Chapter 3: Bones in the Tower

Erlich went to the wizard the next morning. The village had given him the name, and a frightened village's name was as good a place to start as any. He took Godwin. Leofric he sent to the river.

The keep rose at the back of the hall, a square tower of pale stone with a door banded in iron. A servant let them in and led them up a tight stair. The smell hit them halfway — bone-dust, char, something acrid beneath it, the reek of a working that had not long been put out.

Vaelin met them at the top. He was a small man, narrow and dry, with a wizard's long hands and a wizard's long face, and he looked at the rangers the way a man looks at dirt tracked onto a clean floor.

"The King's Rangers," he said. "The baron did not tell me I was to be inspected."

"Not inspecting," Erlich said. "Looking."

"Then look." Vaelin stepped aside, offended already, and waved one long hand at the room.

It was a wizard's tower, and it looked as wizards' towers look. Shelves ran floor to roof on every wall, and on the shelves stood jars and pots and boxes, and bones. Bones in bundles, bones in baskets, a long yellow curve of something too big to be a cow's rib leaning in the corner behind the furnace. Skulls, some wired together, some loose in crates. A table was covered in the mess of a working — ash, a burnt ring, a pestle, a dish of dark powder, the stub of a candle.

"Godwin," Erlich said.

Godwin moved through the room slow, the way he moved through brush, touching nothing, reading it with his eyes. He knew what wizards were. He knew the bones were trade goods. He looked anyway, because that was the work.

"Dragon-bone," Godwin said, stopping at the long rib. "This end of a spine, too. Beast-bone." He lifted the lid of a crate, set it down. "Wolf, I'd say. Maybe troll. All of it old, all of it worked or ready to work."

"A wizard collects bones," Vaelin said, sharp. "Dragon-bone. Beast-bone. It is the trade I am in. The baron knows. The crown knows. It is not a crime to keep what I have paid for."

"Where do you get it?" Erlich said.

"Where does any wizard get it. I buy it. Rangers bring it, sometimes, and hunters, and men who dig where old beasts have died. I pay silver for it and I work it and I sell the working. That is my living." Vaelin's eyes were hard and bright. "It is not your villagers, Ranger. I have not stolen any herdsman. I have not eaten any man's cow."

Erlich said nothing to that. He walked the shelves once more. The jars held powders and dried things and one pale mass floating in oil that he did not stop to name. The smoke of the working still hung at the roof. It all looked the way necromancy would look, if a frightened village had to draw it. He could see why the tavern talked.

He stopped at the table and picked up the dish of dark powder. He did not know what it was. He set it down.

"Where were you," he said, "the night Brennan was taken? The night the Dellwood boy went?"

"In my tower," Vaelin said. "As I am every night. Ask the baron's steward. Ask the servant who brings my evening meal. I do not leave this room after dark, Ranger. The stairs are steep and my eyes are not what they were, and the dark outside this keep is no longer safe. I have heard the talk. I know what the village says. They say necromancy." His voice went bitter on the word. "They say it because they do not know what a wizard is. They see bones and they think death. A bone to a wizard is lumber to a carpenter."

Godwin came back to Erlich's side. He shook his head, very slightly. Nothing here. Nothing that matched a cow gone whole in the dark.

"He's clean," Godwin said, low.

Erlich did not like it, but he nodded. Vaelin was miserly and sour and his tower stank, and none of that was a crime. The bones were trade goods, the way Godwin said, the way wizards always said. Erlich had no reason to hold him, and no wish to. He had no wish to be in a wizard's tower at all.

"You'll stay in the keep," Erlich said. "After dark. Until this is done."

"I am not your prisoner," Vaelin said.

"You are your own," Erlich said. "Stay in at night. That is advice."

He left the wizard glaring after them and went down the stair.

They found Leofric at the river crossing, east of the village, where the ford ran shallow over flat stones. He was sitting on a rock eating an apple, and his boots were wet to the knee. He grinned when he saw them.

"I have been busy," he said.

"Show me," Erlich said.

Leofric led them down to the water's edge and across at the shallows. On the far bank the ground rose into a thicket of scrub and dead willow. He had found the camps. Old fire-scars, trampled earth, a midden of bones — fish bones, mostly, but here and there a longer bone, cracked for the marrow. Scraps of dried meat hung on a thornbush, forgotten or left.

"Orcs," Leofric said. "Been here a while. Came and went by the water, I'd say, in the night."

"Orcs eat meat," Godwin said, slow. "They need it. Cattle would do. A man would do, if they caught one."

"Yes," Leofric said. "It would."

Erlich stood in the trampled camp and felt the pieces move in his head. The river. The night-takings. The drag-marks running down toward the meadow and the ford. Orcs came by water in the dark, took what they could carry, dragged the rest. It was the answer a soldier would give, and Erlich was a soldier when he was not being a dragon-slayer, and he liked the shape of it. It had weight. It had a war in it, and wars were something he understood.

"The marks," Godwin said. "Captain. The belly-marks. The furrow."

"Orcs drag their kill," Erlich said. "A party of them, hauling a cow. Heavy feet, a heavy drag. It would trench the mud."

Godwin looked at the midden, at the cracked bones. He did not say what he was thinking. He had said it before, at the ditch, and the captain had not heard him.

"We watch the river," Erlich said. "Tonight. All three of us. If orcs come across, we take them at the water."

Leofric winked. "I'll bring the bow."

They waded back over the ford and up to the village. Erlich's hand went to his pouch once, in the crossing, and found the weight of the scale still there, and his fingers passed over it and let it be. He had a river to watch now. He had a theory with a war in it. The scale could keep.

That night they took their posts at the crossing, three dark shapes in the willows, and watched the water run shallow and silver under the moons. The dark gathered. Nothing came across.