On the third day, at noon, when the risen took their hands off the carts and walked back to the edge of the ice, Vera put down her spear.
She didn't throw it down. She laid it along the top of the barricade at Rufa's end, carefully, the way you'd put down something you'd borrowed and meant to give back, and turned round to Rufa.
"Today," she said.
It wasn't a question. It had been a question every day since the first morning at the barricade, and every day Rufa had said Not today, and Vera had picked her spear back up. This time she'd said it the other way round.
Rufa looked at her for a long time. Rufa looks at most things for a long time. I've never once seen her hurry to an answer.
Down the barricade, the soldiers had gone quiet, the way they had for the men. The marshal was there. Naomi was there. Liesel had come up beside me without my noticing, which is how Liesel arrives.
"She's at the end," said Vera. "At the back. She's been waving at me for three days." Her voice didn't shake. Her hands, I noticed, had closed into fists at her sides and then opened again, very deliberately, as if she'd told them to. "I said I'd stand at her door. This is her door. It's the only one she's got now."
"She's risen," said the marshal.
"I know what she is."
"They took a cart apart with their hands this morning."
"Not her," said Vera. "She's never come up the road. Not once. Not one morning." She didn't take her eyes off Rufa. "You've watched her as long as I have, Captain. Has she?"
Rufa didn't answer that. She didn't need to; we'd all watched.
"If she touches you," said Naomi, quietly, "we can't come for you."
"I know."
"Nobody will go out on that road after you."
"I know," said Vera. "I'm not asking anybody to."
Rufa looked out at the line. At the end of it, small and round in her brown shawl, Marta stood with her hand up, waving. Then Rufa looked back at Vera, and at the spear lying along the barricade, and I saw her count. Her lips didn't move; they never do. But her eyes went along the line once, end to end, the way they do when she's counting and doesn't want anyone to see.
"Today," said Rufa.
Vera walked out alone.
Down off the barricade at the gap, between Halvard's gray wall and the end of the carts, onto the road. Down the road between Isak's two long shining slopes, which nobody could stand on. Not fast. Not slow. Her hands empty at her sides. Every soldier on that barricade watching her back.
Under 「Eyes」 she was a light. A thin, steady, ordinary light, a woman's light, a little yellow at the edges with tiredness, walking toward a hundred and twenty holes.
The holes didn't move. Not one of them turned its head. She walked along the front of the line, a long stone's throw of it, close enough to touch the nearest of them, and they stood and smiled at nothing and let her pass as if she were the wind.
Then she reached the end of the line, and Marta.
I couldn't hear them. Nobody could. But I saw Marta's hand come down from waving. I saw her look up at Vera, who was a head and a half taller, and I saw her face do something I'd never seen a risen face do. It changed.
Not much. A little. The way a sleeper's face changes when someone they know comes into the room.
Then Marta reached out and took Vera's hand, and held it, and turned back to face the barricade. And Vera, after a moment, turned too, and stood beside her, and didn't let go.
"Glacia's crown," whispered somebody along the barricade.
Nobody told her to be quiet.
She stood there all afternoon.
The risen stood, and Vera stood among them, at the very end of the line, with Marta's hand in hers. Under 「Eyes」 it was the strangest thing I've ever seen, and I've seen some strange things. A long row of holes in the snow, a hundred and twenty places where there should have been people and weren't. And at the end of it, one small steady light, not going anywhere.
At dusk I took my six up to the toll house.
The first had heard the barricade go quiet at noon. She'd been sitting with her hands on her knees all afternoon, listening to it stay quiet.
"What happened?" she said. "Nobody's shouting."
So I told her. Albin's escort, and the spear on the barricade, and Marta of Stonemere at the end of the line, who'd held out her hand.
The first was quiet for a long time.
"Is my mother near them?"
"At the back, with the eleven. The other end."
She nodded. Then she looked at my hands, which I'd just taken out of my coat to warm them.
"Can I hold one?" she said. "While you do it. Not him, not anybody. Yours."
Nobody had asked me that before. Not in all the tries.
"It won't—" I started.
"I know it won't." She held out her hand anyway. "I'd like to."
So I gave her my left hand, and she held it, hard, the way her son had held hers, and I put my right against her side and opened Blue 「Cure」. Her light came up to meet mine. Her fingers didn't loosen once.
The knot shrank. The roots drew in. They stopped where they always stopped.
A demon's seed. Seventeen nights. Growing.
She let go of my hand.
"Thank you," she said. As if I'd done something.
Outside, Ambrose wrote it down. 11. Hand. And under it, in the smaller writing he'd started using for the lines nobody asked for:
Her idea.
Nobody on the barricade slept much that night either.
The braziers burned. The line stood. The snow came and went. Out at the edge of the ice, at the very end, the one light stayed where it was.
"She'll be dead by morning," said Isak, at the gap. He didn't say it cruelly. He said it the way he'd say there'd be frost.
"No," said Rufa.
That was all. She didn't explain it. She didn't move from her end of the barricade all night, and neither did her two watchers, and none of them took their eyes off the end of the line.
Sometime after midnight Halvard knelt in the gap and laid his palm on the frozen road, and was quiet for a long time.
"A hundred and twenty," he said at last. "Standing the way they stand. And one more." He opened his eyes. "Standing like a person."
Liesel came and stood beside me at the barricade. We watched the light together for a while.
"You said it to her," I said. "In the cell. You can only stand next to them while they do it."
"I know what I said."
"Is it enough?"
Liesel didn't answer at once. She doesn't, when the answer matters.
"No," she said. "It's what there is." She was quiet a moment. "Now we find out if anyone can catch her after."
Felix was at the brazier with Marika when I went back. He wasn't singing to a bottle; there weren't any bottles to sing to anymore. He was singing anyway, very softly, the miller's song, with his wrapped hand held out to the coals and his eyes on the one light at the end of the line.
When he came to the one where the middle daughter goes away, he skipped it, the way he always does now, and went straight on to the next, very softly, without looking away from the light once.
Marika didn't turn round. She was on the barricade above him, being Front. But she reached down without looking and put her hand on the top of his head, briefly, the way you'd check a pot was still on the boil, and took it away again. It was Big Sis's gesture, exactly. I don't think Marika knew she'd borrowed it.
"Sing the next one," she said. "LOUDER. So she can hear."
He sang the next one louder.
Later still, when the braziers had burned low, Emil's voice came along the barricade the way it did every night. I heard it go past, soldier by soldier. Goodnight. Goodnight. Then it turned up at my ear.
"Saint. Goodnight."
And then, a moment later, very faint, I heard it again. Not at my ear. Out past the barricade, out over the ice, going away from us toward the end of the line, carried on the wind the other way.
"Vera. Goodnight."
A pause.
"Marta. Goodnight."
I looked along the barricade. Emil was standing at the far end with his cupped hands still at his mouth, and his four escorts behind him, and his face was turned toward the one light in the dark.
Out at the edge of the ice, as the wind went past, one of the risen turned his head.
Slowly. Following it. The only one of them that moved all night.
I didn't see which one.
She came back at first light, a little before they moved.
I saw it under 「Eyes」 before I saw it with my own: the one light at the end of the line drawing away from the holes, very slowly, as if it were being let go of a finger at a time. Then Vera came up the road between the shining slopes, alone, walking the way people walk after a night standing in the snow, stiff from the knees down.
Rufa was at the gap before she reached it, with a blanket. She didn't say anything. She put it round Vera's shoulders and held it closed at the front with one hand for a moment, the way you'd hold a door shut in a wind, and then let go.
Vera's face was gray with cold. Her lips had gone blue. Her eyes were perfectly dry.
"She's all right," she said. To Rufa, first. Then to the rest of us. "Marta. She's all right. She let go of me herself."
Naomi had come up. So had Liesel, and the marshal, and me. Nobody asked the obvious thing. Vera answered it anyway.
"She didn't try to touch me. Not like that. She held my hand. That's all she did, all night." She looked down at her own hand, the one Marta had been holding, as if she expected it to look different. "She talked."
"About what?" said Liesel.
"Him." Vera's voice didn't change at all. "Albin. The bread she used to give him for the road, the rye with the caraway, because he liked it and nobody else in Stonemere would eat it. The time he fell asleep in her chair after the long day and she let him, and put a blanket on him, and told me to go and sit in the yard and keep the dogs quiet." She stopped. "Marta, how's that cough. She said he always asked. Every single time. Fourteen years."
Nobody said anything.
"She asked me if he was coming," said Vera.
"What did you say?"
"No." Vera looked out at the line. "Every time. I counted. Eleven times, in the night. Is he coming? And I said no."
"And she said?"
"Then we'll wait." Vera pulled the blanket tighter. "Every time. Like that. Not sad. Just then we'll wait, and held on a bit harder, and went on looking up the road."
Liesel was very still beside me.
"That's why she never comes up to the carts," I said slowly. "She isn't standing with them."
"No," said Vera. "She's waiting for him. She won't go up the road, because he isn't up the road. He's not anywhere." She turned and looked at me. "Does she know? Saint? Anything in her? You'd see it, wouldn't you?"
I'd looked. All night, I'd looked.
"Nothing I can see," I said. "No light. Nothing."
"Then what was holding my hand?"
I didn't have an answer to that. Nobody at the gap did. Vera waited for one, honestly, the way you wait for someone to finish a sentence. Then she nodded, as if the not-answering had been an answer too.
"Does she know it was you?" said Naomi, quietly. "Who—"
"No," said Vera. "She doesn't know. She thinks I'm the one who used to keep the dogs quiet."
"Will you tell her?"
Vera looked down the road at the small round shape at the end of the line, which had its hand up again.
"Tonight," she said.
Isak had come along the barricade while she talked. He stood a little way off with his arms folded, his breath not smoking, and looked at Vera for a while.
"I said you'd be dead by morning," he said.
"You did," said Rufa.
"I was wrong." He said it exactly the way he said everything. Then he went back to his end of the gap.
Emil came last. He'd run the length of the barricade, his escorts strung out behind him, and he stopped in front of Vera out of breath, with his hair standing straight up off his head in a wind none of the rest of us could feel.
"Did she hear?" he said. "Last night. I said goodnight. To both of you. Did she—"
Vera looked at him for a moment, as if she were trying to remember who he was. Then something in her face eased.
"She heard," she said. "She said it back."
Emil stared at her.
"She said goodnight, then," said Vera. "Out loud. To nobody I could see. And then she asked me if he was coming."
Emil didn't say anything. He just stood there, with his hair blowing, and his eyes very bright, and then he turned round and went back along the barricade to his end without a word. I don't think he trusted himself with one.
They came at first light, the way they always came. All at once, without a sound, up the road to the carts.
All but one. At the very end of the line, at the very back, a little round woman in a brown shawl stood on the road and didn't move, and put her hand up, and waved.
Vera had gone to her end of the barricade. She'd picked her spear back up from where she'd laid it along the top. She stood between Rufa's two watchers, very straight, with the blanket still round her shoulders, and watched Marta wave.
Then she lifted her free hand.
And for the first time, she waved back.
There were seven names in the back of Hana's notebook by the time the line walked back to the ice at noon on the third day. By noon on the fourth, there were nine.
I wrote every one of them. I still couldn't make them neat.