The wall had started singing before dawn. By the time I found the crack, there was a bridge in the ditch.
It had been gone longer than my mother had been alive.
Pale arches stretched beneath the water. Sunlight fell across a parapet from the wrong direction, brightening the wheels of a passing cart. A woman sat on it with white flowers in her lap. She turned toward the man beside her and laughed at something I couldn't hear.
I leaned closer. The bridge stayed where it was instead of making room for my face.
I had seen the river remember things before. Fish that swam through stone. Steps descending beneath a landing. Never a whole road this far inside a bound wall, with people on it going somewhere the rest of us could no longer reach.
For a moment I wanted to see where the cart would go.
Then muddy water spat from the joint beside my knee.
“Corb. Keep off the verge.”
His boots stopped behind me. In the ditch, the cart reached the middle arch and vanished.
I caught a little of the seep on two fingers and touched it to my tongue. Grit. River silt, with none of the greasy bitterness of lock-oil. Water was coming through the earth behind the stone and bringing the wall with it.
Below us, smoke had begun to rise from the houses of the Fourth Reach. The river on the other side of the dike stood higher than their kitchen windows. Ours was among them.
I spat and put my ear against the facing.
The thin whistle rose a little to my left. There.
I worked a lump of clay into a rope and pressed it into the seam. The first piece washed out over my wrist. The second caught beneath a sound edge. I fed in more, a thumb's width at a time, until the whistle faded and the flow slowed to a bead beside my little finger.
The bridge faded too. One white arch remained beneath my wrist for a moment. Then there was only ditch water.
I held the patch until my arm began to shake.
“Breakfast?” Corb asked.
“Busy.”
“I can see that. You're eating the wall.”
Corb Fenn stood on the path with our rolled repair cloth over one shoulder and half a heel of bread in his hand. My walking partner had managed to keep both feet out of the ditch. He was talented that way.
“Put your hand here.”
He tucked the bread into his coat and crouched beside me. When his palm was firm against the clay, I eased mine away.
Nothing shifted.
“How long?” he asked.
“Before the rise, if we're unlucky.”
That took the amusement out of his face.
I drew a chalk line above the seam. A cart of clay was needed behind it, where neither of us could reach.
We had our hands and what we could carry.
Corb helped me up by the forearm. Ditch water ran from my knee into my boot.
“Now breakfast.”
He broke the bread and held out the larger piece. I took it, pulled off enough to make them nearly equal, and gave that back. He watched me do it without comment.
There was onion in the bread, sharp enough to make my mouth ache. I ate while he tested the patch once more.
Mereholt was held dry by earth, stone, salt bindings, and people who got up early enough to hear trouble. The bindings kept the river to its agreed banks. They needed sound ground beneath them, which was something the men who paid for bindings disliked being reminded of. A white line cut into a stone was easier to admire than a cart of well-packed clay.
Someone below us was beating a rug against a doorstep. The sound carried up the slope in cross little thuds.
I wanted to be down there, complaining about dust.
“You've got your Office face on,” Corb said.
“This is my face.”
“No. Your face is worse when you're listening.”
“I filed this section last week.”
“I remember.”
“They said they'd send someone.”
“They said it would be considered.”
I hated that he remembered the exact words. I had walked home with the sound of a cart in my head, already planning where we would tip the clay.
He brushed the crumbs from his coat and started along the path. I followed, testing the next stretch with my palm.
A dike-walk paid the same whether the wall held all morning or tried to fall down before breakfast. After nine years of walking, I had become very good at listening for the difference. At twenty-one, I owned two bad boots and enough chalk to mark places someone else might eventually agree to mend.
One day I meant to finish a round with enough strength left to do something foolish. Go down to the Red Steps for the music. Buy a cup instead of listening from the landing. Stay until the musicians packed up and be sorry about it in the morning.
Corb stopped ahead of me.
I swallowed the last of the bread.
At the second-mile culvert, the drainage water was brown.
“Stay on the stones,” he said.
The path widened here around a lean-to where we kept stakes and wicker mats. Beneath it, a drainage channel passed under the walking road and ran down into the Reach. There was usually a brisk trickle at its mouth, enough to stir the grass.
This morning the grass lay flat beneath water thick with earth.
I stepped onto the culvert's stone lip and caught the lean-to pole for balance.
It moved in my hand.
For one stupid moment I tried to put it back.
Then the gravel beneath its foot dropped away. My heel slipped. I threw my weight toward the wall as a strip of path peeled into the channel, taking the pole and half the wicker roof with it.
Water struck the broken edge and came up brown around my boot.
“Tova.”
“I've got stone.”
“Your other foot.”
My left toe was still on the crumbling road. I moved it onto the lip beside the right.
There was no room to turn. I pressed my cheek against the wall while Corb knelt on the sound path and tested the earth with his knife. Once. Twice. He laid it flat to mark where the firm ground ended.
“Come back this side.”
I edged toward him. A pebble struck the water behind my heels, then several more. Corb waited until I could reach his hand without leaning. He took my wrist, and I stepped past the knife onto ground that stayed where it was.
For a moment I couldn't let go of him.
“The pole wasn't loose yesterday,” I said.
“No.”
He gave me a breath before looking back at the damage. I was grateful enough to resent it.
A length of road as broad as our kitchen table had gone. Beneath the remaining edge, water worried at exposed roots. The fallen roof had caught against the bank, forcing the flow toward our feet.
Corb unrolled the cloth and passed me a rope.
I caught the fallen pole at its fork, where the wicker was lashed. We pulled from the sound edge. The frame dragged through the water, gathered mud, and stuck.
The split in my palm opened. I felt the sting before I saw the blood.
“Lower your end,” Corb said.
“We'll lose it.”
“Toward me.”
I did. He changed the angle, and the frame came free so suddenly I sat down hard. Water poured through the wicker. Corb hauled it clear and braced it against the surviving post.
He glanced at me.
“Don't,” I said.
“Wouldn't.”
His mouth twitched. I laughed once, mostly because I could breathe again, and got up.
With the obstruction gone, the channel ran straighter. Corb cut the sound mat from the frame while I listened along the wall above the washout.
There was a low rush beneath the stone. Then a stretch of nothing.
I moved a handspan and listened again.
I took the butt of Corb's knife and tapped the facing. The answer came back hollow.
“How far?” he asked.
Four arm-lengths before the stone answered solidly. I chalked both ends.
His eyes followed my hand. “That's behind the culvert.”
The little seam at the fifth section could wait for clay. Here the water had carried enough earth away to leave a pocket behind the stone. There was nothing left for a patch to hold against.
Below the washout, a binding stone had tilted out of its bed. The salt in its groove shone through the brown water until it reached a crack.
There the light stopped.
On the dry side, a bead of water climbed a root.
Corb caught my sleeve. We watched the bead swell, flatten against the bark, and lean out toward the path. It hung sideways in the air, clear enough that I could see the root through it.
Then it fell with a sound far too deep for its size.
“The old course,” Corb said.
Something beneath the surface pressed along the broken line. I could see no body. I could see the grass bending away from it, one tuft after another, toward the houses.
I remembered the woman on the cart, the flowers in her lap. Whatever road the river was searching for, people lived on it now.
I added a third chalk mark above the broken stone.
“We need a binder with the crew.”
Corb looked down the slope. “Before it remembers the rest of the way.”
A woman was coming up the path with an empty basket. He called to her before she reached the damaged stretch. She stopped, listened, and looked at the gap.
“Tell Quill we need the lower lane warned,” he said. “People should get themselves and what they can carry up to the steps before the rise. Then tell her where we are.”
“The Hales too,” I said. “Tell Hanna I sent you.”
The woman tucked her basket beneath her arm and went back down quickly.
I watched her until the bend hid her. Then Corb put a stake into my hand.
We laid the salvaged mat over the raw bank. He pegged it into ground that still held while I packed clay around the upper edge. It would slow the scouring. It might keep the path long enough for a crew to bring material across.
We worked without talking. Once, he held out his hand for a stake before I had found it. Once, I moved the clay pouch to his other side before he asked. We had walked enough miles together to save our breath when it mattered.
By the time we finished, sunlight had reached the windows below us.
“They'll have to send a cart now,” I said.
Corb sat back on his heels. “Will they?”
“I'll show them how much has gone.”
“You showed them where it would go last week.”
“Then I'll use shorter words.”
He didn't smile.
The warning form had softened inside my coat. I spread it on the dry side of Corb's cloth and held the corners down with stones.
“I'll go,” he said.
“You haven't written the earlier reports.”
“I can tell them a road fell in.”
“And when they ask which report it belongs to?”
He looked along the path. Someone had to stay until Quill could spare another pair of hands. I could draw what the water had taken. Corb could keep more of the bank from following it.
Neither job felt large enough.
I wrote the section, the culvert, the time. Beneath the measurements I drew the hollow behind the facing and marked the direction of the flow. I added the split binding stone separately: Bank crew and salt-binder required.
Corb leaned over my shoulder.
“Another handspan at the lower end.”
I changed the line.
“And put down the road's gone. Don't make them work it out from your pretty picture.”
I wrote it in capitals.
He watched me finish. “My name too.”
I looked up.
“I was here. Put it down.”
There was one ruled space for the reporting walker. I wrote CORB FENN beneath it, beside the description of the matting.
He inspected the name. “You've made me tidy.”
“Only on paper.”
He added a small cross with the pencil. The point nearly went through.
At the next ditch I washed before going inland. I had to tease a strand of rope out of my palm, and for a moment all my courage went into not making a noise over something so small.
When the surface settled, my reflection looked back: brown eyes still wide from the fall, a pale smear of cheek, blonde curls escaping a tie that had given up hours ago. A leaf had lodged above my ear.
I pulled it free and wiped my face. Office clerks had a particular way of looking at a woman who arrived muddy. Arrive clean, though, and they wanted to know whether she had actually been to the wall.
I settled for a face they could see.
One of my bootlaces had come untucked. Edun had replaced them with new cord while I slept, leaving the ends so long I had nearly tripped on the stairs. My brother was fourteen and beginning to take offense when I thanked him for things.
I had complained about the length instead. He had looked pleased.
I tucked the lace away again. Our house stood beyond the bend below the culvert. From here I could see only the chimney my mother kept asking me to patch before winter.
The woman with the basket should have reached them by now. Hanna would be moving the flour upstairs. Edun would be telling her that he could carry it, and she would be telling him she knew, while continuing to carry it herself.
I wanted to go down to them so badly that I took a step toward the slope.
Behind me, water struck the mat.
“I'll be back before the rise,” I told Corb.
“You get the cart.”
“And then I'll be back.”
He rolled his cloth, leaving out enough clay for the fifth section. There was very little left.
I gave him my pouch.
“You'll want that when you come back,” he said.
“You'll have a cart by then.”
He took it without answering.
The Office stood three miles inland, on ground high enough that its doorstep had never needed a flood-board.
By the time I reached it, the cut in my palm had stuck to my sleeve. Mud dried stiffly at my knees. I had rehearsed what I would say all the way there: failed bank, hollow behind the facing, broken binding. Three things. I could make someone understand three things.
Inside, there was a stove.
That was the first thing I noticed. A small iron stove giving off heat nobody seemed grateful for. The clerk had her sleeves rolled to the elbow. Two men waited ahead of me with their caps in their hands.
I took my place. Behind the counter, papers hung from nine numbered hooks. Beyond them was a closed door with REPAIRS painted above it.
I fixed on that door.
The first man wanted payment for timber taken from his yard. His claim had been approved last month. He had received no money. The clerk checked two columns while he twisted the cap in his hands.
I eased my paper open. Damp had blurred the edge of the map, but not the warning.
The second man had lost a late sowing to flooded fields. He began with the weather. By the time he reached the crop, I was holding my form so tightly that its folded edge had cut into my good hand.
“I put both beds on there,” he told the clerk. “It took both.”
“I can see that.”
She hung his claim on the fifth hook. He waited as though there might be more. There wasn't.
I stepped forward before she called me.
“The second-mile culvert in the Fourth Reach is washing out. Part of the road's gone. We need a crew and a salt-binder before the rise.”
“Form.”
I gave it to her.
She held it by the corners. “Is this wet?”
“It was written beside the leak.”
Her eyes came up to mine. I had meant to be pleasant. I had practiced that too.
“The writing's clear,” I added.
She laid it down. “Name?”
“Tova Hale.”
“Trade?”
“Dike-walker.”
This time I managed not to tell her where on the form to find it.
“Date first observed?”
“The road fell this morning. The seepage was reported last week. I've put the earlier number on the back.”
She went to the hooks. For the first time since entering, I let myself breathe properly. She was fetching the previous warning. She would compare the maps and see how much worse it had become.
She brought back a bundle tied with string.
“This one?”
My handwriting. The earlier date. The same fifth section and the beginning of the seep by the culvert. At the bottom I had written: Repair before next high water.
“Yes.”
The space beneath REPAIRS AUTHORIZED was empty.
“Was anyone sent?” I asked.
“There's no authorization.”
“Was it read?”
She turned it over. A small initial sat beneath the date.
“It was reviewed.”
Outside, a cart rattled across the gravel. I could hear the loose iron of its wheel. Corb was watching the water rise, and my warning had been here all week with someone's initial on it.
“The binding stone has broken,” I said. “There's an old bridge showing in the ditch.”
Her hand stopped on the paper. At last she looked worried.
She glanced toward the repairs door, where someone was talking, and lowered her voice.
“That needs to be added to the requisition.”
“It's on the new form. Beside the hollow.”
She looked where I pointed. I made myself slow down.
“This seam is the one we kept closed. This is the culvert. There are four arm-lengths of stone with earth washing out from behind them. It needs a crew, matting, fill. We can't reach the back from the path.”
“You've written that matting was laid.”
“Against the raw bank. To keep it from taking more of the road while I came here.”
“So the damage is contained.”
“No.”
The word came out loudly enough that the voice behind the repairs door stopped.
I looked at it. No one opened it.
“It's slowed,” I said. “We used the roof off our shelter. There isn't more.”
The clerk drew a blank form from the right-hand tray.
“An emergency requisition requires an assessed quantity.”
“Send someone to assess it.”
“That's what this requests.”
“When?”
“I can't give you a time.”
I looked at the hooks, where paper curled around paper until the numbers seemed to be growing skirts.
There was a chair by the stove. I could sit there and write again. Let the heat get through my trousers. Let somebody else decide what happened next.
I wanted that so badly I stepped away from the counter.
Then I thought of Corb dividing the last clay between two failing seams. Of the laces Edun had knotted with such care that I had needed to loosen them before I could put my boots on.
I stepped back.
“May I speak to someone in repairs?”
“They're allocating crews.”
“That's what I need.”
“From the requisitions.”
She touched the blank form.
I took it.
I wrote my name and trade again. The earlier report number. The measurements. The material we had used. In the box for quantity required I wrote Assessment needed today. A guess would send too little clay, or give them another thing to correct before anyone came.
“You need a quantity there,” the clerk said.
“I need someone who can measure the inside of a wall without opening it. Do you have one?”
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she took the form.
“I'll attach the warning.”
It was the first thing she had said that sounded like help.
I loosened my grip on the pen. There was a dot of blood on its barrel. I rubbed it off with my cuff before putting it down.
She straightened the reports together and stopped at Corb's name.
“Second reporting walker?”
“Witness. He helped secure the bank.”
“Who's responsible for the section?”
“We walk it together.”
“Whose round?”
“Mine.”
She entered my name beneath the description of the road, the hollow, the water.
I wanted it there. If a crew needed to know where the mat was pegged or which stones were sound, they could ask me. I would go back with them. I would carry until dark.
“Sign underneath.”
I read the line. It confirmed that I had observed the damage and that my account was true.
I signed.
She cut a receipt from the bottom of the requisition. A receipt meant a number. A number meant I could come back and ask what had happened to it. I held out my hand.
“A moment.”
She was looking at the earlier warning again.
“No follow-up attendance recorded.”
“I've been there every morning.”
“After the first report.”
“Every morning. I kept the seam closed. Corb can tell you.”
She checked the new report and wrote something in the margin.
“And the bank failed today.”
“That's why I'm here.”
Coal settled behind the stove's little door. I could feel the warmth against my legs and hated how much I still wanted to move closer.
The clerk reached for a stamp.
“Will this get someone sent?”
“The report has to be classified first.”
She pressed the stamp onto the warning, then onto my receipt. I watched her capable, ink-stained hands. She had read both reports. She knew where the damage was. I had explained it properly this time.
She turned the receipt and slid it across.
Beneath my name, in a neat black rectangle, were two words.
Vigilance insufficient.
I looked from the receipt to the report she had begun to fold.
“I told you the wall was failing.”
“Your warning is attached.”
“You've written that I didn't watch it.”
“Your requisition has been filed, Mistress Hale. Keep the receipt.”
Behind me, someone shifted on the floor. Another person waiting for a turn. The clerk put my papers together, my map on top, and laid them in the tray beside the repairs door.
I took the receipt because it was the only thing she had given me.
Outside, the cart was gone. I began the walk back with my hand pressed against my ribs to keep the paper flat. Corb would ask where the crew was. I tried to think what I would tell him.
By the time I reached the market road, I had half a mile left and no answer.
Then the warning bell began to ring in the Reach.
I ran toward home.
