The Opening

Ansel lay awake a long time, anxiously listening for the footsteps to start again. They never did. The feeling of being watched didn’t go, and he lay very still under the blanket, as though he could hide from whatever had seen him. In time his fatigue won out, and he fell asleep. When the first bell rang across the ridge, for once he heard it. He lay on his cot and listened to it fade, waiting for the rest of him to catch up. No faces. No voice. No blood on the pillow. His head didn’t ache. By morning, it should have felt like a dream. It didn’t. He could still feel where it had looked at him, the way skin remembers a hand after the hand is gone.

He pulled on his good shirt, the one he saved for Openings, and tried to work out what he would say. That he hadn’t reached was true, and it was no defense at all. Dareth had asked him for one thing. He had said please. And Ansel hadn’t made it through a single night. If Dareth had heard something, or simply knew, the way he always seemed to know, Ansel would find out at the bottom of the stairs.

He went down the stairs slowly and stepped over the one that creaked. He needn’t have bothered. Dareth was singing.

He had never sung well, and he wasn’t singing well now. He had his sleeves pushed past the elbow and was frying thick slices of oil bread in a pan, working his way through something about a cooper’s daughter and losing the words every other line. Where he lost them, he hummed. Dareth had always preferred to cook for himself rather than let the kitchen do it for him. It tasted better that way, he said, even if it was only fried bread. The air smelled of hot oil and herbs, and there was no blackpress anywhere. On the shelf above the hearth, the cutting lay in its oiled cloth exactly where Dareth had set it the night before.

“There he is,” Dareth said without turning around. “Down before the first bell’s finished. I’ll have to mark the day.”

“It’s the Opening,” said Ansel. “Somebody ought to mark it.”

Dareth laughed out loud and turned the bread. “Sit. Eat. Nobody feeds the cellar until the buyers are done, and the buyers are never done.”

Ansel sat. He watched Dareth slide the bread onto a plate and go hunting through the cupboard for something, still humming, and the knot he had carried down the stairs began to loosen. It didn’t come undone. Every so often, between one line of the song and the next, the back of his neck prickled, and he had to stop himself from looking at the stairs.

He should have known. Every Opening he could remember had started this way. Most days of the year, Dareth weighed his words like casks on a scale. On the morning of an Opening, he hummed. He joked with the coopers. He clapped inspectors on the back, and they let him. In Ansel’s first harvest in the gallery, when he was all elbows and silence and still flinched at every bell, Dareth had put the chalk in his hand to make the first mark on this very cask and told everyone in the gallery that the cellar had a new hand. Back then, Ansel had thought it was the money that put Dareth in such a mood. It had taken him years to understand that it was the wine. Twenty-one years in the dark, tended and turned and listened to, and today someone finally got to find out what it had become.

Dareth set the plate in front of him: fried bread, a wedge of soft white cheese, and a spoonful of figs from the jar he only opened on Opening days. Then he sat down across the table with his own and folded his hands. Up close, he looked worn. The skin under his eyes had gone dark, and there was a patch along his jaw he’d missed with the razor. He hadn’t slept, then. Two nights running. Ansel put it down to the Opening; Dareth never slept well before one, whatever he claimed.

“So,” he said. “Tell me how it goes.”

“You know how it goes.”

“I know how it goes. I want to hear that you do.”

Ansel rolled his eyes, but he put down his bread. He had recited it to Dareth at every Opening for years, and he could have done it in his sleep.

“Fourth bell, the inspectors come back down and check the seal, in case anyone’s been at it overnight.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Then there’s no Opening, the magistrate comes knocking, and you’re the most famous cellarer on the Steps for all the wrong reasons.”

Dareth’s mouth twitched. “Go on.”

“Then the cask goes up to the inspection court, and I carry the cutting in.” He tipped his head at the shelf. “The cellar that kept the cask. Ferra lays it on the seal and says her words.”

“Which are?”

“‘I bear the labor of the year.’” Ansel had heard them so many times on the high line the day before that they had stopped sounding like words at all. “So everyone knows the pickers were there when it went into the dark, and they’re there when it comes out.”

“And then?”

“Then you break the seal, and everyone pretends they can taste twenty-one years in one mouthful, and the buyers start bidding before they’ve swallowed.”

“Buyers don’t bid,” Dareth said mildly. “They request allocations.”

“They bid.”

“They request allocations very loudly.” Dareth took a fig. “And the cutting?”

“Goes back to the reserve rows when it’s done, and gets grafted onto the old vines.” Ansel paused, then gave him the rest, because he knew Dareth was waiting for it. “So the old wood gets its new season.”

Dareth nodded, satisfied, as though Ansel had tapped a cask and named it right. “Good. And after?”

“After, the light goes.” Ansel didn’t have to think about that part. Nobody on the Steps did. Openings were always held on the last day of harvest light, the day the first long dark of the cold season came down. Starset would come about the time the first glass was poured, and by then the crews would be paid and the terraces picked clean, and the frost could have whatever was left. “Selvane opens its share casks on the market road. Lamps go up on every post. Maudry’s crew sings until somebody makes them stop, and nobody ever makes them stop.”

“And?”

“And you dance.”

“Once,” said Dareth. “I dance once.”

“Badly.”

“Once, and with great dignity.” Dareth reached for his cup. “Then I sit down and leave the rest of the night to the young and the foolish. Now. How’s our witness?”

“Terrified.”

“Is she.”

“She practiced the whole way up on the high line. Over and over. Then we got to the graft house, and Ruthe asked her the first question, and every word went straight out of her head.” Ansel found he was smiling. “She said ‘a new year’ instead of ‘a new season.’ And on the terrace, before any of that, she’d asked me what would happen if she dropped the cutting, and when I said I’d be the one carrying it, she asked what would happen if I dropped it.”

“A fair question.”

“I’m not going to drop it.”

“I didn’t say you would.” Dareth broke his bread in half and considered it. “The witness at my first Opening forgot her words entirely. Stood in the middle of the court with the cutting in her hands and said nothing at all, with half the Steps watching. In the end, Ruthe leaned over and said them for her.”

Ansel stared at him. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. The seal broke, and it was the best vintage I ever kept.” Dareth shrugged. “The words matter, but they don’t matter that much. Ferra will be fine.”

“That’s what I told her.”

“Mm.” Dareth ate a piece of bread. “You told her a great deal yesterday, by the sound of it.”

“I was helping.”

“Of course you were. On the high line. And at the graft house. And all the way down again, I suppose, making sure she didn’t drop anything.”

Ansel felt the heat start at the back of his neck. “She’s my friend.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

“I was about to ask you to pass the figs.” Dareth held out his hand, all innocence, and waited.

Ansel passed the figs. “It isn’t like that.”

“I’m sure it isn’t.”

“It isn’t.”

“Then there’s nothing to go red about,” Dareth said, and went back to humming.

Ansel scowled at his plate and decided he wasn’t going to dignify that. He ate instead. The bread was crisp and hot, the cheese was soft, and the figs were as sweet as they were every year. Dareth had moved on to the second verse of the cooper’s daughter, which had even fewer words in it than the first.

He nearly told him then. It would have been easy: the faces, the blur, and the feeling, even now, of being looked at. Dareth would be angry, and then he would know what to do. But Dareth was humming, and it was the Opening, and last night Ansel had already looked him in the eye and said nothing. He found it was easier the second time.

It was only when Dareth got up to fetch the pan that Ansel caught it. On his way past the stairs, Dareth glanced up them, toward the dark at the top where Ansel’s cot was, and for no longer than a breath, the humming stopped. Then he reached the counter, and it started again, and when he turned around with the pan, he was smiling. Ansel knew that look. He had been giving the stairs the same one all through breakfast.

“More?” he said.

“Please,” said Ansel, and held out his plate.

* * *

The inspectors came down at fourth bell, exactly on time. There were two of them, a tall gray-haired woman with the register under her arm, and a young man who carried the lamp. Dareth met them at the gallery door, and the three of them walked the racks while Ansel followed behind with the chalk in his hand out of habit. There was nothing left to chalk. Dareth had seen to all of it. They passed the whole line on the way, twenty casks, one for every harvest since his first, each with Ansel’s mark on its head. The newest, last year’s, was still pale at the staves, with twenty years to go.

The cask for the Opening sat alone at the end of the first rack, on a cradle of black oak the coopers had oiled until it shone. The young man held the lamp close. The seal was a disc of black-red wax as wide as his palm, poured over the bung and pressed with the Selvane mark, three stepped terraces beneath a single vine leaf. A cord of braided vine bark ran through the wax and down the staves on either side, so no one could draw the bung without breaking it. Beside it sat Dareth’s cellar mark, smaller, the one Ansel had chalked. The years had cracked the wax and the cord had gone dark and hard as wire. The woman opened the register, looked at the mark, then at the page, then at the mark again.

“Something wrong?” Dareth asked.

“No. It’s sound.” She pressed a dab of fresh wax beside the old, marked it with her ring, and closed the register. “You’ll have a full court. A tender came in on the rest shift for one of the buyer houses, and Morwal’s been pouring since second bell.”

“Which house?”

“Hessary, the port says.”

Dareth’s face didn’t change. “Then they’ll want an allocation. Everyone always does.”

The young inspector laughed, and even the woman almost smiled. She tucked the register under her arm and went, and the lamp went with them, and for a moment the cask sat in the half-dark with its two seals, the old and the new, side by side.

Ansel waited until the lamplight had gone around the end of the rack. “Morwal’s pouring already?”

“Morwal would pour at a funeral.” Dareth took the chalk from Ansel’s hand, looked at it, and gave it back. “Go and fetch the cutting. The coopers won’t wait for you.”

The coopers came for it a quarter bell later, six of them in leather aprons, the oldest of them calling the lift. Ansel walked beside the cradle all the way to the cask lift with one hand on the wood, the way Dareth had taught him, as though the wine could tell who was carrying it.

Hushvault’s inspection court had been cut into the heart of the ridge long before anyone now living was born. It was a long vaulted hall lit by lamps hung on chains, with tasting tables down both sides and estate banners hanging red and gold from the galleries above. At the far end, a shaft had been bored straight up through the rock to the open sky, so that on the last day of harvest light Vya and Veo could shine down into the court. Their light lay across the floor now in a long bar of gold, and the coopers set the cask down at the end of it. Most days of the year the court was a quiet place, where clerks argued over weights in low voices. Today Ansel could hardly see the floor.

Everyone was there. The Selvane people stood in a knot near the front in their dark collars, and Ruthe stood among them looking as though she would much rather be talking to a tree. Buyers crowded the tasting tables, already holding glasses they had no reason to hold yet. The pickers had come up from the terraces in their good clothes, and Maudry stood in the middle of them, louder than the rest put together, telling a story that involved a great deal of pointing at one of her crew. Ferra stood beside her in a borrowed jacket a size too big, white to the lips, mouthing her words.

She saw him and lifted a hand, and he lifted the cutting in its cloth so she could see he hadn’t dropped it. She almost smiled. It took him a long time to reach her. The court was too full to cross in a straight line, and the only way around the crowd took him past the head of the tasting tables, where Morwal had set up.

Morwal’s cask sat on a cradle of its own, as near to the light as anyone could put it without being in it. The cradle had been oiled to match Selvane’s, and there were more buyers around it than around anything else in the court. Carys stood beside it in a jacket pressed so sharp it could have stood up without her. She was tall, with her brown hair braided tight down her back, and she had the look of someone who had been smiling at buyers since second bell and had hours of it still to go.

Wendel, Morwal’s cellarer, caught Dareth before Ansel could get past. He was a big, red, cheerful man who talked as though everyone in the room were his oldest friend, and he took Dareth by both shoulders now as though they were. “Selvane’s cellarer! A great day. A great day for Hushvault.” He waved at the crowd around his cask. “You’ll forgive us stealing a few of your buyers. Half of them have come to see what my girl can do. Came to us from Velyr no higher than a cask, and look at her now.”

“Wendel,” said Dareth warmly. “You’ve done well by her.” He clasped Wendel’s arm in return and let him talk. To anyone else, he looked delighted. Ansel had lived with him too long to be fooled. Dareth couldn’t stand the man.

Carys looked past Wendel’s shoulder at Ansel. “On time,” she said. “Somebody mark the day.”

“It’s the Opening.”

“So it is.” Her eyes went to the light, and then to her own cask, a pace short of it. “Enjoy the walk.”

He had heard what she’d been saying all harvest, through Ferra and half the Steps. He had expected her to say it louder. This was worse.

A few of the buyers laughed. Four of them Ansel didn’t know, which was unusual; he knew nearly every buyer who came to the Steps by face, if not by name. Their coats were so new he could see the creases where they had been folded, and he supposed Hessary had sent them and fitted them out for the occasion. He felt his ears go hot and found nothing to say back. Then a picker stepped on his foot, and a buyer’s elbow found his ribs, and by the time he reached Ferra he had nearly forgotten it.

“You didn’t drop it,” she said.

“Not yet.”

“Don’t.” She was gripping her own hands so hard the knuckles had gone pale under the purple. “I can’t remember the first word. I’ve said it a thousand times, and I can’t remember the first word.”

“Bear.”

“Bear,” she said, and shut her eyes. “Bear. Bear. Bear.”

Maudry leaned down between them, smelling of crushed grapes and somebody else’s wine. “If you faint, girl, faint forward,” she said. “It looks more devout.”

Ferra laughed in spite of herself, a short, startled snort, and some of the color came back into her face. Then the bell rang for the Opening, and the court went quiet.

The magistrate read from the register first. It was custom that she preside at every Opening. She was a thin woman with a voice that carried to the galleries without seeming to try, and she read it the way it had been written twenty-one years before: the rows the fruit had come from, the day it went into the dark, the cellar that would keep it. Halfway through, Dareth looked away from her, once, toward the Morwal table, and back. Ansel saw it and nearly smiled. So Wendel had got under his skin after all. “Kept in Hushvault,” she finished, “in the gallery of Dareth, cellarer.” Then she looked at Ansel, and it was his turn.

He had imagined the walk a hundred times. It was shorter than he had imagined, and it took much longer. He went down the length of the court along the bar of light with the cutting held in both hands, and every face he passed turned to follow him, and he didn’t look at any of them. Only once, passing the head of the tables, did he see Carys. She wasn’t watching him. She was watching the cutting. At the cask, Ruthe was waiting.

“And who carries it?” she said.

This time he knew. “The cellar that kept the cask.”

He folded back the oiled cloth and laid the cutting in Ferra’s hands, and she turned and laid it across the seal, black wood on black wax, along the line of the cord. Then she opened her mouth, and nothing came out.

The silence went on. Somewhere at the back, a buyer coughed. Ansel thought of the witness at Dareth’s first Opening, standing in the middle of the court with half the Steps watching, and he saw Ruthe draw a breath beside him, ready.

“I bear the labor of the year,” said Ferra.

Her voice shook on the first word and steadied on the rest, and by the last it reached the back of the court. Maudry’s crew stamped their feet on the stone, and the sound rolled down the vault like weather.

While she spoke, the bar of light had climbed the cask. Now it lay across the seal and the cutting together, gold on black, and it was already narrowing. Dareth drew his knife. He cut the cord in one stroke and set his thumb to the wax, and it broke along all its old cracks at once and came away in his hand. He drew the bung. The smell came up out of the cask and filled the court: dark fruit and old wood, and something under them Ansel had no name for, like the air in the deepest gallery after the lamps had been out a long while.

The young inspector held the first glass under the tap. As the wine ran into it, the light thinned to a thread across the cask and went out. Up the shaft, the sky had gone the color of the wine. The long dark had come.

By custom, the first glass went to the witness. Ferra took it in both hands, cautiously, and drank. Her eyes went wide. She opened her mouth again, and again nothing came out, and this time nobody minded at all.

Ruthe lifted the cutting from the broken wax before anyone could set a glass on it. She folded it back into its oiled cloth, quick and sure, and tucked it inside her coat. In the morning it would go onto the old vines, while the wood was asleep, so that it could wake with them in the new season. Ansel would carry it down to the reserve rows and hold the lamp while she cut. Dareth had promised him that much, years ago.

Then the glasses went round, and the court came apart into noise. Buyers pressed toward the cask with their ledgers open. Somewhere in the middle of them, Tolliver’s voice rose over the rest: “Selvane, I should like to request an allocation.” Dareth caught Ansel’s eye across the cask, very straight-faced, and Ansel had to look away to keep from laughing.

Someone put a glass in his hand. He couldn’t taste twenty-one years in one mouthful. Nobody could. But for a moment, holding the glass up to the lamps, he thought he could see them, folded inside the wine the way the green had been folded inside the cutting. Then he drank, and it was only wine, and very good.

When he looked up, Dareth was beside him. “Go and give Carys your congratulations,” he said quietly.

“Now?”

“It’s her cask too.” Dareth took the empty glass out of his hand. “And Ansel. Mean it.”

Morwal had broached its cask while the court was watching Selvane’s, and the buyers had closed around it again. Carys saw him coming and lifted her chin a fraction, the way Ferra did when she imitated her. For a moment he thought she would leave him standing there. Then she drew a glass and held it out.

“Go on,” she said. “Tell me it’s thin.”

It wasn’t. It was younger in the mouth than Selvane’s, and brighter, and it went down with a warmth that stayed.

“It’s good,” he said. “It’s very good. Congratulations.”

“It should have been in the light.”

He opened his mouth to say what everyone said: one cask, Selvane’s right, the way it had always been. He found he couldn’t say it honestly, so he didn’t say anything, and she looked at him as though that were an answer she could live with.

One of the new buyers had come up on her other side. “Your cellarer tells me this was your first mark,” he said.

Carys’s whole face changed. “My first harvest at Morwal. I chalked it myself. I could barely reach the head.” She laid her hand on the staves and told him about it, the cord and the cradle and the first time she turned it, and the man listened as though nothing in the court interested him more. The other three held glasses of Morwal’s. Not one of them had gone near Selvane’s.

Ansel felt it like a pinch. Let Morwal have its buyers. It was a good wine, it deserved them, and he had just said so. But Hessary had come all this way, and its people had walked straight past the cask in the light as though they hadn’t seen it.

He looked at the man before he could stop himself. It was an old habit with strangers, and it never turned up much: a plain, ordinary person, all the way down. But, this man wasn’t ordinary. In fact, he wasn’t anything. The man turned his head and smiled at him politely, and Ansel looked down into his glass. It was the wine, he decided, and the noise, and too little sleep. He didn’t say anything to Carys. He wouldn’t have known how.

Tolliver had drifted over from the Selvane side with a bottle in one hand and his purple coat swinging open, filling the strangers’ glasses as though he were the host. As Ansel turned away, he caught a piece of what Tolliver was saying.

“…the Morwal girl has the better eye, if you ask me. Came to Wendel as a ward, you know, all the way from…”

Ansel didn’t hear the rest. He didn’t want to. He went back across the court with Morwal’s wine still warm in his mouth and his ears hot again, and decided he wasn’t going to mind. Selvane had opened in the light. Ferra had found her first word. Dareth stood by the cask with Ruthe, nodding at something she was saying about trees.

It was the best Opening he could remember. Afterward, he would hold on to that.

* * *

By the time they came up out of the ridge, it was past starset. It was never truly dark on the Steps. With Vya and Veo gone behind Tiravel, Oranth had the sky to itself, and on the first night of the long dark, even the Steps looked up at it. It poured a cold light over the terraces that turned the frost walls silver and the empty vines to lace. The air had already sharpened. Ansel could see his breath. By morning there would be frost on every row, and nobody would care, because the harvest was in.

The market road was a river of lamps. They hung from every post beside the red banners, all the way down the switchbacks, and under them the whole of the Steps had turned out. Selvane had rolled its share casks onto trestles at the head of the road, and the crews were drinking their year’s wages a cup at a time. There were braziers and oil bread and skewers of something charred and dripping, and children running underfoot with stolen sweets, and somewhere a drum. Maudry’s crew had found a wagon to stand on and were singing the cooper’s daughter, with even fewer words than Dareth knew and twice the conviction. Two constables were drinking on duty at Selvane’s share casks, until Maudry shouted down from the wagon that they could dance or go home.

Ferra had not stopped talking since the court. Her color was back, and then some. She told the story of her own silence to anyone who would stand still, and every time she told it, the silence got longer and the ending got better. Ansel didn’t correct her once.

Dareth danced at the second bell of the dark, exactly once, as promised. He bowed to Ferra with great formality and led her out under the lamps, and he danced with immense dignity and no sense of rhythm at all, and Ferra laughed so hard she had to hold on to him. When it was over, he returned her to Ansel, bowed again, and went to sit on a frost wall with his cup like a man who had done his duty.

Ansel was happier than he could remember being. He had nearly forgotten the court, and the man he couldn’t read, and the wine he had blamed for it.

Morwal’s stall stood a little way down the first switchback, backed by its own rows. Wendel was up on a crate behind it, red to the ears, pouring for anyone who held out a cup and telling every one of them about Hessary. Ansel would have steered Ferra wide of it. Ferra steered straight for it.

Carys was behind the trestle, filling cups as fast as Wendel emptied the jug. She saw them coming, and the smile she had been giving buyers all day stayed exactly where it was.

“The witness,” she said. “You found your first word, then.”

“Eventually,” said Ferra. “I hear your cask opened at a table. Was it a nice table?”

Ansel winced. Carys didn’t. “Next to the light,” she said. “If you want to be exact.” She filled Ferra’s cup anyway, right to the brim, and then Ansel’s. “Go on. You’ve had Selvane’s all night. Try something that’s still alive.”

Ferra drank, and Ansel watched her try not to like it, and fail. “It’s all right,” she said, and held out her cup for more.

“Hessary’s people want to see our gallery,” Carys said. She said it to Ansel, lightly, as though it hardly mattered to her. “All four of them. Wendel’s taking them down after the dancing.” She set the jug down. “Nobody’s asked to see yours.”

“They’ve seen it,” said Ferra. “It was in the light.”

He felt the pinch again, smaller than it had been in the court, and kept it off his face. “Then they’ll see a good gallery,” he said.

Carys looked at him as though she were checking for the joke. When she didn’t find one, she seemed almost put out. Then a picker shoved an empty cup at her, and she turned away.

Ferra waited until they were out of earshot. “You were nice to her.”

“Dareth told me to mean it.”

“And did you?”

He thought about the wine, and about Carys walking the court in his place, and found he could picture it. “Mostly.”

Back at the head of the road, it was Ansel’s turn at the tap. The share casks were the cellar’s to pour, and Dareth had poured the first hour himself, before the dancing. Ansel tied on an apron, and Ferra hitched herself up onto the end of the trestle with her cup and told her story to everyone who came for wine.

The old cooper who had called the lift that morning was the first to hold out a cup. He leaned across the trestle, smelling of oak smoke and a good deal of Selvane’s wine. “Funny sort of buyer this morning,” he said. “Met him at the gate, while we waited on the lift. Asked me how long Dareth’s kept an apprentice. Polite as anything.” He grinned. “I told him always. Since you were a gangly thing who couldn’t tell a stave from a hoop.” He laughed, then didn’t. “Funny. Couldn’t tell you when that was.” He shook his head. “Odd thing to want to know, on an Opening.”

“What did he look like?” Ansel asked.

The cooper thought about it, and frowned, and thought some more. “Like a buyer,” he said at last, as though the answer surprised him. Then someone called his name, and he took his wine and went.

Ansel found them a moment later. The four from the court stood at the edge of the lamplight, where the road bent toward the lifts, still in their creased coats. They had cups like everyone else, and they laughed when the singers lost the words, and one of them was haggling with a woman over a skewer. They looked exactly like buyers at an Opening. Only the nearest of them, the one who had smiled at him over Carys’s cask, hadn’t drunk any of his wine. Ansel watched him lift the cup and lower it again, still full.

The man turned his head and met Ansel’s eyes. He had a pleasant, forgettable face, the kind Ansel would have looked straight past on any other night. He smiled politely, the way a buyer smiles at a cellarer’s boy. Ansel looked away first. When he looked back, the man was coming toward the casks through the crowd. He didn’t hurry. He stopped across the trestle from Ansel, close enough to touch, and set his full cup down on the boards.

“You carried the cutting,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. Ansel said, “Yes,” because he couldn’t think what else to say.

“A fine Opening. I came all this way for the wine.” The man looked at Ansel’s face for a moment longer than was comfortable. “Twenty-one years,” he said. “That’s a long time to keep something.”

It was the sort of thing anyone might have said about the vintage. Two paces down the trestle, Tolliver turned his cup in his fingers and went on smiling at nobody in particular.

The man nodded, as though they had agreed on something, and went back to the edge of the light. Ansel found he had stopped breathing. Beside him, Ferra had gone very still.

“He didn’t come for the wine,” she said quietly.

“How do you know?”

She opened her mouth and closed it again. “I just do,” she said, and wouldn’t look at him.

Up on the wagon, Maudry leaned down in the middle of a verse to say something in a picker’s ear. The picker shook her head and pointed down the road, and Maudry straightened and went on singing without missing a word.

That was when the berthmaster came up the road. Ansel had known him for as long as he could remember and had never once heard his name. Everyone on the Steps called him the berthmaster, and he answered to it. He was a narrow man with a squint worn into him from years of watching the sky, who knew every ship that came down on Tiravel and every crate in every hold, and in all the harvests he oversaw, he had never left the port on the night of an Opening. He hadn’t even changed. He still wore his port collar, and he brought the smell of fuel with him.

He didn’t look at the dancers. He went straight through the crowd to Tolliver, who stood at the end of the trestle in his creaseless coat with a cup in his hand, took him by the elbow, and walked him off past the brazier to the edge of the light. Ansel couldn’t hear a word over the drum. He didn’t need to. The berthmaster talked low and fast, close to Tolliver’s ear, and once he held up four fingers. Tolliver listened, and his smile didn’t move at all. Then he said something short, and the berthmaster went very still, the way a man does when a sum comes out wrong.

Tolliver nodded. Then, without any hurry at all, he lifted his cup and looked over the rim of it down the road. He was looking at Maudry.

Maudry was still up on the wagon, in the middle of a verse, and she didn’t stop singing. But her eyes went to Tolliver, and then, before the verse was out, they went past him to the frost wall where Ruthe sat alone with a cup she hadn’t touched. Ruthe didn’t look up. She only turned her head, the way she had turned it toward the tree on the terrace, and looked along the wall to where Dareth sat.

Dareth set his cup down on the stone beside him, once, very carefully, as though he were settling it.

It took no time at all. If Ansel had blinked, he would have missed it. A look passed from the berthmaster to Tolliver, from Tolliver to Maudry, from Maudry to Ruthe, and from Ruthe to Dareth, hand to hand, the way the coopers had passed the lift call down the line that morning, and nobody else on the whole crowded road saw it go.

Ansel had never once seen Tolliver and Maudry so much as speak to each other. Ruthe hardly came down from Auvren at all. As far as he knew, the berthmaster and Dareth had nothing to say to one another beyond the weather and the price of freight. They were his master, and the man who bought from his master, and the woman who teased him on the terraces, and the keeper who talked to trees, and the man at the port. They didn’t know each other. Not like that.

“Ansel.”

Dareth had come around the end of the trestle. Ansel hadn’t seen him leave the wall. He looked exactly as he had at breakfast, easy and pleased, his good coat brushed, his voice as warm as ever. Only his eyes were different. They went once to the lifts, and once up the road, and came back.

“Stay close to Ferra tonight,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s her night, and you’re her friend.” Dareth straightened Ansel’s collar, though it didn’t need straightening. “Just stay with her. Understand?”

Ansel wanted to ask what there was to understand. He wanted to ask about Hessary’s buyers, and the man at the edge of the light, and the look that had just gone down the road. He thought of Dareth’s spoon going round and round in the cup, and of every question that had ever been answered with a different one.

“I understand,” he said.

Behind them, Maudry’s crew reached the end of the song and started it again from the beginning. Ansel turned to look for the man in the new coat. Three of them stood at the edge of the lamplight, where they had stood all evening. The fourth was gone, and he hadn’t seen him leave.

Down the Steps, past the last of the lamps, the frost was settling on the empty vines.

* * *

Wendel came for his buyers at the fourth bell of the dark. The whole road heard him before Ansel saw him. “Hessary! Where’ve you got to? I promised you a gallery!” He came up the switchback with a jug under one arm and a lamp swinging from his other hand, red to the scalp, and the three men in new coats left the bend and fell in behind him as though they had been waiting for nothing else all night. Carys came last, with a stack of cups hooked on her fingers.

They had to pass the brazier to reach the gate. Wendel stopped for Ansel, because Wendel stopped for everyone.

“Selvane’s boy! Come down and see how it’s done.” He laughed before Ansel could answer. “No? Wise. Your master would never forgive me.” He squinted past them into the crowd. “Four of them asked, and I’ve only found three. You haven’t seen the other one? Took a fancy to your share casks, I expect.”

“No,” said Ansel.

“His loss.” Wendel waved the lamp at the gate and went on, and the three went with him without a word to anyone.

Carys didn’t hurry after them. She looked at Ferra, and at Ferra’s cup, which was Morwal’s, and Ferra raised it to her.

“Tell them it was nearly in the light,” said Ferra.

“Tell them yourself,” said Carys. “You’re the one with the story.” She shifted the cups on her fingers and followed Wendel’s lamp up the road, and the gate took her.

Ferra watched her go. “That was the nicest thing she’s ever said to me.”

Ferra found her audience a moment later, as though she had been saving it: two of Maudry’s pickers, a buyer’s clerk with a skewer in each hand, and a pair of old women from the cooperages who had certainly heard it already and didn’t mind hearing it again. Ansel had meant to keep one eye on the edge of the lamplight. Somewhere in the first telling, he stopped.

“…and the whole court waiting,” she was saying, “and the light going, and Ruthe taking a breath like she’s about to save me, which she was, and there’s Ansel, who sleeps above the cellar and still can’t make first bell, mouthing ‘bear’ at me like it’s his line.”

The pickers roared. Ansel opened his mouth to say he had never mouthed anything, and that he had made first bell this morning, as it happened. Then he closed it again. It was a better story with him in it.

“He did,” Ferra told the clerk, who hadn’t asked. “Like this.” She made a face, eyes wide and lips working, that looked nothing like him, and the clerk laughed so hard he dropped a skewer.

Dareth found them when the story had run out of listeners. He had buttoned his coat to the throat, and he carried no cup.

“I’m for my bed,” he said. He looked at Ferra, who was yawning into her sleeve, and then at Ansel. “Don’t keep the witness out all night.”

“He isn’t keeping me,” said Ferra. “I’m keeping him.”

Dareth bowed to her, as gravely as he had before the dance. “Then send him straight home when you’re done with him.”

He went up the road toward the gate, more hurried than normal, but Ansel thought nothing of it. Stay with her, he had said. Ansel supposed that went as far as her door.

They stayed until Selvane’s share casks ran dry, and a while after that. The crowd around the brazier thinned, the singing went ragged, and somewhere in yet another telling of her story Ferra yawned so wide she lost her place.

“That’s me done,” she said, and set her cup down on the wall.

At the bend, the lift keeper had his gate open and his lamp lit. “Running all night,” he called. “Lower terraces, quick as you like.”

“We’ll walk,” said Ferra.

Ansel looked at her. “It’s a long way down.”

“Then it’ll take a long time.”

She didn’t look at him when she said it. She unhooked a lamp from the last post and started down the road, and after a moment he followed.

Below the bend, the posts gave out, and the road was theirs. Oranth lay over the lower terraces, so bright that Ferra’s lamp hardly mattered. Behind them the drum went on, smaller at every switchback, and the singing thinned to a rumor and then to nothing at all. The frost had come down while they weren’t watching. It crunched under their boots and furred the tops of the walls, and when Ferra breathed out, her breath hung in the lamplight a long moment before it let go.

She hooked her arm through his. “It’s icy,” she said.

It was, a little.

They walked a switchback without saying anything, and he found he didn’t mind. On the high line the day before, she had talked the whole way up to keep from thinking about her words. Now the words were said, and she had nothing left to be afraid of, and the quiet was a different kind.

“You still owe me a later,” she said at last.

His stomach dropped. “I know.”

“Not tonight.”

“Not tonight?”

“It’s my night. I’m not spending it on your bad dreams.” She bumped his shoulder with hers. “Tomorrow. I’m keeping count.”

“You always are.”

“Somebody has to.”

At the next bend, the back of his neck prickled, the way it had at breakfast, and he looked back up the road. The market hung above them in its river of lamps, very far off now. Nothing moved on the road between. At least, nothing that he could see.

“What?” said Ferra.

“Nothing.” He turned back. “I thought I heard the drum stop.”

“It never stops.”

He supposed it didn’t.

Halfway down the last switchback, she said, “If I’d dropped it.”

“You didn’t.”

“If I had. The cutting. In front of everyone.”

He thought about it honestly, because she would know if he didn’t. “I’d have caught it.”

She stopped on the road and looked at him, a long look in the cold light, as though she were holding the words up to see if anything showed through. Whatever she found, it seemed to satisfy her. She started walking again, and her arm stayed through his.

The pickers’ houses stood in a row along the lowest terrace, frost on their roofs and dark in every window. Hers was at the end, where the lane ran out against the vines. She climbed the step to her door and turned around, and the step put her eyes exactly level with his. He didn’t think he had ever noticed that before.

“Good night, Ansel,” she said.

She didn’t go in.

“Good night,” he said.

He didn’t go either. She reached out and straightened his collar, slowly, the way Dareth had straightened it on the road.

“It didn’t need straightening,” he said.

“I know.”

Somewhere down the row, a shutter banged in the wind, and she laughed, one short breath of it, and let go of his collar. She went in. The door closed. He stood in the lane longer than he needed to, with her lamp still in his hand, before he realized she had given it to him.

He climbed back up the Steps faster than he had come down, and it hardly felt like climbing. The lamps on the market road were going out a post at a time, and the drum had slowed to the pace of people who meant to go home soon and hadn’t yet. At the bend, someone had left a cup on the frost wall, still full, with a skin of frost across the wine. Ansel passed it without a thought.

Farther up, Morwal’s stall stood dark on the first switchback. Nobody had come back to it. The jug sat on the trestle where Carys had set it down, and the cups beside it had frozen to the wood. Wendel must have kept them down there all night, showing off. Ansel grinned at the thought and went on up to the gate.

The cellar house was dark, except for the lamp in the kitchen, turned down low. Dareth was asleep in his chair at the foot of the stairs, still in his buttoned coat, his chin on his chest. He had dragged the chair there from the table. There was a cup on the floor by his boot. Ansel didn’t look to see what was in it.

He had waited up, then, the way he used to when Ansel was small and came home late from the terraces with frost in his hair. Ansel stood a moment, smiling, and didn’t wake him.

He stepped over the stair that creaked. At the top, his cot was where he had left it, the blanket thrown back. He lay down in his good shirt and pulled the blanket up, and was asleep before he had finished thinking about her door.

If Dareth moved at all in the night, Ansel never heard it.

***

It came at the bottom of the night, long after the Steps had fallen silent.

He wasn’t reaching. He wasn’t even dreaming. One moment there was nothing, and the next there was a cask head close enough to touch, and on it, in chalk gone soft with twenty-one years, a mark he knew. It wasn’t his. The strokes leaned the other way, small and careful, made by a hand that could barely reach.

Then a lamp, shuttered down to a slit, set on the floor so that its light lay along the stone. Wine going into cups on a table. Wendel’s laugh, big enough to fill a gallery, and then not filling it. It stopped in the middle, cut short by something.

There were others in the room. He turned toward them and found no faces, and no way in, like the man in the court.

A door. A hand on the latch, and the end of a brown braid swinging forward over a shoulder as she reached. A gloved hand closed over hers. It wasn’t rough. It was almost gentle, the way you would stop someone from opening the wrong door. Then the light came, white and everywhere at once, and burned the pieces away.

He woke on his side with his face wet. The pillow under his cheek had gone dark, and when he touched his lip, his fingers came away red. His head felt split along an old crack. Through the floor he could hear nothing at all: no chair, no footsteps, no first bell.

It hadn’t been the faces. It hadn’t been a dream, either; dreams didn’t cost this much. He lay still and tried to put the pieces in order, and couldn’t. He didn’t know whether it was happening now, or had already happened, or was still to come.

He didn’t know when. But he knew the mark on that cask. He had watched Carys lay her hand on it in the court and tell a stranger she had chalked it herself.