In the afternoon, Medric came down the stairs, and Leeba, who had gotten very bored with painting glue on paper, leaped up with a cry. “Medric! I have a surprise!” She produced with a flourish a very crooked, glue‑blotted, ink‑smeared book.

“Is that it?” said Medric. “My book?” He swept her up, book and all, and went twirling up and down the hallway with her in a dizzy dance, while she recounted, between shrieks of laughter, her very important role in the construction of this first book. Medric said, “I know exactly where this one is to go.” He poked his head into the parlor. “Stop slaving away in the gloom! Let’s give this book a proper send‑off.”

But first the book had to be wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine, and the knots sealed with red wax. The resulting package was carried outside in triumph, with Medric waving it proudly, and the rest of them following in grimy procession: J’han rubbing his sticky hands ineffectually with a rag, Garland sucking a needle‑pierced fingertip, Emil playing a riddle game with Leeba, Norina intent as a cat stalking a mouse. Out they went into the cold, bright day and Karis came up the slope to greet them, pulling a completed sledge. To get the wood she had dismantled every cupboard in the house, leaving Garland’s kitchen in complete disarray as a result. A hammer was tucked into her belt, and her pockets bulged with pegs or nails. Planes, a brace‑and‑bit, saws, and mallets scattered the porch where she had been working.

“What’s that?” she said, when Medric waved his package at her.

“A book,” he said importantly.

“Just one?”

“The firstone,” Leeba said.

“Well, put it in the sledge. And then go make four hundred and ninety‑nine more.”

“You have no sense of ceremony,” grumbled Medric. “Now listen! This book shall not be hauled across the snow. No weary journey ‘cross hill and dale, no hostile, porridge‑eating farmers to be tempted to use it to start their breakfast fires. No, that may be its brother’s fate, but not this one. Not this one!” He held it up, and shook it for emphasis. “This one shall be delivered by ravens!”

“Give it to me,” Karis said.

Medric came down the porch steps and handed it to her. She weighed it in the palm of her hand. “You should have written a shorter book. How far do you expect it to be carried?”

“To Watfield.”

The amusement faded from her cold‑flushed face. “Medric–”

Medric gave an elaborate shrug, that seemed to begin with his feet, and traveled upwards in a loose‑limbed movement that made him seem on the verge of collapsing into a pile of disconnected bones.

She looked at him, eyes glinting, mouth drawn tight, Garland suspected, to keep herself from uttering words that might at best be discourteous. When she spoke at last, however, it was to say prosaically, “Fortunately, Garland has been stuffing the ravens with corn bread.”

The ravens arrived as she spoke: dropping from the roof, from the treetops, from the cloud‑draped sky. “What–what–what?” they cried.

Medric turned completely around, a giddy man in a maelstrom of flapping wings. “You’re sending them all?”

“I have to, so they can carry your heavy book in relay.” With a very small, very mocking bow, Karis returned to the seer the packaged book. He lifted it over his head, balanced on his fingertips. The ravens rose up again in a flapping cloud that briefly cloaked him, and then he was empty handed, and one of the departing ravens dangled the package from its claw.

“Good‑bye!” Medric cried. “Good luck!” Leeba, and then the rest of them, joined him in shouting their farewells. But Karis stood silent, monolithic, with her hands jammed in her pockets, squinting in the light as she watched the ravens fly away.

Chapter Twenty‑Eight

The door latched softly. Clement, who had fallen asleep with the baby in the crook of her arm and a nippled milk bottle resting precariously on her chest, slitted open her eyes to see that it was the storyteller, slipping in unhindered and unescorted, pulling the hood back from her sharp‑edged face. Clement mumbled, “Is it day or night?”

“Almost suppertime.”

“Where have you been?”

“I owed Alrin a story.” The storyteller hung her cloak on a hook and began stripping off and folding her plain wool clothing.

“How is she doing?” said Clement with surprise.

“She’s dead. Since yesterday.”

The storyteller had been telling stories to a dead woman.

Clement looked down at her son, who blinked at her as though in abject amazement. She felt a sensation she could not put a name to; it seemed too unfamiliar to be called, simply, sadness.

The room was dark, the storyteller an indifferent shadow, doing up the buttons of her silken performance clothes. Clement had hardly slept in two days. And she was shaken by the enormity and suddenness of the catastrophe she had brought upon herself. Clement let a few tears fall, a luxury so long forbidden she wasn’t even certain how to do it. The storyteller, if she even noticed, offered no comment.

Before the woman left for the evening’s performance, though, she put a fresh bottle of milk on the windowsill to keep cold, then came over to the bed to check the baby. She had drilled Clement in feeding and diapering as determinedly as Clement had ever drilled a soldier. Clement said, “Do you approve?” Her voice was still rough with tears.

“I visited the midwife,” the storyteller said. “The nurse will come tomorrow morning.”

“What has taken so long?”

“She’s very young. Her parents are reluctant.”

Clement thought of a young woman, as young as Kelin, maybe, arguing angrily with an array of disapproving parents. “Hell,” she muttered. “Will you tell Gilly that she’s coming? And ask him to visit me after the night bell.”

After the night bell, Gilly arrived with the storyteller and an aide who was carrying a precarious supper tray. The stew had gotten stone cold on its journey from the refectory, but at least there was some meat in it. Clement ate, and Gilly said, “Cadmar complains that he is unattended.”

Clement crushed a fragment of frozen butter onto her cold bread. “He knows I’m leaving in just a couple of days. What does he want from me?”

The storyteller approached them and handed the baby to Gilly, who accepted the bundle with some surprise. She silently left the room.

“Where is she going?” Gilly held the baby awkwardly, looking unnerved.

“She’ll sit on her heels in the hallway. Gazing into space.”

“Peculiar.”

“But it does give me some privacy. Are the soldiers now letting her wander the garrison unescorted?”

“I’ll look into it. She mentioned that the nurse is finally coming tomorrow. Are you thinking that the four of you can live in this one room, in harmony?”

“Won’t the nurse will take the child away?”

The baby was uttering rhythmic grunting sounds. Gilly looked down at him with a puzzled expression, as though the arrival of this small person were nearly as dismaying to him as it was to Clement. “A young woman, unmarried, no household of her own, apparently acting against her parent’s wishes? She’ll expect you to provide for her. She’s got nowhere to take a child.”

“Someone might have told me!” Clement smeared more butter onto her roll. “The storyteller could have told me, if she knew how to volunteer information.” Then she mumbled, her mouth full, “I feel like I’m eating frozen sawdust.”

“It goes well with that frozen mud puddle.” Gilly indicated the gelid bowl of brown stew.

Reminded, Clement swallowed a few chilling spoonfuls. “Fortunately, I know you’d never point out a problem until you’d thought of a solution.”

“There’s a place available not two buildings away from the gate.”

“Keep my own establishment?”

“I would hardly call two rooms an establishment.”

The baby uttered a cry, rather experimentally, but Gilly gave a start, which in turn caused the baby to cry in earnest. Clement shoveled in a few more mouthfuls, then took the baby, and admonished him, “Listen, little soldier, we’re strategizing your future, and strategy requires concentration.”