They did not sleep in Tarn's Rest that night.
The stranger had been given bread and a place by the fire in the old moot hall, because Dessa had said a guest was a guest even when the guest was a god, and because no one could think of a better answer. He ate nothing. He sat with his bare feet to the hearth and his hands open on his knees, and the firelight slid over his robe without staining it, and the longer he sat there the more the hall seemed to fill with a low, soft hush, like the hush that comes after a great bell has stopped. People came to the doors and looked in and went away again. Some of them were weeping. Some of them were praying in low voices to gods they had not spoken to since childhood. A few were already packing carts.
Orrin did not go home. He sat on the step of the mill with his back against the wheel-house wall and his hands hanging between his knees, and he listened to the village not sleeping, and tried to think.
His mother found him there a little before dawn. Ione Vale was a small woman, brown-armed and sharp-eyed, with the flour of thirty years worked into the creases of her knuckles. She did not say anything at first. She sat down beside him, drew her shawl across both their shoulders, and handed him a heel of bread with butter on it. He ate it because she was watching.
"You are going to go to the council," she said at last.
"I haven't been asked."
"You will be." She looked out across the dark roofs. "They are afraid, Orrin. You know that. Of him, yes, but not only him. They are afraid of what it means that he chose you. Every one of them has stood in that square and looked at you at one time or another and thought: he is not like us. And now a god has stood in that square and said the same, and they are wondering what that makes them."
Orrin said nothing. The bread was dry in his mouth.
He had known it all his life, of course. It had never needed saying. He had known it at eight, when the bull had broken its tether and come thundering across the lower pasture, and he had stepped in front of Lysa's little brother and caught it by the horns and held it until the men arrived, and had not understood why the men had stared at him instead of at the bull. He had known it at twelve, when the fever came to Tarn's Rest and took nine of the village's children, and he had walked through the sickrooms for three weeks with the dying breathing in his face and had not so much as sneezed. He had known it at fifteen, when the raiders came down from the east road, six men with spears and a tired horse, and Brannoch had lost his leg beneath the horse's hooves, and Orrin had picked up the fallen spear and finished the matter before anyone could shout at him to stop.
He had been quiet afterward for a very long time. People had called it modesty. It was not modesty. It was the grey, sick, puzzled feeling of a boy who has discovered that his hands know something his heart has not been told.
The cut on his forearm from the wolf pack last winter had been a hand's length long and deep enough to show white. Lysa had stitched it by candlelight with her mouth set in a grim line, and by the end of the week it had closed to a thin pink thread, and by spring it had gone entirely. Lysa had run her thumb over the place where it had been and said nothing. She had said nothing very loudly.
The boy who does not bleed. That was what the younger children called him, when they thought he could not hear. They said it half in awe and half in fear, the way they might name a thunderstorm that had passed over the village and left the barns standing.
"Do you want to do it?" his mother asked.
The question was so plain that it took him a moment to understand it. He turned his head. Her face was close to his in the dark, drawn with the long night, and her eyes were steady and unreadable.
"I don't know," Orrin said. "I don't know what he's asking. I don't know if I can."
"That is not what I asked."
He was silent for a long time. Down the slope, in the moot hall, someone had put another log on the fire, and a red glow breathed in the windows.
"No," he said finally. "I don't think I want to. But I don't think I can walk away from it, either. He looked at me like he already knew what I'd say."
Ione nodded slowly, as though he had confirmed something she had already guessed. She got up, brushed the flour from her skirt, and laid her hand briefly, heavily, on the top of his head, the way she had done when he was small. "Then you had better go and find out what the question really is," she said, "before someone else answers it for you."
The council met at first light in the moot hall.
The room was long and low-beamed, smelling of woodsmoke and old wet wool, with a table of black oak down the centre that had been carved over the generations with the initials of everyone who had ever lost an argument at it. Dessa sat at the head, with her stick laid across her knees. On her right sat Lysa, pale and tight-lipped, her hands folded to keep them still. On her left sat Brannoch, his bad leg propped on a stool, a crust of bread in one fist that he was crumbling without eating. Beside them sat the heads of the six oldest families, farmers and herders with weathered faces, all of whom looked as if they would rather have been anywhere else.
The god was not in the room. He had walked out at dawn and was sitting on the lip of the well in the square, watching the sun climb, with the whole village hanging back from him in a wide, careful ring. Through the open door, Orrin could see the pale back of his robe, and the thick dark smear of his shadow, still pooled and leaning against the light.
"The question before us," Dessa said, "is simple, and we shall not make it complicated. A being who says he is a god has come into our village and asked one of our own to commit what would be, if he is what he claims, the greatest killing in the history of the world. We have to decide what we say to him."
"We say no," said Harl Dunmore, a big man whose barley fields ran down to the stream. "We say no, and we say it loudly, and we let him go back down the road the way he came. I will not have the name of this village in the next song. I will not have it said that Tarn's Rest laid a hand on a god."
"If he is a god," Brannoch said, without looking up from his bread.
Harl scowled. "You felt it. Everyone felt it. Don't tell me you didn't."
"I felt something," Brannoch said. "I've felt something plenty of times. I felt something the night they cut off my leg, and it was no god." He set the crust down. His face was weathered and scarred and very still, the face of a man who had spent thirty years learning how to look at frightening things without blinking. "What I know is this. He asked for the boy. Not for gold, not for a roof, not for a priest. For the boy. A god who can walk a pilgrim road barefoot and not leave a track could kill himself a dozen ways, I'd think. He does not need us for that. So the question is why he does."
"Because he cannot do it himself," Lysa said quietly.
Everyone looked at her. She did not look up. Her fingers were laced so tightly together that the knuckles shone.
"I sat with him an hour last night," she said. "Dessa let me. I wanted to see whether there was anything wrong with him I could treat. He has no pulse. He has no breath that I could find. But he told me something, and I do not know whether it is true. He said that he has tried, many times, in many places, in ways I will not repeat, and that none of it has worked. He said that whatever he is, it does not end when it is told to." She drew a shaky breath. "I think he is telling the truth, and I think I hate that I think so."
A hush fell across the table. Outside, a child laughed, thin and high, and was immediately hushed.
"There is a second thing," Lysa said. "I looked at his hands. Under his nails, in the creases of his knuckles. There is a grey dust there, very fine, like ash. I thought it was from the road. But it is not on his feet, and it does not wash. I touched it. It was cold, and for a moment I remembered a thing I had forgotten for twenty years, my grandmother's burying. I was six. I had not thought of it since." She finally lifted her eyes. "I think it is grief, Dessa. I think it is every grief that nobody carried. And I think it is heavy."
Dessa's thumb moved slowly over the head of her stick. "The old song," she said. "The Unmourned."
"Yes."
Nobody spoke. The fire popped. The beams creaked as the morning wind pressed against the slate roof.
It was then that the door opened, and a stranger stepped in out of the grey light.
He was not the god. He was a thin, travel-stained man in a hooded cloak, with a staff in his hand and a cord of undyed grey wool knotted at his waist. He leaned on the doorframe as if he had been walking for days, and pushed back his hood to show a lean, pleasant face, tanned and creased at the eyes, with the beginnings of a grey beard. He smiled at the room.
"Forgive the intrusion," he said, in the warm voice of a man who has told many stories to many fires. "I did not mean to interrupt. I saw the lights burning and thought I might beg a corner of the hearth. I am only a pilgrim. A late one, I fear." His gaze moved, quite lightly, to the open door behind him, to the square, to the pale figure on the well. "Ah," he said softly. "So I am not late at all."
Brannoch had gone very still. His hand had moved, slow as a cat, to the hilt of the short knife in his boot.
"Who are you?" said Dessa.
"No one of importance." The pilgrim bowed, and the grey cord at his waist swung and caught the light. "I serve the old ways, that is all. I was hoping to see him with my own eyes. I never thought I would be allowed so close." He glanced at Orrin, who stood at the foot of the table, and the smile flickered, just once, like a candle in a draught. "And you must be the young man. They said you were tall."
Nobody had said anything to Orrin about the cord. But Orrin saw it. And in the same instant he saw the pilgrim's staff, and how the iron ferrule was worn bright at the point from long use as a weapon, and the way the man's weight sat balanced on the balls of his feet, and the three fingers of his left hand that were resting, not on the staff, but on the knot of the grey cord, ready to pull.
His hands knew before his heart did.
He did not remember crossing the room. There was a sound like a snapped branch. There was a pilgrim on his back on the flagstones with the staff cracked in two and a short blade skittering out of his sleeve, and Orrin's knee was on his chest and Orrin's forearm was across his throat, and the pleasant face had gone white and wide-eyed, and a thin line of blood was running from one corner of the pilgrim's mouth. Orrin's own breath was steady. His heart was a slow, even drum. That was the part that frightened him.
"Wait," the pilgrim gasped. "Wait. I only came to look."
"With a knife."
The pilgrim's eyes slid sideways. "There are others," he whispered. "They will not let him die. You should know that. They will not let him die." He laughed, a short wet sound. "You are so very strong, boy. Do you know what you are? Do you have any idea?"
The room had gone silent. Dessa had risen. Lysa had a hand over her mouth. Harl Dunmore was backing away from the table with his chair scraping behind him. Brannoch was staring at Orrin as if seeing him for the first time, with an odd, unhappy light in his weathered face.
"You were never going to be only ours," Brannoch said quietly.
Orrin looked down at the man beneath his arm, at the grey cord and the blood and the glazed, hungry eyes, and a cold knowledge settled into the pit of his stomach like a stone dropped into a well. Whatever Serath was, whatever he wanted, he was not the only one who had come to Tarn's Rest. And the rest of them had not come to ask.
Then the pilgrim's eyes rolled up, and his head fell back against the stones, and the grey cord at his waist went slack in Orrin's fist, and out in the square, across the whole stunned stillness of the village, the old god's voice rose, soft and clear and terribly sad.
"I am sorry, Orrin Vale," said Serath. "I did not think they would come so soon."