She did not write to him for the journey. That was the first thing. She had written every day, since the spring he had taken her as his lieutenant, every day at the close of the working hour — a single line of report in her own small careful hand, sealed, sent by the courier who did not know where the courier was sending it. The line had been the spine of her week for three years. She did not write the line on the morning the cart left Marrowport.
She did not, for that, feel any of the things a younger version of herself might have felt. She did not feel rebellious. She did not feel afraid. She felt, in the way a competent woman feels when she has decided, by her own judgement, to defer a piece of correspondence — the small clean pressure of a deferred report. The deferral was not a refusal. The deferral was a measurement.
The cart had been chosen for its plainness. She had paid for it with money from a House that had not known it was paying. The driver had been one of the men who had been useful to her for two years and would, by his own private reckoning, be useful to her for two more. The cart held a single chest, three sealed cloth packets of papers she had not allowed herself to read on the working table, and one boy.
The boy was Calix. He was fifteen.
There were, in the road eastward from Marrowport, two roadside camps that were of any interest to the chronicler. The first was a small clearing at the foot of a hill, three days into the journey, where they stopped at evening to feed the horses and where she lit, with her own small flint, a fire in the camp's small stone ring. She did not let the driver light the fire. She had never let any man in her service light a fire she was going to sit at; she had been raised in a House that had taught her the discipline. The fire took. The fire warmed the small clearing. The boy sat across from her and held his hands out to it.
She took her own dinner from the cart's stores. She set the boy's portion in front of him. He ate it. He ate it slowly. She watched him eat. She had, in the last week, begun the careful quiet practice of watching him eat — not because she suspected he was going to refuse, but because the act of eating in his master's apprentice was the closest external surface to the boy's relationship with the work, and she had been trained to read external surfaces.
He set the bowl down. He did not look up at her at first. He looked at the fire. He spoke, in the small careful tone of a boy who had been preparing the question in his throat for several days, and who had, on the third evening of the journey, finally found the throat empty enough to ask it.
"Mistress."
"Yes."
"Will I be allowed to refuse."
She did not, on the question, look away from him.
She did not, for that matter, answer at first. She watched the boy's face.
"Refuse what."
"The work."
"Which part of it."
"Any part of it. The next part. The part after the next."
"Calix."
"Yes."
"If I gave you an answer, on this evening, the answer would be the answer of a lieutenant. The answer would be useful to my master, and to the work, and — by the smallness of its truth — to you. I do not, on this evening, want to give you that answer."
"Then give me the other answer."
"I do not, on this evening, have it."
"Mistress —"
"Calix. Listen."
"Yes."
"The question you are asking has a shape. The shape, in my hearing, is the shape of the question you have already begun, by some private decision, to answer in your own chest. I have heard it. I will not, by any answer of mine on this evening, take the question off your shoulders. The question is yours. You will carry it east with us."
"Mistress."
"Eat the rest of the bread."
He looked at her. He held her face for a long count. He did not, in the count, repeat the question.
"Yes, mistress."
He picked up the rest of the bread. He ate it. He looked at the fire. After a long count, he spoke once more, in the smaller voice a boy uses when the next question is the one he has been afraid to ask.
"Mistress."
"Yes."
"If I refuse — what will you do."
"Calix."
"Yes."
"You will not, on this evening, get an answer to that question either."
"Mistress."
"But on the evening the question has to be answered, you will know, by the small careful way I have been training you for a year, what I will and will not do. The training was not for the work. The training was for the evening."
He nodded, slowly.
"Yes, mistress."
He picked up the bowl. He went, quietly, to the cart, and he set the bowl in the small wooden tray for tomorrow's washing, and he climbed into the cart and lay down under the blanket she had set there for him.
She remained at the fire for some time. She watched the flame. She trimmed the small piece of brush she had laid across the stone ring, and the flame fed on it, and the flame burned, in the small ordinary way a fire of brushwood and a competent flint will burn, until late in the evening.
She thought, while the fire burned, about the warlock's table, and about the unwritten letter, and about the boy in the cart, and about the country she was bringing the cart into. She did not, in any of the thinking, write to the warlock.
She put the fire out at the end of the evening with the back of a small flat stone. The fire did not protest. She climbed into the cart on the side opposite the boy. The boy was breathing the way a boy of fifteen breathes when he has decided, for that evening, to sleep, and she did not, for a long count, sleep beside him.
The chronicler does not name the moment, in the long ride east, at which Maelis Cinderhand became something other than Drexel's lieutenant. The chronicler does not believe there was a single moment. The chronicler observes, instead, that an apprentice who had asked his keeper if refusal was permitted had begun, in the asking, already to refuse — and that the keeper, by not answering, had begun, in the silence, to permit it. The journey east, that night, had a third member it had not had at Marrowport. The third member was the question between them. The question would ride with them into Krypton.