The man was still at his gate. They came back down through the village at the crossroads on the second afternoon, and Corin saw him from a long way off, leaning where he had leaned before with his arms folded on the top bar. He watched the Ashby horse come down the road the way he had watched it go up, all the way, without moving. The village still did not come out. Nobody had told it anything. The rider the captain had sent ahead had gone through it in the dark without stopping, and no cart would come down from the sea end for another day. As far as the village knew, the house had sent a boy up the road four days ago, and the boy was coming back down it now with his side strapped and a cut over the back of his hand, and nothing whatever had changed. Corin stopped the horse at the gate. He had not meant to. He had meant to ride past, the way he had ridden past on the way up, because he had not had anything to say to the man then and was not sure he had anything now. But he found that he had stopped, and that Talon had stopped a length behind him without being asked, and that the man was looking up at him from the gate with exactly the same expression as before.
COR: Harlow's Reach was attacked two nights ago. Out of the sea, up the cliff. They came on through the fires this time. They didn't go back.
The man said nothing.
COR: Twenty-two men held it. All twenty-two are alive. I have their names, if you want them. One of them might be somebody you know.
The man looked at him for a long time. Then he unfolded his arms from the top of the gate.
VLG: Tarrow. Is Oswin Tarrow up there?
COR: He is. He's got one arm in a sling and a cut over his eye he hasn't told anybody about, and he held the cliff fire all night with a spear in his other hand.
VLG: That's him.
He did not say anything else. He did not thank Corin, or call him anything. He only stood there, and nodded once, slowly, as though a sum had come out that he had not expected to come out. Then he turned and went back into his house. A moment later, through the open door, Corin heard him calling somebody's name. They rode on. Neither of them said anything for some time.
TLN: You could have told him what you did.
COR: I did tell him what I did. I told him who held the wall.
Agnes Pryce was at her blue door before they had reached the end of her street, which meant she had been at the window, which meant she had been at it for some time. She looked at her son, and at the way he was holding his left shoulder, and at the strapping on Corin's side, and her face did a number of things very quickly and then settled into none of them.
AGN: Well.
COR: I brought him back.
AGN: So I see.
TLN: He brought me back, Mother. I didn't help at all.
COR: That isn't true.
TLN: It's a little true.
COR: It's the opposite of true. He brought me back. I'd still be on that wall.
Agnes looked from one to the other of them. Corin saw her see something in her son's face that had not been there four days ago. He had seen it himself, at the parapet at dusk, and then in the mist, and then on the stone at dawn with a borrowed pencil. She did not ask about it. She held out her hand to Corin instead, and when he took it she did not let go for a moment.
AGN: I wasn't asking, Corin. But thank you.
His mother cried when she saw the strapping. She did it briefly and efficiently, in the hall, without letting go of either of his arms, and then she stopped. She said that she would have the physician up from the town that evening whatever he said about it, and that his father was in the east study, and that his father had been in the east study since the morning, and had not eaten.
MTH: He's had a letter. From the captain at the Reach. It came this morning, ahead of you, on a fast horse.
COR: What did it say?
MTH: I don't know. He read it, and then he asked to be left alone, and he's been alone since. I've never known him do that. Not even after the line.
Corin went to the east study. The chair was the same chair and the blanket was the same blanket and the fire was lit, though it was the middle of summer. His father was sitting by it with the captain's letter in his lap, folded once. He was not dressed for an occasion. He was not dressed for anything. He looked up as Corin came in, and Corin saw his face, and understood that his father had not been waiting for a champion. He had been waiting, since the morning, alone, to see whether his son would walk through that door or be carried.
FTH: Sit down.
Corin sat.
FTH: The captain writes a short letter. He always has. He says there was an attack in the night, out of the sea, with a commander at the head of it. He says the commander is dead. He says nobody was lost. And then he says one more thing, and I've been sitting here since nine o'clock trying to decide what it means.
He unfolded the letter, and read it.
FTH: Your son asked every man his name. Then he asked it again.
He folded it.
FTH: Tell me all of it.
Corin told him all of it. He did it in order, the way he had learned to tell things at this table. He told him about the road north and the carts going south, and about the man at the gate, then and today. He told him about Oswin Tarrow in the yard of the last watchtower, and the marks on the cliff that looked like drill, and the requisitions in their box, two years of them, and the boy of nineteen whose mother was on the road. He told him about the night. He told him about the grey things and how the men had held, and about the mist, and the drowned man who came up the cliff path on two feet like a man coming home late, and the sergeant who priced the wall. And then he told him about kneeling on the walkway in the white with four cuts in him, unable to see anything at all.
COR: I was afraid.
His father did not say anything.
COR: Not the way I've been afraid before. I don't think I'd ever been afraid before, not properly. I thought I was going to die, and nobody would see it happen, and I knelt there and I could feel everything I had going out of me, one thing after another. Every reason I had. I couldn't stop it. I was more afraid than I knew a person could be.
FTH: And then?
COR: And then I got up.
He told him how. He told him about the thing that had burned underneath the fear, and what it had been, and what it had not been. He told him that it had wanted nothing for itself, that it had not cared whether anybody saw, and that it had wanted only the wall held and the men home. He told him that he had cut the fear out of himself with his own ability, which he had not known could be done until he did it, and that it had stayed cut just long enough, and then come back. He told him that it was still coming back, now and then, in the evenings, and that his hands had shaken for a whole night. His father listened to all of it without moving.
FTH: Good.
COR: Good?
FTH: That you were afraid. Good. Now you know what the wall costs. Every man up there knows it, and has known it since his first night, and stands there anyway. A lord who doesn't know it has no business asking them to.
He looked at the fire for a while.
FTH: I was afraid too, you know. At the line. I've never told anyone that. I was afraid for a long time before I was hurt, and I stood there anyway, and then something hit me in the back in the retreat and I went down, and I never saw what it was. I've lain awake a year wondering what it was.
Corin had known this was coming since the drowned man's hand closed on his ankle. He had known it for two days on the road, and in the hall with his mother's hands on his arms, and in the doorway of this room. He had not decided how to say it. He found, now that it had come, that there was only one way.
COR: I know what it was.
His father turned from the fire.
COR: The commander told me. At the end, when he was dying. He said it was his sergeant's stone, on the coast road, in the retreat, and that he had ordered it. He said to tell you he was sorry it had missed your neck. That's what he said. Those were his words. He wanted me to have to carry them home to you. The sergeant's dead. Talon killed him. Neither of us knew. And I killed the commander, Father, and I didn't know either. I want you to know that I didn't know. I didn't do it for you. I wish I could tell you I did, because I think you'd like it better, and I'm not going to.
He stopped. The fire moved in the grate. His father did not say anything for a very long time. He sat with his hands as they were on the blanket and the captain's letter between them, and looked at his son. Then at the fire. Then at nothing at all. Corin watched a year of lying awake go across his face, and then go somewhere else.
FTH: You didn't do it for me.
COR: No.
FTH: What did you do it for?
COR: The wall. The men. Twenty-two of them. I did it so that they'd go home.
His father nodded, slowly. And then, to Corin's astonishment, he smiled. It was not a happy smile. It was the smile of a man who has been handed something heavy and has found, turning it over, that it is the right shape for his hands.
FTH: Then you did it for me after all. You just didn't know that's what I was.
There was one more thing. Corin told him that too. He told him about the curse, and about the thread going out over the water, and about the faces with no faces turning in the sea. His father listened to it with the particular stillness Corin had learned last winter meant something mattered. When it was done he was quiet for longer than he had been about anything else.
COR: You'll want to keep me here.
FTH: Yes.
COR: You'll want to send me somewhere safe. Or keep me in this house where you can see me. That's what you did last time.
FTH: Yes. I want both. I want them very badly. I've wanted them since nine o'clock this morning. And I'm not going to do either. I made you a promise last winter, the same as you made me one. I said I'd trust you. I'm not going to take that back the first time it costs me something. A thing that's only true until it costs you something was never true at all.
Then he held out his hand, palm up, and Corin understood, and took the letter out of his coat. It was the one he had carried up to the sea end and back, with the names written in the back of it in his own hand. He did not give it to his father. He opened it, and read them aloud, one after another, slowly, all twenty-two, so that his father would hear every one of them, alive. His father listened to every name. When it was done he said them back, all twenty-two, without a mistake.
The sheet went up on the recruiting board the next morning. Corin wrote it himself, at his father's desk, in his own hand, which was not as earnest as the hand on the old sheet and considerably less tidy. It said that the watchtower at Harlow's Reach had been attacked from the sea, and had held, and that the following men had held it. Then it gave twenty-two names. It did not give his. It did not give Talon's.
He pinned it beside the old sheet, not over it. He had thought about that for a long time. The old sheet said that the heir of the house had won the Trial of Power with his sword never drawn, and every word of it was still true, and it was still a lie. He decided it could stay up and be a lie next to something that was not. People could read them both and make up their own minds.
He was a little way across the square when he heard the woman at the well. She was standing in front of the board with her bucket on her hip, reading, and she said a name aloud, not to anybody. Then she said it again. Then she put the bucket down on the cobbles and went very quickly away across the square, and Corin heard her calling somebody before she was out of sight, the way the man at the gate had called somebody, the way the men on the wall had called each other in the white.
He went home and wrote to Arthur Lyerm. It was the end of July, and Arthur would be sixteen, and Corin had never once in his life written anybody a letter for a birthday. The first draft was four pages and he burned it. The second was one page and he burned that too. The third said:
Arthur, Happy birthday. I nearly lost our rivalry by default this week but I would like it on record that I did not. See you soon. Corin.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he added a line under it, smaller, and sent it before he could take it out.
I was afraid.
I am told this is normal.
I am told you would know.