The lock keeper had taken off his boots to stand in the hot water. Selka noticed that before she noticed the god.
She had spent seventeen days in a cell cold enough to split the skin across her knuckles. Here, under Harrowmere, Merrow's capital, steam ran down the walls. The keeper stood barefoot on a narrow ledge, a bronze pipe pressed against his chest beneath his shirt. Every few breaths he lifted it away, as though embarrassed to need it.
“Mind the step,” he told her.
The soldier behind her shoved. Her ankle struck iron. Somewhere across the chamber, a chain moved.
For twenty years she had imagined Ruun as it had been on the day of surrender: a reach of the Ruun River standing upright, the sunset passing through it. The river crossed Merrow before it reached Torren and the sea; neither border had meant anything to its god. She had been twenty-two, exhausted, bleeding into a folded cloth between her legs. She remembered the wonder less well than she remembered the sound of her baby trying to breathe.
Now a tall body sat in a wheeled carriage, enclosed by iron strips that folded across its ribs. Water traveled under the skin of its throat. The feet were gray stone. Its head was lowered, and its hands lay palm upward, as if something had just been taken from them.
Selka stopped.
Voss stepped out of the steam. Age had thinned him without making him frail. He still wore his hair cropped close, still touched the corner of his mouth before saying anything unpleasant.
“We could have sent for you sooner,” he said. “But I thought you might refuse.”
“You thought I would have more spirit before the cell.”
“You always had more than was convenient.”
Behind him the great lifting frame crouched over a bronze anchor, its bent arms disappearing into the ceiling. Water hissed through a branch pipe that held the frame's hinged arms braced over the anchor's collar. Selka recognized the anchor's split crown, the casting flaw the founder had covered with a collar twenty years ago. She had watched it poured. She had held the god's attention while the men brought it down through the lock floor.
She had known what they were doing.
That had never been the crime they meant to hang her for. Her sentence named the evacuation she had refused to carry out: families driven toward a road already under fire. She had stopped the column. Twenty years of useful obedience, and they condemned her for the one order she would not give.
Ruun lifted its head. The soldier's grip tightened on her elbow.
“You,” it said in the old tide tongue.
Its voice was lower than she remembered. Not weak. Something heavy being dragged over stones.
“Yes,” she answered.
Voss glanced between them. “It recognizes you. Good.”
The god looked at Selka's gray-streaked hair. “You have been kept badly.”
“Not as badly as you.”
“No.”
She had hoped it would spit at her, or rage. Its attention felt worse. It examined the years on her face without finding them a sufficient punishment.
Voss produced a folded paper. Her execution order was short. This one had seals and a ribbon.
“Reedgate. Five days, if the road holds. We hand Ruun over at the Torren border; they return our prisoners. The border posts come down. You interpret the release.”
“Why me?”
“Because it will listen to you. Because you know the fittings. Because we need someone who understands the language before it became dockyard slang.”
“It listened to me once.”
Voss's mouth tightened. “And Harrowmere survived.”
The barefoot keeper looked away.
A captain beside the carriage spoke for the first time. “My brother is in the exchange. Kerr. Seven years.”
Selka knew his name from the guards: Darr. He was broad across the shoulders, with a fresh repair in his uniform sleeve. He held himself as though he had been waiting for this journey all his life and would not allow her to spoil it.
“Deliver the god alive,” Voss said, “complete the exchange, and you are pardoned. Your rank is not restored. You may live in the city. With your daughter.”
There it was. He had let her see the hot water first, the god second, then named the thing she would agree for.
“Anet?”
“At the foundry. Doing well.”
He could not know that. He could know she was alive, perhaps that she had reported for work. Doing well belonged to someone who had heard her laugh.
Selka held out her shackled wrists. “I see her before we leave.”
“A brief visit.”
“And these come off.”
Darr waited for Voss's nod before finding a key.
The lock keeper was struggling with a carriage wheel. Selka crouched beside him and pointed to the catch he had missed. He pushed it. The carriage rolled an inch, bringing Ruun's hand close to hers.
“The anchor stays here?” she asked Voss.
“Until release is completed.”
She knew enough to hear what he had omitted, but freedom was on the road and her daughter was above them. She stood.
“What do I call you?” she asked the keeper.
“Pel.”
“Put your boots back on, Pel. They'll leave without your toes if you don't.”
He smiled, unexpectedly, and pushed the pipe back under his shirt.
Ruun watched her in silence while Darr opened the gate. On the stone beside its feet lay a dark slab, edged with old shell marks. Four soldiers groaned as they lifted it into the carriage.
“Leave that,” Darr said.
Ruun's fingers closed on the iron at its ribs. Water ceased hissing in the pipes.
Voss raised his hand. “Take the stone.”
The warmth returned. Selka felt it on her newly freed wrists.