The seventh thing was Pia's idea, which surprised everyone, Pia most of all.
"The old books," she said. We were standing outside the toll house in the cold, after the scout, with nothing to do with our hands. "Everything in them that's dark hates the light. That's what they say, over and over. Every one of them." She went pink. "I know it's only books."
"Try," said Ambrose.
So at noon, when the sun was as high as it gets over the plateau in winter, which isn't very, the guard carried the bench out of the toll house and set it against the south wall. The first sat on it in the sun with her face turned up and her eyes shut, and the boy in her lap squinting, and I poured.
The light went in, and her light came up to meet it, and for a moment, in the thin winter sun, she looked almost the way she must have looked before any of this: a tired young woman on a bench, holding her son, warm for once.
The knot shrank. The roots drew in. They stopped where they always stopped.
A demon's seed. Thirteen nights. Growing.
- Sun.
"Well," said Pia, very small. "The books are old."
"So's the sun," said Liesel. "Worth asking."
Hana took the boy down to the city that afternoon.
"Until it's over," she told the first. "He'll sleep in my room. I'll bring him up the minute it's done."
The first nodded. She'd known it was coming. She'd asked for it, in a way, the day the horses came.
She didn't make a farewell of it. I watched her not make one. She buttoned his coat to the chin, and pulled up his hood, and tucked the ends of his scarf inside it, very carefully, the way you'd do it on any morning at all.
"Be good for Lady Hana," she said.
"I'm always good."
"Be better."
He thought about that. And then, because he was small, and a long way from understanding anything that was happening at the top of that road, he said, "I'll hold on to her. Hard. Like you said."
The first smiled. It was a real smile. That was how I knew what it cost.
"That's right," she said. "Hold on."
Hana took his hand, and they went out together into the white afternoon and down the first turn of the switchback, the boy talking the whole way. The first sat on her bench with her hands in her lap and listened to him until she couldn't hear him anymore. Then she went on listening for a while after that.
The register came up at dusk, in a basket of bread.
That was Stellara's way, I'd started to notice. Anything that mattered came up the mountain with something to eat.
It was a long, narrow book bound in blue, its spine cracked white with age, with a slip of paper marking one page. The marshal handed it to Halvard without opening it. He held it for a moment the way you'd hold a letter when you already know what it says. Then he opened it at the slip.
I was close enough to read it upside down. I've had practice, with Ambrose's notebook.
Tam, of Crossholm. Blessed by Terran.
And under it, in a long column of different inks and different hands, forty-one years of roads.
"Terran," said Naomi.
"Yes," said Halvard. He didn't look up. "I knew."
He read the whole column, every line, slowly, down to the last one, in ink not much faded, which said only Returned home, at his own asking. Then he shut the book and gave it back to the marshal.
"Did you serve with him?" I said.
"Under him. Eleven years." Halvard looked north, past the braziers, toward the long gray glint of the lake at the edge of the plateau. "He built the shore road."
"Which one?"
"The one they're walking down."
On the twenty-ninth day I didn't try anything new. I slowed her, and that was all. Ambrose wrote the number at the top of a line, 8., and nothing after it, and shut the notebook.
They came into sight at dusk.
Emil saw them first, from the far end of the barricade, and his voice turned up at my ear as if he were standing beside me. It wasn't cheerful this time.
"Saint. North."
I went to the gap.
At first there was nothing but the plateau going away white under a gray sky, and the dark line of the shore road along the edge of the lake. Then something on the road that wasn't the road. A long dark thread, moving. Coming toward us at a walk.
Under 「Eyes」, it wasn't a thread. It was holes.
I'd seen holes before. In a jar, in a bowl, in an old woman's cloth. In the Gloamwood, a whole tide of them. But I'd never seen holes in the shape of people, walking two and three abreast down a road with their hands at their sides. A long line of places where there should have been light, and wasn't.
I counted them. I count everything.
A hundred and nine. Then, a little apart at the back, eleven more. A hundred and twenty.
They came to the edge of Isak's ice a long stone's throw from the barricade, and stopped, all together, without anyone telling them to, and stood. Facing south. Facing us.
Close enough, now, to see them with my own eyes as well as with 「Eyes」. Ordinary coats. Shawls. A man's cap. Children's mittens on women's hands, because their own wouldn't go over their knuckles anymore. And above every face, small and curved and pale against the dusk, coming up through the hair, the horns.
Some of them were smiling. Not at anything. Just smiling, the way you'd smile on a warm afternoon with nothing to do.
"They'll come up the road," said Isak, beside Naomi.
"Yes," said Naomi.
"Good," said Isak. Which meant the ice had done what he'd asked of it.
Down the barricade, at Rufa's end, Vera had gone very still.
At the end of the line, the far end, there was a little round woman in a brown shawl. She had her hand up. She was waving. At nobody, the scout had said, at Stonemere. At nobody, or at the barricade, or at one tall woman with a spear standing between two of Rufa's soldiers. From that far away you couldn't tell.
I don't think Vera wanted to know.
"That's Marta," she said.
"I know," said Rufa.
Vera didn't wave back. She stood there and held her spear the way she'd held it every day since the first morning at the barricade, and watched Marta wave, and didn't look away once.
Nobody slept.
The braziers burned all night along the barricade, and the line stood at the edge of the ice all night, a long stone's throw off, perfectly still, while the snow came down a little and settled on their shoulders and on their horns and none of them brushed it off.
Sometime after midnight Halvard went down on one knee in the gap and laid his palm flat on the frozen road, and stayed there a long time with his eyes shut.
"Tam's there," he said at last. "At the back. With the eleven."
"How do you know?" said the marshal.
Halvard didn't open his eyes. "I'd know his feet on a road with ten thousand others. I followed them for eleven years." A pause. "But the ground doesn't know him anymore."
I didn't understand that. Not then.
Liesel came and stood at my left for a while, looking at the line. She didn't lean on anything.
"When it starts," she said, "you stay where Naomi puts you."
"I know."
"Say it."
"Twenty paces back."
"Good." She was quiet a moment. "Say it again tomorrow. I'll want to hear it."
Emil came and sat on the crate beside me, a little before the moon went down. He'd taken his hat off. His hair, for once, was nearly still.
"Are you scared?" he said.
"Yes."
He let out a long breath. "Good. I thought it was just me."
Marika was on the barricade in front of us, on watch. Felix was beside her. Not behind. Beside.
"Behind me tomorrow," she said, without looking at him.
"I'm always behind you."
"CLOSER behind."
He moved half a step closer. She let him. Her ears, in the brazier light, went the color of the scarf, and stayed that way.
Toward morning I went to the toll house door, because I couldn't not. I didn't open it.
"Saint?" said the first, from the other side. She hadn't been asleep either. "Is she there?"
"Yes."
"Is she standing?"
"Yes."
A pause.
"I'm not," she said.
Naomi found me there when the sky began to go gray behind the mountains. She didn't say anything. She put her hand on my head, the way she does, and left it there a moment.
Then she took it away, and went to the gap, and drew her sword.
They came at first light, all at once, the way they'd stopped.
Nobody gave an order. There wasn't a sound. The whole line simply began to walk again, the way a crowd moves when a door has opened somewhere ahead of it, and came on toward the barricade along the only thing on the plateau that could be stood on: the road.
Two abreast. Then three, where it widened. A woman on the outside of the line stepped off the road onto Isak's ice and her feet went out from under her and she came down hard on her side. She didn't cry out. She got up, slowly, with her black hands flat on the shine, and fell again, and got up, and walked back onto the road, and went on walking. Her face never changed at all.
"Hold," said the marshal.
Emil was at the far end of the barricade, and he cupped his hands, and the word arrived at every ear along the line at once, quiet and close, in the marshal's own voice.
Hold.
The front of the line reached the gap.
The first one to the barricade was a woman I knew. I'd stood at her door at Crossholm while Hana asked her name. Mila. Third from the top. At dusk she'd been at the back with the rest of the eleven; sometime before dawn she'd come forward through the line on her own, and nobody on the barricade had seen her do it. Her sister, the reeve, had gone down the switchback without once looking back up the mountain.
Mila stopped at the cart that closed the gap and looked over it at the soldier behind it, a girl not much older than Marika with a spear, and smiled at her.
"You look so tired," she said kindly. "Come out. We've got plums."
Then she put both black hands flat on the side of the cart and pushed, and the cart moved.
It was a heavy cart. It was full of stones. Three soldiers had dragged it into the gap. It moved a foot across the frozen road with a long scrape of iron rims on frozen ruts, and behind Mila the next ones put their hands on it too, still smiling, and it moved again.
"Spears," said Naomi.
After that I don't remember it in order. Nobody does, afterward. I remember it in pieces.
Spears going over the barricade, and the risen not stepping back from them. Not crying out. Taking them, some of them, and going on pushing. A soldier screaming, because a hand had come over the top of a cart and closed on her arm. Liesel on my left, her spear going past my ear. Wren on my right, not moving, a wall with a sword in it. Pia's hand in the back of my coat, holding on.
"Second rank!" Naomi, somewhere ahead of me. "Now!"
"Fabian." Liesel didn't look round. "Twenty paces."
"I'm at twenty."
"Be at twenty-one."
A soldier came stumbling back from the gap holding her forearm, white-faced, with blood coming between her fingers. "It's nothing, Saint. I can go back."
"It's an arm," I said. "Wait."
Two more came back behind her, and a third leaning on a fourth.
I didn't go to the gap. That isn't what I'm for. I stood twenty paces back where Naomi had put me, and when there were five of them I opened Blue 「Mass Heal」 on all of them at once, three splashes, and watched the yellow and orange in their light go white again.
"Go," I said, and they went back.
Forty-one.
On the left of the gap, Isak put his hand flat on the air and a wall of gray ice came up out of the road where two carts had started to part, as tall as a man, and the risen walked into it and stopped and began, very calmly, to push against that instead. Felix was beside Marika at the barricade, close behind, the way she'd told him, and every time a black hand came over the timbers near her his spark cracked across it, white and loud, and the hand let go.
Halvard hadn't moved. He stood a little back from the gap with his women on either side of him and his hands hanging empty, and watched the back of the line.
I knew who he was watching for.
Tam came up the road alone, out of the eleven at the back.
He walked the way old men walk, carefully, one hand out a little from his side as if he were feeling for a wall. He had his cap on still, pushed back by the horns. He stopped twenty paces from the barricade, behind his neighbors, where he could see over them, and looked at it. At the carts, and the ice, and the soldiers.
At Halvard.
He smiled. It was the same smile he'd given me at Crossholm, over a bowl of plums. Glad to see you. Come in.
Then he lifted his hand.
A circle opened under it.
I knew what circles look like. Mine are white and green and blue. I'd seen fire come out of Cassian's, and lightning out of Felix's, and ice out of Isak's a moment ago. Every circle I'd ever seen was light, in one color or another, because every circle comes from a god, and every god gives light.
This one didn't.
Under 「Eyes」 it was a hole. A round hole, the size of a cartwheel, standing in the air in front of an old man's hand, with that same slow ragged edge I'd seen on the fruit in the crate. To my own eyes it was worse. It was dark. Not black, the way a coat is black or a night is. Dark, the way the inside of a closed eye is dark, so that you couldn't look at it straight; your eyes kept sliding off it, and coming back, and sliding off again.
"No," said Halvard. Very quietly. "No. That's not—"
Something came out of it.
I can't tell it better than that. It was the color of the circle and it came out of it the way water comes out of a burst sluice, and it went over the heads of the risen without touching one of them and hit the middle of the barricade.
It didn't burn. There was no heat in it, no sound, no light. The cart in the gap, the one full of stones, simply came apart. The timbers went gray in a breath, all down their length, the way wood goes gray after forty winters, and split, and fell in. The two soldiers behind it went down with it, flung back across the frozen road like dolls.
And the ground under the gap cracked. A long black line, right across the road.
Under 「Eyes」 their light was still there. Orange and red, both of them, flickering, but there.
"Saint!" The marshal's voice, cracked wide open. "The gap—"
"Two down," I said. "They're alive."
"Can you reach them?"
"Not through that," said Naomi.
For a moment nobody on that barricade moved. Not one soldier. Not the marshal. The risen didn't move either; they stood among the broken timbers, smiling, as if they were waiting for someone to ask them in.
"That's not Terran," said Halvard. His voice had gone strange. "That's not anything. The ground doesn't know it."
"No god gives that," said Isak, very low. "None of them."
Behind me, Pia's hand had gone tight in my coat.
"That's theirs," she whispered. "In the old books. Every one of them. The dark was only ever theirs." Her voice was shaking. "No god ever gave it to anybody. It was never ours. Not once."
A demon's seed. I'd heard 「Discern」 say those words more times than I'd let myself count. I'd thought it was telling me what had been planted.
It had been telling me who the seed belonged to.
Out in front of the broken barricade, Tam had lowered his hand. He'd stooped. He was coughing, a long, dry, rattling cough, an old man's cough, holding on to the shoulder of the woman beside him, who let him. When he straightened up, his face had fallen in. As if somebody had taken five years out of him while I watched, and hadn't bothered to put anything back.
He was still smiling.
Then he lifted his hand again.