Book Two: Chapter 12 The Merchant of Ashenmoor

Book Two: Chapter 12

The Merchant of Ashenmoor

The night the cart left, Roen stood a long while at the dark window of the empty inn. Then he went to the drawer behind the bar and took out the small ledger he had not opened for a long while. Measurements, in his own hand, the last entry dated the week before the fight. He then weighed it in his palm, put it in his coat, and told Brenner over breakfast that he’d be riding out to the lumberjack to look at timber.

He chose a valley two hours past Milo’s farm, or at least where it was supposed to be before it was swallowed by the ground. He walked its edges first, the whole perimeter, and laid quiet wards keyed to warn him if anything larger than a fox approached him. Old habits – habits of a man who didn’t survive the wars of the past by assuming a dead valley was empty just because it looked like it was.

Then he stood in the middle of it, took off his coat, set the ledger open on a flat stone, and did the exact thing he avoided for the last few months.

He opened his channels.

He opened them as he’d been trained to open them for more than three centuries, clean and full, and let the power come up through him the whole way consciously for the first time in this life.

He had braced for it, but the force of his Aether still got him by surprise. It filled the channels wide and easy, no strain, no burn, none of the raw protest a young body should have given, and it kept coming, past the mark where his old measurements said his limit stood, past it and onward, steady, patient, bottomless, until Roen stood in the valley holding more live Aether than he had held since the day he died, in a body too young for that to be possible. He knew his strength was years ahead of what it should have been, but what he noticed most was that the holding, the containment of the Aether cost him nothing at all. Usually channeling power like that requires equivalent power to control it…yet…for him, it required next to nothing.

Another thing to add to that shelf.

He let it go into the ground, slow and shaped, doing no work but a faint warmth in the frost coming and radiating from below. Then he sat down on the flat stone beside his ledger and did not write anything for some time.

“Well,” he said, to the valley.

The valley, sensibly, said nothing.

He wrote the figure eventually, in the old code, in a hand he was mildly disgusted to find not entirely steady. One session told him almost nothing, he reminded himself. One point was not a curve or a predictable algorithm to follow. A man who had taught measurement to disciples for a century did not panic over a single reading, however far above its predicted line that reading sat. He would come back and take it again, and again, properly spaced, and let the numbers say what they said.

He sat on the stone a while longer in the cold, but reminded himself that he does not need to be cold and channelled a small flying flame next to him. He felt the quiet in his own chest where the pressure had been building since the fight, enormous and problematic. It had felt good, he realised. It had felt like taking off a boot that had been laced too tight for a too-long march through mud and rivers. Nothing that felt that relieving, or good, in his long experience, ever came without a ledger of its own.

He rode home the long way, said the timber was overpriced and Sera would not approve of the price, and started the evening bread.

But that was Millhaven’s business, and Millhaven was three days behind the cart now.

• • •

Aldous Veldine’s house stood on the hill road above the wool market, and even dying, the man had the best view of the trade in town.

A housekeeper let them in, a broad grey woman named Petra who took one look at Sera and had clearly been told exactly who to expect, because she said only, “He’s awake and impossible. Go on up,” and took their coats as if they’d come for supper rather than a farewell.

The stairs smelled of beeswax and old paper, and Sera climbed them the same way as she’d climbed them when she was nineteen, twelve or six, two at a time until the last three, which she took slowly. Milo came behind her with his hands behind his back and his chin at its angle. He’d washed at the pump in the yard without being told, and Nyx had vanished somewhere between the cart and the door, on business of her own.

The bedroom door stood open.

Aldous sat propped against a bank of pillows with a lap desk across his knees, three letters in progress, spectacles down his nose, and the expression of a man interrupted. He’d lost weight, the big shoulders had gone to bone under his nightshirt, and his colour was the grey of tallow, and none of it had reached his eyes, which found his daughter in the doorway and performed a full inspection, health, weight, the dust of three days’ road, the fact of her here at all, in the second before anyone spoke.

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“They wrote to you,” he said. “I told them not to write to you.”

“Hello, Father.”

“I’ll dismiss the physician. A man can’t cough twice in this town without the post riders knowing.”

“You can’t dismiss him. If I recall correctly, he plays cards with you every Thursday and lets you win.”

“He does not let me.” Aldous set down his pen. His hand had a new tremble in it, and he moved the hand under the desk when he saw her see it. For a moment the room held just the two of them looking at each other, all the years in it, and then he cleared his throat, hard, twice, and pointed his spectacles past her shoulder at the doorway. “That’s the boy. The one who reads.”

“That’s Milo. You must remember him from the Inn.”

“Come here, boy who reads.”

Milo crossed the room and stood at the foot of the bed, straight with his chin up. Sera watched her father run the old inspection down him, boots, hands, chin, eyes, and watched Milo hold it without flinching, and thought that neither of them knew how alike they looked, the dying merchant and the farmer’s orphan, both refusing to be the smallest thing in any room they stood in.

“You’ve grown since the time I saw you. What are they feeding you at that inn?”

“Everything,” Milo said. “Roen thinks a thin person is a personal criticism.”

Aldous laughed, which became coughing, which he waved off with fury before Sera had crossed half the floor. “Sit down, I’m not dying this afternoon, I’ve letters to finish.” He looked at Milo again, sharper. “What’s that under your arm?”

Milo hesitated, then held it out. The green ledger, which he brought the whole road without saying why.

Aldous took it and turned it over once, and his eyebrows went up at the leather, and up further at the binding, and he shot his daughter a look that said he knew exactly what this had cost and exactly who had paid it. He opened it to the page where some of the entries were, and read in silence for a long minute. Columns in a careful young hand. The inn’s small accounts, egg counts, ale poured, a running war of figures with something labelled only GOAT, DAMAGES.

“Who taught you to carry your remainders like this?”