Chapter 10: The Wardens' Road

He took me down to the cellar and shut the door, and for a long time he didn't speak.

The furnace was low.

Ansgar stood with his back to me and his hands flat on the long table.

The bandage on the left one had gone grey at the edges.

"Say it," I said. "You promised."

"I did."

"Then say it."

"I'll say it the way it happened," he said, "and you can decide after."

He turned round.

He looked ten years older than he had that morning.

"I'm from a village on the Lauremont road. My mother took in laundry.

"When I was seventeen she got the wasting sickness.

"The Provost's own healer came to our door. The Crown would pay for her cure, and for my place at the White Crown."

"In exchange for what?"

"My Oath. Early, at eighteen, a year before most.

"A private Convocation, just the Provost and me. Nobody else was told."

His mouth twisted.

"I was grateful."

I said nothing.

"My mother lived. She died last spring, quietly, in her own bed. That's what the Oath bought, and I'd do the first part again."

"What was the second part?"

"A task."

He looked at his left hand.

"There was a woman who'd run from the Academy forty years before. An Unbinder.

"The Provost had a sense she'd gone north, to a village below Grey Thorn.

"She needed a boy with no history to find out."

My chest had gone cold.

"A boy with a fresh Oath," I said, "who couldn't say no."

"Yes."

"You went to her kitchen."

"I went as a student who'd lost his way and needed a roof.

"She fed me. She taught me to carve a ward over a doorframe.

"She told me about the girl she'd left in the South, who broke things when she was angry."

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