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"Kill the ledger man!" somebody screamed, and the pickaxe was already coming down.
I didn't get my arms up in time. I didn't get anything up in time. One second I was standing in torch smoke with forty miners packed around me in a half-circle, and the next Bram had the pickaxe over his head and it was falling toward my skull like something out of a nightmare, and I thought, stupidly, this is it, this is how the accountant dies, in a hole in the ground, over three months of wages I never touched.
Ivy caught it with her forearm.
Not the flat side. The haft, an inch below the steel head, and I heard the crack of wood against bone and then I heard her make a sound I never wanted to hear again, something between a grunt and a scream bitten in half. The arrow wound in her shoulder — the one she'd taken for me two days ago, the one still wrapped in bandage gone brown at the edges — tore open right along the seam. Blood ran down her arm in a line, fast, and dripped off her elbow onto my cheek. Warm. Then cold almost immediately in the mine air.
"Touch him," she said, teeth together, pickaxe haft locked against her arm and Bram's whole weight bearing down on it, "and see what happens."
"Ivy—"
"Shut up, Ryan."
Bram was a big man, forearms like cured ham, and he leaned into it, grinding the wood against her bone. "Get out of the way, girl. This ain't your fight."
"He's under my protection." Her voice didn't shake. Her arm was shaking. Different things. "You want to argue with that, argue with the blade in my other hand."
She had it out before he finished blinking. Short knife, edge up, resting against the inside of his wrist where the tendons run. He froze. Forty miners froze with him, torches guttering, the whole tunnel gone quiet except for the drip of water somewhere back in the dark and the drip of Ivy's blood off my jaw.
"You people are gonna march on us with pickaxes," I said, "over wages I've never seen a coin of."
"Liar." That was a woman near the back, thin, coal dust ground into the lines of her face. "Steward said Frosthollow's broke because of you. Said you cut the mine's pay to fund your fancy ledgers."
"Matthias said that?"
"Somebody said that."
"Somebody's lying to you." I held up both hands, slow, so nobody got ideas about the movement. "You want proof, I've got proof. It's in my coat. I need one hand free to get it, and I need your foreman to stop trying to open my skull first."
Bram didn't move. Ivy's blade was still kissing his wrist.
"Do it slow," she said to me, not to him. "And if this is a trick, I put this into him before I put anything into you."
"It's not a trick."
I reached into my coat with two fingers, pulled the folded pages free, and held them up where the torchlight could hit them. Wage stamps. Requisition orders. A ledger line item that didn't belong in a mine's books at all — a purchase order for forty crude iron pickaxe heads and thirty short swords, dated six weeks back, paid for out of a line marked Frosthollow Miners' Wage Reserve, and signed off by a seal that wasn't mine and wasn't Matthias's.
"Read the seal," I said. "Anybody here read?"
Silence. Then the thin woman stepped forward, snatched the page out of my hand rougher than she needed to, and squinted at the wax stamp pressed into the corner.
"That's a hawk," she said slowly. "That's Lane's hawk."
"Victor Lane bought your weapons," I said. "With your wages. He held back three months of pay, told you it was me starving the mine, and then he used that same money to arm you and point you at my throat. You want to know why? Because a mine full of dead miners and a dead accountant is a lot cheaper for him than annexing Frosthollow the honest way."
Bram's arm had gone slack against Ivy's blade. Not dropped. Just slack, like the fight had leaked out of it while he was listening.
"That's a lie," he said, but it came out thin.
"Check the seal against anything Lane's men have signed in the last year. Ask a merchant. Ask anybody who's ever taken a Lane contract. That hawk's on every one of them." I let the page shake a little in my hand, not on purpose, my whole body was still catching up to the fact that I hadn't died in the last thirty seconds. "I don't care if you believe me. I care if you put the pickaxe down before your foreman bleeds out from strangling my bodyguard's arm."
Nobody laughed. Ivy's mouth twitched anyway, fast, gone before it landed.
The silence held for three seconds. I counted them, because counting things is what I do when I can't do anything else.
Then somebody at the back of the crowd shoved forward — an old man, stooped, missing two fingers on his left hand — and dropped a rusted iron box at my feet hard enough that the sound of it hitting stone echoed down the tunnel.
"Your father left this," he said. "Before he died. Told me to give it to whoever came asking about the mine's true books, and not before."
I crouched. The box was old, corners eaten with rust, no bigger than a strongbox for coin. There was a lock on the front, small, iron, and jammed into the keyhole where a key should have gone was a folded scrap of paper, stiff and dark at the edges with something that had dried a long time ago and hadn't been ink.
Ivy's blade was still against Bram's wrist, but her eyes had dropped to the box too.
I pulled the note free with two fingers. Unfolded it. Two words, in handwriting I hadn't seen in eleven years and would have known anywhere.
Don't open.