Chapter 145: A Village by the Sea
ULF
Ulf rode alone down the coast road in rough-spun, with the white cloak folded flat at the bottom of a grain sack where no one would think to put a hand. Two days out of the capital, a night in a hedge, and the last stretch at a walk because the mare had thrown a shoe near Duskendale and he hadn't wanted to stop anywhere a man might remember his face. Flour, salt, oil, a jar of honey, a pair of boots two sizes too large for a child who would grow into them by spring. It was the smallest cargo he'd ever guarded and the only one he cared about.
The village announced itself before he saw it. Gulls first, then the smell: fish drying on the racks, tar, woodsmoke pressed down flat by the damp. He left the mare at the last fence post and carried the sacks in on his shoulder like any other man come back from market.
Aegon was walking.
He came across Dalla's floor on legs that hadn't decided yet whether they belonged to him, one hand out for the table edge, missing it, sitting down hard on the rushes and getting up again without a sound of complaint. Eleven months old. Silver-blond hair lifting in the draught under the door. Ulf stood in the doorway with the flour still on his shoulder and did the arithmetic he did every time, and it came out the same. Helaena's eyes. His own jaw, under all that softness, waiting.
"He's hungry all the time," Dalla said, without turning from the pot. "Eats like a dragon. Screams like one too."
"Does he sleep?"
"When the tide's out. Never when it's in. Ask me why and I'll tell you when I know."
Ulf set the sacks down and crouched, and the boy came at him with the reckless confidence of someone who'd never yet been dropped. He lifted him. Under his palm the small heartbeat went fast and steady, faster than a man's, quick with all the years still ahead of it, and he held it there a moment longer than he needed to.
"Thank you," he said. "For everything."
"Mm."
"I mean it. I know what I've asked of you. And I know what I'm about to ask, which is worse, because the visits have to thin out. There's a household around me now that notices a missing week. If I keep riding out like this, someone eventually rides after me, and then it isn't a secret, it's a—"
"Stop." Dalla put the spoon down. She had flour to the wrist and a scar across the back of one hand from a gutting knife thirty years old. "You've been apologizing since you came through that door. You did it last time. You'll do it next time. He doesn't hear apologies. He hears a voice he knows twice a season, and when he hears it he goes quiet and looks at the door. Spend it on him. Not on me."
Aegon had got a fistful of Ulf's collar and was pulling it toward his mouth. Ulf let him.
Dalla studied him then, up and down, the coarse wool, the boots he'd deliberately scuffed. "You're not wearing the rough-spun because you're hiding," she said. "You're wearing it because you don't want the village to know what you've become."
He shifted Aegon higher against his shoulder and said nothing.
"So." She wiped her hands. "Is it time? Are you taking him home?"
"Soon."
"Soon." She let the word sit where he'd put it. "The boy's got a brother who's king, if the tales that come in on the salt boats are worth anything. He's got another brother. He's got a sister. When does he meet them?"
Wind came off the water and worried at the shutters, and one of them knocked twice against the frame. Ulf looked at the top of his son's head. There was an honest answer somewhere and he did not have it yet.
"Before the year turns," he said.
"That's a promise or that's a comfort. I'd like to know which."
"It's a promise."
She nodded once, hard, and went back to the pot. "Then eat something. You look like a scarecrow that's been robbed."
He ate. It was fish stew with too much pepper in it and it was the best thing he'd had in a month. When he stood to go out, Dalla took the boy from him without being asked, and Ulf said, "There's one more thing first."
Corwen found him at the village's edge, where the path turned up toward the headland and the boat sheds sat with their doors open to the wind. The old fisherman was seated on an overturned skiff with a net across his knees and a bone needle in his fingers, and he wasn't mending anything. He'd been waiting.
"Sit down," Corwen said, "or don't. It's your legs."
Ulf sat.
"I've held my tongue since the spring, and I'm done holding it. I brought you into this village. Mine was the first roof you stood under and mine's the word that keeps the rest of them from asking about the woman with the child who came from nowhere. I've earned better than nothing." The needle went still. "The men who visit call you Lord Commander now. The boy has your face."
The gulls went over. Ulf watched a boat come in past the point with its sail half down and let himself think about how many ways this could be answered, and how few of them were true, and how not one of the true ones could leave his mouth.
He'd meant to keep this the way he'd kept it since the birth, which was alone. That had worked while he could ride out whenever he liked. It wouldn't work at four visits a year. A secret held by one man is only as good as that man's horse.
"Here's what you get," Ulf said. "The boy is watched. Not by me alone. By people with power enough to level this village off the coast if they were the other sort, and they're not the other sort, and they love him. That's the whole of it. Ask for the rest and I'll lie to you, and I'd rather not."
Corwen breathed out through his nose. "That's more than I had this morning."
"It's also a weight. You know enough now to be worth questioning. If a stranger comes asking after a silver-haired child, you don't lie well, you don't lie at all. You say the child is your sister's grandson out of Maidenpool and you send word the same day."
"To who? You'll not be here."
"No. Twice a season a man comes in with the salt boats. He'll want a barrel of your worst salt fish and he'll pay stupidly for it. That's him. Anything the cottage needs, anything you see, anything that frightens you, it goes to him and it's with me in three days. The boots come that way now. So does the coin."
"And you?"
"Rarely. That's the price."
Corwen turned the bone needle over twice. "Rarely's better than never, and never's what I expected." He almost smiled. "It's going to be a story, you know. 'The White Bastard and the Queen, hiding in a fishing village.' I'll wait until you've taken him home before I start telling it."
He crossed to the fence post and untied the mare, then swung up into the saddle. "Make sure it's a good one."
The light had gone amber over the water by the time he came back past the cottage. Dalla was standing in the doorway with Aegon on her hip and the shutters knocking behind her, and the boy had the wooden spoon in his fist and was hammering her shoulder with it. Ulf reined in. Aegon stopped hammering. He looked up at the man on the horse and his whole face worked, and he said, loud and pleased with himself, something with a *d* in it that might have been a word and might have been nothing at all.
Dalla laughed. "That's new."
Ulf sat there a moment. Then he lifted his hand, and turned the mare toward the coast road, and rode out of the village smiling for the first time in a year of leaving it.
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