Chapter 48: Names on a List
ULF
Bryce Waters' parchment went soft at the folds by the third day.
I carried it inside my jerkin and worked it like any list of men I meant to spend. Forty names. District, age, trade, and whether anyone would come asking after them. I crossed off nine. I added four. Every stroke of the quill decided which of them would stand in front of a dragon.
That was the daylight work.
The other list had no name on it at all, and I kept it behind my teeth. Garrett had died with a kitchen girl in his mouth. Marta, and a drop near the sept. Marta had been dead five days.
The drop was still being emptied.
Somebody was reaching past a corpse and lifting the paper anyway, which meant she'd never been the top of anything. She'd been the bottom of it. I'd cut the wrong end of the rope and congratulated myself for it.
So I bought eyes. Maron took the harbour ledgers, four coppers a page, hunting consignments that didn't add up. Marsh put a fishmonger's boy on the sept's south steps from first light to dark, and a second boy on the cistern lane behind it. Eleven silver, and a favour I'd been keeping for something worse. Marsh counted the coin twice in front of me. He'd never done that in nine years.
"You're spending fast," he said.
"I am."
"Fast's the dearest way to buy anything." He pushed the coin back across the boards, then thought better of it and drew it in again. "Two of my boys won't work the sept for you. Not since the Gold Cloaks started taking names off the Hook."
"That wasn't mine."
"It's got your hand on it now. That's the same thing down here." He wiped the boards where the coin had been. "Nobody's saying no to you yet. They're just asking what a run costs before they take it. They never used to ask."
I sat the drop myself on the third night and the fourth. Cold stone, a gutter that ran into my boot, a cat that came twice for the same nothing. On the fourth night a man in a carter's coat came down the undercroft stair with an empty hand and went back up with a full one. I went heavy on the top step so the stone took my print instead of my sound, and had him against the wall before he'd finished turning.
He knew nothing worth beating out of him. Paid at the Iron Gate by a steward's man he'd never seen unhooded, twice a month, four stags a run. He'd never opened what he carried, because he couldn't read.
I took the packet and let him walk. A courier who vanishes tells them more than a courier who arrives late.
The packet held grain receipts. Nine of them in a steward's hand, tallies for wheat and barley moving inland off the Blackwater docks. No cipher. No seal worth having. Numbers.
Ser Criston Cole was waiting outside the Tower of the Hand at dawn, his white cloak dark at the hem from the wet.
"You took a man off the sept steps last night."
"I did."
"And released him."
"That too."
"Traitors' correspondence inside the Red Keep is Kingsguard business." He never raises his voice. He doesn't need to. "It is not a bastard's private hunt. You will give me the man, the papers, and whatever you have not written down."
"He's a carter. Break him and you'll get a confession shaped exactly like the question you asked him."
"Then give me the papers."
"They're grain receipts, ser. You'd read them for an hour and hand them back."
His jaw set. "You are one man with one queen's leave and no rank at all. I have taken this to the Hand."
"So have I," I said, which wasn't true yet.
Helaena found me at midday in the small solar with the receipts spread across the table and the candidate roll pinned under an inkpot so it couldn't slide in among them. She looked at the food I hadn't touched, then at me.
"You haven't slept."
"I slept."
"On stone, in the wet, and you're grey as a fish." She sat down anyway. She always sits. "Eat, and I'll leave you to it."
I ate to be rid of the argument. She turned one of the receipts around with a fingertip and read it upside down, which she does better than anyone I've known.
"Wheat," she said. "Going up the Rosby road. More wheat."
"Going to a hill seat that feeds sixty mouths in winter and a hundred in summer. That's eleven hundred bushels in a season. Somebody's provisioning a camp and writing it down as a granary."
"Whose camp?"
"That's the part I don't have." I pushed the pages apart. "The drop sits under the sept. Behind the sacristy, the old undercroft steps."
Her hands stopped over the parchment.
"The bottom of a stair," she said.
"What?"
"I dreamed it in the spring. The bottom of a stair, and something with antlers standing in the dark at the foot of it. Patient. Waiting to be fed." She recited it flat, the way you say a thing you've been laughed at for. "Aegon asked whether it would enjoy being hunted. My mother told me to hush and drink my milk."
I was already reaching for Maron's ledger sheets.
House Buckwell of the Antlers. Sixty leagues out the Rosby road, up in the hills. Forty men in the hall, two hundred swords when they answer a call. Lord Jon Buckwell had signed for eleven hundred bushels he had no mouths for, and his ravens came into the city and didn't come to Orwyle's rookery.
When I looked up, Helaena hadn't moved. Her face had gone very still, and there was no fear in it at all.
"You believed it," she said.
"It's evidence."
"Nobody has ever called it that before."
Otto Hightower read the receipts twice, in silence, at the window where the light was best. He's a hard man to watch reading. Nothing in his face moves until he's decided what he wants it to say.
"Buckwell," he said at last. "Yes. That is the shape of it."
"Then you agree."
"I agree entirely. Your work is sound and your conclusion is correct." He set the pages down and squared their edges. "You will not touch him."
"He sold the Keep's floors to Daemon Targaryen. His girl put the nursery stair into a butcher's hand."
"He has two hundred swords, the Rosby road, and every hill lord between here and Maidenpool watching what we do to him." Otto's voice stayed level. That is the worst of him. "We are four months into losing a war. If the Crown hauls a Crownlands lord out of his own hall on a bastard's grain arithmetic, we don't lose one traitor. We lose eight houses who decide the Greens arrest whoever they please. Leave him where he is. Watch him."
"And the children?"
"Are guarded. By men I appointed." He turned back to the window. "Say it aloud, so we both know it was said."
"I'll leave him where he is."
"Good."
We stood there a moment longer. He knew precisely what I'd just done, and he let it stand, because a Hand who makes a man lie twice has to act on the second one.
I found Cole in the outer ward, watching two of his sworn brothers at the ring.
"You'll want this from me before you get it from the Hand," I said. "The receipts point at Lord Jon Buckwell of the Antlers. Two days' ride."
He looked at me a long moment. "You'd hand me that."
"You wanted the jurisdiction. Take it. But an arrest wants a white cloak standing beside it, or it's a killing, and I'd rather it wasn't."
"The Hand has approved this."
"I'll need a horse and a witness."
"On whose authority?"
"Yours."