Slowly, he lifted his own hand, and waved back.
The girl had seen.
She looked up the slope, and saw the soldier waving, and she waved too, wildly, with her whole arm, both arms, jumping up and down on the flat stone so that her short braids bounced.
She was grinning at him with her gap-toothed grin.
Tobin laughed beside him, a soft surprised laugh, and waved too.
Then the boy took his sister’s hand, firmly, the way an older brother does.
He said something to her that Kaelen could not hear.
And the two of them turned and ran, along the flat stones, across the shallow end of the pool, up the far bank under the willows, and away across the green field toward the village, the little girl’s braids flying and her bare feet flashing white in the grass.
Kaelen watched them until they were gone between the gray stone houses.
“Ash,” said Tobin gently.
“Come on.
Dunmore’s looking.”
Kaelen turned and walked on down the muddy road.
But he looked back once more at the empty pool, where the dragonflies were still hanging over the clear water, and the willows were still trailing their fingers, and the ripples where the trout had gone were still spreading slowly out across the surface, one ring after another, wider and wider, until they touched the edges and were gone.
He did not whistle for the rest of the way down.
The Square
The column came into Oakhaven at the middle of the morning, and the village went quiet around it like a pond going still after a stone.
There were people in the lanes when the first soldiers came over the bridge.
Kaelen saw them.
A woman with a basket of wet washing on her hip.
Two old men sitting on a bench outside a low stone house with a painted sign of a black kettle over its door.
A boy with a stick, driving three geese along the lane in front of him.
A girl at a window, shaking a rug.
By the time the middle of the column reached the square, every one of them was gone.
The washing basket stood on the cobbles by itself.
The bench was empty.
The geese wandered in the lane, honking, with nobody to drive them.
The rug hung half out of the window, and the window behind it was shut.
But they were watching.
Kaelen could feel it.
Behind the small thick panes of glass.
Behind the half-open doors.
Behind the low garden walls.
Eyes.
Hundreds of them.
Watching three hundred gray coats tramp into their square and stop, and stand, and wait, with their pikes on their shoulders and the mud of four days drying gray on their boots.
The square was bigger than it had looked from the hill.
It was paved with round gray cobbles, worn smooth by a hundred years of feet and cartwheels, and there were little green weeds growing in the cracks between them.
The well in the middle had a round stone wall around it, waist high, and a wooden roof over it on four posts, and a bucket on a long rope.
The old tree beside it was an oak.
A huge one.
Its trunk was so wide that four men holding hands could not have reached around it, and its lowest branches spread out over the whole north side of the square like a roof.
Someone had hung things from those branches.
Little things.
Strings of wooden beads.
Small bundles of dried flowers tied with ribbon.
Tiny carved wooden birds, turning slowly in the air.
Hundreds of them.
“What’s all that?” said Tobin, looking up.
“Memory-tree,” said Sergeant Dunmore.
“Old valley custom.
When someone dies, the family hangs something of theirs in the oak.
So the tree remembers them.” He looked up at the turning wooden birds with his walnut face.
“They don’t have Ledgers out here.
Don’t have Banks.
They had the tree.”
“Had?” said Kaelen.
Dunmore looked at him for a long moment.
Then he looked away.
“Column!” A voice rang out from the front of the square.
“Column, halt and stand easy!
Company officers to the front!”
Kaelen did not see who had shouted.
A captain, probably, one of the young ones from the capital with clean boots.
The officers walked to the front.
The rest of them stood easy, which meant they put down their pikes and leaned on them and did not talk.
Kaelen leaned on his pike and looked at the houses.
They were good houses.
Small, but good.
The stone was gray and old and thick, with green moss in the cracks and yellow lichen in round spots like coins.
The windows had painted wooden shutters, blue and green and red, faded by the sun.
The doors had iron knockers shaped like hands, or fish, or acorns.
In front of nearly every house there was a little patch of garden behind a low wall, and in the gardens there were flowers.
Late flowers.
Big round heads of orange and gold, and tall spikes of blue.
And on every door, nailed at eye height, there was a small square of wood with words carved into it.
Kaelen was close enough to read the nearest one.
It was on the door of the house with the painted kettle.
THE MILLERS.
HERE SINCE THE YEAR OF THE GREAT FROST.
WE REMEMBER.
He looked at the next one.
THE ORCHARDS.
FIVE GENERATIONS.
WE REMEMBER.
And the next.
THE COOPERS.
WE REMEMBER.
We remember.
On every door.
Carved deep into the wood, so deep that the letters had gone dark with years of rain.
“Like a dare,” said Tobin quietly beside him.
He had read them too.
“Isn’t it?
Like they’re daring someone.”
Kaelen said nothing.
He was thinking of the line of crystal towers on the ridge, glittering cold and blue in the sun.
Billets
The officers came back after half an hour with lists.
They always had lists.
The column would stay in Oakhaven for three days.
Perhaps four.
They were to wait for the Inquisitor-General, who was coming from the capital with the engines’ crews, and then they would hold the valley against the rebel army coming over the far hills.
That was what the young captain with the clean boots said, standing on the edge of the well with his list in his hand.
He said it very loudly and very clearly, so that the people behind the windows could hear him too.
Hold the valley.
Kaelen thought of the towers on the ridge again.
You did not need three crystal engines the size of houses to hold a valley.
You needed men, and walls, and a good position.
You built engines like that to do something else.
He did not say so.
Soldiers did not say things.
Soldiers leaned on their pikes and waited for their names.
The men would be billeted in the houses.
Two or three to a family.
The families would feed them and give them a place to sleep, and the Ministry would pay them for it later, in coin or in tax relief.
That was the law.
Nobody behind the windows believed it, and neither did the soldiers.
The sergeants went down the lists, calling out names and houses.
“Ashford.
Reed.” Sergeant Dunmore looked up from his list and pointed with his chin at a house on the far side of the square, past the great oak, where a narrow lane ran down toward the river.
“End of that lane.
Last house before the water.
Name of Vane.”
The Vane House
The last house before the water was smaller than the ones on the square.
It stood by itself at the very end of the lane, where the cobbles stopped and turned into a path of flat stones leading down through long grass to the riverbank.
It had a slate roof and one chimney, and a door painted a deep, faded red, and two windows on each side of the door with red shutters folded back.
Behind it, Kaelen could see a vegetable garden, a small apple tree heavy with red apples, and a wooden shed with a crooked roof.
The little square of wood on the door said, THE VANES.
TEACHERS.
WE REMEMBER.
Under it, someone had carved something else, much smaller and much less neatly, in the clumsy, careful letters of a child.
AND CORIN AND ELARA.
Kaelen looked at the small carved letters for a long moment.
Then Tobin knocked.
For a while nothing happened.
Then they heard footsteps inside.
Quick and light.
A bolt slid back.
Then another bolt.
Then the red door opened a few inches, and a woman looked out at them.
She was perhaps thirty.
Not tall.
She had dark hair pulled back tight from her face and tied with a strip of blue cloth, and a long plain gray dress with the sleeves pushed up to the elbow, and an apron over it, white with flour.
Her face was thin and sharp and pale, with high cheekbones and a narrow chin.
And her eyes were dark.
Very dark, almost black.
Kaelen had seen those eyes that morning, looking up at him from the edge of a pool.
“Yes?” said the woman.
Her voice was low and very calm.
Too calm.
The kind of calm that is holding something very hard behind it, the way a dam holds a river.
“Ma’am.” Tobin took off his cap.
His carrot-colored hair sprang up in every direction.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.
We’ve been billeted on you.
Private Reed, and this is Private Ashford.
We won’t be any trouble.
We’ll sleep wherever you put us.
The shed’s fine.
We’re used to worse.”
The woman looked at Tobin.
Then at Kaelen.
Then past them both, up the lane, at the square full of gray coats.
“How long?” she said.
“Three days, ma’am.
Maybe four.”
The woman’s face did not change.
But her hand on the edge of the door tightened, just a little, until the knuckles went white.
“You’ll sleep in the kitchen,” she said.
“By the stove.
Not the shed.
The shed leaks.” She opened the door wider and stood aside.
“Wipe your boots.
I’ve just done the floor.”
The Kitchen
The kitchen was most of the house.
It was a long, low room with a floor of red tiles, worn pale in a path from the door to the stove and from the stove to the table.
The ceiling was low and crossed with thick dark beams, and from the beams there hung bunches of dried herbs, and strings of onions, and two copper pans, and a ham wrapped in cloth.
The stove was big and black and iron, set into a wide stone hearth, and it was warm.
There was bread baking in it.
Kaelen could smell it.
The smell of the bread hit him so hard in the stomach that for a moment he could not breathe.
His mother’s kitchen had smelled like this.
Every morning.
All his life.
Along one wall there was a long wooden table, scrubbed nearly white, with benches on both sides.
Along the other there were shelves.
And on the shelves there were books.
Kaelen had never seen so many books in a house that was not a lord’s.
There must have been two hundred of them.
Old ones, mostly, with cracked brown spines, and some newer ones, and stacks of loose paper tied with string, and slates, and boxes of chalk.
A big map of the valley was pinned to the wall above the shelves, hand-drawn in brown ink, with every house marked and every field named.
Beside it hung a smaller paper, covered in a child’s careful printing.
A list.
Kaelen was too far away to read it.
“Sit,” said the woman.
“You’ll want to eat.”
“We don’t want to put you to any—” Tobin began.
“You’ve been walking for days.
I can see it on your boots.
Sit.”
They sat.
They took off their packs and leaned their pikes against the wall by the door, and sat down on the bench at the long white table, and the woman put two thick slices of bread in front of each of them, still warm from the stove, and a lump of yellow butter on a plate, and two cups of milk.
Kaelen looked at the bread for a moment.
Then he ate it.
He tried to eat it slowly.
He could not.
The woman stood by the stove with her arms folded and watched them.
“My name is Maren Vane,” she said.
“I teach at the school.
The long building with the bell.
Or I did.
Nobody’s sent their children for a week.”
“Because of the war, ma’am?” said Tobin, with his mouth full.
“Because of you.”
Tobin stopped chewing.
Maren Vane looked at him.
Her face was very calm.
“Not you yourself, Private Reed.
I’m sure you’re a nice young man.
Your mother would be proud of your manners.” She looked at Kaelen.
“Both of you.
But you’re wearing that coat.
And the people who send that coat into valleys like this one do not send it to hold the valley.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
The bread in the stove crackled softly.
“The Free Valleys,” said Kaelen slowly.
“The rebels.
They’re coming over the far hills.
We’re here to—”
“Do you know what the Free Valleys are, Private Ashford?”
Kaelen opened his mouth.
Then he closed it.
Maren Vane unfolded her arms.
She walked to the shelf of books and took one down.
A thin one, with a plain brown cover.
She opened it and laid it on the table in front of him, and Kaelen looked down.
It was a list of names.
Pages and pages of them, in small careful handwriting.
Each name had a village beside it.
And a date.
And a word.
Taken.
“Those are the people from this valley and the valleys around it who could not pay the Memory Tax,” said Maren Vane quietly.
“In the last ten years.
The Ministry came for them in carts, and took their childhoods and their skills and their wedding days and their dead children’s faces, and put them into stones, and sold them in Veridia to burn in the streetlamps.” She turned a page.
Then another.
More names.
“Some of them came back.
Most of them came back empty.
Slates.
They sit by the river now and smile at the water.
They don’t know their own wives.”
She closed the book.
“The Free Valleys are what happened when the people who were left said no,” she said.
“That’s all.
They are farmers and millers and teachers who said no.
And you have come with three hundred men and three great engines on the ridge to make sure nobody ever says it again.”
Tobin had gone red.
He was looking at his plate.
Kaelen looked at the thin brown book.
At the plain cover.
He thought of the recruiting officer on his street in Veridia, with his drum and his list and his smile.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
It sounded very small in the warm kitchen.
Maren Vane looked at him for a long time.
Her dark eyes were hard and tired and something else, something Kaelen could not name.
“No,” she said at last.
“I don’t suppose you did.
That’s how they like it.”
She took the book back to the shelf.
And from the doorway at the back of the kitchen, the one that led to the rest of the house, a small serious voice said, “Mother.
That’s him.”
They all looked round.
The boy from the pool was standing in the doorway.
His sleeves were still rolled up.
His trousers were still wet at the knees.
Behind him, peering round his legs with her hands clutching the back of his shirt, was the little girl, with her two short braids sticking out like jug handles.
The boy was looking straight at Kaelen with his careful dark eyes.
“That’s the soldier who waved,” he said.