The horse came in through the trade entrance and not the southern gate, which was the first oddity, and the rider dismounted unaided and did not hand the reins to the boy who came to take them, which was the second.
Aldric, crossing the inner yard with a satchel of customs papers under his arm, registered both at the same time and altered his course.
The rider had set the reins over the post himself and was bending to brush dust from the hem of his robe. He was a Man — taller than middling, slim, perhaps fifty years old by mortal reckoning — and the robe was the deep clean grey of a scholar's wear, with a small embroidered band at each cuff that the boy with the reins had not given a second look. The bands carried, in a colour that was nearly the same grey as the cloth, a device. It was small. It was deliberately small. It would not have shown at a glance, and the angle of it on the cuff was such that the rider could, if he wished, keep his hand turned to hide it.
He had not turned his hand to hide it.
Aldric set the satchel down on the bench by the wall.
"Master scholar."
"My lord — if I have correctly judged the man you are."
"You have."
The rider straightened. He had a long lined face, well-kept hands without scars, the particular care to his bearing that came from a life in libraries and a life among colleagues who valued formality. He bowed, slightly, a careful bow that was longer than a peer's and shorter than a subject's.
"My name is Radaman, my lord. I carry letters from Master Hardbristle of Bree and from the trade-house of Sandelfoot, both of whom commended me to your hospitality on the grounds that I am, by trade, a chronicler of the northern territories, and that no chronicle of the present age would be complete without an entry on the realm now risen at Northwatch."
"You carry letters."
"I carry letters, my lord." Radaman produced them, two folded sheets with the small Bree seals on them, one in green wax and one in red. He offered them with both hands.
Aldric took them.
He did not read them at the post. He glanced at the seals — both were proper Bree seals, the kind he had seen on a hundred prior letters — and set them under the strap of the satchel. He looked back at Radaman.
He looked, this time, at the cuff.
He did not let his eyes rest on it.
He had let his eyes rest on it for a half-second on the first pass, which was enough; the device was visible to him now whether or not he was looking. It was the small mark of Orthanc. He had seen it once before in his other life, in a margin of a book he had read for a course in undergraduate English, and the mark had stayed with him because the book had had pictures and the page with the mark had had a single line of caption that he had memorised without meaning to: the device borne by the Order of the White on the cuffs of their household, before the breaking of it.
The cuff was a quiet thing.
A man might wear it for years without anyone naming it. A man might wear it in Bree, in Tharbad, in Rivendell, in every reasonable place a scholar travelled, and the only people who would recognise it were the small number who had read the small number of books that had ever named it.
Aldric, who had read one such book, knew it.
Tauriel, who had been alive for the rise and the long career of the Order whose device it was, would know it the instant her eye crossed it.
Aldric did not, by any movement, signal that he had recognised the device.
"You are welcome at Northwatch, Master Radaman. The steward will see you settled in the guest room over the hall. I will speak with you this afternoon, in the second hour after the noon meal, regarding your work."
"My lord — my thanks."
The steward came across the yard at Aldric's gesture. Radaman gathered his satchel and his small leather case and went with the steward toward the keep. The boy with the reins led the horse off toward the stables.
Aldric stood by the post a moment.
Across the yard, near the eastern arch, Tauriel was crossing on her way back from the orchard with a basket on one arm. She did not stop. She did not break her step. She did not turn her head.
She did, very briefly, lift her chin a quarter-inch as she passed the trade entrance, in the small private signal she used when she had seen something and was going to find him at the first place she could find him in private.
She went into the keep.
Aldric picked up the satchel.
[RECORDS HALL — A QUARTER-HOUR LATER]
He went, not to his study, but to the records hall.
The records hall was the small annex behind the council chamber where the writs and the customs returns and the population rolls and the maps of all ten regions lived in their oak cases along three walls. It had two doors — the main one off the council corridor and a smaller one off a back passage. It was lit by a single window high in the western wall, which kept the light off the papers, and it smelled — at this time of year — of beeswax from the polish the clerk used twice a month on the cases.
The clerk was not in.
The clerk was at the bookbinder's, where he was retrieving the autumn returns that had come back from the binder with a stitching error and needed to be picked up before the binder closed for the night. He would not, by the schedule pinned on the inside of the main door, be back for an hour.
Tauriel was already in the records hall.
She had come in by the back door. She was standing in the middle of the floor with her arms folded across her chest, the basket from the orchard set down on the floor by her boots. She looked up when he came in.
"Close the door."
He closed the door.
He set the satchel of customs papers on the low table by the window.
"You saw."
"I saw."
"The cuff."
"The cuff. The device. I had not thought I would see that mark in this country in this hundred years, and certainly not on a Man on a road from Bree."
She unfolded her arms.
"That is Orthanc, Aldric. That is the household device of the Order of the White."
"I thought it might be."
A pause. She narrowed her eyes a fraction. The fraction was the most movement her face had given in the conversation.
"You thought it might be."
"I read about it once. A book. A small book. I would not have been able to name it on a stranger's cuff except for the angle his wrist made when he handed me the letters. He had it turned out where it could be read."
"He had it turned out where it could be read by someone who would know it."
"Yes."
"Aldric." She took a breath. "Saruman the White is in Isengard. Saruman the White is the head of his Order. Saruman the White does not, by any account I have heard, send chroniclers north for the love of chronicles. If a man in his livery has come to your gate, he has been sent. The letters of introduction are real. The seals are real. The man is real. The chronicling is real, possibly. The errand is not chronicling."
"I know."
"You know."
"I have been told the same by a man whose name I will not now invoke."
She read his face.
She did not press the unspoken name; she had learned over seven years not to press for names he set aside.
"What will you do."
"I will tour him."
"Tour."
"Through the market. The smith-row at the public end, not the iron forge. The trade stalls. The southern grain wagons coming in for the spring shipment to the Blue Mountain. The drill yard if a drill is on, but only from outside the rail. The fish-stalls. The wool-stalls. The carter's row." He set his hand on the table. "Then I will say I have business and turn him over to the steward for the rest of the afternoon, and the steward will take him through the old keep stair and the high wall and the south orchard, which is all very pleasant and entirely public, and at the second hour after the noon meal I will sit with him in the chamber and answer general questions about administration in terms a man could read in a Bree pamphlet, and at supper he will be fed, and at first light he will ride out, and the letters of introduction will be returned with the proper civility."
"And the records hall."
"Will be locked tonight by the time the bell rings the fourth hour. No clerk's hand on the door. Two locks. The second key in your hand."
"Mine."
"You are the one person in this keep who I am willing to let into the records hall without an officer of mine present. The steward is loyal but the steward is a man one can pay. The clerks are loyal but the clerks are men one can frighten. You I cannot pay and you I cannot frighten. The key goes to you."
She did not, by any movement, react.
After a beat she said: "And the southern Greenway compact."
"The compact is filed in the civilian archive. The civilian archive is in a different room. I will move the eastern military returns and the dwarven compact terms and the maps of the watchtower placements into a different case in a different room tomorrow morning, before he is awake. I will move them with my own hands. I will not tell the clerk what I have done. The clerk will discover, on Monday, that two cases in the records hall are emptier than he left them, and he will discover this in the presence of an officer, and he will be told that the contents are now in the under-room, and he will be told nothing else."
"Aldric."
"Tauriel."
"You read all of that out as if it had been written down."
"It has."
"When."
"In my head. In the time it took me to walk from the trade entrance to this room."
"Aldric."
She did not, ordinarily, say his name twice in a sentence.
She said his name twice when she was, in her own old way, registering an emotion.
She said: "He is the head of the Order. He is the head of the White Council. He has been a friend to my people for an age. If there is to be a parting of the way between him and what is north of the road — that is a great matter, and one I would prefer not to be the first to cross."
"I know."
"You do not seem surprised."
"I am not surprised."
She set her hands on the back of a chair.
She did not look at him for a long moment.
When she looked back, the look was the long measured one — the one she had given him on the parapet, and again in the chamber the day after the council ceremony, and again in the upper room when she had read Elrond's letter alone.
"You have been keeping a thing about him."
"I have been keeping many things, Tauriel. Some of them are yours to know. Some of them are not. This one I will name as far as I can name it: I have been told, by one whose word I cannot question, that the head of his Order has not been entirely what he has appeared to be for some time, and that the parting of the way is not in the future tense. The parting has already begun. The man has not chosen to announce it. That is the choice he is in the middle of."
"By whom told."
"That is the part I cannot name."
She read his face for a long beat.
"All right."
"All right?"
"All right. I will not press it. I have learned, with you, that there is a small set of things you will not name and that none of them have been wrong yet. I will not press it. I am noting it. I am noting that the noting is a thing I am doing." A faint dry note in her voice. "And I am keeping the second key."
"You are keeping the second key."
She unfolded her hands.
"Then go and tour him, Aldric. Tour him well. Tour him so thoroughly through the public market that he writes back to Orthanc that the lord of Northwatch is an unusually generous host who showed him every chimney and every fish-stall and every wool-merchant's apron and gave him not one single number he could have used. Tour him so that the report itself is the message."
"That is exactly the tour I had in mind."
"Then go."
He went.
He paused at the door of the records hall and looked back.
She was already at the back wall, lifting one of the map-cases off its rest, the basket from the orchard set aside, the day's business put down.
She did not look up at him.
He closed the door.
He went out to find Master Radaman of the chronicling-house of nobody and to walk him for two hours through the most public market in the north, and to give him nothing.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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