The town slept.
The stream, out of practice, talked to itself in the dark, finding its way over stones it had not touched in fifty years. The sound of it ran under every dream in Onner's Bridge that night like a thread pulled through cloth.
On the step of the Temple of Hudor, at the hour when even the Dry Toast was dark, Mother Vess watered her urns.
The watering can poured.
It had been pouring for some time, longer than any can holds, a thin silver line in the moonlight, and the urns stood full to their brims and drinking. Something green had come up in the nearest one since sundown that had no business being up before spring.
None of this was remarked upon, because there was no one in the square to remark, except the knight.
Lord Daniels stood at the foot of the temple steps, gleaming.
There was no moon side to him and no dark side. The light came off the armor evenly, from everywhere, sourced from nothing: a man-shaped patience shining quietly in an empty square. His horse was down in the channel, standing in the new stream to the fetlocks, drinking with its reins on its neck.
The water parted around its legs in the wrong direction.
The horse did not care.
No one had ever asked the horse anything.
"She shows the signs," said Lord Daniels.
"So did her father." The can poured. "And look where that got him."
"He did bring prosperity and ale to the region."
"Don't forget the elven wine in the services."
Mother Vess glanced up from the urns and winked, an event which would have required, from anyone who had ever sat through one of her sermons on the virtue of diminished expectations, several days of quiet lying down.
"Denari red. Three casks a year down that pass of his, and not one of them ever troubled the customs rolls. A useful man. He never once knew for whom."
The green thing in the urn put out a second leaf.
"The wall was loud," said Daniels, in the tone of a man submitting a report he knows is incomplete. "Louder than the ford. Louder than the ledges at the pass. It is getting louder."
"It is getting closer to the surface," said Vess. "Those are different things, though I grant they rhyme."
She set down the can at last.
The can went on being full.
She looked out over the square: the market corner, the graveyard rise pale on its hill, the healed face of her own temple, clean joints and square arrises, fifty years of weather taken back like a word.
She looked at that longest.
Her expression was the one Genna had filed and never read.
Not astonishment.
"Time's people were on the road," Vess said. "At the river crossing. They looked at her, and walked away, and reported."
"To whom?"
"That," said Mother Vess, "is the question I have been asking for rather longer than this town has had a name, and the answer has not improved."
She gathered her shawl around herself, small and round and gray, a country priestess on a cold step, to the last stitch of her.
Except that the stream below the square had gone quiet while she spoke. All of it. The whole new water holding its noise like a held breath.
It did not start talking again until she sat down on the step, comfortable, done.
"The boy with the ledger will take her to their academy," Vess said, "and they will hang their instruments on her, and their instruments will tell them something. Instruments always do. Let them. A wrong label on a right jar. It keeps."
"And I?"
"Continue to watch her. Let's not rush things until we can confirm."
"Agreed," said Lord Daniels.
It was given and taken like an oath, which, between the two parties present, it was.
He gathered the horse out of the stream.
At the mouth of Ford Street he turned, and the gleam of him turned with him. He looked back at the little temple with the full urns, as soldiers look back at a border.
"She asked me once who knighted me," he said. "On the steps at Marrowell. And what banner I fall under."
"And you told her?"
"A righteous one."
A pause, in the dark, at the edge of a sleeping town.
"She said it was not a bloody answer."
"She's right," said Mother Vess, comfortably, from her step, in the voice of weather deciding, of water taking back a channel, of a small round country priestess who had waited out fifty dry years beside a bridge over nothing for the sound that was moving through it now.
"It's mine."
The knight went gleaming up the west road, and was gone by no particular point in it.
Mother Vess sat on the temple step a while longer, listening to her stream.
Below the square, in the channel, the chickens had reconvened on the dry ledge under the north footing, ruffled, betrayed, glaring out at the moving water in a thin outraged row.
"Oh, settle," she told them. "Everything comes back eventually."
She looked up the hill, at the graveyard, at the two hundred and eleven stones standing patient in the moonlight.
She smiled the smile of an old woman with the whole night to herself and said, to the stones, or the stream, or the girl asleep three streets away with a writ on her table and thirty days on the clock, in a voice of enormous and terrible kindness:
"She thinks the town is odd. She hasn't seen it normal yet."
The water ran.
The urns drank.
The green thing in the nearest one, by morning, would be flowers.