The deck boards outside the Waystone creaked, and inside, the low sound of the telling stopped.
It did not trail off. It stopped, clean as a snuffed wick, between one word and the next. Chronicler's quill hung above the page. Bast went still on his stool by the hearth, and his stillness was the stillness of a cat that has heard something underneath the floor.
The innkeeper was already moving. There was no hurry in it. That was the remarkable thing, if anyone had been watching for remarkable things. He crossed from the far table to the space behind the bar without seeming to hurry and without seeming to have been anywhere else. By the time the latch lifted he was Kote entire, a towel over his shoulder and last night's glasses in front of him. A man mildly occupied in a slow morning, wearing the inn as other men wear a coat.
The door swung inward. Old Cob came through it, familiar and worn as an old coin.
He crossed the room at his own pace, which had one speed, and settled onto his stool at the bar. The stool had long ago given up being anyone else's; its grooves fit him as a riverbed fits its river. "Pint o' cider, Kote," he grunted. "Hell of a long morning. Don't suppose there's any of that pie left?"
"No pie, I'm afraid."
Cob clicked his tongue. "Pity, that. Pie's the thing for a morning like this one. Something warm and sweet to keep a man going."
Kote pulled a tankard from the shelf, wiped its rim, and filled it at the tap. His hands did the work as hands do work they have done ten thousand times, no motion wasted and none rushed. If the creak of the boards had troubled him, if anything at all had troubled him, it was not present in his hands. He slid the cider across, and Cob took it in both of his and drank half of it down in one long pull.
"Ahh." He set the tankard down with a soft thunk. "That's good, that is. Nothing like cider for settling the dust in a man's throat."
He leaned an elbow on the bar then, and his face rearranged itself toward gravity, though his voice stayed at its usual amble. Cob had delivered sixty years of news over one bar or another, weddings and wars alike, and it had all gone out at the same wagon-pace. "By the by. Had a talk with the Bentleys this morning. Whole family out front of their place, packing the big wagon. Everything they own, near enough, tied down proper. Tied down like they mean it."
"Leaving?" Kote took up the white linen cloth and began to wipe the bar in slow circles.
"For good and all, by the look of it." Cob's lips went thin. "And here's the why of it, since you're too polite to ask. They saw something two nights back. In their backwoods, past the sheep field. Not a man." He paused, the pause of a man setting a plate down carefully in front of someone. "Not quite a man, any road. Mary got the best look, and Mary's not one for vapors. Raised six children and buried two, that woman, she don't startle. She says it didn't walk right. Legs too long for it, or wrong some way, down low. Arms hanging past where arms ought to hang. And it moved—" Cob's hand made a vague, unhappy motion in the air. "Delicate, she said. Like it was dancing at nothing. It stood at the edge of the trees the whole time she watched, still as still, looking at the house. Gave her the shivers something fierce."
The white cloth moved through its circle. Completed it. Began another.
"They couldn't talk her round," Cob went on. "Not Bentley, not the priest, not nobody. She says she knows what she saw, and she don't intend to stay and see it twice. And Bentley—well. He didn't argue as hard as a man argues when he thinks his wife is wrong. That's the truth of a marriage, right there. You can read it all in how hard he argues."
"That's a bit of bad luck," Kote said mildly. He folded the white linen cloth, corner to corner, and smoothed the fold flat.
"Luck." Cob snorted and finished his cider with a flick of the wrist. He set the tankard down harder this time. "Luck ain't got a whit to do with it, and you know it same as me. It's all of a piece, is what it is. Shep in the ground before his time. Carter hauling that black devil-thing out of the woods for the whole town to poke at. And that thing weren't the only one of its kind neither, whatever Graham says. Teamster came through on Felling and had it off a tinker, that they'd found more of them down south, past Baedn. A nest of them. Spider-devils, cutting up livestock of a night. Soldiers on the road thick as flies on offal, and bandits thicker, and the levy men behind the both of them. The roads is bad and getting worse, and now there's things standing at the treeline of a night, watching folk's houses." He shook his head, and his joints and the stool creaked together, one instrument. "I'll tell you what I told Graham. The Bentleys might have the right of it. Might be the only wrong thing about it is how late they've left it. Run while you've got the legs, I say. Not everyone's got the legs."
He pushed himself up off the stool with a groan, joints popping loud in the quiet room.
"Anyway. Best be off. Things as need tending, same as ever." He gave Kote a short nod, glanced once, incuriously, at the scribe with his papers at the far table, strangers with papers had stopped being interesting days ago. Then he made for the door, boots heavy on the boards.
The door closed behind him.
The silence that came after was heavier than the one he'd interrupted. It settled over the common room like snow, evenly, into every corner, and the Waystone drank it as it drank all sound, and asked for more. The fire moved without crackling. Somewhere in the walls the old inn made one small tick of wood against nail, and then thought better of it.
Kote stood behind the bar, and did not move.
There was nothing unusual in what Cob had said. That was what a reasonable man would observe. Folk had left Newarre before. Farms changed hands. Women saw shapes at treelines in bad years as ponds grow ice, regularly, seasonally, whenever the world got cold enough. Nothing in it. A prudent innkeeper would already have stopped listening.
He was still listening. He listened to Cob's footsteps go down off the porch boards and along the road, fading, gone. He listened a while longer after that, to nothing at all, his head very slightly turned toward the door, and for the length of that listening his stillness was not an innkeeper's stillness. It was the other kind. The kind found in tall grass, in the last moment before it is decided which animal is which.
By the hearth, Bast sat watching him not move. Bast had not said one word since the boards first creaked, which was itself a thing worth remarking, and his eyes did not leave his master, and there was nothing playful in them at all.
Legs too long. Arms too low. Delicate, like dancing. Standing at the treeline, patient, watching the house. A cat at glass.
There had been other things, and lately. The crawling things that had killed Carter's horse out on the Baedn road not a span past, black-shelled, many-legged, wrong in the plain honest fashion of a blight. The scrael, though nobody in Newarre had a name for them but devil. Those had been dreadful, and those had been simple. They could be met with iron and fire and buried deep, and had been. If more of them were coming up out of the south, that was dreadful and simple too, in the manner of a hard winter coming, and a man could prepare for winter.
The thing at the Bentleys' treeline had stood still the whole of a night, and watched a house, and gone away untouched. It was not simple. It had not come to feed.
Kote took the folded cloth from the bar, shook it out, and folded it again, more precisely, as though the first fold had been the thing occupying him all along and had simply wanted doing better. He set it down square to the bar's edge. He put Cob's tankard in the wash bucket. He touched the taps, both, confirming what did not need confirming, the small liturgy of a man closing an account. His eyes went once to the cellar door, which was shut, and had been shut all morning, and needed nothing from anyone.
Then he came out from behind the bar and crossed the long room to the far table, where Chronicler sat over his pages, kneading his wrist with his off hand as he always did between sessions. Working the cramp out of the tendons a word at a time.
"Where were we?"
Chronicler looked up. If he had drawn any conclusions about deck boards and treelines and the quality of the innkeeper's stillness, he had put them somewhere out of sight, which was a kind of professional courtesy, and possibly a kind of courage. He squared his sheaf, dipped his quill, and held it ready above the paper.
"You were on your way to Renere," he said.
Kote nodded and sat. And then, for a moment, he did not begin.
His hand rested on the tabletop, fingers just at the wood's edge, riding the grain like a hand on a rail it has not decided whether to lean on. The fire threw its light down the length of the room, and the shadows of the empty chairs stretched and shifted on the wall, a company of thin dark shapes at their own slow business. He glanced at the door. Once. It was a small glance, and it spent no more time than a glance spends, and a stranger would never have marked it.
Bast marked it. Bast, from the hearth, watched his Reshi look at a shut door in his own inn as if reckoning, quietly, professionally, the time it would take to reach it. And what might be reached before it. And what might not.
Then the moment folded itself away like the cloth, corner to corner, put up neat somewhere behind the innkeeper's face where all such moments went.
"Yes," Kote said softly. "Renere."