On the seventh morning, they didn't come.
Nobody had slept. After the night before, nobody on that barricade was going to trust the dark again. They'd stood at their places from moonset on, every one of them, listening for Halvard's hand on the road, with nobody at the far end anymore to carry what I saw.
First light came up gray behind the mountains, the way it had every morning, and every soldier on the barricade was standing at her place with her spear, and the braziers were built up, and Rufa's women were at the second rank with the crates of bottles that still fizzed. Naomi was at the gap with her sword out. I was twenty paces back, where she'd put me. I'd gone back to twenty paces without anybody telling me to.
The line stood at the edge of the ice and didn't move.
The light got stronger. The sun came up over the mountains, thin and white. The line went on standing, facing south, a hundred and nineteen holes in a row, with the snow on their shoulders, and at the end of it a small round woman in a brown shawl with her hand up, waving.
Nobody had told them to come. Nobody had told them not to. They just didn't.
"Why?" said the marshal, at the gap. She didn't say it to anyone.
Nobody answered her.
Vera came back up the road a little after sunrise, later than she ever had, because nothing had moved to make her. She came up between the shining slopes with the light on her face, and Rufa met her with the blanket, and Vera turned round at the barricade and waved, and Marta waved back.
"She didn't let go of my hand until I asked her to," said Vera, to Rufa. "Usually she lets go when they start to move. This morning they didn't start."
"Did she say anything?"
"She asked me if he was coming." Vera pulled the blanket round her. "And then she said, Not today, love. Not today."
Rufa looked at her for a long moment.
"That's my line," said Rufa.
It was the most words in a row I'd ever heard her say about herself.
I had Emil's hat inside my coat. I'd put it there the night before and I hadn't taken it out. It made a lump against my ribs where Hana's notebook usually sat, and every time I moved I could feel it, too big and too soft, the way it had been too big for him.
The bond opened a little after sunrise. I think Naomi opened it. I think she knew I wouldn't.
(Fabian,) said Hana, from the city below. (I felt it last night. All of it.)
(I know.)
(I'm coming up.)
(The boy—)
(He's coming too. He's asleep on my bed with his boots on. I'll keep him in the old guard house below the last turn of the switchback. He won't see the line from there.) A pause. (I'll be inside a bowshot. That's what you need.)
She was right. With four of them near me instead of three, my pitcher would fill a little faster. Not much. Enough to matter. I hadn't asked her. I'd never have asked her.
(Thank you,) I said.
(Go and eat,) said Hana.
A long quiet, far to the south. Then Cordelia's candle turned toward me, the whole of it, and I felt her decide what to spend her day on.
(Emil.)
That was all. She'd never met him. She'd never heard his voice. She'd only known him through me, on the bond, in the evenings: the hat, the calls, the goodnights. She said his name the way the marshal said the names of the dead in the tent, as if she were setting it down on a table in front of her.
Then she was quiet, and stayed quiet, and I felt her there anyway, the whole day.
Stellara came up the switchback at noon.
She hadn't come up since the first night of the men. She came now with no bread and no basket and nobody but her own two escorts, and she walked straight to the far end of the barricade, past the toll house, to where Emil had been, and stood there for a long time looking at the frozen ground. Then she came to the tent.
We were all there. The marshal. Naomi standing behind the table. Isak by the flap with his arms folded again. Halvard on his crate. Rufa. Liesel at my left. Ambrose with his notebook shut on his knee. The brazier doing its best.
"I sent for him," said Stellara. She didn't sit down. Her thumb wasn't moving on her ring. "Riders at dawn, to every house that holds a blessing of mine. His mother wrote back to me herself. Three lines. He's coming. He's very excited. Please send him home." She looked at the table. "I'll have to write to her."
"I have his hat," I said. "His escort gave it to me. I'm to take it to her."
Stellara looked at me for a long moment.
"Then we'll both go," she said. "When it's over."
Nobody said anything. Then Ambrose opened his notebook, because somebody had to say a number, and Ambrose would always rather it was him.
"Thirty-one," he said. "Still fizzing. Forty gone flat."
"They didn't come this morning," said the marshal. "First time. I don't know why. I don't like not knowing why."
"Waiting," said Halvard.
"For what?"
He didn't answer.
Isak unfolded his arms.
"I said a thing two days ago," he said. "In here. I'm going to say it again, and then I won't say it anymore, whatever's decided." He looked at Naomi, and then at me. "What are we doing it for? Six a night, at the toll house. A boy's dead. Thirteen soldiers are dead. Thirty-one bottles. What's it for?"
Nobody answered at once. Naomi didn't answer. She was looking at me, and I understood that she wasn't going to answer this one for me. That she'd been waiting two days for me to.
So I did.
"Because she's the only one," I said.
Isak waited.
"Everybody on that road is past it. Tam. Mila. The eleven. Her mother. Marta. Everyone from Stonemere, everyone from the two villages past the lake." I could hear my own voice, and it sounded steadier than I felt. "I couldn't reach any of them in time. Now nobody can. 「Discern」 says Growing about exactly one person on this mountain, and she's sitting on a bench in the toll house because standing up makes her want to walk out the door."
"And?"
"And if I ever find it," I said. "The thing that pulls it out. Whatever it is. It'll only ever work on someone like her. Someone it hasn't finished with. If I stop slowing her now, then the day I find it, there won't be anybody left on this mountain to use it on."
"And if you never find it?" said Isak. Not cruelly. He just needed to hear it.
I thought about the bench. About a little boy climbing into his mother's lap every afternoon, and putting his cold face in her neck.
"Then she'll have had twenty more days," I said. "Twenty more afternoons with him in her lap. Twenty more days of being his mother, instead of standing at the edge of your ice with snow on her shoulders, smiling at nothing." I stopped. Then I made myself finish. "That's what it's for. If that's all it ever turns out to be for, then that's what it's for."
It was very quiet in the tent.
Liesel didn't say anything. But her shoulder came against mine, the way it had the first night, and stayed.
Naomi looked at me for a long time. Then she looked at Isak.
"Six," she said.
It sounded different from the other times. The other times, she'd been defending it. This time it was a number she'd picked up and decided to carry.
Isak looked at her. Then at me. Then, for a long time, at nothing, the way he'd looked at the plateau the first morning.
"Then I'll ice the rocks," he said.
He went out.
Halvard laughed. Once, very low, in his chest, the first time I'd ever heard him do it. Stellara looked at him in surprise.
"That," said Halvard, "is how a man from the passes says yes."
Stellara turned her ring, once, and then stopped.
"Then everybody in this tent has said yes," she said. "And I'll write to his mother tonight."
Isak came to the toll house at dusk.
I didn't ask him to. He was simply there when I came along the barricade with Liesel, standing beside Ambrose at the door with his arms folded, the cold coming off the plateau and through both of us and not, somehow, through him. Ambrose had his notebook open. They'd clearly been standing there together for some time, not talking, which is something both of them are very good at.
"Cold slows things," said Isak, when I reached them. "Meat. Milk. Rot. Everything that grows." He looked at the door. "I don't know if it slows that. I'd like to find out."
"Thirteen," said Ambrose, and wrote it, and waited.
Inside, the first looked up when Isak ducked under the lintel after me. She knew who he was. Everybody at the top of that road knew who he was by then.
"You're the one who said six was a waste," she said.
"I did," said Isak.
"And now?"
He thought about it, honestly, the way he thought about everything.
"Now I'm cold," he said. "And I've got two hands. Where do you want them?"
She looked at him for a moment. Then, for the second time since I'd known her, she laughed, a small cracked surprised sound. She pulled her shawl down off one shoulder.
"There," she said.
Isak laid his palm on her shoulder, just above where I'd put mine against her side, and a small white circle came up under it, very faint, and frost spread out from his fingers across her skin in a fine white fern, the way it grows on a window. She hissed through her teeth. She didn't pull away.
I opened Blue 「Cure」.
The light went in. Her light came up to meet it. Isak's cold sat over both of them like a lid on a pot.
The knot shrank. The roots drew in. They stopped where they always stopped.
「Discern」.
A demon's seed. Twenty-one nights. Growing.
Isak took his hand away. The frost melted off her shoulder in a breath. He looked at me, and I shook my head, and he nodded slowly, as if that were exactly what he'd expected and he'd needed to see it anyway.
"Thank you," said the first, pulling her shawl back up. "For trying."
Isak looked at her for a long moment.
"Your son," he said. "The little one. He's down at the guard house with the Saint's sister."
"I know."
"I'll be on the rocks tomorrow," said Isak. "If anything comes the long way round, it'll have to come past me." He ducked back out under the lintel. "Goodnight."
Outside, Ambrose wrote it down.
- Cold. Isak.
Hana came up the last turn of the switchback just before dark, with a basket on her arm and her hair coming down, and stopped at the top and looked at me, and didn't say anything at all. She just put the basket down on the road and held out her arms, and I went into them, and stood there for a while with my face in her shoulder like the boy with his face in his mother's neck.
"Did you eat?" she said, into my hair.
"No."
"Then that's first," said Hana, and let me go.
I felt it at once. Four of them within a bowshot instead of three. My pitcher wasn't any bigger. But it filled differently, the way a room feels different when one more lamp is lit in it.
I was halfway through the bread when Halvard went down on one knee in the gap.
He did it quickly. Not the slow, careful kneel of a man in a shrine. He went down the way you'd duck, and laid his palm flat on the road, and went very still, and stayed that way.
"Two," he said. "On the shore road. Coming down from the north."
"Risen?" said Naomi, already moving toward him.
"No." Halvard didn't open his eyes. "Too light. They walk like—" He stopped. His face had gone gray, the color of his wall after the dark had touched it. "The ground doesn't know what they are."
He took his hand off the road as if it had burned him.
I went to the gap. Everybody did. We stood there in the last of the light and looked north, along the dark line of the shore road, past the end of the line of risen, toward the lake.
At first there was nothing. Then there were two shapes on the road, small with distance, walking side by side. Not fast. Not slow. Gray cloaks. Hoods up. Close together, the way a pair of anything is close together when it has always been a pair.
Under 「Eyes」 they were holes. But not like the risen. The risen were holes the way an empty room is empty: nothing there. These were holes the way the fruit in the nailed crate was a hole, with that slow, ragged, moving edge round them, as if the dark at the middle were eating outward, very patiently, into everything around it.
"What are they?" said the marshal.
"The ones who brought the fruit," I said. I'd never seen them. I didn't need to. "Village to village. A plum for the hungry, one at a time."
"Always two," whispered Pia, behind me. "That's what every village said, when we asked. At every door. Always two of them, in hoods, and nobody ever saw their hands."
"Then they've come to collect," said Liesel.
Nobody answered her. Nobody needed to.
They walked down the shore road to the back of the line, to where Tam stood held up between two of his neighbors. They stopped there.
And every one of the risen, all hundred and nineteen of them, the whole length of the line, turned their heads at once, away from us, toward the two in the hoods.
Except one.
At the very end of the line, a small round woman in a brown shawl kept her face turned south, up the road, toward the barricade. Toward where her Saint had never come from.
She didn't look round at all.
"Marta's not looking at them," said Vera, at Rufa's end. Her voice had gone very quiet. "Everybody else is. She isn't."
"No," said Rufa.
Naomi drew her sword. She didn't do it quickly. She did it the way she does when she's decided something and wants everyone to see her decide it.
"Nobody sleeps," she said.
Nobody did.