My lord, you asked for the truth of it. I will tell it plain.

The dream went like this. Margaret stood in a field of gold. The gold was not wheat. It was sound. The golden song lay on the ground like a thing you could touch, and she walked through it, and every step wore some of the gold away. She did not mean to. She was a child. I called to her. She turned. Her mouth was open, but the song was in her feet, and her feet were wearing it thin. I could not reach her. That was the whole of the dream. A thing I could not reach, being worn away by the very child who carried it.

I woke. The house was cold. The wind was up. The red wind, they called the plague, and it had come to the city at last. I went to her room. She lay burning. She was singing the golden song to the fever, singing it over and over, wearing it the way a river wears a stone, and I stood in the door and I could not believe how far gone the gold already was. She smiled. "Da," she said. "You'll come back."

I said I would.

There is no law for a father's love. There should be one. It is the only hunger the world refuses to govern. I would have burned my two hands for her. I would have burned the earth and salted it. This is not a prideful thing to say. It is a confession. I sat by her bed and sang the song back to her, and what was mine in the song passed into her the way a coin passes from hand to hand, losing the face of the king and keeping only the weight. She slept. I sang until the grey came up.

The summons came at first light. Lord Pemberton stood at the high window with his hands crossed behind his back. He did not turn to greet me. He said there was a village in the hills. Ashcombe. The villagers had shut their gates against the red wind. They refused the King's tithe. They sheltered the sick and the landless and the treasonous. The King's justice was a clean house, and the house must be taken. He asked me if I was the King's man.

I said I was.

He spoke of the physician. That was his way. He never raised his voice. He said the physician could not be everywhere, and a captain's daughter was not written in the King's book, but a man who served the King's justice in Ashcombe would find his household remembered. I stood in the sound of it like a man standing in a cold river. I said I would go.

Edward Whitmore walked with me to the gate. My sergeant, my oldest friend. He said, "Tom, the walls have ears." I told him my ears were my own. He said, "That village, that song. They sing the golden song up there. Your old man's song." I told him I had no old man. He looked at me a long time. "No," he said. "You never did."

The road was a hangman's cord. The red wind had been through the valley before we came to it. Fields burned black at the edges. The church eaves were boarded. A dog sat in the middle of the road and would not move, and I remember thinking that dog would sit there forever and the world would build its grave around him, which is the kind of thought a man has when he is keeping his mind from the thing behind him.

The village had two walls. The outer one was manned. There was singing on the other side. I could hear it through the wood. The golden song. The worn gold. It came to me like a thing from the bottom of a well, and my hand went to the pommel of my sword, and the hand would not stop shaking. A woman stood above us on the wall. Old, with grey hair hanging to her waist. She looked at me. Then she looked at Edward. Then she looked at me again.

"You have the look of Elias Bradshaw," she said.

Eleanor Fairchild. She was the healer of Ashcombe. She said it plain, the way a woman of that valley says everything. "Your father did not die in the King's wars. The King said traitor. He was no traitor. He walked out of the King's service because he could not carry the King's sword another year, and he came down to this valley, and he taught us the song, and when the first wind came through he went into the sick houses and sang it to the dying, and he died of it on the ninth day. He is in this ground. And you are the man they sent to burn it."

The truth came slow, the way things come slow in a dream. My father was not a coward. My father was not a traitor. My father was a man who refused the law of the court, and the court had kept his name and fed it to me like bread. I had worn his shame for twenty years. I had carried it up that road. I had brought the King's fire to his grave. I stood in front of that gate, and I was a grown man, and I understood that I had never grown. That is the cruelty of the court. It keeps you a boy. A boy does what he is told, and he calls it justice.

Hollis, the corporal, brought up the torch. He asked me for the word. I did not give it. He gave it anyway. I took him by the collar, and we went down in the mud, and I broke his wrist before I knew my hand had closed. My hand was not my own. The men stood around us in a ring, no one moving, and the singing went on behind the wall, and I lay in the mud with Hollis's blood on my teeth and thought of my Margaret burning in her bed, the song going thin in her mouth, and I let him up. I let the whole thing up.

Edward knelt beside me. He said, "There is still a road back."

There was not. The Steward's man was already reading the letter aloud. The physician. The remembered household. I heard the words like words under water. And I gave the word. I gave it to the wall. I said burn it.

I will not tell you what it is to hear the song burn. It went up with the thatch. It went up with the beams. The voices carried it. The old woman sang it standing at the gate, sang it until the smoke took her voice, and the last I heard of the golden song was the sound of it coming apart, worn through at last, a thread breaking in a crowd. I stood there and let it go, and I was nothing but a man holding a broken hand up to the sky.

The ride back was a long quiet thing. Nobody talked. The city received us like a stranger's house.

Margaret died on the fourth night. The physician had never been sent. That was the Steward's accounting. A captain's daughter was not in the King's book. I had known the words. I had trusted the weight behind them. My neighbor told me she sang my song all the way to the end. She wore it out waiting for me. That is what I carried home from Ashcombe. That is what I carried away from my own child.

Let me tell you something, my lord, since you asked for the truth. The King's justice is a clean house. It has clean floors and clean shelves, and nothing lives in it. The real justice comes later. It comes the way a debt comes. It comes from behind, with its hands out, and it asks for the thing you loved, and you pay it in the only coin you have left, which is the truth of what you did to keep some other coin. Justice will come to every man who stands in line for the King. It will come to the King himself. I am not afraid of it now. I am already in debt, and I am already paid.

I have brought you back your men, my lord. Your torch. Your clean word. You can keep them all. The sword is there on the floor at your feet. It was my father's before it was mine, and it never belonged to either of us. Nothing in this house will ever need me again, and I will not need this house. I walked out while you were still calling for the guard.

The village is gone now. The walls are gone. I am lying in the field of ash, and the rain has worked it, and in the low light the ash has a colour to it that is almost gold. They left the dead where they lay. I found the gate. I found the corner of the wall where the old woman stood. I lay down in the ash as a man lies down in rain, and the wind spoke over me, and I sang the golden song, the worn and crippled thing, the coin with no face. I sang it for my father. I sang it for Eleanor Fairchild. I sang it for the people who had kept the green gold of it while I carried the King's. And at the last I sang it for Margaret. I sang the whole worn hammered-out song into the red wind, and the red wind took it, and took me, and I went down into the earth that was already full of the song, and the earth wore the last of the gold away. It was well. It is well. Golden goes the world, and all is well now, all the way down to the root, and all of it is well.