Chapter 4: What the Dark Took

The night came down cold and clear. The two moons tracked over the willows and the river ran shallow on its stones, and nothing came across.

Erlich had set them in a line along the bank — himself upstream where the ford was widest, Godwin among the roots at the water's edge with his bow across his knees, Leofric downstream where the brush thinned. They did not talk. They did not move. Three dark shapes in the dark, watching the wrong border.

The cold came up off the water and settled in the bones. Once an owl went over. Once a fish broke the surface. Apart from that, nothing. The river ran, and the moons turned, and the night did its work somewhere else.

Dawn came grey. Erlich was stiff and cold and had seen nothing, and he was beginning to feel the shape of a wrong thing in his chest when the boy came.

He came running down the lane from the village, a boy of ten or eleven, barefoot in the mud, and he was shouting before he was close enough to be understood. Godwin caught him by the arms and held him still.

"Slow," Godwin said. "Slow. What is it."

The boy could hardly get it out. "The stockade," he said. "In the night. The dog — Edric's dog is gone. And the reeve's man. The stable-hand. Gone. There's marks, there's—"

Erlich was already moving.

They ran. It was not far. The lane climbed the low rise to the palisade gate, and the gate was open, and people were standing in the yard in their bedclothes staring at the mud. Haden was among them, and his face was the color of the dawn.

The yard told the story before anyone could. The belly-furrow was there, the broad smooth trench running across the trampled earth, with the drag-scars scored down its middle. It crossed the yard from the stable to the palisade wall and went under — under the bottom rail, where the posts were set wide and the ground was soft, and out the other side into the ditch beyond. No blood. No bone. No hide. The dog was gone. The man was gone.

"Edric's dog was tied at the gate," Haden said. His voice was flat, the way a man's voice goes when he is holding himself together by the edges. "He bayed at something in the small hours. Edric thought it was the moons. He did not get up. In the morning the lead was bitten clean through and the dog was gone." He stopped. "My man, Wulf. He slept in the stable loft. The loft is empty. The ladder is down. There are marks on the floor where he was dragged to the door."

Erlich looked at the furrow. It was the same furrow. The same width as a man's body, the same smooth drag down the middle, the same clean trench as the goat-pen and the byre and the ditch at the stockade edge. The same marks, and the same silence where the blood should have been.

Godwin was already at the palisade. He came back. "It went under," he said. "The posts are set too wide at the corner. The ground's soft there. Something low and heavy pushed through and pulled itself across the yard and out again. No gate opened. No wall scaled. It went under, and it came back under."

"Goblins," someone said, from the edge of the yard. It was one of the villagers, hopeful and faint.

Erlich turned on him. "Goblins don't scale a palisade," he said. "Goblins don't go under a stockade wall and take a man from a loft and a dog from a lead and leave no blood and no sound. Goblins dig, and there is no dig here. There is a furrow, and the furrow was made by something with no legs."

He had said it before he knew he was going to. The words hung in the cold air. Godwin looked at him. Leofric looked at him. He had just undone his own answer, and he had done it out loud, in front of the village.

He stood in the trampled yard and let the silence work.

"Vaelin," he said, because the habit of suspicion was still on him.

"The steward's word," Godwin said. "I set one of the baron's men on the tower stair before we left, Captain, the way you bid. The wizard did not come down. The servant brought his evening meal and his morning meal. He has not left the room."

"Then not Vaelin," Erlich said.

"Not Vaelin," Godwin said.

Erlich looked at the furrow again. It ran from the stable to the wall and under, and beyond the wall it ran into the ditch and out into the grass and stopped, the way it always stopped, at no burrow and no lair. He thought of the river, and the long night of watching it, and nothing coming across. Whatever had done this had not crossed the river. It had been inside the stockade the whole time they watched the water. It had walked — no. It had pulled itself, low and heavy, across the yard of the village while every ranger stood at the wrong edge.

Tomas was there, standing at the back of the crowd, and his face was white. He had seen this before. He had seen it the morning the goats were gone. He had lived with the fear of it for weeks. Now it had come inside the walls, and there was nowhere left in Eastbrook that was safe.

"The tally," Erlich said to Haden.

Haden pulled out his slate. His hand was not steady. He added a line. A dog. A man. Wulf, the stable-hand. He did not say anything. There was nothing to say.

Erlich stood in the yard with the cold in his bones and the wrong thing solid in his chest, and he did what he almost never did.

"I was wrong," he said. Flat. Not loud. "It is not orcs. It is not goblins. It is not the wizard. Something else hunts here, and I have been watching the wrong border."

Godwin came up beside him. He did not say anything kind, because Erlich would not have stood for it. He said, "What do we watch now, Captain?"

Erlich looked at the furrow, and the wall it had gone under, and the trampled yard. His hand went to his pouch, found the weight of the scale still sitting where he had put it, and his fingers closed on it for a moment and let it go.

"The hall," he said. "All of it. The tally, the marks, the scale. We are going to read it again, and this time we read it right."