I woke up warm.
That was the first thing. Not the plateau kind of warm, where one side of you is near a brazier and the other side is in the wind. All of me, all at once, under a weight of blankets that smelled of somebody else's soap. A ceiling with painted stars on it, faded. A window full of white light.
Hana was asleep in a chair beside the bed, with her head on her arm on the edge of the mattress and her notebook open under her hand.
I didn't move. I lay there and looked at the stars on the ceiling and counted them, because I count everything, and because I wanted to be sure I could. Forty-one. One of them had been painted over and painted again, slightly crooked.
Then the bond woke up, all of it at once, the way it does when one of them notices before the others.
(HE'S AWAKE,) said Marika. (HANA. HANA, WAKE UP, HE'S—)
Hana's head came up off her arm.
She looked at me. She didn't say anything at all. Her eyes filled up, and spilled over, and she didn't wipe them, and she didn't look away. She just sat there in the chair with her hair coming down and her notebook sliding off her knee, crying, and looking at me as if I were the only thing in the room.
"Did you eat?" I said. My voice came out like a door that hasn't been opened all winter.
Hana laughed. It came out wet and cracked and halfway to a sob, and she put both hands over her face, and laughed into them.
"You've been asleep for four days," she said, through her fingers. "Four days, Fabian. No, you didn't eat. You're going to eat. You're going to eat everything in Arctura."
(There,) said Cordelia, far away to the south.
One word. Her whole day, spent at sunrise. There. The way you'd say it when you've been looking for something for a long time, and found it exactly where it should have been.
Hana told me while I ate. She made me eat first and then told me, a piece of bread for every piece of news, the way you'd bargain with a small child.
Four days. The palace in Arctura; Stellara's own guest room, the one with the stars on the ceiling. They'd carried me down the switchback on a door, Liesel at one end and Halvard at the other, and Halvard hadn't let anyone else take a turn the whole way down.
Felix's hand was fine. He'd been in to look at me every morning and every evening and told me a different joke each time, and Hana had made him stop on the third day because the jokes had started being about me.
The line was gone. All of it, north along the shore road behind the two in the hoods, through the black water and past Halvard's broken wall. The scouts had followed as far as Crossholm, and past it, and come back. Crossholm was empty. So was every village past the lake. Nobody knew where they'd gone. Stellara had riders on every road north.
Nine more soldiers had died on the last morning. Hana had written their names in her notebook, under mine. She'd copied all of mine out again, neat, the way she'd said she would.
"Twenty-three," she said. "With Emil." She looked at her hands. "And Tam. I put Tam in too. I didn't know which list he went on. I put him in that one."
"That's the right one," I said.
Marta was still on the road.
Not on the barricade. On the road, a long stone's throw out, where the line had been, standing at the edge of the gray ice, facing south. She hadn't gone north. She hadn't come in. She hadn't moved, Hana said, except to take Vera's hand.
Vera had been out there with her every night. Every night, and most of every day. Rufa took her bread. Rufa took Marta bread, too, and left it on the road beside her, and in the morning it was gone, and nobody had seen her eat it.
"And the first?" I said.
Hana's face changed. Not much. Enough.
"We kept her slow," she said. "The bottles. Ambrose checked every one he gave me for fizz, and I gave her one every evening, the two-notch kind, the way you showed us." She held my eyes. "But we don't know, Fabian. We can't see it. None of us can. We kept her slow. That's all we could do. We don't know if it was enough."
I knew what I'd find before I looked. I don't know how. But I did what I do every morning when I wake up, before I've done anything else: I shut my eyes and looked at my blessing, the way you'd look in a drawer to see that everything's still where you left it.
Nearly everything where I'd left it. The skills in the order they'd come to me, and after them the three rewards, 「Eyes」 and 「Voice」 and 「Mercy」.
Under 「Mercy」 there was a second line. It hadn't been there before.
When you pour from the clay, she will mend the vessel sooner.
Four days, Hana had said. After the Academy, ten below had cost me six. This time I'd gone fifteen below and come back in four. Somewhere on that plateau, between the gap and the toll house, Hana's count had crossed another of its round numbers. Hana would know which one.
And under them, a line that hadn't been there four days ago, where for a long time there had only been ?????.
Reward granted: 「Tend of Elysia」. You would not let go of the one who was slipping. Now you may pull what has not yet taken hold.
I lay there with my eyes shut and read it again. And again. Hana said afterward that she thought I'd gone back to sleep.
Then I opened my eyes.
"Hana," I said. "How much have I got?"
She didn't understand at first. Then she did, and she went very still.
"Nothing," she said. "You woke up empty. You always do, after." Her voice had gone very careful. "Fabian. What is it?"
I told her.
She didn't say anything for a long moment. Then she stood up, and picked her notebook up off the floor, and put it in her apron pocket, and held out her hand to help me out of the bed.
"Then we'll go up," said Hana. "And you'll sit in the toll house and eat until there's enough."
They carried me up the switchback in a chair. I said I could walk. Liesel said I could walk the last turn, and not before, and she was right; I nearly didn't manage the last turn.
The barricade was still there. The broken carts on the left had been dragged back into place, and Halvard's two gray walls stood across the road one in front of the other, crumbling at the edges. Beyond them the plateau went away white and empty to the lake. No line. No holes. Only the gray ice, and the black streaks across it where the two hoods had walked, frozen again now, like two long scars.
And out on the road, a long stone's throw away, two small shapes standing together. One round, in a brown shawl. One tall, beside her.
I looked at them for a while. Then I went into the toll house.
Everybody came. I hadn't asked anyone. They just came, the way people come to a door when they've heard something through it. Naomi stood just inside, with her back to the wall. Liesel at the hearth. Wren in the doorway. Marika and Felix squeezed in beside her, Felix with his hand held carefully in front of him as if to show it off. Isak and Halvard outside, where there wasn't room, with Ambrose between them and his notebook open. Pia one step behind me, where she always is.
Hana brought the boy up from the guard house. Nobody stopped her. There wasn't anything out there for him to see anymore.
He climbed into his mother's lap the way he always did, without asking, and put his cold face in her neck. The first put her arms round him. She was sitting, of course, on her bench, with her back very straight. She looked at me over his head. She'd heard everything from the guard. She didn't ask. She'd stopped asking a long time ago.
I sat down beside her on the bench, and Hana gave me a bowl of soup, and I ate it, and waited.
It took more than an hour. Hana fed me the whole time. Nobody left. Nobody said much. Felix tried a joke once and Marika put her elbow in his ribs without looking at him, and that was the end of the jokes. The light moved across the floor of the toll house from the window to the hearth. I sat with my hands round the empty bowl and felt it come back into me a splash at a time, the way you'd listen to rain filling a barrel.
Three.
"Discern first," I said. My voice sounded strange in the quiet. "I have to know first."
The first nodded. She pulled her shawl aside.
I put my palm flat against her side and opened 「Discern」, small and flat and blue, the edge of it showing between my fingers.
A demon's seed. Twenty-six nights. Growing.
I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding for four days.
"Growing," I said.
Behind me, I heard Hana sit down very suddenly on the hearthstone.
Zero again. I had to wait for three more.
It took an hour. It was the longest hour I've ever sat through.
Three.
I didn't know what it would look like. I'd never cast it. Nobody had. I put my hand back against her side, where I'd put it every evening since the first night, and I reached for the new line in my blessing the way you'd reach for a word you've only just learned, carefully, not sure yet how it sits in your mouth.
「Tend」.
The circle that came up under my hand wasn't white or green or blue. It was something I'd never seen. White at the edge, and gold toward the middle, and soft, like sunlight coming through a leaf.
The light went in.
It didn't push. That was the first thing I felt. Every evening since the first night, my light had gone in and pushed, and her light had come up behind it and pushed with it, and the roots had drawn back to the knot and stopped there, and the knot had sat there like a stone in a stream.
This light didn't push. It went in and went round. Round the knot, round every one of the fine dark roots, the way your fingers go round a weed in a garden bed when you mean to have all of it. Not tight. Just all the way round.
Her own light came up to meet it, the way it always did. And this time, when it met mine, the two of them didn't push together.
They pulled.
Under 「Eyes」 I watched the roots come loose. One at a time, from the very ends inward, out of the white of her, the way roots come out of wet ground after rain: a little resistance, and then none. Every one of them. All of them, drawing back into the knot, and the knot drawing up, toward my hand, toward the warm gold middle of the circle.
She gasped. The boy in her lap went very still.
And then it came out.
Not through a wound. There wasn't one. It came up through her the way a breath comes up, and through my palm, and was simply there, sitting in the middle of my hand inside the gold circle: a small, hard, cold, black thing, about the size of a plum stone.
It was a plum stone. That's exactly what it looked like.
I looked at it. Everybody in that toll house looked at it.
Then the gold in the circle closed over it, very gently, the way a hand closes, and it went white, all the way through, and crumbled, and there was nothing in my palm at all but light.
The circle went out.
Nobody moved.
Under 「Eyes」, I looked. Below her ribs, where for twenty-six nights there had been a small dark knot with fine roots going out from it into the white, there was nothing. Just her light. White all through, a little yellow at the edges with tiredness, the way everybody's is in winter. Whole.
"It's gone," I said.
I don't think anybody heard me. I don't think I said it very loud.
The boy lifted his face out of his mother's neck. He looked at her. Then at me. He'd asked the same question every afternoon he'd been allowed up the road, and been told the same answer, and he asked it again, because he was small, and that's what you do.
"Is Mama better?"
The first looked down at him.
"Yes," she said.
Not slower. Not slower is a day. Just yes. She said it as if she were trying the word for the first time and wasn't sure it would hold her weight.
Then she put him down off her lap, very carefully, onto the floor, and put both hands on the edge of the bench, and stood up.
She didn't sway. Not toward the door. Not toward anything. She stood there in the middle of the toll house with her shawl half off her shoulder and her hands open at her sides, perfectly still, the way anyone stands.
"It doesn't pull," she said.
She walked to the door. Wren moved out of her way. She opened it, and the cold came in, and she stood in the doorway and looked out along the top of the road, and across the barricade, and out over the plateau to the gray ice and the two black scars across it, and the two small shapes standing together far out on the road.
She looked for a long time.
Then she shut the door, and came back, and picked up her son.
Outside, Ambrose was writing. I could see him through the window, his pencil going, his head bent. When he'd finished, he turned the notebook round and held it up to the glass so I could read it.
- Tend.
And under it, in the same narrow hand, two words I'd watched him write a hundred times on a windowsill in the Academy infirmary, and every afternoon for two weeks on a toll house wall. Except that this time they were different.
Result: yes.
I looked at it for a long time.
"That's one thing it is," said Liesel, from the hearth.
Behind me, I heard Pia's pencil.
"What are you writing?" I said, without turning round.
"I've started a new column," said Pia. Her voice was shaking.
"What's it called?"
A pause.
"Is," said Pia.
Afterward, when the boy had gone back down to the guard house on his mother's hip, and she'd walked down the switchback herself, on her own feet, holding his hand, I stood at the gap and looked north.
Under 「Eyes」, there was nothing out there now. Plateau and lake and the empty road. Two black scars on the ice, frozen over. Two small shapes standing together far out on the road: one light, steady, a little yellow with cold, and beside it, one hole.
I looked at Marta for a long time. I knew what I'd see if I went out there and put my hand on her and opened 「Discern」. I didn't need to.
"One," I said.
Liesel was beside me. She didn't ask what I meant.
"It's one more than yesterday," she said.
Isak was at the end of the barricade where the rocks were, the ones he'd iced, with his arms folded. He looked at me a while, and then at the road where the first had gone down, holding her son's hand.
He didn't say anything for a moment. Then: "Good."
Marika was crying. She was doing it very fiercely, with her chin up and her arms folded, at the plateau, and saying, to no one, "I'm NOT," every few moments. Felix unwound the red scarf from his neck without a word and held it out to her. She took it, and scrubbed her face with it, hard, and held it out to give it back.
"It's YOUR scarf now," said Felix.
She looked at him. Then she wound it round his neck again herself, twice, tight enough to make him cough, and turned back to the plateau. Her ears had gone the color of it.
Naomi came and stood behind me. She didn't say anything. She put her hand on my head, the way she does, and left it there a long time.
Hana was the last.
She'd come out of the toll house behind everyone else, with her notebook open in her hands. She stood at the gap beside me and turned the pages, past her count, past the forty-four names on the other list, to the page with The first written at the top of it in her small round hand.
She took out her pencil, and drew one neat line through The first.
Then she looked down the switchback, to where a young woman was walking down the last turn of the road with a little boy on her hip, in the thin winter sun, warm for once.
"I need her to tell me again," said Hana. "So I write it right."