The aqueduct mouth waited where Willa had promised it would, low in the fort's west wall, half choked with tumbleweed and a century of silt. In the last light it had looked like a shadow. In full dark it was only a colder breath on Jonas Hale's face, air moving out of the hill with the smell of wet stone and old lime. He lay on his belly in the dry grass and listened to the fort settle above him: a boot on a parapet, a cough, the far clink of a chain where horses shifted in their sleep. Then Willa's hand found his wrist in the dark, once, briefly, and she went in first, because the way was hers by memory and because she had refused, flatly and without heat, to be the one who waited outside.
Jonas crawled with his shoulders turned, one elbow and then the other, his hat off and tied at his throat, his revolver wrapped in oiled cloth against the grit. The stone sweated. Somewhere ahead of him Willa moved with a silence he could not have matched at gunpoint, her veil bound close, her skirts kilted above her knees, and now and then her boot sole brushed his knuckles, guiding him around the places where the channel narrowed or the roof had slumped a hand's breadth lower.
It was longer than the scouting had promised. A crawl makes liars of distances, and Jonas's shoulders had begun to burn before her boots found the iron grate and stopped. Through its bars came a smell of lamp oil and mildewed grain, and a thread of light so thin it seemed painted. Willa worked the grate the way she had described on the ride in: two rusted bolts, coaxed rather than forced, her knife blade eased under each head in turn while Jonas held his breath and counted the guard's steps overhead. The second bolt took longer. When it came free at last it came with a small, bright tick of sound that stopped both their hearts, and they lay frozen in the channel while the steps above paused, turned, and went on.
The cellar ran the length of the old barracks, divided by later walls into storerooms that smelled of salt pork and mouse-nest. The lock on the farthest door was newer than anything else in the place, a good padlock on a hasp screwed into sound timber, and Jonas set himself before it with Willa's hairpins and the patience of a man picking burrs from a horse's tail. "Left a little," she whispered, her ear near the lock, listening to the pins as he could not. "There. Hold it there." Sweat ran into his eyes. The tumblers of the lock were stiff with disuse and then, all at once, they were not, and the shackle jumped in his hand with a softness that felt like mercy.
Tobias Renner was chained by one ankle to a ring set in the wall, in a room that held nothing else but a bucket, a pallet, and a candle burned down to a pool in its tin. He was gaunt as a fence rail, and his eyes were those of a man who had decided weeks ago what he would and would not say. "Harrow sends clerks to do his asking now?" he said. His voice was a ruin, but the defiance in it was in good repair. "Tell him the copies stay where they are until a court asks me for them, and then he can listen in the gallery like any other citizen."
"I'm not Harrow's," Jonas said. "Name's Jonas Hale. My brother was Micah." The old clerk went very still. Something moved in his face that was not suspicion, and it undid the suspicion's hold. "Micah Hale," Renner said, "kept his figures in a hand like copper wire, and he laughed at my ledgers because they had no poetry in them." His chained leg shifted and the iron spoke against the stone. "You're taller. He said you would be wasted on cows." He looked past Jonas then, to Willa standing veiled in the doorway, and his ruined voice gentled. "And you. The chief's daughter, with the scar, who rides like the wind has manners." Willa drew the veil back from her face. "Then you knew what the locket held," she said. "I knew he meant to put it where Harrow would never think to look," Renner said. "In a woman's keeping, in a hidden valley. Bring me out of this hole, Hale, and I will tell any court in the territory where every page of it lives."
Jonas had the ankle iron open and Renner's weight across his shoulder, one thin arm locked around his neck with surprising strength, when the footsteps came. Not the parapet guard this time. Boots on the cellar stair, deliberate, unhurried, and the yellow fan of a lantern widening along the corridor wall. Willa killed the candle with two fingers. In the dark Renner's breath went shallow against Jonas's collar, and none of them moved at all.
Chapter 17
: Paper and Iron