Nobody Leaves

He was out of bed before he had decided to be. He didn’t look at the pillow; he knew what he’d see there. He found the basin in the dark and scrubbed until the water ran clean between his fingers, then stood with his hands on the rim, dripping, waiting for his head to stop ringing. It didn’t. He was still in his good shirt, and from the state of it, for the last time.

Ferra’s lamp sat on the sill where he had left it, smelling of the market road. He turned the wick up a finger’s width and went down. At the bottom, Dareth sat in his chair, chin on his chest, coat buttoned to the throat, the cup by his boot where it had been. In the low light from the kitchen he looked older than he had at breakfast, and very tired. He knew what Dareth would say. Dreams say all sorts of things. But this was no dream. His actual dreams never bloodied a pillow.

He went past the chair and out through the house door, and he didn’t let it latch behind him.

Hushvault at night was a different place. The ridge lamps had been turned down to a glow at every turning, and between them the passage ran dark. The cold had come in since starset; he could feel it in the stone, and his breath showed in the lamplight. He had walked this way every day of his life, half asleep, late, with chalk on his hands, and he had never noticed how loud his own boots were.

He passed Dunmarrow’s door, and Ravelle’s, and Corriden’s, each one shut and quiet. Nobody else was up. Every cellarer in Hushvault was sleeping off the Opening, and every apprentice with them. Wendel was asleep too, he told himself. Wendel had taken his buyers down and poured for them until the jug was empty, and then he would have poured from the casks. Somewhere in the small hours he had sat back on a chair, too full of wine to do anything else, and fallen asleep with his mouth open. That was why nobody had come back up for the cups. That was all the cups meant, surely.

He had nearly believed it by the time he reached Morwal’s door.

It was marked like the others, Morwal’s mark cut into the stone above it. No light showed beneath. He set the lamp down and put his ear to the wood and heard nothing: no snoring, no tick of a cooling lamp, nothing at all.

He knocked. The sound went down the passage and didn’t come back. He knocked harder, with the side of his fist. “Wendel,” he said, not loudly. Then, louder, “Carys.”

Nothing.

He reached for the latch, and his hand stopped short of it. He knew it. He had never touched this door in all his years here, never had a reason to, but he knew the curve of that latch and the place where hands had worn the iron down. He had seen a hand reach for it, a brown braid swing forward, and a glove close over her fingers.

He made himself take hold of it. The iron was cold. It didn’t give.

He could look. The thought came quietly, the way the woman in the vines had come, and the green thing folded inside the cutting. He wouldn’t have to reach. He would only have to stand here and let the door show him what was on the other side, the way everything else did.

Last time, something had looked back. Whatever it was might still be there, waiting for him to open himself up again. He kept his hand on the latch. There was nothing for it: he had to look.

It wasn’t like the vision. There was no pain behind his eyes or in his ears. The door simply stopped being in the way. Inside, it was dark and smelled of wine. A cask sat pale in the black, with cups on it, more than two. And on the floor just inside, close enough to touch if the wood hadn’t been between them, a braid lying across the stone, and a hand beside it, fingers curled toward the latch.

It didn’t move. He looked for her face and couldn’t find it, only the line of a shoulder and the braid lying where it had fallen. He made himself look at the hand again. The fingers were bent the way his own were when he fell asleep on his arm. Move, he thought at it. Just one finger.

But nothing did. And the longer he stood there, open, the more he felt that something might be watching. He tore himself away, so hard that his shoulder struck the far wall.

He stood there with his heart hammering. She might only be hurt. She might have been lying there all night, waiting for someone to come. He beat on the door one last time.

“Carys, please. It’s Ansel.” But no reply came.

He couldn’t open it. Not on his own.

He snatched up Ferra’s lamp and ran back, the light jumping along the walls, and he didn’t care anymore how loud he was. He came through the house door and didn’t stop.

Dareth’s eyes opened before Ansel’s hand reached his shoulder.

“I need you to open a door,” Ansel said.

* * *

Dareth didn’t ask what had happened. He looked at Ansel’s face, then at the lamp shaking in his hands, and got up out of the chair as though he had never been asleep in it.

“Whose?”

“Morwal’s.” It came out too fast. “Carys is on the floor inside. She isn’t moving. Wendel won’t answer, and it’s locked.”

Dareth was already at the house door. “How do you know she’s on the floor?”

Ansel had known he would ask. He had had the whole way back to think of an answer, and he hadn’t found one that wasn’t true.

“I saw it. Tonight, after I went up.” Then, before Dareth could say it: “I didn’t reach. It came on its own. Her cask, and cups, and a hand on Morwal’s latch.” He swallowed. “And just now I looked. Through the door.”

Dareth stopped with his hand on the frame. He didn’t turn around. For a moment he didn’t do anything at all, and Ansel, who had been braced for anger, found he would rather have had it. Then Dareth lifted his head and looked up the dark stairwell, as though listening for something on the floor above.

“How long?”

“Not long. I stopped.”

Dareth breathed out. Then he came back into the kitchen, reached up to the shelf over the hearth where the spare wicks and the tally chalk were kept, and felt along the back of it. Ansel had taken chalk from that shelf every morning of his life. Dareth’s hand came down with a key on a loop of old cord, dark with age, and it went into his coat before Ansel could get a proper look at it.

“Show me.”

They went fast. Dareth took no lamp of his own and didn’t seem to need Ansel’s; he kept half a step ahead of it, and he didn’t look at any of the doors they passed. Ansel ran to keep up, and the light swung and jumped between them. At Morwal’s door Dareth didn’t knock. He took out the key and fitted it to the lock under the latch, and it turned on the first try, smoothly, as though it knew the way.

Ansel stared at it. “Where did you get that?”

“Wendel gave it to me.” Dareth didn’t look at him. “In case.”

In case of what, Ansel didn’t ask.

The door swung in a hand’s width and stopped against something.

Dareth looked down. Then he turned sideways and went through the gap, careful where he put his feet, and Ansel followed with the lamp.

She was lying where he had seen her. The light found the braid first, then the shoulder, then the hand, fingers still curled toward the latch. Her face was turned to the stone. Under her, the floor was darker than it should have been, and the lamp made it black.

Ansel knelt. He hadn’t decided to; his knees simply went. He touched the back of her hand. It was colder than the latch had been.

All the way back to Dareth and all the way here again, he had held on to it: she might only be hurt. He let go of it now. There was nothing else to do with it.

He lifted the lamp. Wendel sat at the far end of the rack with his back against a cask cradle, his legs out in front of him, his chin on his chest and his mouth a little open, exactly the way Ansel had pictured him all down the passage. For one hopeful moment Ansel waited for him to snore. Then the light reached the front of his coat. It was soaked through, and Ansel stopped waiting.

Nearer, on the head of the cask by the door, stood the cups. Five of them. Under the rings they had left, Ansel could make out a child’s chalk mark, small and crooked, made by a hand that could barely reach. Carys had laid her palm beside it in the court not a day ago and told a stranger she had made it herself.

Two of the cups were empty, a red stain dried in the bottom of each. The other three were full to the brim and hadn’t been touched.

Three. Wendel had come for four and found three.

Ansel thought of the man on the road setting his full cup down on the trestle and never picking it up again. His stomach turned over, and he held the lamp very still so it wouldn’t show.

Behind him, Dareth had knelt by Carys. He laid two fingers against her neck, though there could be no need, and left them there. Then he lifted her braid off the stone and laid it straight down her back, the way she always wore it, and Ansel saw her face. Her eyes were open. Her mouth was open too, a little, as though she had been about to call down the passage for someone, and had been very sure they would come.

After that he didn’t move at all. Dareth had always been pleasant to her, the same careful, smiling pleasant he gave Wendel, and Ansel had been sure it went no deeper than that. He had been sure about Wendel, too, until the key. Ansel waited for him to get up. He took a long time.

“If I’d come when I saw it,” Ansel said. His voice sounded wrong in the gallery, too loud. “If I’d woken you then.”

“She’s cold, Ansel.” Dareth didn’t look up. “She’s been gone for hours. Whatever you saw, it came late.”

“Then what good was it?”

Dareth didn’t answer that. He got to his feet slowly, like a much older man, and came past Ansel to the cask by the door. He stood over the cups. He looked at the three full ones for a long time, and then up the gallery at Wendel, and then back at the door they had come in by, and his hand went to the top button of his coat and found it already done.

Ansel had seen Dareth tired, and angry, and once or twice sad. He had never seen him afraid. He knew it the moment he saw it.

“Listen to me,” Dareth said. “Very carefully. What you saw tonight, you didn’t see it. Not last night, not the door. Not to the magistrate, not to the constables, not to Ferra. Not to anyone.”

“They’ll ask me why I came here.”

“Yes,” Dareth said.

Ansel waited for the rest. There wasn’t any.

“Don’t touch anything else.”

He hadn’t touched anything but her hand. He looked down at his own and found it clean, and didn’t know why that should make it worse.

“Who would do this?” It came out of him before he could stop it. “They were buyers. Hessary’s buyers. Why would buyers…”

“Let the magistrate find that out.” Dareth was already at the door.

“Dareth.”

He hadn’t meant to tell anyone. It had seemed like nothing in the court, a thing to blame on the wine. It didn’t seem like nothing now.

“The one in the court,” he said. “The one who asked Carys about her mark. I looked at him. I only wanted to know what he thought of her cask.” His mouth had gone dry. “There was nothing there. Not a lie, not anything. There was no way in.”

Dareth had stopped with his back to him.

“I thought it was the wine,” Ansel said.

When Dareth turned around, his face had gone pleasant and careful, the face he kept for Wendel, and Ansel understood that this time it was for him.

“Then we have less time than I thought,” he said, mostly to himself. And then, to Ansel: “Come. We do this the way anyone would.”

He pulled Morwal’s door behind them and went three doors down the passage and beat on Corriden’s with the flat of his hand.

It took a long time to open. Corriden’s cellarer was an old man with his hair standing up and a blanket around his shoulders, and he looked at Dareth, and then at Ansel, and then at Ansel’s face, and stopped being angry. Dareth said four words to him that Ansel didn’t hear. The old man turned and shouted for his apprentice. The boy came stumbling out half dressed, with one boot in his hand. “Constables,” the old man told him. “Run.” The boy ran.

The old man didn’t go back inside. He came and stood with them by Morwal’s door, with his blanket held shut at his throat, and none of them said anything. Somewhere above them, first bell rang out across the ridge. For once, Ansel was up to hear it.

After that there was no keeping it. Doors opened along the passage, Ravelle’s and Dunmarrow’s and doors farther down that Ansel only knew by their marks, the way they opened every morning, and people came out yawning into a day that should have been like any other. They saw Dareth standing in front of Morwal’s door, and old Corriden in his blanket, and they stopped. Then they came closer, in twos and threes, talking low. Nobody went near the door.

Old Corriden said something to the nearest of them, low, and it went down the passage from there, door to door. Someone said Carys’s name, just the name, as a question. A woman from Ravelle’s put her hand over her mouth. One of the Dunmarrow apprentices sat down on the step outside his own door as though his legs had decided it for him, and stayed there.

Ansel stood where Dareth had put him, with his back to the stone and Ferra’s lamp hanging from his hand, and let the passage fill up around him.

The constables came first, the same two who had been drinking at Selvane’s share casks until Maudry sent them off. One of them still smelled of it. They went in at Morwal’s door together and were a long time coming out, and when they did, the younger one stood in front of it with his arms folded and his face the color of the stone, and nobody tried to look in again.

The magistrate came a little after, with a coat over her nightclothes and her hair down her back in a gray plait. She was the only person in the passage who didn’t look as though she had just woken up. In the court her voice had carried to the galleries without trying. Here she kept it low, and the passage went quiet around her to hear it.

She went in alone. When she came out, she came straight to Ansel.

“You found them.”

“Yes.”

She looked at him, at the good shirt he had slept in and Ferra’s lamp in his hand, and her eyes stopped at his collar.

“There’s blood on your shirt.”

He looked down. He had forgotten it. It ran down the front from the collar in a long brown stain, dried stiff where his chin had pressed it into the pillow. Everyone near enough could see it. He felt them seeing it. A panic rose quickly in his chest.

“It’s mine,” he said, too fast, too loud. His hand went to it as though he could cover it. “It’s mine. My nose. In the night. It does that, it’s always done that…”

He made himself stop.

“Show me your hands.”

He held them out. They were clean; he had scrubbed them at the basin until the water ran clear, and he had touched nothing in the gallery but Carys’s hand. The magistrate looked at them, and then at his collar again, where the blood had dried brown, and he hoped that she was reading the difference between old blood and new.

She let his hands go.

“No apprentice on the Steps is up at first bell the morning after an Opening,” she said. “Most of them don’t see second. What were you doing at Wendel’s door?”

He could tell her. I saw it. Then she would ask how, and he had no answer for that. Not to anyone, Dareth had said, and he was standing three paces off. Ansel kept his eyes on the magistrate and said nothing.

He made himself go back. Ferra’s step. The climb, the lamps on the market road going out a post at a time. The first switchback.

“Morwal’s stall,” he heard himself say. “When I came up last night. It was dark, and the jug was still on the trestle, and the cups had frozen to the wood. Nobody had come back for them. Wendel doesn’t leave a jug.” He swallowed. “I kept thinking about it. So I came to see. Nobody answered, and I went for Dareth.”

“Wendel doesn’t leave a jug,” the magistrate said slowly. She seemed to turn it over. “No. He doesn’t.”

“He took Hessary’s buyers down,” Ansel said. “After the dancing. Carys said all four wanted to see the gallery, but Wendel only found three.” He thought of the cups on her cask. “Three of the cups weren’t touched.”

“I counted them.” She turned her head without taking her eyes off him. “Somebody find Hessary’s factor.”

Every word of it had been true. He had only left out why. It had come easier than no and nothing ever had, and he didn’t like that at all. The magistrate looked at him a moment longer. Then she turned to Dareth.

“Cellarer.”

“Magistrate.”

“The door was locked.”

“It was.”

“And you had a key to it.”

“Wendel gave it to me.”

“When?”

“Years ago.”

“In case of what?”

“He didn’t say,” Dareth said. “I didn’t ask.”

“No. You wouldn’t have.” She hadn’t raised her voice, but the people nearest had stopped pretending not to listen. “I’ve read the register at every one of your Openings, cellarer, and in all those years I don’t believe you’ve told me a single thing I didn’t have to ask you for first.”

“You’ve never had to ask very hard.”

Something went across her face and was gone. “Two people dead behind a locked door,” she said, “and a key to it in your coat.”

The passage had gone very quiet. Ansel saw the older constable shift his feet and move, not quite casually, to stand at Dareth’s shoulder. His own heart was going so hard he thought she must hear it.

Dareth didn’t move at all. “If I’d done this, magistrate,” he said, “I wouldn’t have brought my apprentice to find it.”

“No,” she said. “You’d have sent him to find it on his own.”

Ansel opened his mouth, and didn’t know what was going to come out of it, and never found out. There was a stir at the end of the passage, and Corriden’s boy came pushing back through the crowd with a man Ansel half knew: Hessary’s factor, who came to the Steps every harvest and bought every harvest and had never, in Ansel’s memory, been seen without his hat. He had no hat now. His coat was on over his nightshirt, buttoned wrong.

“They weren’t ours,” he said, before anyone had asked him anything. “Magistrate. I told him. Those four weren’t ours.”

“Say that again.”

“Hessary sent nobody to the Steps this year. Nobody but me.” He was out of breath, and his voice cracked on it. “I told Wendel so myself, last night, at his stall. I thought someone was having him on. He laughed. He said he’d ask them about it himself.”

It went down the passage behind him faster than he could have walked it. Hessary sent nobody. He told Wendel. Wendel knew. Ansel heard it pass from mouth to mouth, and grow a little at each one, and come back to him from the far end of the passage as something nobody there had seen.

The magistrate had turned away from Dareth. Ansel didn’t think she had forgotten him. She had only found something larger to look at.

“Four men in new coats,” she said, and nobody needed to ask which. She spoke to the older constable without looking at him. “Find them. And send to the port. Nothing lifts from the basin until I say so. Nothing.”

At the back of the crowd, by Ravelle’s door, stood Tolliver.

Ansel didn’t know how long he had been there. He wore his purple coat buttoned for once, and he was standing among the Ravelle people as though he had been one of them all his life. When the factor spoke, every face in the passage had moved. Tolliver’s hadn’t. He looked across the passage at Dareth. Dareth looked back. Neither of them did anything else.

The magistrate raised her voice then, for the first time, and it carried the way it had in the court, to the end of the passage and around the turning and up the stair.

“Nobody leaves the Steps,” she said, “until I’ve found them.”

When Ansel looked for Tolliver again, the purple coat was gone.

* * *

The passage emptied the way it had filled, a door at a time. The older constable went up toward the gate at a run. Someone went for a cart, and someone else for sheets. The magistrate stayed by Morwal’s door, and when Dareth turned Ansel toward home with a hand on his shoulder, she spoke without looking around.

“Don’t go far, cellarer.”

“I never do,” Dareth said.

They had gone perhaps thirty paces when Maudry caught them up from behind, pushing through the last of the crowd in her road boots and an old coat with frost still on the shoulders. Ansel had never once seen her inside Hushvault. She belonged to the terraces and she looked wrong between the gallery doors, too big for them.

She came around in front of him and stopped. Her eyes went to his collar, and something happened in her face that he couldn’t read.

“Ansel,” she said. That was all.

Then she fell in beside Dareth, a few steps ahead, and they walked on together with their heads bent close. Ansel came behind with Ferra’s lamp. He caught only pieces.

“…today,” Maudry said.

“The port’s held.”

“I know.”

They talked the way people talk who have done it many times, with no beginnings, picking things up in the middle. Last night he had watched a look go down the road from the berthmaster to Tolliver to Maudry to Ruthe to Dareth, and told himself it was nothing. He watched the backs of their heads now and couldn’t tell himself anything at all.

He let them draw ahead.

He hadn’t liked Carys. There was no use pretending otherwise now, when it couldn’t matter to anyone. For as long as he had known her she had made a contest of being better than him, and she had usually won, and she had let him know it. He had spent half his life waiting for her to lose. Now she had, and there was nothing in him but a cold, sick weight that he didn’t know where to put. Tears pricked at the edges of his eyes, and it surprised him. She hadn’t deserved that.

He kept seeing her behind Morwal’s trestle with the jug, filling Ferra’s cup to the brim even after Ferra had been rude to her. Nobody’s asked to see yours. That was the last thing she had said to him. He had answered her kindly for once, and she had looked at him as though she were checking for the joke, and been almost put out when she didn’t find one. He had been pleased with himself about that. He had thought there would be time to be kinder still. There had always been time, with Carys. They had grown up in the same passage.

The last he had seen of her, she was following Wendel’s lamp up the road with the cups hooked on her fingers and the three men in new coats walking ahead of her, and the gate had taken her.

She had been wrong about one thing, though. Somebody had asked about his. In the court, one of the four had wanted to hear all about her first mark, and her whole face had changed when she told him. Then on the road, the same man had stood across the trestle from Ansel and talked about the cutting, and twenty-one years, and what a long time that was to keep something.

Two apprentices on the Steps had opened twenty-one-year casks this harvest. Carys, and him.

Then it came all at once, and it burned through him. They hadn’t come for Morwal’s wine. Hessary hadn’t sent them. Three cups poured, and not one of them touched; they hadn’t gone down there to drink. They had come for one of the two of them.

And Dareth had known. Not who, maybe, or why, but enough. Enough to drag his chair from the table to the foot of the stairs last night and sit up in it with his coat buttoned to the throat, between the house door and the room where Ansel slept. Enough to look up the stairwell before anything else, when Ansel told him what he had seen. Enough to turn around in the gallery with the face he kept for Wendel and say less time than I thought.

It might not even be true. He didn’t know why anyone would want either of them. But the thought had come, and it wouldn’t go: Carys had died in his place. Or she had died because of him. He couldn’t tell which was worse, and he thought he might never be able to.

Four men in new coats. Three had gone down with Wendel. The fourth hadn’t.

The cup on the wall at the bend. Full, with frost across the wine. Not Ferra’s; she had set hers down back by the brazier, before they ever reached the lift keeper’s gate. He had passed it on his way back up, alone, and hadn’t given it a thought. Somebody had set it down there and never come back for it, at the very top of the road down to the lower terraces, and it had sat there long enough to freeze.

At the next bend, going down with Ferra, the back of his neck had prickled, and he had looked back up the road and seen nothing, and blamed the drum.

He didn’t come for the wine, Ferra had said.

And at the brazier, with half the Steps listening, she had told them all where he slept. She had made them laugh with it.

Ferra, who knew him better than anyone alive but Dareth. Who lived alone at the end of a lane at the bottom of the Steps. And it was past first bell.

He didn’t decide to run. He was simply running, back the way they had come, against the people going home, past Corriden’s door and old Corriden in his blanket, past Morwal’s door and the younger constable in front of it, who put out an arm and missed.

“Ansel!”

Dareth’s voice, once, behind him. He didn’t stop.

He went up the passage past the stave yard and the cooperages and out through the gate, and the cold took hold of him so hard it was like running into a wall.

There was no morning to speak of, and there would be none for a long while. The long dark had come with the Opening, and only Oranth lit the Steps, hanging huge and banded over the basin, laying its cold light on everything. The lamps were out on every post. The banners hung stiff with frost. The trestles stood bare along the switchbacks, and the frost had furred every one of them, and the road was empty all the way down except for one small figure far below, running for the port: the older constable.

He ran. Ferra’s lamp swung and guttered in his hand, and he let it.

Whatever you saw, it came late. He had been late all his life, to first bell, to the lift, to everything, and it had never cost anyone more than Dareth’s patience and Ferra’s teasing. She was most likely asleep behind a shut door, and he was probably wrong about all of it. He wasn’t going to be late finding out.

Morwal’s stall went past on the first switchback, dark, the jug still on the trestle and the cups still frozen beside it. He didn’t slow. Somewhere far behind and above him he heard boots on the road, two pairs, one heavier than the other, and didn’t look back.

At the bend, the cup was still on the wall.

The frost had grown over it in the night until the wine was hidden, and it sat there white and full at the top of the road down, exactly where a man would stand to watch two people go down the switchbacks with a lamp between them, and wait to see which way they turned.

This time he saw it.

Then he was past it and going down, the lower terraces opening below him, the frost walls silver and the machine rows still and the pickers’ houses standing in their row along the lowest terrace, dark in every window.

Hers was at the end, where the lane ran out against the vines.

Her door was standing open.

* * *

The lamp went in ahead of him.

Frost had been kicked off the step in a long smear, and there was something dark on the stone where it had been. The light found it and moved on. Inside, a man lay on the floor against the door frame with his legs out across the boards, as though he had fallen there and meant to get up again. He wore a coat so new Ansel could see the creases where it had been folded. The front of it had gone black.

It was the face from the road, pleasant and forgettable. The man’s eyes moved when the light touched them, and found Ansel, and stayed. His breath came slow and wet, with a catch at the bottom of each one. Ansel stepped over his legs. He didn’t decide to. He didn’t look down again.

Ferra was by the hearth. She sat on the floor with her back to the wall and her legs out in front of her. The hearth behind her was cold. Her picker’s knife lay in her lap, its short hooked blade red to the handle. One of her hands sat at her side as if she had put it down there and forgotten it. The other had been pressed low against her stomach. It had left a print on her shirt, and the shirt under it was wet through.

Her neck was the worst of it. In the lamplight he could see the marks along her jaw and under it, already coming up purple, one for each finger.

“Ferra.”

Her eyes came open. It took them a moment to find him, and when they did, something in her face let go.

“He said you sent him.” It wasn’t her voice. It was a scrape of a thing, and it hurt him to hear it. “Said there was trouble. At Hushvault.”

“I didn’t send anyone.”

“I know.” She swallowed, and he watched it cost her. “Couldn’t hear anything in him. Kept asking when you’d come.”

He didn’t know what that meant. He put his hand over the wet place on her shirt and pressed, because he had heard somewhere that it helps, and she made a small sound, and her fingers closed on his wrist. Her hand was warm. Carys’s had been colder than the latch. Ferra’s was warm, and it held on.

He looked at the marks on her neck and made himself keep looking. The man had used Ansel’s name to get her door open, and then he had asked her, over and over, when Ansel would come.

He hadn’t come here for Ferra. He had come here to wait. And Ansel had come running down the Steps with a lamp in his hand, exactly as he was meant to.

Then Maudry filled the doorway and didn’t stop. She stepped over the man as she would have stepped over a basket and came down on her knees beside Ferra, and before Ansel could move she had her, gathered up against her chest with one big arm under her shoulders and the other hand flat over Ansel’s on the wound.

“There,” Maudry said. “There, girl. I’ve got you.”

Ansel took his hand away. Maudry’s stayed.

Ferra’s breathing had been fast and shallow, a bird’s breathing. While he watched, it slowed. It deepened. Her head settled against Maudry’s shoulder, and her eyes closed, not the way they had been closing before. Maudry’s face had gone the color of the frost on the step. She looked like a woman who had climbed the whole of the Steps without stopping, and she held on, and didn’t loosen her grip, and didn’t say anything else.

Ansel didn’t understand it. He didn’t try to.

Behind him, Dareth had knelt by the man in the doorway. He took the man’s chin in his hand, not roughly, and turned his face up into the lamplight.

“Who saw?” he said.

Nobody, Ansel wanted to tell him. Every window on the row had been dark when he came down the lane. Every picker on the lower terraces was asleep with the Opening still in their heads. Nobody had seen her do it.

The man looked at Dareth. Then, past him, he looked at Ansel, and he smiled, politely, the same smile he had given Ansel over Carys’s cask. Then his breath caught at the bottom, and didn’t come up again.

Dareth stayed where he was, on his knees, with the man’s chin in his hand. He stayed there longer than he needed to. When he let go, the head rolled a little to the side and came to rest against the door frame, and Dareth wiped his hand on his coat and stood up.

Ansel looked at the knife in Ferra’s lap.

She needed a Mender. The thought shoved everything else aside. Her breathing had eased against Maudry’s shoulder, but the shirt under Maudry’s hand was still dark and spreading, and her lips had gone pale. Anywhere a Mender could be found was a long climb from here, and every step of it would be a step she was bleeding.

And the first person to see her would see the man in her doorway. She had killed a man, in her own house, with her own knife. She could tell the magistrate what he had done, and the magistrate might even believe her. But she would stand in this room and look at the knife and the body and the blood, and she would want Ferra where she could ask her questions, for as long as it took. And three more of them were out there somewhere, and they knew where this house was.

“She needs a Mender,” Ansel said. “Now.”

“We’re leaving,” Dareth said.

“Going where?”

Dareth didn’t answer. He looked at Maudry, and Maudry looked back at him over Ferra’s head, and something went between them that Ansel wasn’t part of.

“Away from here,” Dareth said. “Now.”

There was a plan. Ansel could hear it in the way he said it, plain and settled, as though he were only saying out loud a thing that had been decided a long time ago. Ansel didn’t know what it was. And all at once he was afraid that it had never had Ferra in it.

“Did you not hear me? She needs a Mender!”

“Ansel, we need to go.”

“Not without her.” His voice cracked on it, and he didn’t care. “I’m not leaving her here for them. I’m not.”

Dareth looked from him to Ferra, with her eyes closed against Maudry’s shoulder. Then at the man in the doorway, and past him at the open door and the lane and the dark rows going down. Ansel watched him do the sum. He couldn’t see what was in it. He could see that whatever it came to, it cost Dareth something, and that he paid it.

“She comes with us,” Dareth said. “She will live, I swear it.”

Ferra’s eyes opened.

“My house,” she said. It was barely anything.

“It’ll keep,” said Maudry.

Ferra’s eyes went around the room: the cold hearth, the shelf above it, the two chairs at the table, the door. They went slowly, as though she were counting. Then they closed again, and she didn’t say anything more. Maudry got her feet under her and stood, and lifted Ferra with her as easily as she lifted a full basket at the end of a row. The knife slid out of Ferra’s lap and fell to the boards and lay there. Nobody picked it up.

Ansel took the lamp. He went out first, over the man’s legs, and Maudry came after him with Ferra held against her, and Dareth came last. On the step, Dareth turned back. He stooped, moved the man’s legs in off the threshold, and pulled the door shut until the latch caught, as though there were still someone inside who might be woken.

Somewhere down the row, a shutter banged in the wind. At the end of the lane, where it ran out against the vines, Dareth stopped. From there you could see all the way down. Past the last of the lower terraces, past the orchard stairs and the oil groves, the port was a small dark shape at the foot of the retaining wall, with the berths along its edge. Nothing moved down there. Only one thing was lit: a ship on the upper berths with its running lights up, ready to lift.

It was first bell the morning after an Opening, and nobody on the Steps was going anywhere. Ansel knew of only one ship that had come down for this one: the tender the inspector had mentioned, in for one of the buyer houses. For Hessary.

While he watched, the port woke. Lamps came up along the berths all at once, a whole line of them, and then the floor beneath them, until the port sat in a pool of its own light at the bottom of the dark. The older constable had got there. Nothing lifts from the basin until I say so.

The ship’s lights stayed on. It didn’t move. If the other three were aboard it, they weren’t going anywhere. If they weren’t, they could be anywhere.

Dareth said nothing. Ansel waited for him to start down toward the port. It was the only way off the Steps there was.

Then Dareth turned, and it wasn’t down. It was up.

* * *

“She can’t climb the Steps,” Ansel said. “There isn’t time.”

Dareth looked down at the port once more: the lit floor, the tender in the middle of it with its running lights up, the tiny shapes at the edges of the light that might have been constables and might have been anyone.

“Nobody crosses that floor tonight without being seen,” he said.

“I’ve got her,” said Maudry, and that was the end of it.

She didn’t take the lane back to the road. She went off the end of it, into the vines, onto a path Ansel would never have found on his own: a pickers’ path between two rows, packed hard by boots and just wide enough for one person and a basket. Dareth let her go first. Ansel had never once seen him follow anyone.

“Turn that down,” Dareth said.

Ferra’s lamp was the only light anywhere on the terraces. From the port it would look like a spark caught in the vines. Ansel turned the wick down until there was nothing left but a blue bead at the bottom of the glass, and kept carrying it.

Oranth was enough to see by, once his eyes stopped waiting for the lamp. It laid the rows out in silver and black, the stripped vines furred with frost, every post and wire picked out sharp as chalk. Where a terrace ended against the wall of the next, there were steps cut into the stone, steep and narrow and worn hollow in the middle by every picker who had ever carried a full basket down them. Maudry took them without slowing. Ferra’s head lay on her shoulder. One arm hung loose and swung a little with every step.

At the third wall, where the path widened at the foot of the steps, Ansel came up beside her. “Let me take her.”

“No.”

“Just for a while. You’re…”

“No,” Maudry said. She didn’t say it any louder, and he didn’t ask again.

But she was slowing. He could hear it in her breath, which came harder at every wall, and he could see it in her face when the light found it, ashen and weary. She held Ferra the way she had held her on the floor, one hand flat over the wound, and she never once moved it: not on the steps, not when her boot slid on the frost and Dareth caught her by the elbow. It was the climb, Ansel told himself. She had come down the whole of the Steps behind him at a run, and now she was going back up them with Ferra in her arms. Anyone would look like that.

They came up out of the lower terraces at the bend, under the lift keeper’s gate. Maudry kept off the road and climbed through the estates’ rows behind the stalls, terrace by terrace, and each time a switchback cut across their way they crossed it one at a time, bent low, while Dareth stood at the edge of the vines and watched both ways. Nothing moved on the road. The trestles stood white and empty. Somewhere above, a banner had torn loose in the night and lay across the road like a body, and Ansel didn’t breathe until he saw what it was.

Near the top, the vines gave out against the ridge. A stair went up the rock there, cut for the rail crews, so steep it was nearly a ladder, and at the top of it the freight rail ran along its ledge under the lip of the ridge. Maudry went up first with Ferra held against her, and Dareth close behind, a hand at her back. Ansel came last. At the top he looked down once, and the whole of the Steps fell away below him to the lit port at the bottom, so small now that he could have covered it with his thumb.

They followed the rail along the ledge. The line curved in toward Hushvault, and a spur ran off it and ended at the cask door of Selvane’s gallery, with the estate’s mark burned into the wood, where every cask in the racks had gone in and every one of them had come out again.

Dareth opened the small door set into the big one, and they went in.

It was dark, and cold, and it smelled the way it always had, of wine and wax and old wood. Dareth went ahead without a light. Ansel didn’t need one either. Across the gallery, a thin line of light lay under the kitchen door. The lamp had been left burning.

Someone knocked.

Not on the kitchen door. Beyond it, on the house door, out in the passage: three quick knocks. Maudry stopped. So did Ansel. In the dark he heard Ferra’s breath catch, and Maudry’s hand move, and the breath go on.

“Cellarer.”

He knew the voice. He had heard it say Nobody leaves the Steps loud enough to reach the stair. It wasn’t loud now. It didn’t need to be.

Don’t go far, cellarer. I never do.

Nobody moved. The knock came again, the same three, no harder than before. Then nothing. No voice, and no footsteps going away either. Ansel didn’t know which was worse: that she might still be standing out there with her hand raised, or that she had already gone for the constables.

Dareth turned from the line of light and went down the far rack without a sound. Maudry went after him. Ansel made himself follow. He had walked this rack a thousand times. He walked it now with his hand on the casks, one after another, to the last one, where there was nothing beyond but the bare wall.

And then he was facing the other way.

He was looking back up the rack, toward the kitchen door and the line of light. He didn’t remember turning. He had the oddest feeling that he had done this before, here, and forgotten it, and that he was about to forget it again.

Dareth’s hand came down on his shoulder. It turned him back around, not roughly, and stayed there.

“This way,” Dareth said.

There was a door in the bare wall. It was low and narrow, the wood gone as dark as the stone around it, with an iron ring for a handle, and the ring was worn bright where a hand had turned it many times. Nothing about it was new.

“How long has that been there?”

“Long enough,” Dareth said, and opened it.

Stone steps went down. Maudry had to turn sideways and stoop to get Ferra through, and Ansel heard the breath go out of Ferra as her shoulder brushed the frame. Dareth came last and pulled the door to behind them, and the dark that came down then was a dark Ansel had never been in, total, the kind his eyes would never get used to.

“Now,” Dareth said, and Ansel turned the lamp up.

The stair came out in a low space under the gallery floor, so low that Dareth had to bend his head, and from there a passage ran away through the rock, with a channel cut along one side where water moved thin and black. They followed it. It turned, and turned again, and went down steps and on and down again. Ansel tried to keep the turnings in order and couldn’t. Each one went out of his head as soon as they were past it, like a word he had been told and lost. After a while he stopped trying and counted Ferra’s breaths instead. In, and the catch, and out. When one came late, he found he had stopped walking, and he didn’t start again until it came.

Somewhere past two hundred, her eyes opened. The lamplight was in them. She found him over Maudry’s arm and looked at him as though she were working out who he was.

“Told him,” she said. It was less than a whisper. “Told him you’d be late.”

“Hush, girl,” said Maudry, and Ferra’s eyes closed again.

He had been. He went on behind them with the lamp, and the count had gone out of his head, and he couldn’t get it back.

The passage climbed a little at the end, and there was a door, iron this time, with cold air coming around its edges that smelled of oil and frost and hot metal. Dareth had him turn the lamp down again. Then he opened the door.

Outside was a narrow way between the foot of the retaining wall and the backs of the lower berths. The berth housings rose beside them, great curved walls of plate and rivet, close enough to touch. Over the top of them the port’s light came up white and laid their shadows on the wall behind. On the other side of those housings were the floor and the lamps and the constables, and the tender sitting in the middle of all that light. Nobody out there could see this. Ansel understood then why they had climbed the whole of the Steps only to come down them again.

Two people were waiting in the shadow of the housing. One was Ruthe, with a bundle held against her chest, wrapped in sacking and tied with cord. The other wore a purple coat. Ansel had last seen that coat at the back of the crowd in Hushvault. He didn’t know how Tolliver had come here before them. He didn’t know how any of them had known to be here at all.

Tolliver saw Ferra, and his face changed. “Dareth.”

“She comes,” Dareth said.

Tolliver opened his mouth. He looked at Maudry, at the gray in her face and the hand that hadn’t moved, and shut it again.

Ruthe didn’t say anything. She looked at Ferra once, the way she might have looked at one of her trees after a hard season, and then at Ansel. Then she went to Dareth and spoke to him low, close to his ear.

The look on the road last night had gone through five people. Four of them were here now, in the dark behind the berths, as though they had always meant to be. He didn’t know where the berthmaster was. He didn’t know what any of them were to Dareth, or to him. He had been right about the look, and nobody was going to tell him what it meant.

He caught only the end of what Ruthe said.

“…ship’s held. They know it.”

* * *

Tolliver didn’t wait for an answer. He went along the foot of the wall to a narrow iron door in the back of the nearest housing, with no mark on it, and held it open, and they went through one at a time into the lower berth. It was bigger inside than Ansel had ever imagined from the floor: a great curved hollow of plate and girder, as cold as the passage and smelling of fuel. Overhead, the shutters were closed, with a seam down the middle where they met. A ship sat in the cradle below them. It was small, as ships went, and plain, with its ramp down and a faint light inside.

At the far side of the berth, a man was turning a crank. It was a great iron wheel as high as his chest, with a handle on its rim, and every time he brought the handle around, something far above gave a clank, and the seam in the shutters opened a finger’s width wider. He worked it the way Maudry climbed, steadily, without hurrying and without stopping. Beside him, the big door to the port floor stood open a hand’s width, and he kept his eyes on the gap while he turned.

It was the berthmaster. Ansel knew the narrow back and the port collar, and the squint when the man glanced around at them. Last night he had held up four fingers at the edge of the lamplight and gone still. He looked at Ferra in Maudry’s arms for exactly as long as it took the handle to go once around. Then he looked back at the gap and kept turning.

Tolliver went up the ramp without a word. From the moment he was inside, the ship was hard to look at. Ansel looked straight at it and found that his eyes had moved on, to the cradle, to the crank, to the shutters, and he brought them back, and they moved on again. Its edges wouldn’t stay where they were. He put it down to the climb, and the dark, and no sleep, and found he didn’t believe any of it.

Maudry carried Ferra up after Tolliver. Halfway up, her knee gave, and she caught herself against the rail with the arm under Ferra’s shoulders and didn’t move the other hand at all. Then she was inside, and his eyes wouldn’t stay on her either.

Ruthe didn’t go up. She stood by the open door with her bundle, near the berthmaster, as though that were where she had always meant to stand.

The crank went around. The seam overhead had become a gap. Out on the floor, someone shouted.

It was too far off for words at first. Then it came again, nearer, a constable’s voice, the voice of a man who wasn’t used to being ignored. “Stand where you are!” Then running feet. The berthmaster’s hand didn’t pause on the crank, but he leaned a little to see more of the floor.

Ansel saw them too. Through the open door, across the white floor, three men in new coats were walking toward the berth. They weren’t running. They walked the way they had walked up the road behind Wendel’s lamp, together, unhurried, and the port’s light lay on them and showed the creases in their coats.

One of them lifted his arm.

The sound was small: a flat crack, no louder than a shutter in the wind. The berthmaster came off the crank and sat down hard against the wheel, and didn’t get up. Above them the shutters groaned. With no hand on it, the wheel began to turn back on its own, slowly, and the gap overhead began to close.

It was a sound no arm could make. He had never heard it in his life. The Binding saw to that.

He had known the berthmaster as long as he could remember, and he had never once heard his name.

Ruthe let the bundle fall. She took the edge of the big door in both hands and dragged it shut, and it went home with a boom that rang through the whole housing, and she laid both palms flat on the iron. She was talking to it. He couldn’t hear the words, only the sound of them, low and even, the way he had heard her talk to her trees at Auvren when she thought nobody was near.

Something struck the far side of the door. It struck again, harder, and then came the crack, twice, and the iron rang under her hands. It bowed beside her fingers, a dent standing out toward her the size of a fist, and then another, and the hinges shrieked. She didn’t take her hands away. The door shook in its frame and went on shaking, and went on holding, the way the wax and cord had held on his cask for twenty-one years, as though it had been told to keep and meant to.

Dareth was at the crank. Ansel hadn’t seen him move. He had stepped past the berthmaster and caught the handle, and the shutters stopped closing, and then they were opening again, clank by clank, Oranth widening in the gap.

“Ansel,” he said. Not loudly. “Up.”

Ansel was at the foot of the ramp. He didn’t remember getting there. Above him were the light of the open hatch and Maudry somewhere inside, and Ferra. Behind him were the berthmaster against the wheel, and Ruthe with her hands on the door, talking, and Dareth turning the crank as though it were any morning’s work.

He had carried the question since the passage outside Morwal’s door. He hadn’t known until now that he was going to ask it.

“Was it me?”

The crank went around once. Dareth looked at him across the berth, and Ansel waited, the way he had waited in Morwal’s gallery for the rest of an answer.

“Get on the ship.”

That was an answer. He knew it was. He stood there with it anyway.

“Someone has to close the door behind you,” Dareth said, and turned the crank again.

“Then leave it.” Ansel came off the ramp.

“I can’t.”

“Then I’m not going.” He was already crossing the berth. “Not without…”

He didn’t get there. An arm came across his chest from behind and another around his middle, and he was lifted clean off the floor, and the smell of ship air closed around him. He hadn’t heard Tolliver come down the ramp.

He fought. He kicked back at Tolliver’s shins and drove his elbows into anything he could reach, and twisted, and Ferra’s lamp went out of his hand and broke somewhere on the floor, and he screamed Dareth’s name. Tolliver’s arms didn’t move. They weren’t a cellar agent’s arms. A ring bit into Ansel’s ribs. Tolliver said nothing at all. He backed up the ramp with Ansel held against him, step by step, as though nothing else in the world needed doing.

Across the berth, Dareth turned the crank. He didn’t stop, and he didn’t look away.

The door rang under Ruthe’s hands. The ramp came up between them and shut out the berth. Tolliver let go. Ansel was at the ramp before he was on his feet, hammering at it with both fists, and Tolliver was already walking forward. He sat down with his back to them and didn’t turn around. Maudry was on the deck against the bulkhead with Ferra across her lap, and her hand was where it had been since the lane. She said his name once. He didn’t stop.

Then the deck shuddered, and the floor pressed up against him and put him on his knees, and they were lifting. There was a port in the side, a round of thick glass. He pressed his face to it. The berth fell away below. He looked for the crank, and the door, and Dareth’s coat.

His eyes slid off.

He looked again, and they slid again, the way they had slid off the bare wall at the end of the far rack, the way they had slid off the ship. The berth was there. He knew it was there. He couldn’t find it. He couldn’t find any of it, and then the shutters were below them, and the lights of the port, and the whole of the Steps, and he went on looking for Dareth until there was nothing beneath them but the dark.