The Rumor

Between the Doors there was an inn.

Isolde found it the way one finds a lit window on a country road at the end of a bad night: with no sense of arrival, only a sudden, unreasonable relief. The sea had dropped away behind them, and the cold pine-scented wind had thickened to a damp gray fog, and then the fog had thinned, and there it stood on the verge of a cobbled lane. A long low building of black beams and white plaster, with a sagging roof and a sign above the door that creaked on its hook. The Crossing. Smoke rose from three crooked chimneys. A single lantern burned in the porch.

"The Waystation," said Brannoc. He said it flatly, like a man naming a disease he had survived. "Every Door lets out here. Every Stray who lives comes through. There's a rule, mind. No blood on the threshold. No blades drawn under the roof. It's the one place in the Hollow where a man can sleep without a knife in his hand."

"Who made the rule?" said Isolde.

"Mrs. Dray." He shrugged. "She keeps the place. Ask her where she came from, and she'll tell you she's always been here."

"And the Companies keep it?"

"They'd best."

She looked at the lantern and thought about warmth. She thought about a bed, and a basin, and a whole night with nobody crying in it. She had not been clean in four days. She had not slept in more than snatches. Her feet hurt and her knees hurt and her ears still rang with the Siren's lullaby in her mother's voice, and she wanted so badly to push open that door that the wanting felt like a pain.

"Isolde," said Valerian.

He had stopped at the edge of the light. The fog hung round him in strips. He stood a little apart from the rest of them, as he always did, with his hands in his coat, and his face was tight.

"They will be inside," he said. "All of them. Every Company that made the crossing this week. They will have heard."

"Heard what?"

"What I did on the ship."

"You did nothing on the ship."

"I did not kill a girl who had a knife at your throat," said the Overseer. "I believe that will be sufficient."

She stared at him. He looked back at her with a slight, strange, bitter twist of the mouth, and she thought, He's afraid. She had not expected it. It was such a small and ordinary fear, so entirely human, that it undid her. She stepped up beside him and took hold of his sleeve, as she had in the clock tower, and held it.

"Then we'll walk in together," said Isolde. "And if anyone says a word, I'll read them the covenant."

…

The common room fell silent when they entered.

It was a good room. That was what she noticed first, in the strange crystalline hush that fell on a hundred conversations. It was long and low and smoky, with a great black hearth at the far end and a ceiling of smoked beams from which hung strings of dried apples and iron lamps. There were tables, and benches, and a long scarred bar. There was a cat on the mantel, large and orange, asleep. And there were people, a hundred or more, packed along the benches in their dusty traveling cloaks: pale faces turned toward the door, spoons halfway to mouths, cards stopped in mid-deal.

She saw red hands stenciled on a dozen jerkins. She saw lanterns on lapels.

She saw, at a table by the window, a small boy in a nightshirt too big for him, with sandy hair and a wooden spoon, who looked up and dropped the spoon.

"Isolde!"

Wick came across the floor like a thrown stone. He hit her at the waist and held on. She put her hand on his head and felt the warm small skull under her palm, and for a moment she could not breathe. "You're all right," she said, stupidly. "You're all right. You're warm."

"They gave me soup."

"Good."

"There was a bit of ham in it." He drew back and looked up at her fiercely. "They said I wasn't to talk to you. The captain said. He said you had a bad influence. I told him he was wrong."

"Did you?"

"I told him you were the best Stray in the whole place." He wiped his nose on his sleeve. "He said that might well be true."

Over his head, across the long smoky room, a man in a green coat rose from his chair by the fire with a smile on his face. It was the old, warm, tired smile. It reached all the way up to his eyes.

"Miss Isolde," said Gideon Fallowes. "How very good it is to see you safe."

…

It would have been so much simpler if she could have hated him.

She sat with him an hour later in the private parlor behind the bar, a small low room with a table and two chairs, a lamp, a window overlooking a muddy yard. He had asked her, with great courtesy, for a few minutes of her time. He had brought tea himself on a tray. It was a dark fragrant smoky tea, and when she raised the cup to her lips it tasted, for one aching instant, of her mother's kitchen, and she set it down again, hard.

"Mrs. Dray's blend," said Gideon, amused. "It tastes of whatever you miss. A kind of hospitality. I find it rather cruel, myself, but I never refuse a cup." He lifted his own. "I should tell you that I was grieved to hear about Sera."

"Were you?"

"Terribly. She was a dear girl." He did not look away. "She disobeyed a direct order. I had told her only to bring you to us. I had not told her to use force. I had not known she'd taken it upon herself to carry a draught."

"She said you sent her."

"She was mistaken."

"She said the Prioress—"

"Miss Isolde." He put the cup down. "I'm afraid the poor child was out of her mind. Surely you can see that. She had been in the water for hours. She'd seen forty people drown. And you are asking me to believe that a girl with a madwoman's eyes had been given careful orders by a captain she'd known a fortnight?" He shook his head gently. "I would sooner believe that she was possessed."

It was a very good answer. It was so good that she sat for a moment with her hands folded in her lap, admiring it as one admires a clean piece of grammar. He has done this before. She had the thought quite coldly. He has done this a very great many times.

She said, "What do you want, Captain?"

"To warn you." The lamplight made a halo of his hair. "I am not your enemy. I think you know that. I'm a man who has watched a great many good people die in this place, and I have a particular horror of watching it again. You are bright. You are brave. And you are walking beside a creature who has killed more people than the Plague."

"He's the Overseer."

"He is." Gideon leaned forward, and his voice dropped to a murmur. "I don't expect you to believe me. But I've been in the Hollow a good deal longer than you, and I've seen what happens to the ones who make friends with him. You know what the word Overseer means, in the Old Tongue?"

"Vaelor. The keeper of thresholds."

"A keeper. Yes." He sat back. "Keepers keep, my dear. It's their nature. They hold what they love as tightly as a hand holds a coin, and they do not open it, even when the coin is crying out. He will care for you very much. I don't doubt it. And one day, in some terrible hour, he will keep you."

"That doesn't sound like Valerian."

"Valerian." Gideon repeated it softly. "He has a name now, has he? How very touching. And you imagine you know who he is."

She was silent.

Clause three. Neither shall tell the secrets of the other to any third party. She had written it herself. She had not realized, till now, how very much it could weigh.

"I'd like to go," she said.

"Of course." He rose at once, all grace. "I only wished you to know that you are welcome in our camp. At any time. In any circumstance. You need not ask." He held the door. And as she passed, in the narrow doorway, he said so gently that she hardly heard it, "You've made a very great difference to him already. I hope you won't regret it."

…

Valerian was sitting in the corner when she came out.

She stopped dead. She had not seen him sit in a chair before. He was at a small round table in the lee of the chimney, with his long legs stretched out and his back to the wall, and in front of him on a wooden plate lay a heel of bread. He was looking at it with an expression of absolute suspicion.

"It is bread," said Odile, at his elbow.

"I am aware of that."

"You've been looking at it for ten minutes."

"I am deciding."

"It's not complicated. You put it in your mouth and you chew." Odile was perched on a stool, chin on her fist, with a face of unholy delight. "Haven't you ever had bread?"

"I have no memory of it."

"Well, there's a first time for everything. Brannoc, tell him."

"Eat it, lad," grunted the old man from the bench, over his ale.

Valerian lifted the bread. He turned it over. He bit into it, very small and very carefully, as a man tests ice, and chewed; and an extraordinary thing happened to his face. It went, for a moment, entirely blank. Then the eyes widened. A faint flush came up into the hollows of his cheeks. He swallowed, and looked down at the heel with an expression of such dazed, wondering outrage that Isolde nearly laughed aloud.

"Good Lord," said the Overseer. "It is warm."

"Isn't it?"

"It is— there is a sensation in the roof of the mouth. A sort of—" He bit again. "It is extremely good."

"Of course it's good, it's bread."

"I had no idea."

"Well, now you know," said Odile, and patted his arm.

Isolde came and sat down beside him. She did it without a word, and he did not look up, but she felt him go still. The cat on the mantel opened one yellow eye, regarded them, and shut it. The noise of the common room rose again behind them, a hundred voices low and watchful, and over it a single word floated clear.

Overseer.

—picked a side—

—saw him himself, I swear—

—stepped in front of a Stray, as if he'd any right—

She did not look round. She was aware of every eye. She was aware of the hush that followed him as he moved, and the way the Redhand men at the long table had gone silent, and turned their stenciled backs, and begun to whisper. She put her hand on the table, flat, a few inches from his.

"They're afraid," she said, very low.

"Yes."

"Of you?"

"Of what I may do." He swallowed the last of the bread. "And of what I have done. They are right to be."

"Don't."

"It is the truth."

"It's a truth." She turned her head. "There's more than one. A man can have killed a hundred people and still be capable of eating bread like that."

His mouth twitched. It was only a flicker, there and gone, but she saw it, and her heart jumped. He looked down at his plate. After a moment he said, in an odd rough voice, "You worry about me."

"I don't."

"You do."

"I've known you four days."

"Five," said Valerian. "I have been counting." He lifted his eyes. "You have not stopped looking at the door since we sat down. You are afraid that someone will come through it. You are afraid, I think, that someone will come for me."

She opened her mouth to deny it. And closed it again.

It was true. She had been watching the door. She had been watching the Redhand table, and the Lantern table, and the gathered stray faces turned toward the Overseer like flowers toward a window. She had been counting the exits. She had been, she realized, for most of an hour, entirely occupied with a question that had never once occurred to her before this week: What would I do if they hurt him?

It was a new thought. It was a most unwelcome one.

"I suppose I do," she said slowly.

He said nothing. But something shifted in the line of his shoulders, and the hand on the table lay down, very quietly, beside hers.

…

The old woman found her at the fire.

She had left them at the table, at last, to stand by the great hearth and warm her hands. The room had thinned. It was late. The Companies had gone to their beds, in a hundred small rooms above, and the candles were burning down, and the cat on the mantel had started to snore. She was alone but for a lean gray figure on the settle beside the fire, who had been there for some time, sipping something from a pewter cup.

"You're the reader," said the old woman.

She was very old. She sat wrapped in three shawls, with her white hair in a knot and her hands twisted with age like old roots. She wore a Lantern pin on the topmost shawl. Her eyes were small and black and clear as a bird's.

"Mother Thessaly," she said. "The Captain's aunt, in a manner of speaking. I've been in the Doors since before he was born." She patted the settle. "Sit down, child. I'll not bite."

Isolde sat.

"I've no wish to frighten you," said Mother Thessaly. "I'm too old, and the fire's too warm. I only wished to say a small thing. A thing I noticed." She tilted her head toward the corner, where the Overseer had gone back to staring at the plate. "That one."

"What about him?"

"Look at him."

She looked.

He had pushed back his hood. His hair had grown. It lay thick and black and tousled on his neck, no longer slicked back, and the lamp showed the faint pink of blood under the skin of his cheek. He was holding the heel of the loaf, the last of it, and breaking it into small crumbs with those scarred pale hands, absent-mindedly, as a man does when he is thinking of something else. There was a crease between his brows. He looked like a student at a long examination.

He looked, thought Isolde, with a small cold lurch, tired. He looked like a man.

"When I came," said Mother Thessaly, "that man was a statue. I swear it. I saw him in the Third Cycle, and he stood so still that the pigeons landed on his shoulder. His eyes were like glass. You could have put a candle behind them and not seen it flicker." She sipped. "He's not the same. I don't say it's a bad thing. I only say it's a thing. If he were truly just a gatekeeper, a lock, a bit of machinery, you'd think he'd look the same as ever. Yet every day he looks—"

"Like what?"

"Like one of us," said the old woman softly.

The fire cracked. A log shifted. Isolde sat very still with the heat on her face and a cold in her stomach like a swallowed stone.

Like one of us.

"I'm going to bed," she said.

"Do," said Mother Thessaly. "You've a great deal of sleeping to do." She turned her head. Her black eyes glittered. "And do ask yourself, child, when you've a spare moment. If a thing that was made to hold the door begins to turn into a man. What happens to the door?"

…

She didn't answer.

She went up the stairs with her candle, and she lay in a narrow bed under a patchwork quilt, and she stared at the ceiling until the candle was a stub. Odile slept beside her, a warm soft heap. The wind moved at the casement. Somewhere below, a floorboard creaked, once, and was still, and she knew without being told that a tall man was sitting at the foot of the stairs with his back to the wall.

What happens to the door?

She did not know. She did not want to. She turned onto her side and drew the quilt over her ear, and in the pitch dark, some time before dawn, she heard the Crossing's front door rattle in its frame.

She sat up.

It was not a knock. It was a long, slow, grinding sound, like something very heavy being dragged across stone. Light shone under the door of the room: not lamplight, but a pale and sickly silver, the color of a moon in a fog. It threw a bar across the quilt.

Footsteps ran in the passage. A man shouted. Below her, in the common room, Mrs. Dray's voice rose, shrill and furious and utterly astonished.

"It's not time! It's not due for a full day! Who's rung it? Who's called it?"

And the pleasant voice, from every wall and floor and beam, said softly:

"Door Six is open."