The old earth mage spent his first hour at the barricade with his hand on the road.
I found him there at dawn, when I came along the barricade to look at the night watch. He was kneeling in the gap, in the middle of the frozen ruts, with his right palm flat on the ground and his eyes shut. He was the biggest man I'd ever seen: broad as a door, gray beard cut short, the top of his head bare and pink with cold, in a sheepskin coat that must once have been a whole sheep and still wasn't quite big enough. Two gray-haired women in Septentrian blue stood a little behind him with their hands on their sword hilts, the way women stand when they've stood behind the same man for thirty years.
The soldiers on the barricade were going round him the way you'd go round a dog asleep in a doorway: carefully, and without looking.
I waited. After a long time he opened his eyes and looked up at me.
"Frozen four feet down," he said. "Good."
"Good?"
"Frozen ground holds." He got up slowly, one knee and then the other, the way a wall would get up if a wall could. "Halvard."
"Fabian."
"I know." He looked at me for a while, from a long way up. "You're small."
"Everyone says that."
"Everyone's right."
He didn't smile. I got the feeling he didn't, much. But the corners of his eyes did something that, on a smaller man, might have been the start of one.
The marshal came along the barricade with Naomi, and between them a second man I'd only seen from a distance the night before. Lean, pale, about forty, with fair hair cropped so short it looked white and a thin old scar running through one eyebrow. His eyes were the gray of ice on a puddle. Everyone's breath was smoking in the cold off the plateau, the marshal's and Naomi's and mine.
His didn't.
"Isak," said the marshal. "From the north passes. Master Halvard you've met."
Isak looked at Naomi. Naomi looked at Isak. It went on for slightly longer than looking usually does.
"You're Naomi Valcrest," said Isak.
"Yes."
"You and the princess killed the Broodmother at Greymark."
"With help."
"Good." He turned to the plateau and looked at it the way Naomi looks at a map. "Blue. Ice. I can make the ground either side of this gap so slick nobody stands on it, a hundred yards each way. Then there's only the road."
"Do," said Naomi.
"Today?"
"Today."
Isak nodded once. Two people who talk in short sentences had just had an entire council of war, and I'd only understood half of it.
Naomi turned to Halvard. "And you?"
"Earth. Red." Halvard looked down the switchback, at the long turns of the road falling away toward the city. "Twice. I've got it twice."
Red. I'd only ever seen one Red mage before, Cinna, in the siege at Greymark, and I'd watched him run empty on his third cast. Two or three casts out of a whole pool. That was what years bought you, if you weren't a Saint.
"Then we choose where," said Naomi.
"We do."
He didn't move off at once. He stood there with his huge hands hanging at his sides, and then he turned to me.
"The register," he said. "It says Tam of Crossholm."
"Yes."
"Is it true?"
"I saw him," I said. "Ten days ago. He'd eaten. He offered me a plum."
Halvard didn't say anything for a long time. The wind came down off the plateau and went through all of us, and his two women didn't move, and neither did he.
"He taught me to put my hand on the ground," he said at last. "When I was seventeen."
That was all he said about it. Then he went off along the barricade, slowly, looking at the carts and the timbers the way a carpenter looks at somebody else's table.
He stopped at the far end. Rufa's end. Vera was there with her spear, between Rufa's two watchers, very straight.
"Vera," said Halvard.
She didn't flinch. "Master Halvard."
He knew. I could see that he knew; it had gone round Arctura faster than any rider. Rufa's two women shifted their feet. Rufa herself didn't turn round from her brazier, but her hand had stopped moving over the coals.
Halvard looked at Vera for a long time.
"Albin's," he said.
"Yes."
Another long time.
"Ground remembers," said Halvard, and walked on.
I didn't know if it was a curse or a promise. From Vera's face, neither did she.
That afternoon, Hana said her name.
It was the last key I had. Tacita had come back to Cassian on hers, in the middle of the night, after years of nobody asking. Hana had asked the first's name at the gap in the barricade, the very first day, and then written The first. at the top of a clean page, with the name underneath it. Nobody had said it to her while my circle was open.
So Hana sat on the bench beside her with the boy between them, and I opened Blue 「Cure」, and Hana said it. Softly. The way she'd say it across a supper table.
"Yes," said the first, with her eyes shut.
Hana said it again.
"Yes."
It went on like that, a name and a yes, a name and a yes, like a roll call in a schoolroom with only one child in it. The boy joined in on the yes, after a while. He liked a game.
The knot shrank. The roots drew in. They stopped where they always stopped.
「Discern」.
A demon's seed. Ten nights. Growing.
I closed the circle. Hana stopped. The first opened her eyes and looked at me, and I watched her read my face, which she'd gotten very good at.
"Not that either," she said.
"Not that either."
She nodded. Then she was quiet for a while, stroking the boy's hair flat where the wind had stood it up on the way up the switchback.
"I heard horses last night," she said. "A lot of them."
"Yes."
"The guard says they're men. Mages. From all over." She didn't look at me. "Are they here to fight my mother?"
The guard on her stool by the door went very still.
"They're here to hold the road," I said.
"That's not what I asked."
"I know."
She was quiet again. Then she bent her head down, close to the boy's, so that her cheek was against his hair.
"If she comes up this road," she said, very low, "don't let him see her."
"He won't," said Hana.
She said it the way she tells me to eat: as if it had already been arranged, and all that was left was for everybody else to find out.
Ambrose was outside the door, as always. He wrote it down without asking.
- Name.
Somebody was standing beside him, leaning on the toll house wall with his arms folded. Isak. I didn't know how long he'd been there, but long enough, from his face.
"That's the woman who ate," he said.
"Yes."
"And you come up here every day."
"Every day."
"What does it cost you?"
"Six," said Ambrose, without looking up from his notebook.
Isak looked at Ambrose, and then at me. "Six. Out of?"
"Out of enough," said Liesel. She was leaning on the wall on my other side, and she said it flatly, without moving. It was true. It was also all he was getting, and I didn't add to it.
He did the sum anyway, with what he had. I watched him do it; he didn't hide it. It's not a hard sum. Six splashes a day for one woman I couldn't help, with eleven more of her neighbors ripening a day's ride north and a hundred more standing round them in the snow.
"You can't get it out," he said.
"Not yet."
"But you can slow it."
"Yes."
"Slow," said Isak. He said it the way you'd say the name of a horse that had never once won a race.
"He knows the sum," said Liesel, just as flatly.
"Good," said Isak. "Then he'll stop when it's time."
"No," said Liesel. "He won't."
Isak looked at her for a moment. Then at me. Then he unfolded his arms, pushed himself off the wall, and walked away along the top of the road toward the barricade, where the ground on either side of the gap had begun, since noon, to shine.
He wasn't wrong. That was the worst part. Everything he'd said was true, and so was everything Liesel had.
The youngest one found me at the brazier that evening, while Felix was singing to the day's last bottle and Pia, beside me, was writing down which verse it was.
I knew him before he got there. It was the hat: a great round fur thing, much too big, that came down to his eyebrows and made him look like something that lived in a burrow. Under it he was slight and fair, about my age, maybe a little older, with a face that had clearly never been told no by anyone but his mother. Four escorts came with him. They stopped at a distance that said they'd been told to give him room and had argued about exactly how much.
"You're the Saint," he said.
"Yes."
"You're—"
"Small."
"I was going to say young." He sat down on the crate across the fire without being asked, and two of his escorts flinched. "Emil. Just Emil. My mother says Lord Emil, but she's not here." He pulled the hat off, and his hair came up after it, the color of wheat, and didn't settle.
It didn't settle at all. There wasn't a breath of wind by the brazier; Rufa had picked the spot for exactly that. But his hair kept moving, very slightly, all the time, as if it were standing out in a breeze none of the rest of us could feel.
"Zephyra," he said, seeing me look. "Last spring. It does that. My mother hates it."
Felix finished his verse, and Ambrose took his finger off the neck of the bottle and corked it, and held it up to the brazier light. Tiny bubbles were climbing the inside of the glass, the way they always do, silver in the red.
"Fizz," said Ambrose.
"Is that good?" said Emil.
"Still," said Ambrose, which in Ambrose means yes, so far, and put the bottle in the crate with the others.
Emil looked at the crate. Then at Ambrose. Then at Felix, who had sat back down and was rewinding Marika's scarf round his neck. Then at me. He looked at the three of us the way Pia looks at a shelf of books she hasn't read yet.
"I've never done this," he said.
"Done what?"
"Sat with any. Others. My age." He turned the hat round in his hands. "There was a boy two valleys over when I was little, but they never let us play. In case one of us fell over."
"Octavia's the same," I said. "I'm not allowed to hold a tent peg."
His whole face lit up. "Neither am I."
"Bellonia's worse," said Felix. "We're not allowed to hold anything either. We're just much more dramatic about it."
Emil laughed, a bright, startled laugh, and then looked at his escorts to see if he'd been allowed to do that. They looked back at him as though he were a cup of milk someone had set down too near the edge of a table.
"What's the scarf?" he said to Felix. "Is it your house color?"
"It's my scarf," said Felix.
"It's MY scarf," said Marika, from the barricade behind us, without turning round.
"She gave it to me."
"I THREW it at you."
"And then didn't take it back," said Felix, to Emil, confidentially.
Emil looked from one to the other. "Is she your betrothed?"
"TACTICAL," said Marika, to the plateau, "ARRANGEMENT."
She glared at the nearest crate as if it had asked the question. Felix said nothing at all, but he wound the scarf round one more time.
Emil looked at me for help. I shook my head. Some things you just have to learn.
"What do you do?" I said. "With Zephyra."
"Oh." He brightened. "Mostly I make the laundry dry. But I can do this." He cupped his hands round his mouth, turned toward the far end of the barricade, a long stone's throw away in the dark, and said in a perfectly ordinary voice, hardly louder than talking, "Captain Rufa. The Saint says good evening."
His hair went flat for a moment, all of it, pointing the way he'd spoken. Then it sprang back up.
At the far end of the barricade, by her own brazier, Rufa turned round.
A moment later, faint and clear, as if she were standing at my elbow, the wind brought one word back.
"Evening."
Somebody along the barricade laughed out loud. Somebody else said Glacia's crown, which is how Septentrians swear. Emil went pink and looked very pleased with himself.
Naomi had come up out of the dark behind me. I don't know how long she'd been there. She usually has.
"How far?" she said.
Emil jumped. "The whole line, my lady. Farther, if the wind's with me."
Naomi looked along the barricade, at the gap and the braziers and the shining ground, and I could see her putting him somewhere on her map, the same way she'd put an old man that morning.
"Tomorrow," she said, "you carry the calls."
Emil sat up very straight. "Yes, my lady."
I'd remember that later. How straight he sat. How glad he was to be given something to carry.
Emil carried the calls the next day, and the day after.
He walked the barricade from end to end with his four escorts trailing behind him like ducklings who'd lost an argument, and whenever the marshal or Naomi wanted something said at the far end, Emil cupped his hands and said it, and the wind took it there. The watch changes. The scouts out. Ground on the left's done, tell the Saint. By the second morning I'd stopped jumping when his voice turned up at my ear out of nowhere, cheerful and close, as if he were standing right beside me.
"Saint. Lady Hana says have you eaten."
I hadn't. I went and ate.
Isak's ice spread out from the gap on both sides, a little farther every day: a long gray shine on the frozen ground, smooth as the inside of a bowl, so that the only thing anybody could stand on for a hundred yards each way was the road. Halvard walked the switchback twice, top to bottom and back up again, very slowly, with his two women behind him. He didn't say anything. He looked at the turns of the road the way Ambrose looks at a knot of thread.
And every afternoon, I went into the toll house.
The fifth afternoon, Felix sang. He stood by the hearth and sang the miller's song to the first and her son, quietly, while I poured, because his song steadies his spark and nobody knew what else it might steady. The boy fell asleep in the second verse.
A demon's seed. Eleven nights. Growing.
- Song.
The sixth afternoon, the first asked for nobody.
"Let me do it alone," she said. "Nobody holding me. Not him. Not anyone." She looked at me steadily. "Then you'll know if the holding ever did anything at all."
Outside the door, Ambrose said one word, which was "Control," and I understood that he thought she was right, and that he'd been waiting for someone to suggest it.
So Hana took the boy outside, and the first sat alone on her bench with her hands in her lap, and I poured.
The knot shrank. The roots drew in. They stopped where they always stopped. Exactly where.
A demon's seed. Twelve nights. Growing.
- Alone. Same.
"So the holding never mattered," said the first, when I told her.
"Not to the seed," I said.
She thought about that for a while. Then she said, "It mattered to him," and went to the door to call her son back in.
Thirty-six splashes. Six things it wasn't. Pia's column was getting long.
The scout came in at dawn on the twenty-eighth day. Not at a trot. At a gallop, up the shore road and across the plateau, flat over her pony's neck, and she didn't stop at the edge of Isak's ice but rode straight down the road between the two shining slopes to the gap.
It was the girl who was no older than Marika. She slid off before her pony had properly stopped.
"Marshal—"
"Say it."
"Horns, Marshal." Her voice was steady. Her face wasn't. "The eleven. All of them. In the night."
The barricade had gone silent. Every soldier on it. Every brazier, it felt like.
"And?" said the marshal.
"And they're walking, Marshal. All of them. The whole line. South."
Halvard was standing in the gap. He'd been standing there when I came along at first light, and his women told me later he'd been standing there since midnight. He didn't turn round.
"I know," he said. "I've felt them since the moon went down."
Nobody asked him how. Nobody needed to.
"How fast?" said Naomi.
Halvard was quiet a moment, as if he were listening to something a long way off, under all of us.
"They're not running," he said. "They don't need to."
I didn't look north. There was nothing to see yet. I looked down instead, at the notebook in my coat, where Hana's eleven names from Crossholm were written on the other list in her small round hand. Mila, third from the top, who'd kept saying you look so tired. Tam.
I'd never reached any of them. Not one.
When I opened the toll house door, the first was sitting on her bench with her hands pressed together between her knees, the way she'd sat on the very first night. She'd heard the scout. Everybody at the top of that road had heard the scout.
"Is she walking?" she said.
"Yes."
She shut her eyes.
She didn't stand up.