Halvard went down on one knee and put his hand flat on the road.
He didn't hurry. That was what I remembered afterward. Tam's hand was coming up, and the hole was opening again under it, and Halvard knelt as slowly and carefully as an old man kneeling in a shrine, and laid his palm on the frozen ground, and said something under his breath that I didn't catch.
I'd never been close to a Red circle before. It came up under his hand like a wheel of dull red fire laid flat on the road, wider than the gap, so wide its edge ran under the carts on either side. The road shuddered.
Then the road stood up.
That's the only way I can say it. The frozen road in front of the gap, ruts and stones and four feet of ground that Halvard had said would hold, tipped up out of itself like a page being turned, and went on rising, until there was a wall of earth and rock standing across the gap as high as the eaves of the toll house. Between the barricade and the road, and everything on the road.
The dark hit it a breath later.
No sound, the way there'd been no sound before. The face of Halvard's wall went gray all at once, as if the stone had grown old while I watched, and began to crumble, grit sliding down it in long whispering falls. Halvard's shoulders went down, as if something heavy had been laid across them. His two women put a hand each on his back. He didn't get up.
"It's eating it," he said through his teeth. "It eats what it touches."
"Will it hold?" said Naomi.
"Long enough."
The crumbling slowed. Then stopped. The wall was grayer than it had been, and thinner, and it was still standing.
"Now," said Rufa.
She was already moving, two of her women behind her. They went into the gap in the shelter of the wall, over the gray splinters of the cart, and came back dragging the two soldiers by their coats, and laid them on the road twenty paces back, in front of me.
I knelt.
One was the girl Mila had smiled at. Her coat was gray across the chest where the dark had touched it, the wool gone brittle and pale as ash, and under the coat her skin was gray too, and cold. Not winter cold. Cold the way a cellar is cold in summer, from somewhere inside. Her ribs moved wrong under my hand. Under 「Eyes」 her light was orange going on red.
The other was older, a woman with a gray streak through her hair that had nothing to do with the dark, out cold, one leg bent where a leg doesn't bend. Gray all down that side.
I didn't know. That was the truth of it, kneeling there on the road. I didn't know if 「Heal」 would touch a wound the dark had made. Nothing like it had ever come under my hands.
"Fabian," said Liesel, above me.
"I know."
Blue 「Heal」. Three splashes.
The circle came up blue under my palm, and the light went in, and the gray went out.
Not slowly. The way frost goes off a window when you breathe on it: all at once, from the middle outward, and there was pink skin under it, and the ribs slid back where ribs go, and the girl dragged in a breath that hurt and coughed it out again and opened her eyes.
"It heals," I said. I think I said it out loud. "It's just a wound. It heals."
"Then it's only dark," said Pia, behind me. Her voice was still shaking. "It's not—it isn't—"
"It's only dark," said Liesel. "Dark wears off."
I did the older woman. Blue 「Heal」 again, three more. The leg straightened under my hand with a sound I've learned not to flinch at, and the gray went, and she woke up swearing, which in Septentria involves Glacia and her crown, and tried to stand.
"Sit," I said.
"I've a spear somewhere—"
"Sit."
She sat.
Thirty-five.
The girl was looking up at me. She was very young. Her eyes kept going past me to the wall, to the gray crumbled face of it, and back.
"She smiled at me," she said. "She said I looked tired."
"You do," I said. "Go to the back. Sleep, if you can."
She didn't. Nobody did, that day. But she went to the back.
Tam didn't cast a third time.
He tried. I watched him lift his hand, out on the road behind Halvard's wall, where I could just see the top of his cap over the rubble at the end of it. Nothing opened. His hand stayed up for a long moment, shaking, and then came down again, and two of his neighbors took him under the arms, gently, the way you'd help a grandfather up a step, and held him standing.
They didn't sit him down. None of them ever sit.
Marika — Arctura
The thing about a barricade is that it's a line, and a line is only as good as its worst yard.
I'd found ours by the middle of the morning. It was the yard in front of me.
Not because of me. I want to be very clear about that. Because of the cart. Halvard's wall had shut the gap, which was excellent, but it had shut it by being in the way, and the risen did what water does when you put something in its way. They went round. Round both ends of the wall to where it met the carts, and the cart at the left end was the oldest cart on the plateau, with a back wheel somebody had mended with rope, and I was standing behind it. So that was the worst yard. So that was where I stood. That's not bravery. That's arithmetic.
They don't fight. Everybody says that as if it's good news. It isn't. Something that fights you, you can fight back. These just came up to the timbers and put their hands on them, black to the elbow, some of them in children's mittens because their own wouldn't go over the knuckles anymore, and pushed. And smiled. And talked, some of them, in ordinary voices, the way people talk over a fence.
"You look so cold, dear."
"Come out. Come out, it's warm."
"Your mother's here."
You put your sword through a hand like that and the hand doesn't let go. You put it through the arm and the arm doesn't. A spear went into a woman's shoulder right in front of me, all the way in, and she looked down at it, interested, the way you'd look at a bird that had landed on you, and went on pushing.
Felix was behind me.
Not where I'd put him. I'd put him a step and a half back and to the left, where he could see over my shoulder and the cart would cover him. He was a step back. Then less. Every time a black hand came over the top timber, his spark went past my ear, white and crackling, and hit it, and the hand let go for as long as it took to remember it didn't have to. Every time he did it he was a little closer, until I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up when he cast.
"Step and a half," I said.
"I can't see from a step and a half."
"Then SEE LESS."
He didn't move back. I didn't make him. I had a cart to hold.
Emil's voice was in my ear the whole time. Left. Two carts on the left. Second rank to the right. Hold. He said Hold so many times that morning it stopped being a word and turned into something more like weather. You stopped hearing it. You'd have noticed if it stopped.
And under Emil, the other thing. The bond doesn't give you words unless somebody spends them, and nobody was spending them, because every word on it comes out of Fabian, and I'm not STUPID. But it gives you him, if you listen. It's like a kettle on the back of a stove: you stop hearing it, and then you hear it again. Behind me, twenty paces back, the blue circles kept coming up, and every time one did, I felt him go down a notch. Like a bucket going down a well.
Naomi had put him twenty paces back. Correct. I'd have put him thirty.
The girl beside me was called Kaja. I didn't know that yet.
She had a long fair plait tucked down the back of her coat and a spear too long for her, and every time the cart jumped and knocked us together she said "Sorry," as if she'd done it. Six times. I counted. Not because I count things; that's Fabian. Because it was annoying.
The seventh time the cart jumped, a hand came over the timber beside her and took hold of her wrist.
Not grabbed. Took hold. The way you'd take a child's wrist to cross a road. Then another hand, on her sleeve. Then one on her plait, over the top, black fingers in the fair hair, quite gently.
I let go of my sword with one hand and got her belt.
I want to be clear about this, too. I had her belt. I had it in my fist. She was a small person and I'm not, and I had my boot against the cart's mended wheel, and for a moment she didn't move at all, and I thought, good, fine, done.
Then there were more hands. I couldn't count them. Over the top of the timber, in the cart's shadow, all wanting the same thing, very patiently, none of them in a hurry, and none of them letting go when Felix's spark hit them, because there were too many for one spark.
She didn't scream. She said "Sorry" again. To me. As if she'd done it.
And she went over.
The belt came out of the buckle. I had it in my hand. I still had it in my hand when the place where she'd gone closed up again, the way water closes, smiling.
Hold, said Emil, in my ear. Hold.
I held. That's what you do. You don't get to do anything else at a barricade. You don't go over after her, because then there's two, and the worst yard on the line has nobody in it. That isn't feelings. That's tactics. That's the only thing I've ever been good at.
I want that written down. Her name was Kaja, and she said sorry to me seven times, and the last one wasn't her fault either.
The hand that took my wrist was colder than the cart.
I didn't see it come. I was looking at the place where she'd gone. It came over the timber and closed round my wrist above the glove, and pulled, not hard, just steady, the way the tide pulls, and my boots slid on the frost, and the timber was against my ribs, and over the top of it a woman I'd never seen was smiling at me from very close and saying, kindly, "There you are."
Felix's spark went past my cheek like a thrown knife.
It didn't crack this time. It went, all of it at once, from closer than he'd ever cast it, into the hand on my wrist, and the hand opened, and I fell backward off the timber into him, and we both went down on the frozen road in a heap with my sword somewhere underneath us.
He was swearing. Felix doesn't swear. He was sitting on the road holding his right hand away from himself and shaking it hard, the way you shake a hand you've burned on a pan, and the palm was red and blistered all across, because you can't put that much lightning through something from that close and keep none of it for yourself. Everybody knows that. He knows that. He did it anyway.
I got up. I got my sword. I got back to the cart, because it was still the worst yard on the line, and I tore a strip off the bottom of my own sleeve with my teeth, still facing the plateau, and held it out behind me.
"Wrap it," I said.
"It's fine."
"WRAP the STUPID hand."
He wrapped it. I didn't look round. You don't turn your back on the line; that's not feelings, that's tactics, and my ears were cold because it was WINTER, and anybody who says otherwise can come and hold the cart.
He got up behind me. A step back. Then less.
I didn't say anything about it. I had a cart to hold.
All morning, at the far end of the line, at the very back, a little round woman in a brown shawl stood on the road with her hand up, waving. She never came any closer. She never pushed. She just waved, at the barricade, at nobody, the way you'd wave at someone you were sure was coming.
I hated that more than the hands. I don't know why. I'm not going to think about why.
Vera never stopped watching her. I saw that too, every time I looked along the line: a tall woman at Rufa's end with a spear she wasn't using, standing very still, not looking at the carts at all.
At noon the hands on my cart let go.
All of them, all at once. They took their hands off the timbers and turned round and walked away down the road, and the hand that had been on my wrist went with them, and the woman who'd said There you are, and somewhere in among them, I suppose, a long fair plait. I didn't look for it. Tactics.
I stood at the cart with my sword up for a long time after there was nothing to point it at.
"Marika," said Felix, behind me. Close.
"I KNOW," I said. I didn't know what I knew. I said it anyway.
Fabian — Arctura
Thirty-two. Twenty-nine. Twenty-six. Twenty-three. Twenty. Seventeen. Fourteen. Eleven. Nine.
That was my morning. Three at a time, whenever there were enough of them in front of me to be worth the three: Blue 「Mass Heal」 over twos and threes, and the corks going at the second rank as Rufa's women handed out bottles, one after another, like somebody counting under her breath.
Three didn't come back from the gap.
I didn't see how. I was twenty paces back, where Naomi had put me, where Liesel had made me say I'd stay. I saw it under 「Eyes」, though. Three lights at the barricade, a long way apart in the morning. One, and then a long time later another, and then, very near noon, the last. Each one there, and then not. Each one too far, and too fast, behind too many carts and too many people, for me to reach.
The second was beside Marika. I felt that one before I understood it: on the bond, all at once, her whole body going hard as a fist, and her heart going so hard I could feel it in my own teeth. It didn't stop going like that until noon.
At noon, they stopped.
Nobody gave an order. There was no horn, no shout. The risen at the carts simply took their hands off them, all together, and turned round, and walked back down the road the way they'd come. Not hurrying. Not looking back. As if somebody, very far off, had called them in for dinner.
Two of them carried Tam between them, his feet just touching the road.
"Saint." Emil's voice at my ear, hoarse now, barely more than a breath. "They're going."
"I see them."
At the edge of the ice they stopped, and turned round again, and stood. Facing south. Facing us. Exactly where they'd stood all night, as if they'd never moved.
I sat down on the road where I was. I hadn't meant to. My legs did it.
Liesel sat down beside me. She didn't say anything. Wren stood over both of us and hummed, low and steady, and kept humming until I could breathe properly again.
Nine.
"We count again," said Naomi.
It was the middle of the afternoon. The marshal's tent smelled of wet wool and lamp oil, and the brazier was doing its best. Through the flap I could see the line at the edge of the ice, standing in the falling snow.
The marshal went first. She always does, with the dead.
"Three," she said. "Ylva. Ottilie. Kaja." She said each name as if she were setting it down on the table in front of her. "Eleven hurt past walking. The Saint has them all on their feet."
Marika had come in behind Naomi and was standing by the flap. At the last name her hand closed on the tent pole, and stayed closed.
"Bottles," said Naomi.
Ambrose had his notebook open. He didn't need it. "Made, a hundred and seventy-four. Used before today, thirteen. Today, twenty-two. Left, a hundred and thirty-nine."
"The oldest?"
"First day of the road." He looked up. "Thirty days. Tomorrow."
"Still good?"
"Fizz," said Ambrose. "Today."
Naomi turned to me. "Fabian."
"Nine at noon," I said. "Sixteen now."
"Nine at noon," said Naomi. "With the line still on the carts. If they'd stayed another hour, you'd have been pouring from nothing." She didn't raise her voice. She never does. "Eighteen a day into the bottles is eighteen that aren't in your hands when they come."
I knew what she was going to say. I think everyone in the tent did.
"The bottles stop," said Naomi. "From tomorrow. Every splash you have goes into your hands."
"And the ones we've got?"
"Oldest first. Use them before they go flat."
"And when they go flat?" said Isak.
"Then they're water," said Ambrose.
Isak nodded slowly, as if that were the most sensible thing anyone had said all day. Then he looked at me, and I knew what was coming next, too.
"And the six," he said.
Naomi didn't answer at once.
"He had nine at noon," said Isak. Not unkindly. He just said it, the way he'd said everything since he came up the mountain: like a man reading the depth off a measuring stick. "Six of what he's got go up to the toll house tonight, to slow one woman who's sitting down. If they'd come back this afternoon, that's two more soldiers on their feet. Maybe three."
"I know," I said.
"I know you know. I'm saying it so it's been said."
Naomi looked at me for a long moment. Then at Isak.
"Six," she said.
Isak let out a breath. It didn't smoke; his never did.
He didn't argue. But he didn't stop looking at me, either, and I knew it wasn't finished. It had only been said.
Halvard hadn't spoken. He sat on an upturned crate in the corner because his women had made him, with his big hands hanging between his knees. His face was the color his wall had gone.
"He's spending himself," he said, suddenly, to nobody. "Tam. You saw it."
"Five years a cast," I said. "About that."
"He hasn't got so many years." Halvard looked at his hands. "Two more. Three. And he spent two of them on me."
"On the wall," said Naomi.
"On me," said Halvard. "He looked at me first. He wanted to see if I'd still put my hand down." He shut his eyes. "I did."
Nobody said anything after that. Outside the tent, very faintly, somebody along the barricade began to sing the miller's song, badly, and somebody else told her to stop, and then, after a moment, joined in.
Emil found me at the brazier afterward. He'd lost his hat somewhere. His voice was nearly gone, and his hair hung down flat over his forehead, for the first time since I'd met him, as if even the wind in it was tired.
Felix was there already, holding his wrapped hand up in front of him like something he'd been asked to mind for someone else.
"A hundred and twelve," said Emil hoarsely, sitting down.
"A hundred and twelve what?"
"Holds. I said Hold a hundred and twelve times." He rubbed his face. "I counted. You count things. I thought I'd try it."
"Does it help?"
"No."
"It never does," said Felix. "He keeps doing it anyway."
Emil laughed, or tried to; it came out as a sort of croak. Then he looked at the line out on the plateau for a while, standing in the snow.
"Is it always like this?" he said. "After?"
"No," said Felix. "Usually somebody brings soup."
Somebody did. It came up the switchback a few minutes later in a great covered pot on a handcart, with a note tied to the handle in Hana's writing that said only Everyone. Fabian first. Emil read it over my shoulder and laughed again, properly this time, without any voice at all.
"My mother would hate this," he whispered.
"Which part?"
"All of it." He took the bowl I handed him and held it in both hands for the warmth. "Me most."
He didn't sound sorry. He sounded, for the first time all day, eighteen.
I took what I had up to the toll house at dusk. Nineteen, by then; the pitcher had been filling all afternoon, a splash at a time, the way it always does.
The first was sitting on her bench. She'd been sitting there, the guard told me, all morning, through all of it, with her hands pressed flat on her knees and her eyes shut, and she hadn't once asked to stand up or to look out of the door.
"Was she at the front?" she said, before I'd closed the door behind me.
"At the back. All morning. She never came up."
The first let out a long breath, and her shoulders came down an inch.
"Good," she said.
I didn't try anything new. There wasn't a new thing left in me that afternoon. Blue 「Cure」, and the knot shrank, and the roots drew in and stopped where they always stopped. 「Discern」.
A demon's seed. Fifteen nights. Growing.
Thirteen.
Outside the door, Ambrose wrote 9. in his notebook, and nothing after it, the way he had the day before. Then, after a moment, he wrote something after it after all, and turned it round so I could see.
- Still.
That night, before I drained the last thirteen, I took Hana's notebook out of my coat.
Hana keeps two lists. The first is her count, the one she's kept since the very beginning: everyone I've helped, in her small round hand. It's long now. The second is the other list: the ones we haven't reached yet, the ones we're going to find. Forty-four names, and a page headed The first.
I turned past both of them to a clean page.
I wrote the date at the top, the way Ambrose does. Then I wrote Ylva, and Ottilie, and Kaja, one under the other, as neatly as I could, which isn't very.
Hana would want them written. I didn't know where else to put them.
Hana kept two lists.
Now there were three.