They crossed the old border on the nineteenth day, and the country changed so completely that for a mile or two nobody spoke.
It was not any single thing. The road was the same road, a rutted brown ribbon winding south through low hills. The sky was the same pewter sky. But the frost had thinned in the night to a faint gray rime, and the air had lost its hard northern edge, and everywhere Valeria looked the land lay silent and abandoned. Fields that should have been green stood choked with brambles. Fences leaned. A stone wall ran along the roadside for half a mile, its top row of rocks tumbled as if kicked down by some great careless foot, and beyond it a pasture lay sunk in tall yellow grass without a single animal in it.
"The war," said Kaelen quietly, riding up beside her. "The empire fell eight months ago. Half the people fled south, or north. The rest..." He did not finish.
"The rest stayed, and starved." She had been looking at the wall. "I know. I used to hear it. The physicians discussed it through the grate above my cell, whenever the news came. A town burned here, a granary seized there. They spoke of it the way one speaks of weather."
"I am sorry."
"Do not be. It is not your doing." She turned her head. "It is only strange to see it. I have never seen any of this. I have only heard it described."
She did not realize where the road was leading until they crested the third hill.
It was a small hill, low and rounded, crowned with a ragged stand of birches. Below it, in a shallow valley, a scatter of gray roofs huddled around a muddy crossroads. A stream wound through the village, dark and slow. A stone bridge crossed it. Smoke rose from perhaps three of the chimneys. And at the far edge of the settlement, beyond a field gone to seed, stood a low square church with a crooked wooden steeple and a weathervane in the shape of a rooster that had lost its tail.
Valeria stopped her horse.
She did not decide to. Her hands simply tightened on the reins, and the mare stood still, and the world went very quiet. She heard the wind in the birches. She heard Alaric draw rein beside her. She did not look at him.
"I know this place," she said.
"Valeria?"
"I know the church." Her voice sounded thin and strange. "The weathervane. It had a tail when I was small. A boy broke it with a stone. I watched him do it. I was supposed to be in the yard minding my mother's washing."
She heard her own words as if someone else were speaking them. She had not known she remembered. She had believed, for twelve years, that the whole of her childhood had been scrubbed out of her like a stain, that there was nothing left of that small house and that small girl but a few fragments, a coin purse, a sound of closing iron. But the rooster's crooked silhouette against the gray sky had unlocked something. She could smell river water. She could taste the ashes of a cooking fire.
"Dunmarrow," she whispered.
"Is that the name?"
"It was a small village. We had a mill, and a smith, and a church that was too big for it." She swallowed. "I did not know it was still standing. I did not think I would ever see it again."
Alaric reached across the space between the horses and laid his hand over hers on the rein. He did not speak. After a moment, she felt Kaelen's horse move quietly away, and heard him giving low orders to halt the column, to make camp on the hill, to keep the men back from the village. She had not asked him. She had not needed to.
"Do you want to go down?" said Alaric.
"I do not know."
"You do not have to."
"I know." She looked at the roofs. At the thin smoke. At the little crooked rooster, who had been waiting for her all these years with his tail missing. "But I think if I do not, I will always wonder."
*
They went down on foot, the two of them, leaving the horses tethered at the edge of the birches.
The village was very quiet. A dog barked somewhere and fell silent. A woman hanging washing on a line behind a low stone house looked up, saw two strangers, one a tall man in a dark cloak and the other a slight woman with a gray knot at her wrist, and went inside, closing the door. Valeria walked slowly down the muddy lane with her eyes on the ground, and felt her feet remember it. A turn to the left. A broken fence post. A patch of nettles where there had once been a well.
The house stood at the far end of the lane.
It was smaller than she remembered. She had thought of it for twelve years as a big, warm, bright place, full of voices and smells, and now she stood at the gate and saw a low, sagging cottage with a thatched roof half fallen in and a door hanging crooked from one hinge. The windows were blind with dust. The garden, where her mother had grown cabbages and a row of stubborn marigolds, had gone to bramble. But the door-frame was the same. She would have known the grain of that wood anywhere. She put her hand on it, and it was cold, and splintered, and entirely real.
"I was six," she said. "I was sitting right there, on the step. I had a fever. My mother had wrapped me in a blanket, and I was watching the rain. And a man came up the lane, in a long gray coat, and talked to my father for a long time."
Alaric stood behind her, close, without touching her. He did not say anything.
"I remember I was not afraid. I remember thinking he looked kind." She laughed shortly, a cracked little sound. "He had a very soft voice."
"They told your parents he was a healer."
"They told them he came from the crown's physicians. That there was a special hospital in the capital for children with fevers like mine. That I would be well in a month." She pressed her palm flat against the wood. "My father could not read. He signed with a mark. My mother held me the whole time. She was crying, but she was trying not to let me see."
"Valeria."
"I thought for years that they did not care." Her voice was shaking now. "That they took the coin and went home and ate a good dinner. I told myself it did not matter. I made it matter very little." She drew a long breath. "I have been angry at them for twelve years, Alaric. I did not know I could be this angry at people who are not even here."
"You are allowed."
"I do not want to be." She pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes. "I wanted to come here and feel nothing. I wanted to look at this house and see a ruin. And instead I..."
She could not finish. A small sound escaped her, and then another, and her shoulders began to shake. Alaric caught her as her knees gave way. He sank to the wet ground with her in his arms and held her against his chest, and she wept into his coat with great wrenching sobs, the grief of a six-year-old girl on a rain-soaked step, the grief of an eighteen-year-old in a tiled cell, the grief of a woman who had spent a decade pretending she had none.
"Hush," he murmured. "I have you. I have you."
She did not know how long it lasted. The rain began again, a thin cold drizzle, and it ran down her face with the tears. She was dimly aware of the dog barking, of a door creaking open somewhere nearby, of a step on the gravel. She did not care. She wept until she had no more strength to weep, and lay still against his chest, spent and hollow and strangely light.
"Girl."
It was a cracked old voice, hoarse as a rusted hinge. Valeria lifted her head.
An old woman stood at the gate with a shawl pulled over her white hair. She leaned heavily on a stick. Her face was a map of deep lines, and her eyes, small and bright and black as a bird's, were fixed on Valeria with an expression of wonder.
"You have her chin," said the old woman. "Gods above. You have her chin."
*
Her name was Hesper, and she had lived next door for sixty-three years.
She would not hear of them standing in the rain. She bustled them into her own low kitchen, scolding, and sat Valeria by the fire with a blanket round her shoulders and a mug of something hot and sweet in her hands. Alaric she put on a stool in the corner, where he folded himself up with the stiff, apologetic air of a very tall man in a very small room. She did not seem to find anything remarkable about his presence. She looked at him once, a long, shrewd, appraising look, and nodded, as though a question had been answered.
"You are the one she walks beside," she said.
"I am," said Alaric.
"Good." She turned back to the fire. "She will need someone."
Valeria had not spoken. She sat with the mug in her hands and watched the old woman stir a pot of something that smelled of onion and barley, and the smell was so completely, impossibly familiar that she thought for a moment she might be sick.
"You knew my mother," she said at last.
"Knew her? Girl, I helped her bring you into the world." Hesper's wrinkled face softened. "A small, scrawny, furious thing you were. Screamed for three days. Your mother said you had your father's temper, and your father said no, it was your mother's. They quarreled about it for years."
Something broke and stung in Valeria's chest. "They are..."
"Dead." The old woman said it gently, without flinching. "Your mother, the winter after. A lung fever. She never recovered. Your father..." She paused, and her bright eyes clouded. "He lived another eleven years. He did not do much living."
Valeria set the mug carefully down on the table, because her hands could not be trusted with it.
"Tell me."
"You are certain?"
"I have been not-knowing for twelve years." Her voice was a thread. "I would like, now, to be certain."
Hesper nodded slowly. She wiped her hands on her apron and sat down heavily across from her, in a chair that creaked, and looked at the fire for a long moment before she spoke.
"He knew within a week," she said. "That it was a lie. The man in the gray coat had said that you would write. That the hospital would send word. No word came. Your father went to the capital on foot, three weeks walking, and stood at the gates of the crown's office, and asked for his daughter. They told him no such child had ever been admitted. They threw him out in the street."
Valeria closed her eyes.
"He went back the next year. And the year after. He walked it six times, I think, before the winter he gave up." Hesper's voice was low and even. "He drank, after that. Not too much. Enough to keep the quiet out. He worked the fields, and kept the house, and never sold the land, though the bailiff came twice with an offer. He said you would need somewhere to come home to."
"He kept..." Valeria's breath caught. "The coin."
"The purse." The old woman's face creased. "Aye. He kept that too."
"They said he took the money."
"He took it, because the man pressed it into his hand and he did not know how to refuse. He carried it home. And he never spent a single copper." Hesper reached out and laid one gnarled hand over Valeria's. "He put it in the cupboard above the hearth, in the little blue bowl. I saw it every time I visited. He would not touch it. He said it was the price of the worst mistake he had ever made, and that if he spent it, he would be agreeing that it had been a fair trade."
Valeria could not speak. A thick tear slid down her cheek, and another, and she let them fall.
"He died four winters back," said Hesper. "In his sleep, at the table, with his head on his arms. I found him in the morning. We buried him beside your mother, up by the church. And I put the purse in his hands, myself, before they closed the box." She squeezed the fingers she held. "I thought he would want it with him. As a reminder, perhaps, of what he owed."
"What he owed," Valeria whispered.
"To you. He never got to pay it." The old woman's eyes shone. "But I think he would be glad to know you are standing in my kitchen. I think he would be glad to know that you are alive."
Valeria bent forward and put her face in her hands, and for the second time that day, she wept. It was not the wild wrenching weeping of the garden. It was quieter, deeper, a slow river of grief that had waited a very long time to find its channel. She wept for the girl on the step, and for the father who had walked six times to a closed gate, and for the mother she barely remembered, and for the blue bowl above the hearth that nobody had ever emptied. She wept because she had been angry for twelve years at two people who had never stopped loving her, and she would never be able to tell them she was sorry.
She felt Alaric's hand on her shoulder, warm and heavy. She leaned into it.
"There is something else," said Hesper, after a while, softly. "Wait."
The old woman rose, with an effort, and shuffled to a carved wooden chest at the foot of her bed. She came back with something folded small in her hands, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth, and set it gently in Valeria's lap.
"Your mother gave me this the night before you left. She said she could not bear to have it in the house. She said, if you ever came back, I should give it to you."
Valeria unwrapped the oilcloth.
Inside lay a child's blanket, small and gray with age, worn threadbare at the corners. It had been patched and mended many times, in careful tiny stitches. In one corner, in faded red thread, were embroidered six letters, neat and slightly crooked, as though by a hand that was not accustomed to the work.
VALERIA.
She stared at it. She traced the first letter with her finger, and her whole body began to tremble.
"She taught herself to stitch it," said Hesper. "That winter. She could not read, you know. She had your name written for her by the priest, and she copied it, letter by letter, over and over, until her fingers bled. She wanted you to have it where you could see it. She said you would need to remember who you were."
Valeria pressed the blanket to her face. It smelled faintly of smoke and lavender and old wool. It smelled, impossibly, of her.
"The ledger," she whispered. "They struck my name from the ledger. They called me a number. I thought... I thought I had lost it. I thought no one had ever kept it."
"Someone kept it," said Hesper. "Someone has always kept it."
*
They buried nothing and dug nothing that evening. They only climbed the hill behind the church, Valeria and Alaric, in the long gold light that fell between the clouds, and stood side by side before two small gray stones at the edge of the old burying ground.
The graves were simple. Each bore a name, cut in rough letters, and a single line of weathered inscription. The nearer one read: Tomas Wren, miller's son, father of Valeria. The other: Elin Wren, beloved wife and mother.
Wren.
Valeria stared at the stone for a long moment, and a strange, dizzy, wavering feeling went through her. She had never known it. In twelve years, no one had ever spoken her family's name. She turned her head and looked at the man beside her, who had suggested, a month ago, in a candlelit cell, that a small brave singing bird would have made a fine name for a girl behind a wall.
"You knew," she said.
"I had no idea." Alaric's voice was very low. "I swear it. I only chose what seemed fitting."
She laughed, shakily, wetly, and pressed her hand to her mouth. "Wren. The girl behind the wall. I never found out her real name. I spent years inventing them, every night, and I never once..." She shook her head. "I think perhaps some part of me kept it for myself."
She knelt in the wet grass between the graves. She did not know what to say. She did not know the proper words, or whether any were required. She only laid her palm on the cold stone of her father's marker, and then on her mother's, and bowed her head.
"I am alive," she said, very softly. "I wanted you to know. They took me, but I am alive. I was not alone, at the end. I have a man who loves me, and friends, and a home. I found a place where I belong." She swallowed hard. "I am sorry that I was angry. I did not know. I think I would have understood, if I had known. I would have forgiven you both a very long time ago."
The wind moved in the grass. A bird sang somewhere in the birches, a thin clear note, once, twice.
She stayed there a long while. When she rose, her knees were wet and her face was stiff with dried tears, and the sun had sunk to a line of red at the edge of the world. Alaric took her hand without a word. She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he put his arm round her, and they stood together in the gathering dusk with the two small graves at their feet.
"I did not know," Valeria said at last, "that it was possible to be this sad and this glad at once."
"I think it is the nature of finding something you thought you had lost."
"Yes." She turned the blanket over in her hands. The red letters glowed faintly in the dying light. "I am going to keep this. I am going to take it with me."
"Of course."
"And when this is over..." She stopped, and tried again. "When this is over, I would like to come back. To mend the house. To put marigolds in the garden. Perhaps to bury my mother's stitching beside her."
"Then we will come back." He pressed his lips to her hair. "I will hold the ladder."
She laughed, softly, and the laugh turned into a sob, and then into a breath of something that was almost peace. They stayed on the hill until the first stars came out, and the weathervane on the church creaked in the rising wind, and far below, in the little kitchen with the fire, an old woman set out three bowls of barley soup and sat waiting, patiently, for the two who would come in from the dark.
You've reached the end of this chapter
They crossed the old border on the nineteenth day, and the country changed so completely that for a mile or two nobody spoke.
It was not any single thing. The road was the same road, a rutted brown ribbon winding south through low hills. The sky was the same pewter sky. But the frost had thinned in the night to a faint gray rime, and the air had lost its hard northern edge, and everywhere Valeria looked the land lay silent and abandoned. Fields that should have been green stood choked with brambles. Fences leaned. A stone wall ran along the roadside for half a mile, its top row of rocks tumbled as if kicked down by some great careless foot, and beyond it a pasture lay sunk in tall yellow grass without a single animal in it.
"The war," said Kaelen quietly, riding up beside her. "The empire fell eight months ago. Half the people fled south, or north. The rest..." He did not finish.
"The rest stayed, and starved." She had been looking at the wall. "I know. I used to hear it. The physicians discussed it through the grate above my cell, whenever the news came. A town burned here, a granary seized there. They spoke of it the way one speaks of weather."
"I am sorry."
"Do not be. It is not your doing." She turned her head. "It is only strange to see it. I have never seen any of this. I have only heard it described."
She did not realize where the road was leading until they crested the third hill.
It was a small hill, low and rounded, crowned with a ragged stand of birches. Below it, in a shallow valley, a scatter of gray roofs huddled around a muddy crossroads. A stream wound through the village, dark and slow. A stone bridge crossed it. Smoke rose from perhaps three of the chimneys. And at the far edge of the settlement, beyond a field gone to seed, stood a low square church with a crooked wooden steeple and a weathervane in the shape of a rooster that had lost its tail.
Valeria stopped her horse.
She did not decide to. Her hands simply tightened on the reins, and the mare stood still, and the world went very quiet. She heard the wind in the birches. She heard Alaric draw rein beside her. She did not look at him.
"I know this place," she said.
"Valeria?"
"I know the church." Her voice sounded thin and strange. "The weathervane. It had a tail when I was small. A boy broke it with a stone. I watched him do it. I was supposed to be in the yard minding my mother's washing."
She heard her own words as if someone else were speaking them. She had not known she remembered. She had believed, for twelve years, that the whole of her childhood had been scrubbed out of her like a stain, that there was nothing left of that small house and that small girl but a few fragments, a coin purse, a sound of closing iron. But the rooster's crooked silhouette against the gray sky had unlocked something. She could smell river water. She could taste the ashes of a cooking fire.
"Dunmarrow," she whispered.
"Is that the name?"
"It was a small village. We had a mill, and a smith, and a church that was too big for it." She swallowed. "I did not know it was still standing. I did not think I would ever see it again."
Alaric reached across the space between the horses and laid his hand over hers on the rein. He did not speak. After a moment, she felt Kaelen's horse move quietly away, and heard him giving low orders to halt the column, to make camp on the hill, to keep the men back from the village. She had not asked him. She had not needed to.
"Do you want to go down?" said Alaric.
"I do not know."
"You do not have to."
"I know." She looked at the roofs. At the thin smoke. At the little crooked rooster, who had been waiting for her all these years with his tail missing. "But I think if I do not, I will always wonder."
*
They went down on foot, the two of them, leaving the horses tethered at the edge of the birches.
The village was very quiet. A dog barked somewhere and fell silent. A woman hanging washing on a line behind a low stone house looked up, saw two strangers, one a tall man in a dark cloak and the other a slight woman with a gray knot at her wrist, and went inside, closing the door. Valeria walked slowly down the muddy lane with her eyes on the ground, and felt her feet remember it. A turn to the left. A broken fence post. A patch of nettles where there had once been a well.
The house stood at the far end of the lane.
It was smaller than she remembered. She had thought of it for twelve years as a big, warm, bright place, full of voices and smells, and now she stood at the gate and saw a low, sagging cottage with a thatched roof half fallen in and a door hanging crooked from one hinge. The windows were blind with dust. The garden, where her mother had grown cabbages and a row of stubborn marigolds, had gone to bramble. But the door-frame was the same. She would have known the grain of that wood anywhere. She put her hand on it, and it was cold, and splintered, and entirely real.
"I was six," she said. "I was sitting right there, on the step. I had a fever. My mother had wrapped me in a blanket, and I was watching the rain. And a man came up the lane, in a long gray coat, and talked to my father for a long time."
Alaric stood behind her, close, without touching her. He did not say anything.
"I remember I was not afraid. I remember thinking he looked kind." She laughed shortly, a cracked little sound. "He had a very soft voice."
"They told your parents he was a healer."
"They told them he came from the crown's physicians. That there was a special hospital in the capital for children with fevers like mine. That I would be well in a month." She pressed her palm flat against the wood. "My father could not read. He signed with a mark. My mother held me the whole time. She was crying, but she was trying not to let me see."
"Valeria."
"I thought for years that they did not care." Her voice was shaking now. "That they took the coin and went home and ate a good dinner. I told myself it did not matter. I made it matter very little." She drew a long breath. "I have been angry at them for twelve years, Alaric. I did not know I could be this angry at people who are not even here."
"You are allowed."
"I do not want to be." She pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes. "I wanted to come here and feel nothing. I wanted to look at this house and see a ruin. And instead I..."
She could not finish. A small sound escaped her, and then another, and her shoulders began to shake. Alaric caught her as her knees gave way. He sank to the wet ground with her in his arms and held her against his chest, and she wept into his coat with great wrenching sobs, the grief of a six-year-old girl on a rain-soaked step, the grief of an eighteen-year-old in a tiled cell, the grief of a woman who had spent a decade pretending she had none.
"Hush," he murmured. "I have you. I have you."
She did not know how long it lasted. The rain began again, a thin cold drizzle, and it ran down her face with the tears. She was dimly aware of the dog barking, of a door creaking open somewhere nearby, of a step on the gravel. She did not care. She wept until she had no more strength to weep, and lay still against his chest, spent and hollow and strangely light.
"Girl."
It was a cracked old voice, hoarse as a rusted hinge. Valeria lifted her head.
An old woman stood at the gate with a shawl pulled over her white hair. She leaned heavily on a stick. Her face was a map of deep lines, and her eyes, small and bright and black as a bird's, were fixed on Valeria with an expression of wonder.
"You have her chin," said the old woman. "Gods above. You have her chin."
*
Her name was Hesper, and she had lived next door for sixty-three years.
She would not hear of them standing in the rain. She bustled them into her own low kitchen, scolding, and sat Valeria by the fire with a blanket round her shoulders and a mug of something hot and sweet in her hands. Alaric she put on a stool in the corner, where he folded himself up with the stiff, apologetic air of a very tall man in a very small room. She did not seem to find anything remarkable about his presence. She looked at him once, a long, shrewd, appraising look, and nodded, as though a question had been answered.
"You are the one she walks beside," she said.
"I am," said Alaric.
"Good." She turned back to the fire. "She will need someone."
Valeria had not spoken. She sat with the mug in her hands and watched the old woman stir a pot of something that smelled of onion and barley, and the smell was so completely, impossibly familiar that she thought for a moment she might be sick.
"You knew my mother," she said at last.
"Knew her? Girl, I helped her bring you into the world." Hesper's wrinkled face softened. "A small, scrawny, furious thing you were. Screamed for three days. Your mother said you had your father's temper, and your father said no, it was your mother's. They quarreled about it for years."
Something broke and stung in Valeria's chest. "They are..."
"Dead." The old woman said it gently, without flinching. "Your mother, the winter after. A lung fever. She never recovered. Your father..." She paused, and her bright eyes clouded. "He lived another eleven years. He did not do much living."
Valeria set the mug carefully down on the table, because her hands could not be trusted with it.
"Tell me."
"You are certain?"
"I have been not-knowing for twelve years." Her voice was a thread. "I would like, now, to be certain."
Hesper nodded slowly. She wiped her hands on her apron and sat down heavily across from her, in a chair that creaked, and looked at the fire for a long moment before she spoke.
"He knew within a week," she said. "That it was a lie. The man in the gray coat had said that you would write. That the hospital would send word. No word came. Your father went to the capital on foot, three weeks walking, and stood at the gates of the crown's office, and asked for his daughter. They told him no such child had ever been admitted. They threw him out in the street."
Valeria closed her eyes.
"He went back the next year. And the year after. He walked it six times, I think, before the winter he gave up." Hesper's voice was low and even. "He drank, after that. Not too much. Enough to keep the quiet out. He worked the fields, and kept the house, and never sold the land, though the bailiff came twice with an offer. He said you would need somewhere to come home to."
"He kept..." Valeria's breath caught. "The coin."
"The purse." The old woman's face creased. "Aye. He kept that too."
"They said he took the money."
"He took it, because the man pressed it into his hand and he did not know how to refuse. He carried it home. And he never spent a single copper." Hesper reached out and laid one gnarled hand over Valeria's. "He put it in the cupboard above the hearth, in the little blue bowl. I saw it every time I visited. He would not touch it. He said it was the price of the worst mistake he had ever made, and that if he spent it, he would be agreeing that it had been a fair trade."
Valeria could not speak. A thick tear slid down her cheek, and another, and she let them fall.
"He died four winters back," said Hesper. "In his sleep, at the table, with his head on his arms. I found him in the morning. We buried him beside your mother, up by the church. And I put the purse in his hands, myself, before they closed the box." She squeezed the fingers she held. "I thought he would want it with him. As a reminder, perhaps, of what he owed."
"What he owed," Valeria whispered.
"To you. He never got to pay it." The old woman's eyes shone. "But I think he would be glad to know you are standing in my kitchen. I think he would be glad to know that you are alive."
Valeria bent forward and put her face in her hands, and for the second time that day, she wept. It was not the wild wrenching weeping of the garden. It was quieter, deeper, a slow river of grief that had waited a very long time to find its channel. She wept for the girl on the step, and for the father who had walked six times to a closed gate, and for the mother she barely remembered, and for the blue bowl above the hearth that nobody had ever emptied. She wept because she had been angry for twelve years at two people who had never stopped loving her, and she would never be able to tell them she was sorry.
She felt Alaric's hand on her shoulder, warm and heavy. She leaned into it.
"There is something else," said Hesper, after a while, softly. "Wait."
The old woman rose, with an effort, and shuffled to a carved wooden chest at the foot of her bed. She came back with something folded small in her hands, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth, and set it gently in Valeria's lap.
"Your mother gave me this the night before you left. She said she could not bear to have it in the house. She said, if you ever came back, I should give it to you."
Valeria unwrapped the oilcloth.
Inside lay a child's blanket, small and gray with age, worn threadbare at the corners. It had been patched and mended many times, in careful tiny stitches. In one corner, in faded red thread, were embroidered six letters, neat and slightly crooked, as though by a hand that was not accustomed to the work.
VALERIA.
She stared at it. She traced the first letter with her finger, and her whole body began to tremble.
"She taught herself to stitch it," said Hesper. "That winter. She could not read, you know. She had your name written for her by the priest, and she copied it, letter by letter, over and over, until her fingers bled. She wanted you to have it where you could see it. She said you would need to remember who you were."
Valeria pressed the blanket to her face. It smelled faintly of smoke and lavender and old wool. It smelled, impossibly, of her.
"The ledger," she whispered. "They struck my name from the ledger. They called me a number. I thought... I thought I had lost it. I thought no one had ever kept it."
"Someone kept it," said Hesper. "Someone has always kept it."
*
They buried nothing and dug nothing that evening. They only climbed the hill behind the church, Valeria and Alaric, in the long gold light that fell between the clouds, and stood side by side before two small gray stones at the edge of the old burying ground.
The graves were simple. Each bore a name, cut in rough letters, and a single line of weathered inscription. The nearer one read: Tomas Wren, miller's son, father of Valeria. The other: Elin Wren, beloved wife and mother.
Wren.
Valeria stared at the stone for a long moment, and a strange, dizzy, wavering feeling went through her. She had never known it. In twelve years, no one had ever spoken her family's name. She turned her head and looked at the man beside her, who had suggested, a month ago, in a candlelit cell, that a small brave singing bird would have made a fine name for a girl behind a wall.
"You knew," she said.
"I had no idea." Alaric's voice was very low. "I swear it. I only chose what seemed fitting."
She laughed, shakily, wetly, and pressed her hand to her mouth. "Wren. The girl behind the wall. I never found out her real name. I spent years inventing them, every night, and I never once..." She shook her head. "I think perhaps some part of me kept it for myself."
She knelt in the wet grass between the graves. She did not know what to say. She did not know the proper words, or whether any were required. She only laid her palm on the cold stone of her father's marker, and then on her mother's, and bowed her head.
"I am alive," she said, very softly. "I wanted you to know. They took me, but I am alive. I was not alone, at the end. I have a man who loves me, and friends, and a home. I found a place where I belong." She swallowed hard. "I am sorry that I was angry. I did not know. I think I would have understood, if I had known. I would have forgiven you both a very long time ago."
The wind moved in the grass. A bird sang somewhere in the birches, a thin clear note, once, twice.
She stayed there a long while. When she rose, her knees were wet and her face was stiff with dried tears, and the sun had sunk to a line of red at the edge of the world. Alaric took her hand without a word. She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he put his arm round her, and they stood together in the gathering dusk with the two small graves at their feet.
"I did not know," Valeria said at last, "that it was possible to be this sad and this glad at once."
"I think it is the nature of finding something you thought you had lost."
"Yes." She turned the blanket over in her hands. The red letters glowed faintly in the dying light. "I am going to keep this. I am going to take it with me."
"Of course."
"And when this is over..." She stopped, and tried again. "When this is over, I would like to come back. To mend the house. To put marigolds in the garden. Perhaps to bury my mother's stitching beside her."
"Then we will come back." He pressed his lips to her hair. "I will hold the ladder."
She laughed, softly, and the laugh turned into a sob, and then into a breath of something that was almost peace. They stayed on the hill until the first stars came out, and the weathervane on the church creaked in the rising wind, and far below, in the little kitchen with the fire, an old woman set out three bowls of barley soup and sat waiting, patiently, for the two who would come in from the dark.
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