People Who Had Arrived

Mara reached the customs house while Ada was practising her first sentence.

She had tried three versions. One sounded like Hald. One sounded angry before it had said anything. The third began with a number, and Ada could already hear Sile asking what qualified her to interpret it.

Then someone downstairs said her name in her mother's voice.

Ada left all three versions on the table.

Mara stood in the entrance holding a cloth bag against her chest. Her coat was damp at the shoulders. Beside her, Hobb the miller was trying to ease his boots off without sitting down, a method that had reached its natural limit.

“You're too thin,” Mara said.

“You're here.”

“So I see.”

Ada put her arms around her. The bag between them contained something hard and angular; Mara shifted it aside, and the embrace became possible. Her coat smelled of cold air and home cooking. Ada had been carrying those smells in imagination for weeks and had got them wrong.

For a little while she said nothing useful at all.

Jon had remained with Perrin and the village work. Dema had sent a statement, refusing to spend the money and leave her house merely to repeat it to people who preferred important rooms. Hobb had come because he had carried Bren and because, as he put it, a man might as well discover whether the capital's famous bread justified the journey.

Mara emptied the bag upstairs. There were route accounts, two pairs of clean stockings, a jar of something wrapped against breakage, and the repaired coat Dema had promised to send.

Perrin had written a note inside the coat pocket.

He had reached home. Toll was with relatives whose names had been checked by the carriers, not merely supplied by a clerk. Nessa had sent word from her own district. Perrin's back hurt less when he slept on the old mattress. He had repaired the bird's other boot because Ada had complained, in her last letter, that the drawing made its feet look uncomfortable.

At the bottom he had added: Dad keeps saying the basket can wait. It can't. It's appalling.

Ada laughed and found she was crying again.

Mara touched the side of her face, then looked at Ysra.

The sisters held each other for longer than they spoke. When they separated, Mara took the bowl of warm water from beside Ysra's chair and checked it with her own hand before moving it within reach.

“I've been doing that,” Ada said.

“I know.”

Her mother had not meant to take the task away from her. Ada heard the childishness in her own voice and let the bowl stay where Mara had put it.

They had an hour before the hearing. Hobb ate half the bread Pella had brought back and declared it adequate but expensive. Ren examined the ground accounts. Mara changed her damp collar for a dry one and listened while Ada explained who would be in the room.

“Will they let you finish?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Then decide which sentence you most need finished.”

At the Regent's hall, a guard searched their bags. He lifted the jar Mara had brought and asked what it contained.

“Pickled roots.”

“For what purpose?”

“To eat.”

Ada had answered a question about a loaf at a gate much like this one. Hearing her mother use the same tone steadied her more than any advice could have done.

The hearing room was smaller than the hall in which Sile had announced the Rebinding. That made it harder to hide people behind ceremony. A long table stood beneath the windows. The Regent sat at its head rather than on a raised platform. The young prince was absent. Hald had several folders arranged before him in perfectly parallel lines.

Sile looked at Mara before he looked at Ada.

“You have brought your family.”

“I've brought a route witness,” Ada said. “She also happens to be my mother.”

The carriers' public scribe dipped her pen.

Ada had been placed first. Tovan stood by the door. Cal sat with the other prospective witnesses rather than beside her. He met her eyes once and did not try to tell her with an expression that it would be all right.

Regent Meral asked her to begin.

Ada looked down at her prepared sheet. The three openings had been crossed out. Beneath them was a fourth, written after Mara arrived.

“A coffin came home three times,” she said.

No one moved a page.

She described the church approach, the white milestone, Hobb's shoulder beneath the pole. She described the twelve-mile transfer and the correction that had divided it among routes their users had actually agreed to lend. She did not describe her aunt's blood as a miracle. It had broken the bearers' attention from a failing arrival line long enough for them to step away from it. Ysra had still needed measurements, witnesses and another place for the burden to go.

Then Ada showed the register.

“Thirty-one people,” she said. “Eighty-three live there. Here are the current household entries. Here are the journeys that disappear when you use the old number.”

Sile waited until she had finished the sentence before interrupting.

“A moving account. No one here disputes that errors deserve correction.”

“Then correct it before the lock.”

“The question is whether a particular error justifies delaying an entire winter system.”

Hobb put up his hand.

The Chancellor looked at him as though furniture had spoken.

“When do I get to say my bit?” Hobb asked.

“You will be called in order.”

“Good. Because you said particular error, and I'm one of the particulars.”

Meral looked towards the clerk. “Call him now.”

Hobb took the witness chair. He set both feet flat on the floor, a man making sure that his body had arrived where the room expected it.

“I've carried grain to Dunmere for twenty-six years,” he began. “I know what an extra mile feels like. I also know when I've walked the same willow three times without getting to the gate.”

Ada stepped back beside her mother.

Mara took her hand beneath the table, turned it over and felt the edge of the numb thumb with one careful finger. Ada watched recognition pass across her face.

“Later,” she whispered.

Her mother nodded. She did not let go.