The boy’s name was Corin, and he had a great many questions.
He asked them all through the afternoon.
He asked them while Kaelen and Tobin unpacked their kit in the corner of the kitchen by the stove.
He asked them while they cleaned the mud off their boots on the back step with a stiff brush and a bucket of river water.
He asked them while his mother sent him out to the garden to pull carrots, through the open window, so that his voice came floating in over the cabbages.
He asked them the way some children throw stones into a pond, one after another, to see what kind of splash each one makes.
“How far is Veridia?”
“Eleven days’ march,” said Kaelen.
“Four days by coach.”
“Have you been on a coach?”
“Once.”
“Is it true the streetlamps are blue?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Kaelen stopped brushing his boot.
He looked at the boy through the open window.
Corin was kneeling in the dirt between two rows of carrots, with a bunch of them in one hand, their feathery green tops waving, and he was looking back at Kaelen with his serious dark eyes, waiting.
“Because they burn memories,” said Kaelen.
“The lamps.
There’s a stone in each one, a little blue stone, and it’s full of things people have forgotten.
And the lamp burns it, slowly, all night, and that’s the light.”
Corin thought about that.
His forehead creased.
“Whose memories?”
Kaelen did not answer at once.
He was thinking of the thin brown book on the shelf.
Taken.
Taken.
Taken.
“People who owe money,” he said finally.
“People who can’t pay their taxes.”
“Like Father,” said Corin.
He said it very simply.
Not sad.
Not angry.
Just a fact, the way you might say like the rain or like the river.
Then he went back to pulling carrots.
Kaelen looked at Tobin.
Tobin looked at the bucket.
The Sister
The girl’s name was Elara, and she did not ask questions.
She made announcements.
“I am four,” she announced, standing in front of Tobin with her hands on her hips, while he sat on the back step lacing his clean boot.
“And a half.”
“That’s very old,” said Tobin gravely.
“I know.
Cor is seven.
He’s very old.
He can read everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.
Even Mother’s big books with no pictures.” She leaned closer.
“I can read my name.
And cat.
And no.”
“No is a very useful word,” said Tobin.
“I know.” Elara looked at his hair.
She looked at it for a long time, with great interest.
“Why is your head on fire?”
Tobin burst out laughing.
It was the first time Kaelen had heard him really laugh in weeks, a big round warm laugh that came all the way up from his belly, and Elara looked enormously pleased with herself.
Then she turned to Kaelen.
“You,” she said.
“You were making a noise on the road.
Before.
With your mouth.
Cor heard it.
He said it was a song.”
Kaelen blinked.
He had not known they could hear him from the pool.
He had not known he had still been whistling when they came round the bend.
“It’s just a tune,” he said.
“Do it again.”
“It’s not—”
“Do it again.”
So he did.
Sitting on the back step of the Vanes’ house with a boot in one hand and a brush in the other, in the warm gold light of the late afternoon, with the river murmuring at the bottom of the garden and the apple tree dropping one red apple every now and then into the grass with a soft thump, Kaelen whistled the song about the fisherman who caught the moon in his net and had to let it go.
Elara listened with her whole face.
Her mouth fell a little open.
When he got to the high part, the part where the moon begs the fisherman to let her go home to the sky, she put both hands over her heart.
When he finished, she let out a long breath.
“Teach me,” she said.
“You can’t whistle,” said Corin from the garden.
“You’ve got a hole in your teeth.”
“The hole helps,” said Elara with great dignity.
She turned back to Kaelen and pursed her lips and blew.
Nothing came out but air and a small amount of spit.
She tried again.
Air.
She tried a third time, so hard that her face went red, and a tiny thin squeak came out through the gap in her teeth, like a mouse stepping on a reed.
She stared at Kaelen in total amazement.
“I did it,” she whispered.
“You did,” said Kaelen.
And he found that he was smiling.
Really smiling.
He could not remember the last time.
Supper
Supper was stew.
Mutton and carrots and barley, thick and brown, with the rest of the morning’s bread, and a jug of cider so cold from the river that the outside of the jug was wet.
They ate at the long white table.
Maren Vane at the end, Corin and Elara on one bench, the two soldiers on the other.
A lamp hung from the beam above the table, an old oil lamp with a smoky glass chimney, and its light was yellow and soft and flickered a little when anyone moved.
Not blue.
Kaelen noticed that.
In Veridia, even the poorest houses had a little blue gemstone lamp.
Here the light was yellow, and it smelled of oil and warm metal, and it made shadows dance on the walls.
Nobody said much at first.
Then Tobin told a story about the bakery where he had worked, and the time the baker’s cat had fallen into a vat of dough and been baked into a loaf, alive, and had come out an hour later, angry and steaming and perfectly fine, and lived another eleven years.
Kaelen had heard the story four times.
He was fairly sure it was not true.
But Elara laughed so hard that cider came out of her nose, and even Maren Vane’s mouth twitched at one corner, and Corin listened with his serious frown and at the end said, “How did it breathe?”
“Holes,” said Tobin.
“Holes in the bread.”
Corin thought about this.
Then he nodded slowly, as if it were very important information, and went back to his stew.
When the bowls were empty, Maren Vane stood up and began to clear the table, and Kaelen stood up too, and took the bowls out of her hands, and carried them to the stone sink by the window.
She looked at him in surprise.
He did not explain.
His mother had always made him wash up after supper.
His hands did it by themselves.
He pumped water into the sink.
It came out of the iron pump in cold gulps, smelling of stone and river.
He scrubbed the bowls with a brush and a cake of yellow soap, and set them on the wooden rack to drip.
Maren Vane stood beside him and dried them with a cloth, and for a while neither of them said anything.
Then she said, very quietly, so the children would not hear, “Their father was taken two years ago.”
Kaelen kept scrubbing.
“Tomas,” she said.
“He taught the older children.
Mathematics.
History.
He was—” She stopped.
Her hands were very still on the cloth.
“We couldn’t pay.
It was a bad year.
Blight in the barley.
And the tax men came, and they took the debt the way they always take it.” She set a bowl down on the shelf with great care.
“He came back in the spring.
On a cart, with four others.
He sat by the river.
He smiled at the water.
He did not know my name.
He did not know the children.
Corin brought him his history books, every day, and read them to him, and Tomas listened very politely, the way you listen to a stranger on a coach.”
She picked up another bowl.
“He walked into the river in the autumn,” she said.
“Not to die.
I don’t think he meant to die.
I think he just saw the water and wanted to touch it.
And he didn’t remember how to swim.”
The yellow lamp flickered.
Somewhere behind them, Elara was trying to teach Tobin to whistle through his teeth.
Tobin was pretending he could not do it, and she was very stern with him.
Kaelen did not know what to say.
He had a feeling there was nothing anyone could say.
So he said the only true thing he could find.
“I’m sorry.”
Maren Vane dried the bowl.
She put it on the shelf.
“Corin keeps a list,” she said.
“Did you see it?
On the wall, by the map.”
Kaelen looked over his shoulder.
The paper with the child’s careful printing was still there, pinned beside the big brown map of the valley.
“He started it after Tomas came home,” said Maren Vane.
“Go and read it.
He won’t mind.
He likes people to read it.
He says that’s what it’s for.”
The List
Kaelen dried his hands on his trousers and walked across the red tiles to the wall of books.
The paper was pinned with four iron tacks, one at each corner.
It was cheap paper, gray and soft, the kind you could buy for a copper a sheet in any market.
Someone had ruled lines on it with a pencil and a straight edge, very carefully, so that they were perfectly even.
And on the lines, in big, round, careful letters, each one pressed hard into the paper, was written:
THINGS I KNOW
My name is Corin Vane.
I live in Oakhaven in the last house before the water.
My mother is Maren.
She is a teacher.
My father was Tomas.
He was a teacher too.
He knew all the kings.
My sister is Elara.
She is four.
She has a hole in her teeth.
I can read.
I can tickle trout.
I can count to a thousand.
I am afraid of the dark.
And then, at the very bottom, in smaller letters, squeezed in under the last ruled line as if it had been added later:
If I forget, read this.
Kaelen stood very still in front of the list for a long time.
He heard a small sound behind him and turned.
Corin was standing there, a few steps away, with his hands behind his back, watching him read.
His face was very serious.
“It’s so I don’t forget,” said Corin.
“Like Father.
If they take it.”
“Yes,” said Kaelen.
“I see.”
“Mother says they can’t take things you write down.
Only things in your head.” Corin looked up at the list.
“So I wrote down the important ones.”
Kaelen looked at the last line but one.
I am afraid of the dark.
“Why did you put that one?” he said.
“That’s not something you’d want to remember, is it?”
Corin frowned.
He thought about it for a long time, the way he seemed to think about everything.
“Because it’s true,” he said at last.
“Father said history is the true things, even the bad ones.
If you only write the good ones, it’s a story.
Not history.” He paused.
“And I want to know, if I forget, so I can be brave about it.”
Kaelen did not say anything for a moment.
He was not sure he could.
“That’s very wise,” he said finally.
“Father said it.”
“Then he was very wise.”
Corin nodded, accepting this.
Then he looked at Kaelen sideways, with his careful cat-in-the-doorway look.
“Are you afraid of the dark?”
Kaelen thought about lying.
He did not.
“Sometimes,” he said.
“On the march.
When we camp in the open, and there’s no moon, and you can’t see anything at all.
And you can hear the other army somewhere out there, but you don’t know where.” He shrugged.
“Yes.
Sometimes.”
“What do you do?”
“I whistle,” said Kaelen.
Corin’s eyes went wide.
“That’s why?”
“That’s why.” Kaelen crouched down, so that his face was level with the boy’s.
“My mother taught me.
When I was smaller than you.
She said the dark is just the daytime with its eyes shut.
Everything that’s there in the day is still there.
The table.
The door.
The people who love you.
They didn’t go anywhere.
You just can’t see them for a while.” He smiled a little.
“So you whistle.
So the dark knows you’re there.
And so you know you’re there too.”
Corin looked at him for a long, long time.
Then he turned and walked to the shelf under the list, and took a stub of pencil from a jar, and stood on his toes, and in the narrow space under the last line, under If I forget, read this, he wrote, slowly, pressing hard:
The dark is the day with its eyes shut.
He stepped back and looked at it.
Then he looked at Kaelen.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Your whole name.
Not Ash.”
“Kaelen.
Kaelen Ashford.”
Corin stood on his toes again.
Very carefully, in even smaller letters, so that they would fit, he wrote beside the new line: (Kaelen said.)
“So I know who told me,” he explained.
And from the long white table behind them, triumphant, came a tiny thin squeak, like a mouse stepping on a reed, and then Elara’s voice, shrieking with joy:
“Mother!
Mother, the fire-head soldier can’t do it and I can!”
The Carriages
The Inquisitor-General arrived the next day, a little after noon, and he arrived the way weather arrives.
Kaelen was on watch at the bridge when the carriages came.
He heard them before he saw them, a deep steady rumble coming down the hill road, much heavier than the column’s boots had been.
Then they came round the last bend out of the black pines, and the soldiers on the bridge stopped talking.
There were six of them.
Six black carriages, long and low and shining, each one pulled by four black horses with black plumes nodding on their heads.
The wheels were tall and thin, painted black, with silver rims that flashed in the sun.
The doors were painted with the Ministry’s sign in silver, the open book and the closed eye, and the windows were dark glass, so dark that you could not see inside, only your own face looking back at you, small and pale.
Behind the carriages came wagons.
Big, square, covered wagons, pulled by oxen, with iron-bound wheels that left deep cuts in the wet road.
Their sides were wood, painted gray.
And their backs were not open, like ordinary wagons.
They had doors.
Heavy wooden doors, with iron bars across them, and small square windows high up, barred too.
Kaelen counted the wagons as they rolled past him onto the bridge.
Twelve.
Then four more, painted black instead of gray, smaller and lighter, with no windows at all.
Silver letters ran along their sides.
OBLIVION BANK.
INTAKE.
His mouth had gone dry.
“What are the wagons for?” said the soldier next to him.
A young one, younger even than Kaelen, called Fenn or Benn.
Kaelen could not remember.
“Supplies,” said Kaelen.
He did not believe it.
He did not think the young soldier believed it either.
The Inquisitor-General
The carriages stopped in the square under the great oak, in a long black line, and the doors opened, and the people came out.
Kaelen had been relieved from the bridge by then.
He was standing with the rest of his company along the north side of the square, in two straight gray rows, at attention, with his pike held upright at his side.
Sergeant Dunmore was at the end of the row.
The young captain with clean boots was in front of them, with his chin up and his back very straight and a fine shine of sweat on his upper lip.
The first person out of the first carriage was a man of about thirty-five.
He was tall and slim, and he moved very easily, the way water moves.
He wore a long coat of dark gray wool, very plain, with no gold on it at all, and no medals, and no sword.
His hair was black at the top, but it had gone silver at the sides, early, in two clean bright wings above his ears, and it made him look both young and old at once.
His face was long and pale and calm, with a straight nose and thin lips, and his eyes were a soft, clear gray, like rain on a window.
He did not look like a general.
He looked like a schoolteacher.
Or a doctor.
Someone who would sit by your bed when you were ill and hold your hand and tell you in a quiet, kind voice exactly what was wrong with you.
He stood for a moment on the carriage step and looked around the square.
At the gray stone houses.
At the shut windows.
At the old oak and its hundreds of little wooden birds turning in the wind.
At the carved square of wood on the nearest door.
WE REMEMBER.
He smiled.
It was a sad, gentle smile, as if he had been told a small joke that was not quite funny.
“Inquisitor-General Valerius,” breathed the soldier beside Kaelen.
“That’s him.”
Kaelen had heard the name.
Everyone had.
Valerius was the youngest Inquisitor-General the Ministry had ever had.
People said he had been born in the slums of the Lower Docks and had climbed all the way to the Ministry Council on nothing but his brain.
People said he had never lost an argument.
People said he had never burned a single one of his own memories, not once, in his whole life, because he did not need to.
Because he always had someone else’s.
Valerius stepped down from the carriage.
The young captain marched forward and saluted so hard that his heels cracked together like a pistol shot.
“Inquisitor-General, sir.
The Third Field Company is present and ready, sir.”
“Thank you, Captain.” Valerius’s voice was quiet and warm and carried right across the square without his seeming to raise it at all.
“Stand them easy, please.
They’ve walked a long way.” He looked along the rows of gray coats.
His soft gray eyes moved from face to face, and for a moment they rested on Kaelen’s, and Kaelen felt, absurdly, that he had been seen.
Really seen.
Weighed, and understood, and forgiven for something he did not know he had done.
Then the gray eyes moved on.
“Stand easy,” called the captain, and the rows relaxed.
The Others
The others came out of the carriages one at a time.
From the second carriage came a young man in the dark blue coat of a Ministry Councillor’s aide, with a gold chain across his chest.
He was perhaps twenty-eight, broad-shouldered and fair-haired, with a square, open, handsome face and a beard trimmed very short.
He looked around the square the way Valerius had, but without the smile.
He looked at the shut windows for a long time, and his jaw was tight.
“Who’s that?” murmured Tobin.
“Thorne,” said Sergeant Dunmore, without moving his lips.
“Aurelian Thorne.
Lord Thorne’s eldest.
Council’s sent him to watch.
Write it all down.
Make sure it’s done by the book.” He snorted very softly through his gray mustache.
“Whose book, they didn’t say.”
From the third carriage came a man in a long brown leather coat, with a wide leather satchel slung across his body and a pair of round spectacles pushed up on top of his head.
He was older than the others, perhaps forty, with a thin, tired, clever face and gray stubble on his cheeks, and his fingers were stained with something dark blue right up to the knuckles.
He carried a long thin case of polished wood under one arm, the kind a musician carries a flute in.
He did not look around the square at all.
He looked at the ground, and at his boots, and at the black carriage wheels, as if he were very tired and wanted to go home.
“Harvester,” said Dunmore, very quietly.
“Ministry Harvester.
Hale, his name is.
Linus Hale.
He’s the one who collects the Ash.”
“The what?”
“Ash.
What’s left of a mage when he dies with spells still in him.
Like smoke.
Hale catches it in jars.” Dunmore’s walnut face did not move.
“If there’s a lot of dying, they bring a harvester.”
Kaelen felt the skin on the back of his neck go cold again, the way it had when he first saw the towers on the ridge.
And from the fourth carriage came a boy.
He was perhaps seventeen.
He was slim and very pale, with hair so fair it was almost white, cut short and neat.
He wore the gray uniform of an Inquisitor cadet, with its white collar and its silver buttons, and it fit him perfectly, as if it had been made for him that morning.
He was very handsome, in a cold, clean, careful way, like a statue of a boy.
And he was eating a sweet.
He was unwrapping it as he stepped down from the carriage.
A little round sweet in a twist of red paper.
He did not look at the square, or the houses, or the oak.
He looked at the sweet.
He unwrapped it slowly and carefully, smoothing out the red paper between his fingers, and put the sweet in his mouth, and folded the paper into a tiny neat square and put it in his pocket.
Then he looked up.
He looked straight at the shut windows of the houses around the square.
One after another.
Slowly.
With a small, pleased, interested smile, as if he were looking at a shelf of jars in a sweetshop and deciding which one to open first.
“And that,” said Sergeant Dunmore, so quietly that Kaelen almost did not hear him, “is young Kross.
Silas Kross.
Valerius’s pet.” He was quiet for a moment.
“Stay away from that one, lads.
Whatever happens.
Stay well away.”
The Registration
That afternoon, the captain with clean boots stood on the edge of the well and read out an order.
He read it from a long white paper with a silver seal at the bottom, in a loud clear voice, so that everyone behind the shut windows could hear.
It said that by order of the Ministry of Records and the Oblivion Bank, all children of the village of Oakhaven under the age of fourteen were to be brought to the schoolhouse before sunset, to be registered.
Registered.
It was a dull, flat, ordinary word.
A paperwork word.
The kind of word that meant your name was being written in a book.
Nobody came.
The captain read the order again an hour later.
Still nobody came.
The windows stayed shut.
The doors stayed shut.
The little wooden birds turned in the oak.
Somewhere a cow lowed in a field, and somewhere else a baby was crying, high and thin, and then it stopped very suddenly, as if a hand had been put over its mouth.
Then the soldiers were sent to knock on the doors.
Kaelen was sent with Tobin and four others to the houses along the river lane.
He knocked on the door of the house with the painted kettle, the Millers’ house, and an old man opened it, the same old man who had been sitting on the bench the morning before.
He had white hair and a white beard and hands that shook.
He looked at Kaelen’s gray coat and the pike in his hand, and then past Kaelen at the square, at the long black carriages and the barred gray wagons, and his old face crumpled up like paper.
“Please,” he said.
“Please.
There’s only my granddaughter.
She’s six.
She’s all that’s left.
Please.”
Kaelen opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
Behind him, the soldier who might have been called Fenn said, “It’s just registration, grandfather.
Just names in a book.
They’ll bring her straight back.”
The old man looked at him.
He did not say anything.
He did not need to.
Then he turned and went back into the dark house, and came out a minute later holding the hand of a small girl in a blue dress, with brown curls and a rag doll of the old valley kind clutched against her chest.
It was made of brown sacking, with one black button eye and a little dress of faded red cloth.
The little girl looked up at Kaelen.
She was not crying.
She was too frightened to cry.
Kaelen took her small hand.
It was very cold.
He walked her up the lane to the square, and across the square, past the black carriages, to the long stone schoolhouse on its low rise with its silent bell.
He did not look at her face.
He could not.
The Glass
The schoolhouse was one long room, with a high ceiling and tall windows down both sides, so that the late afternoon light poured in and lay across the floor in long gold bars.
There were wooden benches in rows, and a big black slate on the wall at the front, with the day’s lesson still half rubbed out on it.
The rivers of Vaelen, it said, and under it, a list of names.
The children had been learning geography.
The benches had been pushed back against the walls.
In the middle of the room, there was a table.
On the table there was a sheet of glass.
It was a big sheet, as big as a door, laid flat on a frame of black iron.
It was perfectly clear, so clear that at first Kaelen thought it was empty air.
Then the light moved on it, and he saw that it was thick, as thick as his hand, and that deep inside it, very faint, there were lines.
Thin, fine silver lines, like the veins of a leaf, running all through the glass in patterns too small and too complicated to follow.
Linus Hale stood beside the table, with his round spectacles pulled down onto his nose now and his blue-stained fingers resting on the edge of the glass.
Silas Kross sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk at the front of the room, swinging one foot, unwrapping another sweet.
Aurelian Thorne stood by the window with a leather-bound book open in his hands and a pen, writing.
And Valerius stood at the end of the table, with his hands folded behind his back, watching the children come in with his calm, soft, rain-gray eyes.
There were perhaps sixty of them, by the end.
All ages.
Babies carried in their mothers’ arms, because the mothers had refused to let go of them, and the soldiers had not been ordered to make them.
Little ones of three and four.
Bigger ones of ten and twelve, standing very straight, trying to look brave for the little ones.
They stood in a long line down the side of the room, against the wall, under the tall windows, in the long bars of gold light.
Kaelen stood by the door with his pike.
It was his job to make sure nobody left.
One by one, the children were brought to the table.
It did not hurt them.
Kaelen saw that, and was so glad of it that his knees nearly gave way.
Hale took each child’s hand, gently, and pressed it flat on the glass for a moment, and took it away again.
That was all.
Then he looked down into the glass, through his round spectacles, and said a word, and Aurelian Thorne wrote the word in his book.
Mostly the word was clear.
The silver lines in the glass did nothing.
They stayed faint and still.
Clear, said Hale, and Thorne wrote it down, and the child was taken back to stand with its mother, and the next one came.
Clear.
Clear.
Clear.
Then Hale took the hand of a boy of nine, a big, freckled, red-cheeked boy, the miller’s son, and pressed it flat on the glass.
And the silver lines lit up.
Not brightly.
Just a little.
A faint blue glow ran through them, spreading out from under the boy’s palm like ink in water, a few inches, and then faded.
Hale looked at it for a long moment.
Then he said, very quietly, “Trace.”
Aurelian Thorne’s pen stopped.
Valerius said nothing.
But he moved one hand, just slightly, behind his back.
And a soldier came forward and took the freckled boy by the shoulder, not roughly, and walked him to the other side of the room, away from the line, away from the mothers, to stand alone by the black slate with The rivers of Vaelen on it.
The boy’s mother made a sound.
Just one.
Like a door closing.
Clear.
Clear.
Trace.
A girl of eleven.
Clear.
Clear.
Clear.
Trace.
Two little brothers, twins.
Clear.
By the time the light outside had begun to turn from gold to red, there were seven children standing by the black slate.
And then Maren Vane came through the schoolhouse door, holding Corin’s hand on one side and Elara’s on the other, with her chin up and her dark eyes like stones.
She stopped in the doorway.
Right next to Kaelen.
She did not look at him.
But he saw her hand tighten on Corin’s, so hard the boy winced.
“Ah,” said Valerius softly, from the end of the table.
“Mistress Vane.
The teacher.
I wondered when you would come.”
He smiled at her.
Gently.
Kindly.
“Bring them here, please,” he said.
“Both of them.”