Isak — Arctura
In the passes, they teach you ice before they teach you letters.
A finger of it holds a child. A hand holds a man. Two hands hold a horse, if the rider has the sense to get down and walk it across. My father taught me that on the tarn above our house when I was four, with his knife and his thumb, and then he sent me out to the middle on a finger and a half and made me stand there until I stopped shaking. I have been laying ice for twenty-four years. I know what it holds. I know what it costs.
It does cost. People forget that, because it looks like nothing: a gray shine on the ground, the kind you see on any pond in winter. Every night on that plateau I walked it end to end and mended what the day had cracked. The two slopes either side of the road, a hundred yards each way, so that nothing could stand on them. The walls behind the carts, where the timbers were weakest. Then I stopped, and kept the rest, because a mage who spends everything at dawn is a man lying down by noon.
I laid it to the foot of the rocks above the lake, and no further. The rocks are black and wet and sheer, with the water breathing under them. Nobody stands on them. They are their own ice. I did that sum on the first morning, and Halvard looked at it and agreed, and I checked it every day after. It came out the same every time.
They kept hours. That was the other thing.
Five mornings they had come at first light. Five noons they had walked back to the edge of my ice, all at once, as if somebody had rung a bell for them. The soldiers had begun to sleep by it. So had I. On the fourth night I told Naomi Valcrest that a thing which keeps hours is teaching you its hours, and that one day it would stop keeping them.
"I know," she said, and doubled the watch from midnight.
She does not argue with a sum because she dislikes the answer. That is rarer than people think.
On the sixth night the boy came along the back of the barricade at the change of the watch, on his way to his end, with his four escorts behind him and the hat down over his eyebrows.
He stopped by me. He always stopped by me. I have never understood why.
"Isak," he said. "I've been practicing mornings."
"Why."
"Goodnight's sad on its own." He pushed the hat up so he could see me. "It wants a morning to go with it. Do you want to hear one?"
"No."
He did one anyway. He didn't put it on the wind. He only said it, the way anybody says anything, standing on the frozen road in the dark with his breath going up white past the brim of that hat.
"Morning."
"It is the middle of the night," I said.
"That's why I'm practicing now. So it's good by the time anybody needs it." He waited. "Did it sound all right?"
It had sounded like a boy of eighteen saying a word he liked.
"It sounded fine," I said.
"Good." He grinned. "I'll do a better one tomorrow."
He went on toward his end, past the toll house and round the corner of it, and his escorts went after him, and I went back to watching the dark. I didn't watch him go. I have thought about that since. Not because it would have changed anything. Because I would like to have it.
The moon went down an hour after midnight, and after that the plateau was the other kind of dark.
You will not know it unless you have wintered in the passes. Not the dark of a room with the lamp out. The dark of a place so big and so empty that the eye gives up on it. The braziers along the barricade had burned down to red, and the red lit nothing but the hands held over it. My ice gave back a little gray from the stars. Past it there was nothing at all. The line was out there, a long stone's throw off, standing the way it stood every night, and you could not see it. You knew it was there the way you know a drop is there in a whiteout: because you walked past it in daylight, and you believe yourself.
Vera came in through the gap a little after the moon set. An hour early. Rufa met her there, and I heard her ask something, low.
"She told me to go in," said Vera.
Nobody asked who. There was only one person out there who said anything.
Then Halvard went down on one knee in the gap and laid his palm flat on the road.
He stayed there a long time. Long enough that the soldier beside him stopped stamping her feet to listen with him.
"They're moving," he said.
"It's not light," said the marshal.
"No." Halvard didn't lift his hand. "All of them. Now."
All along the barricade the little clouds of the soldiers' breath stopped, as every one of them held it at once. Mine doesn't smoke. It never has. For the space of that breath the whole barricade looked the way I always do.
"Hold," said the marshal.
Hold, said the boy, in every ear, from the far end of the line. Not loud. He never needed loud.
Nobody saw them come. They didn't come up between my slopes; they didn't need to. The first anybody knew of it was the carts creaking, all along the front at once, the way a house creaks when the wind leans on it, and a soldier at the left of the gap shouting and putting her spear into the dark at something she couldn't see. You cannot see a black hand at night. You cannot see a smile.
I put my hand up, and had nowhere to put the ice. A wall needs a place. I couldn't see a place.
"Emil," said Naomi, from somewhere near the gap. Very level. "Carry the Saint."
I didn't understand her. Then I did.
The wind went back from the boy's end along the whole barricade, to the place behind the gap where Naomi kept her brother twenty paces back, and fetched what was there, and brought it to every ear on the plateau at once.
Left cart. Three. High.
The Saint's voice. Not loud either. Tired, and very exact.
The gap. Eight. Low, on their knees under the spears. Second cart from the toll house, two. Third cart, four.
The soldiers at the left cart put their spears in high. Something on the other side of the timbers didn't make a sound, and didn't step back, and went on pulling, but somewhere else now. Somewhere the Saint could tell us about.
Third cart. Four, said the Saint again, sharper, at my ear.
I put a wall behind the third cart. I couldn't see the third cart. I put it where the voice said, and heard the timbers groan against it, and stop.
I don't know how he did it. I didn't ask, then or after. In the passes, when a whiteout comes down on a road, sometimes there is one man in the party who can still find the road, and nobody knows how, and you don't ask him. You walk where he walks. You put your feet in his tracks.
So we fought by ear. That is the only way I know to say it. The boy carried the Saint's eyes along the whole barricade, and the soldiers put their spears where they were told, and I put my walls where I was told. Every few breaths, at the left of the gap, the Bellonian boy's spark went off white over the timbers, and for one heartbeat the whole front jumped out of the dark at us: the carts, the spears, the middle Valcrest sister with her sword in front of him, and on every timber the black hands, and above every pair of hands, a smile. Then it was gone, and you had to remember where everything had been.
Behind the gap, the Saint's circles came up blue whenever they brought him somebody, one after another. They were the only steady light on the plateau. People were carried into them and walked out.
An hour of that. Perhaps more. The dark doesn't keep time.
Then the Saint said something that wasn't a place.
One's missing.
The boy carried it the way he carried everything. Then the Saint again, slower.
A hundred and nineteen. There were a hundred and twenty yesterday. The old man at the front, the one who never pushes. He isn't there.
I have done sums all my life. Most of them are about ice and most of them are dull, and this one wasn't hard. Where does a man go, on that plateau, that the Saint can't see?
Not up the road. He could see the road. Not onto my slopes; nothing stands on my slopes. Not at the gap. He was looking at the gap.
He stood twenty paces back of it, where Naomi had put him. From there you can see the whole front of the barricade, all the way to Rufa's end. You cannot see past the toll house. Past the toll house there is the rest of the barricade, and the end of it, and the rocks.
And the boy.
I ran.
I am not a quick man. I am a man who lays floors. I ran along the back of the barricade in the dark with one hand out to the timbers, past soldiers who didn't know why I was running, and behind the mountains the sky began, very slightly, to go gray.
Morning, said the boy.
To everyone. In every ear, the whole length of the barricade: the word he'd been practicing. Cheerful. Pleased with himself. A boy who'd been told it sounded fine.
It did sound fine.
I was at the toll house. I was going round the corner of it.
Hold, said the boy, at my ear, as if he were standing beside me. Hold. Hold. Ho—
And stopped.
The wind stopped with him. I felt it go. A mage who works in cold feels the air change the way a farmer feels rain coming; I have felt a wind die at the top of a col a hundred times, all at once, between one step and the next. I had never felt one die like that.
His escorts were at the end of the barricade, five paces back from where he'd been standing, the way he liked them. Three of them were going down on their knees. The fourth was standing, holding his hat.
He was on his back on the frozen ground. The front of his coat had gone gray from the collar down.
I didn't stop. I would like to say I did. I went past him to the very end of the barricade, where it met the rocks, and looked over.
Below me my ice ran out to the foot of the rocks and stopped, the way I'd laid it. On the rocks just past where it stopped, wet black stone with the lake breathing under it, an old man was kneeling. He had come the long way round, along the water, in the dark, where nobody stands. His cap had fallen off. His face had fallen in, all of it, as if every year he had left had gone out of him in one breath and he'd kept nothing back to stand up with.
I put my hand up. My circle came up blue under it. I had a wall in my hand, a good one, two hands thick.
There was nothing left to put it in front of.
I lowered my hand. The old man looked up at me from the rocks I had not iced, and smiled.
Fabian — Arctura
I didn't see any of that.
I was twenty paces back of the gap, where Naomi had put me, and from there I could see the whole front of the barricade, all the way to Rufa's end, and every hole on the plateau in front of it, in the dark, as plainly as if it were noon. Under 「Eyes」 the dark doesn't matter. Nobody else on that barricade could see a thing, so I saw for them. Emil took every word out of my mouth and put it in every ear before I'd finished saying it, and between words I healed whoever they brought me, by the light of my own circles.
Thirty-eight when Emil's Hold woke me. Thirty-five. Thirty-two. Twenty-nine.
I couldn't see Emil's end. The toll house was in the way.
I've thought about that a great deal since. The toll house was in the way.
I'd counted the line, the way I count everything. A hundred and nineteen. I'd said so, and Emil had carried it, and then the sky had started going gray and Emil had said Morning, to all of us, the word he'd been practicing, and I'd been smiling at it with a soldier's broken wrist under my hand, because he'd never said morning before. Only goodnight.
Then, at my ear, cheerful and close, as if he were standing right beside me: Hold. Hold. Ho—
And stopped.
Not trailed off. Not got quieter, the way a voice does when someone turns his head. Stopped. In the middle of the word, as if somebody had shut a door on it.
I stood there. I didn't understand. The carts were still creaking. The soldiers were still shouting. It was light enough now to see the timbers with my own eyes, and the black hands on them, and I didn't look at any of it, because I was listening for the end of a word.
It didn't come.
The wind had stopped.
I ran.
I'd promised Liesel twenty paces. I'd said it out loud, twice, the way she'd made me. I broke it without deciding to, the way you'd take your hand off a stove.
Liesel didn't stop me. She came with me. She was beside me before I'd gone five steps, her spear in her hand, and Pia was behind us both, one step, the way she always is, running.
Along the back of the barricade. Past the toll house, where the first was sitting on her bench behind a barred door, with her hands on her knees. Round the corner of it.
Emil's end.
Isak was already there, at the very end of the barricade where it met the rocks, with his back to us and his hand half raised. A blue circle was going out under it, slowly, the way a lamp goes out when nobody feeds it. He didn't look round.
Emil's four escorts were there. Three of them were kneeling in a ring on the frozen ground, and the fourth, the oldest, was standing, holding his hat in both hands against her chest, very carefully, as if it were the thing she'd been told to keep safe and she was still keeping it.
He was lying on his back between them. The front of his coat had gone gray from the collar down, the wool brittle and pale as ash, the way the girl's had at the gap on the first morning. His hair was lying flat on his forehead.
It had never once lain flat while he was awake.
Under 「Eyes」 there was nothing.
Not a hole. Not dark. Just a boy's shape on the ground, and no light in it at all, the way there's no light in a coat or a blanket or a stone. I'd seen that before. At the Long Meadow. At the Hollowcrown. I knew what it meant.
I knelt down anyway. I put my hand on his chest, on the gray, and opened Blue 「Heal」.
The circle came up. The light went in.
Every time I've ever done that, every single time since I was seventeen, something has come up to meet it. A little or a lot. Tired or strong. The person's own light, coming up from inside them to meet mine, the way a hand comes up to take a hand.
Nothing came up.
I held it open anyway. I held it until Liesel put her hand on my wrist, very gently, and kept it there, and didn't say anything. Then I let it close.
Three splashes. I didn't count them. It's the only time I ever didn't.
"He sent us back," said the oldest escort. Her voice was perfectly level. "Five paces. He said he couldn't hear the wind properly with us breathing on him." She looked down at the hat in her hands. "We went back five paces."
Nobody said anything to her. There wasn't anything.
"Fabian," said Pia, behind me. Her voice had gone very small. "Is he—"
"Yes," said Liesel, before I had to.
I got up and went to the end of the barricade, to Isak. I don't know why. Because he was standing so still, I think.
Below us, his ice ran out to the foot of the rocks at the lakeshore, and stopped. On the rocks just past it an old man was kneeling, with his cap fallen off beside him, smiling up at us. His hair had gone white while I watched, or perhaps it had been white already; I couldn't tell anymore. His face had fallen in the way Tam's had after his first cast, but much further. Twenty years, thirty. All at once. As if he'd spent everything he had left on a single circle and kept nothing back to stand up with.
Under 「Eyes」 he was a hole like all the others. The hundred and twentieth. I'd counted him every morning.
Then he leaned forward, very slowly, onto his hands on the rocks. And then onto his face. And then he didn't move again.
Halvard had come up behind us. He'd run too. I'd never seen him run. He stood at the end of the barricade breathing hard and looked down at the old man on the rocks for a long time.
"Ulf," he said.
"You knew him?"
"Everyone on the passes knew him." Halvard's voice was very low. "Zephyra. He kept the high roads clear, forty years ago. He could call the snow off a pass. He could carry a whole company's orders on the wind from one valley to the next." He shut his eyes. "He'd have heard that boy from a mile away. He'd have heard every word he ever said."
Isak lowered his hand at last. He turned round and looked at me, with his arms at his sides instead of folded, which I'd never seen.
"I iced everything to the rocks," he said. "Not the rocks."
"Nobody stands on the rocks," said Halvard.
"He did." Isak looked past me at Emil. "I should have iced the rocks."
Nobody told him he was wrong. Nobody told him he was right, either.
The wind came up off the lake then, cold and ordinary, the way wind does. It didn't carry anything. It just blew.
I went back and knelt down beside Emil again. I didn't know what else to do with my hands.
Felix came round the corner of the toll house and stopped.
He didn't say anything. Felix always says something; it's how you know he's all right. He looked at Emil on the ground, and his face did nothing at all, and then his spark snapped off his fingers, white, into the air, all by itself, the way it does when he hasn't told it to. Once. Twice. He didn't seem to notice.
Marika was behind him. She didn't touch him. She stood there, close enough to, and didn't.
Naomi came last. She looked at Emil, and at me kneeling beside him, twenty paces and a toll house away from where she'd put me. She didn't say anything about that. She knelt down next to me and put her hand on my head, and left it there.
Then she took it away.
"They're still on the carts," she said. Quietly. "Come back to the gap."
It was the hardest thing anybody's ever asked me. She knew that. She asked it anyway, because it had to be asked, and she's always been the one who asks.
I got up. I went back to the gap.
Twenty-six.
They'd come in the dark, but at noon they walked back to the ice, the way they always did.
Two more soldiers didn't come back from the gap, one in the dark and one after it. Their names went in Hana's notebook, under the others, in my bad writing. Thirteen.
Then I wrote Emil.
I made it neat. I don't know how. My hand wasn't steady, and the page was cold, and I'd never made a single one of the others neat. That one came out neat. It's the only one that ever did.
Fourteen.
His oldest escort came and found me in the afternoon. She still had his hat. She held it out to me in both hands.
"He said his mother wanted to meet you," she said.
"He told me."
"You said you'd take him to Sanctara." She'd heard. They'd been five paces back, the way he liked them, close enough to hear everything. "When it's over."
"I said that."
"Then take this to her," she said. "When it's over. On the way." She put the hat in my hands. "She'll want to hear it from somebody who promised him something."
I held it. It was much too big. It had been much too big for him, too.
"I will," I said.
She nodded once, the way escorts do when an order has been given and received, and went back to the other three.
I slowed the first at dusk. I didn't try anything new. There wasn't anything new in me to try.
She'd heard. The guard had told her.
"The boy who said goodnight," she said.
"Yes."
"He said it through the door, once. The second night. To the guard, and then to me." She looked at her hands. "Goodnight, whoever's in there."
"He said it to everyone."
"I said it back," said the first. "He couldn't hear me."
"I know," I said. "I did that too. Every night."
She didn't say she was sorry. When I'd finished she reached out and held my hand for a moment, the way she had the night she'd asked to, and then let it go.
A demon's seed. Twenty nights. Growing.
Outside, Ambrose didn't write a number. He wrote the date, and under it one word, and closed the notebook.
Emil.
That night the wind didn't come.
It came, of course. It's the plateau; there's always wind. It came down off the snow and through the braziers and through everyone's coats, cold and ordinary, the way it had that morning at the end of the barricade. It just didn't carry anything.
Nobody along the barricade said anything about it. But everybody was listening. I could feel it, the whole length of the line: every soldier on watch, a little after the braziers had burned down, going still and waiting for a voice at her ear that wasn't going to come. Nobody said the other thing, either: that if they came in the dark again tonight, there was nobody left to carry what I saw.
It went on being quiet for a long time.
Then Felix got up off the crate by the brazier.
"Somebody has to say it," he said. It was the first thing I'd heard him say since the morning.
"Then say it," said Liesel.
"He'd do it better."
"Then do it worse," said Liesel. "But do it."
Felix looked at her for a moment. Marika, on the barricade above him, didn't turn round, but I saw her hand close on the top timber.
"Go on," she said. Quietly, for Marika. "I'll be here."
He walked away along the back of the barricade, past the toll house, to the far end, where the barricade met the rocks above the lake. There was a soldier on watch there, the last one, a girl not much older than Marika. Felix stopped beside her.
"Goodnight," he said. Out loud. Not carried on anything. Just a voice.
The girl looked at him. Then she turned to the soldier on watch beside her.
"Goodnight," she said.
And that one turned to the next.
It came along the barricade toward us like that, voice to voice. Not loud. Every soldier on watch, turning to the one beside her, the whole length of the line.
"Goodnight."
"Goodnight."
Past the two of Emil's escorts who'd stayed on watch at his end.
"Goodnight," said the oldest, to the next.
Past the toll house. From behind its barred door, very quietly, the first said it to her guard, and the guard said it to the soldier outside.
Past Isak at the edge of his ice.
"Goodnight," said Isak to the marshal, as if he were reading it off a stick. Then, after a moment, differently: "Goodnight."
It came to the gap.
"Goodnight," said Halvard to Naomi.
"Goodnight," said Naomi to me.
I turned to Liesel.
"Goodnight," I said.
"Goodnight," said Liesel, and turned to Wren, and Wren said it, and then hummed it, low, three notes, so that the next soldier heard it twice.
On it went. Along the top of the drop, all the way down to Rufa's end. Rufa was the last. There was nobody beside her to say it to.
She stood at the end of the barricade for a moment. Then she put her hands round her mouth and called it out over the ice, toward the end of the line, toward the one small light standing there in the dark beside a hole in a brown shawl. As loud as I'd ever heard Rufa say anything.
"Vera. Goodnight."
It went out over the ice and was gone. Nothing carried it. It was just a voice.
For a long moment there was nothing at all.
Then, very faint, from the far end of the line:
"Goodnight."
And after it, fainter still, so faint I thought for a moment I'd made it up, an old woman's voice, with a catch in it like a cough that had never quite gone away:
"Goodnight, then."