The Long Approach

The journey took five days, not four.

On the second day a tow rope broke near the old lime landing. Nothing dramatic happened. The boat drifted against a bank of reeds, the towman used several words Ada had never heard from her father, and everyone waited while he and the boat's owner argued about whose rope it had been. Repairing it required a walk to a farm and the purchase of a length of hemp that would not have appeared in any Hall calculation of river capacity.

Jessa wrote the delay in her account.

“Put down the reason,” Ren told her.

“I have.”

“Not just rope.”

Jessa held up the page. She had described the missing reserve equipment, the journey to the farm and the cost of the farmer deciding they looked desperate.

Ren gave it back without further advice.

Ysra travelled badly. The cold made her shoulders stiff; the hard bench made everything else stiff. Ada wanted to place her in a warm room with a door nobody guarded. Instead she folded a blanket four times and tried not to apologise each time her aunt shifted on it.

On the third evening, Tomar taught Ada to mend the split handle of a ferry hook. He could not hold the wood securely with his knees as he once had, so Cal braced it while Ada wound the cord.

“Not that tight,” Tomar said. “You want to strengthen the joint, not make the next break happen an inch farther down.”

Cal loosened his grip when she loosened the cord. Their hands did not touch.

They passed a village where the river had taken half a garden. A man was digging up winter cabbages along the new edge, working quickly and with an expression of personal offence. Two children carried the plants to a cart. The house was still safely back from the water, but its owner had tied a rope around the porch post as though preparing to tow it inland.

At the next landing, Ren sent an account of the bank loss ahead to the route office. There was a bound ferry line downstream. If its approach marker had moved, an old description could become dangerous before anyone in Orison received a complaint.

The clerk accepted the report.

“Three days for a response,” he said.

“The bank won't wait for one.”

“I can't change the response time.”

“Then don't put the report in the ordinary pile.”

He looked at her brace, at the names beneath the report, at the boat waiting outside. He moved the paper to a smaller pile. Ada could not tell whether that would help. She thanked him for reading it while they were there.

On the last morning, the capital appeared beneath a low ceiling of smoke.

Ada remembered how it had looked from Tam's wagon: spires, white walls, the roads arriving obediently beneath them. From the river, she saw the backs of warehouses and the people emptying waste from buckets. A boy crouched beneath a wharf with a basket, collecting pieces of coal that had fallen between the boards. He was careful not to drop a single one when their boat disturbed the water.

Pella met them at the landing. She had arrived the previous afternoon and looked both pleased and annoyed to have beaten them.

“The lower warehouse steps are carrying a new transfer,” she said. “Don't use them with luggage. The posting clerk says it hasn't changed the route length because they haven't repainted the sign.”

“Has it?” Ada asked.

“Took me twenty minutes with half a sack of onions. You can have his sign for supper if you prefer it.”

Two of Serit's riders waited at the top of the landing. Beside them stood Marshal Tovan.

She wore a dark coat without braid, and her hair was cut close enough that the rain could do little to it. Ada had expected someone imposing. Tovan was not particularly tall. What distinguished her was the space other people left around her, and the fact that she seemed aware of it.

Her eyes went first to Cal.

“You've lost weight.”

“So has the horse you sent after me.”

“The horse was eating beans.”

He almost smiled. Ada saw the remembered kindness arrive between them, real and insufficient.

Tovan turned to the others. “Your revised terms have been entered. Your lodgings are in the west customs house, under my officers rather than the Hall. The outer doors will not be locked against you.”

“And the inner ones?” Tomar asked.

“You may inspect them.”

“I intend to.”

She accepted that without offence.

Cal stepped forward.

“Before we go anywhere, I need to correct my letter.”

Tovan's expression changed very slightly.

“These people agreed independently to come,” he said. “I had no authority to promise their attendance, or to offer their names before asking them. Put that with the original.”

“I received your correction by carrier.”

“Put this one there as well.”

He handed her a signed page. She took it and gave it to Serit without folding it away from view.

Ada did not thank him. She watched Tovan accept the inconvenient addition to her record, and stored that beside the other things she knew.

On the way to the customs house, they passed the short bridge below Hald's office. A line of people waited at its entrance. Soldiers were checking tokens against a list while those without them crossed by the long embankment route.

A woman in the queue was trying to keep a child asleep against her shoulder. She saw the escort and stepped back. Then she saw Ren's bag, the maps showing above it, and came forward again.

“Are you repairing it?”

“Not today,” Ren said.

The woman's expression collapsed into a tired courtesy.

“My mother minds him,” she said, lifting the sleeping child a little. “On the other bank. If they close it altogether, I'll have to leave before dawn.”

Ada looked towards the bridge. A carriage passed through the token gate without stopping. Its passenger was reading.

“We're trying to keep the necessary journeys,” she said.

The woman tightened the cloth beneath her child's legs.

“Mine is necessary.”

“Yes.”

It was the only answer Ada could honestly give her. She did not pretend it was a plan.

At the customs house, Tomar inspected the locks. Pella inspected the kitchen. Ysra sat down before anyone had finished explaining where she could sit. Ada carried their papers to a table by the window and heard the city beginning an argument beneath it: a wheel stuck in a drain, a hawker defending his prices, someone calling to a person on an upper floor.

Eleven days remained.

She opened the schedule on a table large enough to hold it and began writing down the routes she had seen on the way in.