The Ford

The ford beacon stood on a stone pillar at the river's edge, and when Tamsin reached it the sky over Mirefold was the colour of a bruise.

"Storm's two hours off," said Sir Aldous Crane, holding her stirrup. He was a broad, weathered man of fifty with a knight's plain steel at his hip and mud to his knees. "If the beacon's dark when it hits, the Vesk carters will try the crossing blind, and the bog takes them. It has taken three already this season. Tell me you can light it, mage."

"I can light it." She hoped that was true. "I'll need an hour with it first. The current under the pillar is what died, not the flame. I have to find where it broke."

She climbed the pillar steps with the Harrow Lantern in her arms and set it in the iron cradle at the top, where the old beacon-stone sat cracked and grey. Then she put her palm flat on the stone and reached down with the part of her that was Second Circle, the part that could feel the current and shape it, and followed the dead channel back along the riverbed until she found the break. A boulder had shifted in the spring flood and pinched the flow. Nothing dark, nothing cursed. Just the river doing what rivers did.

She could not move a boulder. But she could run the current around it, the way you run water round a stone with your hand, and that took a lesser spell, and a lesser spell took everything a Second Circle mage had. She fed it in slowly and felt the channel open and felt the Harrow Lantern drink. The wick-stone kindled. The glass went gold.

Crane whooped from the foot of the pillar like a boy.

When she climbed down her hands were shaking and her sight was full of sparks, but the beacon burned, and the first rain was only just beginning to fall. The minor matter of the ford beacon was settled before the storm arrived: she had come to light it, and it was lit, and it would stay lit as long as she fed it every evening. That was the job. Tamsin let herself feel the small, clean satisfaction of a job done and then went to be sick behind the pillar.

"That's a Second Circle lesser spell," Crane said when she came back, handing her a flask. "I've seen court mages of the fourth circle do the same with less fuss and more wine. You did it with a lantern and a wet coat. Hesper chose well."

"Circle Four mages don't come to fords, Sir Aldous."

"No. More's the pity."

The storm came in off the Mirefold bog an hour after dark, and with it came the Duchess.

Tamsin did not believe it at first. But there was the Ashcombe wine-red cloak coming down the ford road at a canter, and there was a boy on a pony behind, and two riders in the Duke's colours, and all of them soaked. Duchess Isolde Ashcombe swung down in the mud and pushed her hood back, and Cedric, her son, slid off the pony and stood close against her.

"My husband sent us ahead," she said to Crane without preamble. "The Duke means to ride for Vesk at first light to speak with the free city's council about the crown, and he wants his wife and his son across the ford before the river rises, not after. He will follow in the morning. I am sorry for the hour, Sir Aldous."

"The hour is nothing, my lady. The crossing is lit. I'll walk you over myself." Crane looked at the boy, who was shivering and trying not to show it. "Though the young lord might take a cup of something hot first."

They crowded into the ford-keeper's hut with the storm hammering the roof. Cedric drank soup. The Duchess did not drink anything. She sat near the door with her gloves off and looked at the beacon's glow through the shutter crack, and after a while she said, to Tamsin, "You're the hedge-mage. The Lamplighter's girl. Second Circle."

"Yes, my lady."

"You lit that beacon tonight."

"Yes."

"Then you felt the current when it opened." It was not a question. "Did it feel like anything? Anything other than water?"

Tamsin thought. "No, my lady. Just the river."

The Duchess nodded slowly, and something went out of her shoulders, and she said, "Good. That's good." Then she looked at her son and did not say anything else, and Tamsin was left with the strangest sense that the Duchess of Westmarch had been afraid of the answer. Isolde Ashcombe had been at the Sundering; everyone knew that. She had been in the hall at Caerlan the night the crown cracked, and she had never once said what she saw there, not to the court, not to the treaty scribes, not, by the look of her, to her husband. Tamsin had heard that rumour as a child and had never believed it meant anything. She believed it now.

She was still thinking about it when the Mire Hound came out of the bog.

Crane heard it first. He was on his feet with his sword half drawn before the howl finished. "Stay in the hut," he said. "All of you. Mage, keep the beacon."

A Mire Hound was not a dog. It was a bog thing the size of a pony, grey-furred and black-mouthed, that came up out of Mirefold after storms to take whatever the water had loosened. Baron Pell's men hunted them for their teeth, which were a hand long and did not rot, and a Mire Hound tooth sold in Vesk for three crowns as a charm against drowning. Tamsin had seen the teeth in market stalls all her life. She had never seen the animal.

It came at the hut low and fast, and Sir Aldous Crane met it at the door.

She saw it through the shutter crack because she could not stop herself. He put his sword into its shoulder and it did not slow. It took him off his feet and down into the mud, and he rolled and got the blade up under its jaw, and it screamed, and he drove the sword home and it went down on top of him. For a moment there was only rain.

Then the Duchess was out of the door, and Tamsin after her, and the Duke's two riders dragging the dead thing off, and Sir Aldous Crane lay in the mud with his sword still in the Hound's throat and his own throat open where the black mouth had found it.

He was alive for perhaps a minute. He looked at the beacon, which was still burning, and he said, "Good girl," and Tamsin did not know whether he meant her or the lantern, and then the Warden of the Ford was dead on the ground he had held for nine years.

Nobody spoke for a long time.

It was Cedric, in the end, who moved. The boy came out into the rain and knelt by the knight's body and, very carefully, closed his eyes, the way someone must have taught him. The Duchess put her hand on her son's head. "He walked a hundred carters across this river," she said. "We will tell the King that. Cedric, you will remember his name."

"Sir Aldous Crane," the boy said.

"Yes."

Tamsin went to the dead Hound and, because she could not think of anything else to do with her hands, pulled one of the long teeth from its jaw with her knife. It came free with a crack. She wrapped it in her sleeve. Later she would think about why; now it was only something to hold.

They did not cross the ford that night. They sat with the body until the storm blew itself out, and in the grey before dawn the Duke's riders built a litter, and the Duchess said the words for a knight because there was no one else to say them. Tamsin fed the Harrow Lantern a cantrip at first light, and another at full dawn, and the beacon never dimmed.

When the Duke rode in from Harrow an hour after sunrise, he found his wife standing over a dead Warden, his son holding a dead man's sword, and a Second Circle hedge-mage with blood on her sleeve and a bog-beast's tooth in her fist, and the ford still lit. He looked at all of it for a long moment from the saddle.

"Who holds the ford now?" he said.

Nobody had an answer. Tamsin thought: I do, until someone tells me otherwise. She did not say it.