Harlow's Reach was the end of the line. The watchtower stood on a bare headland with the land falling away to the sea on three sides, a hundred feet of black rock below it and the whole of the northern ocean beyond. Twenty-two men held it. The captain of the tower, a lean, dry man who had plainly been told the heir was coming and had decided in advance not to be impressed by it, met them in the yard and looked at Oswin's arm before he looked at Corin.
CAPT: You were told to stay down.
OSW: I was.
CAPT: And?
OSW: And I've stayed down before, sir, and I didn't care for it.
The captain looked at him a moment longer, then nodded once, as though this was the answer he had expected and the only one he would have accepted, and turned to Corin.
CAPT: My lord.
COR: Corin, please. I'm here to look and to listen. My father would be here himself if he could.
CAPT: I know he would. He was, for twenty years. He'd stand on that wall in the rain and ask every man his name, and then he'd ask it again the next time, because he said a man doesn't believe you remember him until you've done it twice.
Corin had not known that. He filed it in the place where he had begun, this summer, to keep the things about his father that nobody had thought to tell him.
The captain showed him the requisitions first, because they were nearest. They were kept in a box in the lower room, two years of them in the captain's own hand, every season asking for twelve more men and every season answered. Corin read them all. The answers were polite and regretful and arrived later each time, and they had sent four men in two years. One of the four was nineteen and had joined because the recruiting terms had got generous. He had his family in one of the carts Corin had passed on the road, going south.
SLD: My mother said she'd not wait for the sea to come up the street. I don't blame her.
COR: Nor do I.
SLD: She said the house'd still be sending letters when it did.
He said it without heat, as a man reports the weather, and went back to his work. Corin stood with the box of requisitions in his hands and did not defend the house, because there was nothing in the box that would have let him.
He went down the cliff path at low tide that afternoon with the captain, as he had been told to, and looked at it properly. There were marks on the rock. They went up from the waterline in lines, in four, five, six places, deep and evenly spaced, and Corin stood at the bottom with the sea coming in round his boots and looked up the face of the cliff along them. He thought of Rufus Hale on the platform at the mill, reading thirty feet of timber in one look and knowing which board would go. The marks were straight. They went up together and stopped together, at the same height, a body's length below the lip, and went no further. They did not look like the marks of something that did not know what it was doing.
COR: Captain. Have you ever seen them climb like this before?
CAPT: I've never seen them climb at all. On the coast road they come as they come. All of a heap. Like water finding the low ground.
COR: These aren't a heap.
CAPT: No.
COR: They look like drill.
The captain did not answer that. He looked up the rock for a long moment with his jaw set, and Corin understood that he had stood in this exact spot two days ago and thought the same thing, and had not yet found anybody he could say it to.
He spent the rest of the day with the men, which was the other half of what he had been told. He asked them their names and wrote every one of them down in the back of his father's letter, twenty-two of them, and then went round and asked them again, which made two of them laugh and the captain look at him sideways. He asked what they needed and wrote that down too, and did not promise them any of it. He had no idea yet what he could deliver, and a promise he could not keep would only have been the house sending a boy again. He ate with them at the long trestle in the tower's lower room, on the bench, with his elbows among theirs. Nobody gave him the good chair. There was not one. Talon, at the end of the bench, noticed this and did not remark on it. Corin noticed him not remarking on it, and neither of them remarked on that. They went up onto the wall together before dusk. The light was going long and yellow across the water, and for a while neither of them said anything.
TLN: You told him, then.
COR: Before the soup.
TLN: I'd have waited for the soup.
COR: I know. You said.
TLN: How did he take it?
Corin thought about it. He thought about the glass set down and the hand on the chair arm and the title belongs to the academy.
COR: Better than I deserved. Worse than the sheet on the board. Somewhere honestly in between.
TLN: That's Briar's line.
COR: Briar has good lines. He'd never let me use one to his face.
Talon smiled at the water. Corin let a little time go by, because he had learned that from Talon too, and then said the thing he had been carrying since the morning.
COR: Your mother's cup.
TLN: Mm.
COR: How long has it done that?
TLN: Always. It isn't much. Something goes, and something else turns up. It's never what you'd want. You lose a good cup and you get a chipped one. You lose a glove and you find somebody else's, a size wrong.
COR: That's not nothing.
TLN: It's never been anything else.
He said it lightly, the way his mother had said it, and Corin recognised the shape of it now. It was not modesty. It was the voice of a person who had been told the size of a thing so early and so kindly that he had never once thought to measure it again for himself.
They lit the fires at dusk. There were three: a great iron basket at the cliff edge and two more down the headland on either side, and the light went out a long way across the water and came back off it orange. The sea was flat. There was no wind to speak of. Oswin took the first watch, with his arm strapped and a spear in his good hand, and said it would be quiet, because after a night like the last one it always was.
Talon stayed at the parapet after Corin had turned away. When Corin came back to him some time later, he was still there, with his hands flat on the cold stone, looking out at the water. The stillness on him was not his ordinary one. Corin had known him long enough to tell the two apart.
COR: What is it?
TLN: I don't know.
COR: Talon.
TLN: I don't know. Something's missing.
COR: From where?
TLN: Out there.
He did not take his eyes off the sea.
TLN: Something's been moved. And nothing's come to take its place yet.
Corin looked. There was nothing to see. There was the flat water going black and the firelight going out across it, and very far off the last line of light where the sky came down. He was about to say so. Below them, at the foot of the cliff, the sea moved.
It did not break and it did not swell. It parted along the waterline in four, five, six places, exactly where the marks began, and things came up out of it straight up the face of the rock in their lines, in the full light of the fires. They did not slow at the light. They did not wait. Oswin shouted something from the cliff edge that was a name, and then another, and the bell went, and the whole of the tower came up off the benches at once. The fires were lit. They kept coming. And out beyond them, past the last of the light, where Talon had been looking all evening, the thing that had been missing from the sea came up out of it to take its place.