At noon on the fourth day, when the line walked back to the ice, Vera laid her spear along the barricade again.
She didn't say today this time. She didn't need to. She looked at Rufa, and Rufa looked back at her, and nodded once, the smallest nod I've ever seen anybody give. That was all it took now.
Before she went down off the barricade, she stopped beside Liesel.
They'd hardly spoken since the cell. Not because of anything. Just because there hadn't been anything that needed saying, and neither of them is the kind of person who says the other kind of thing.
"If I can't walk back," said Vera, low, so that only Liesel and I could hear, "don't let them send anyone out."
"No," said Liesel.
Vera looked at her.
"I mean no, I won't do that," said Liesel. "If you can't walk back, I'll walk out."
"Naomi said—"
"I heard what Naomi said. Naomi wasn't the one in the cell." Liesel didn't look away. "I said I'd catch you after. I don't say things twice."
Naomi was standing ten paces down the barricade. She'd heard every word; Naomi always does. She didn't turn round, and she didn't say anything, and that, from Naomi, was as good as a seal on a letter.
Vera stood there a moment longer. Then she went down onto the road, and out between the shining slopes, and along the front of the line, past a hundred and twenty people who didn't turn their heads, to the end, where Marta was waiting with her hand already held out.
At dusk the first asked me something before I'd even sat down.
"Is she there again? The escort?"
"Yes."
"Holding her hand?"
"Yes."
She nodded slowly. She had her hands flat on her knees, the way she always did now. She'd been thinking; I could tell by the way she didn't look up.
"I want to try something," she said. "Mine. Not his. Not yours."
"All right."
"Don't tell anybody what it is." Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. "It's embarrassing."
So I didn't tell anybody. I opened Blue 「Cure」, and while the light went in, she sang. Under her breath, so quietly that even sitting beside her I only caught half of it. A song for putting children to sleep. The kind every mother on the plateau must know, about a boat on a lake at night, and the stars coming out one by one to row it home.
She sang the whole thing. Her voice shook on the last verse, and steadied, and finished.
The knot shrank. The roots drew in. They stopped where they always stopped.
A demon's seed. Eighteen nights. Growing.
"Well," she said, after a while. Her eyes were wet. "He likes that one."
Outside, Ambrose had heard, of course. He hadn't been meant to. He didn't write what it was. He wrote:
- Hers.
Then he closed the notebook, and put it away, and stood there in the cold for a while without writing anything at all.
The night came down cold and clear, with no snow, and every star there is.
Emil's goodnights came along the barricade the way they always did, soldier by soldier, and then went out over the ice the other way. Vera. Goodnight. A pause. Marta. Goodnight. I didn't hear an answer. None of us could have. But I watched Emil at the far end, and when he lowered his hands, he was smiling.
I stayed at the gap. So did Liesel. So did Rufa, at her end, and her two watchers, and after a while Pia came and stood one step behind me with her coat buttoned up to her nose.
"What do you think she's saying?" said Pia.
"Nothing yet," I said. "Marta's doing the talking."
Under 「Eyes」 I could see it: the one light at the end of the long line of holes, standing very still. I'd been watching it so long that I could tell the difference, now, between the ways it stood. There was the way it stood when Marta was talking, a little turned, a little bent, listening. And there was the way it stood when Marta was quiet.
Some time near midnight, it changed.
The light went down.
Not out. Down. Slowly, the way a person goes down onto their knees on cold ground: one knee, and then the other, and then a long stillness.
"She's kneeling," I said.
Liesel didn't say anything for a moment.
"Then she's telling her," she said.
Pia let out a breath behind me. "In the old books," she said, very quietly, "the Saints used to hear people. When they'd done something. They'd kneel, and the Saint would listen, and then—" She stopped. "Somebody's supposed to hear it."
"Marta's hearing it," said Liesel.
I watched. I couldn't hear a word, and I wouldn't have wanted to. It wasn't mine.
The light stayed down a long time. Long enough that my feet went numb in my boots. Long enough that Rufa, at the far end, stopped pretending to look at anything else and simply stood with both hands on the top of the barricade, watching, counting something with her eyes, not her lips. I don't know what.
Then, under 「Eyes」, the hole at the end of the line moved.
It bent. Slowly, the way an old woman bends, with a hand on her own knee for balance. Down over the light, until the hole and the light were very close together, so close I couldn't see where one ended. And it stayed like that.
I didn't know what I was looking at. I still don't, really. I've seen a lot of things under 「Eyes」, and I've learned what most of them mean. Not that.
Halvard had been kneeling in the gap with his palm on the road for an hour. He spoke without opening his eyes.
"One of them's still standing like a person," he said. "Kneeling like one, now."
"And the other?"
He was quiet so long that I thought he wasn't going to answer.
"The other one isn't standing like them," said Halvard. "Not tonight." He opened his eyes. "Not quite."
Out at the edge of the ice, very faint, the wind went past again, going home.
Goodnight.
One of the risen, somewhere in the middle of the line, turned his head to follow it. Slowly. Then turned it back.
I didn't see which one. I was watching the end.
Liesel — Arctura
The trouble with promises is that, sooner or later, somebody holds you to them.
Usually it's the other person. That morning it was me.
I'd been at the gap all night with Fabian and Pia and the cold, keeping a file. That's what I do when there's nothing to do with my hands. Mother taught me: if you can't act yet, write down what you know, so that when you can act you don't have to stop and think. The file was short. Vera. Out there. Kneeling since midnight. Marta bent over her since some time after. Promised: if she can't walk back, I walk out. Under that I'd written nothing, because nothing else was true yet.
A little before dawn Fabian said, "She's getting up."
I can't see in the dark. He can. He doesn't lie either. So I believed him, and after a while I could see it too: a tall shape coming away from the end of the line, very slowly, and starting back along the road between Isak's shining slopes.
She walked like someone who'd been kneeling on frozen ground for five hours. Stiff from the knees down. Slow. Twice she stopped in the middle of the road and stood there with her head down.
The first time, she started again.
The second time her knees went, and she knelt on the road, and stayed.
The sky behind the mountains had begun to go gray.
That was the other thing in my file. They come at first light. Every morning. Exactly. Four mornings, and not one of them a breath late. They keep hours like a convent. That's the trouble with them, and the only good thing about them, and it meant I had until the gray turned into light. Then a hundred and twenty people would walk up that road, two abreast and three where it widened, to the place where Vera was kneeling.
I went down off the barricade.
Nobody stopped me. Naomi was ten paces down. She watched me go and didn't say a word, which from Naomi is a signature on an order. Fabian said "Liesel" once, behind me, the way he says it when he means I know, and didn't follow, because he'd promised me twenty paces and he keeps his promises too. Pia didn't say anything. I think she was writing.
I walked to the end of Halvard's gray wall, which was as far as we'd agreed anyone could stand. Then I walked past it.
Here is a true thing: the road is very long from the middle of it. From the barricade it's a long stone's throw. From the middle, with the slopes shining on either side and no timber in front of you and a hundred and twenty holes ahead that you can't see but know are there, it goes on for a while.
I counted my steps. That's Fabian's habit. I caught it off him like a cold, and I've never been able to give it back. Forty. Fifty.
Then I could see them. Not well. Gray shapes against gray, standing at the edge of the ice in a long row with snow on their shoulders and their black hands hanging, the way they'd stood every night. Close enough now to see faces. Close enough to see that some of them were smiling, in the dark, at nothing.
None of them turned their heads. I'd been told they wouldn't. Knowing a thing is different from walking toward it.
"You look so cold, dear," said one of them. A woman, near the front. Kindly.
"I am," I said, because it was true.
Vera was kneeling in the middle of the road with her hands on her thighs and her head down. She heard me coming. She didn't look up.
"I said if I couldn't walk back," she said to the road.
"You can't," I said. "So I walked out."
She tried to get up. Her knees went again, and I caught her: one arm round her back, one under her elbow, the way you'd catch someone coming off a horse badly. I didn't stagger. I'm smaller than Vera, but I've been catching people coming off horses since I was six, mostly myself.
"I've got you," I said. And then, quieter, because it was the thing I'd come out to say and I'd been holding it all night: "This is the after."
She didn't answer. She put her arm over my shoulders, and her weight came down on me, all of it, the way weight does when somebody finally stops holding it up by themselves.
We walked back.
Not fast. You can't, with someone's whole weight on you, on a frozen road, in the gray. I counted again; I couldn't help it. Behind us the sky got lighter. I didn't look round. I didn't need to look round to know what was behind us. I could feel it the way you feel a door come open at your back in a cold house.
Sixty. Seventy. The end of Halvard's wall.
Rufa was there. I don't know how long she'd been there. She had the blanket over one arm, and she took Vera's other side without a word, and between us we brought her in through the gap.
Behind us, the line stood at the edge of the ice exactly where it had been, and the gray went on getting lighter, and nothing moved. We had a little while yet. They keep hours.
We sat her down on a crate by the brazier, and Rufa wrapped the blanket round her and said one word, which was "Breathe," and Vera did.
We stood round her. Nobody asked. Fabian was there, and Pia one step behind him, and Naomi, who'd come down the barricade at last. We waited.
"I told her," said Vera at last. "All of it. The chapel. The thing that touched me in the spring and agreed with me. Every door I told it." Her voice was quite steady. "Which villages loved him best. Hers was one of them."
"What did she say?" I said.
Vera looked at the brazier.
"She said I know."
The coals ticked. Nobody moved.
"She knew," said Vera. "The whole time. Everybody on the plateau knew. It came up the shore road at the end of the summer, before any of the fruit: the Saint dead in his chapel, by his own escort's hand." She said it the way you'd read out somebody else's letter. "She knew the first day I walked out to her. She knew when she was waving at me. She knew all night, the first night, while she was holding my hand."
"And she held it anyway," I said.
"She held it anyway." Vera's hands had come out of the blanket. She was looking at them. "When I'd finished, she put her other hand on my head. The way he used to, when he blessed the bread for the road. And she said, I know. I know, love." She stopped. "And then she asked me if he was coming."
Her voice broke on coming. Just that one word. It cracked straight down the middle, like ice taking a weight.
And then, for the first time since the cell, for the first time as far as any of us knew, Vera cried.
I have a file on crying. It's short. Mother keeps one too; hers is shorter. Both of them say the same thing, which is that there's nothing to tell someone who's crying that they don't already know, so you don't tell them anything. You sit down.
I sat down beside her and put my arm round her and didn't say anything at all.
After a while Rufa sat down on her other side. Rufa didn't say anything either. Between the two of us we had about four words to spare, and we spent none of them.
Fabian — Arctura
I went and stood by the toll house wall where I couldn't see, because it wasn't mine to watch.
"You can only stand next to them while they do it," said Pia, very quietly, at my back. "And catch them after."
"You remember that?"
"Everybody who was in the cell remembers it." Pia's voice wobbled. "I wrote it down."
"What did you put it under? Which column?"
A long pause.
"I made a new one," said Pia.
They came at first light, the same as every morning, up the road to the carts.
At the very back, a little round woman in a brown shawl put up her hand.
Vera was on her feet by then. She was standing between Liesel and Rufa, with the blanket round her, and her face was blotched and swollen, and her eyes were the clearest I'd ever seen them.
She waved back.
Two more names went into Hana's notebook before noon. Eleven. I wrote them, and couldn't make them neat, and wrote them anyway.
In the tent that afternoon Ambrose read out the bottles without looking at his notebook. Sixty-three left that still fizzed. Nineteen gone flat since the first morning, set aside on the right-hand side of the cart in a row, like a shelf of jars in a larder that nobody would ever open.
"The flat ones go faster every day," he said. That was a whole speech, for Ambrose.
"How fast?" said Naomi.
"Don't know." He shut the notebook. "Faster."
Isak had been standing at the back with his arms folded. He waited until the marshal had finished with the watches, and then he said it again, the way he'd said it before, as if reading it off the measuring stick one more time so nobody could say they hadn't heard.
"Six a night. At the toll house."
"Six," said Naomi.
"For how long?"
Naomi looked at him. "Until it's over."
"And if it's never over?" said Isak. Not loudly. "If they stand at the edge of my ice until the spring, and come up the road every morning, and the bottles all go to water? Six a night, every night, for a woman who's still sitting on a bench when the last soldier's dead?"
Nobody said anything.
"I'm not saying stop," said Isak. "I'm saying somebody in this tent had better decide what we're doing it for. Before the sum decides for us."
He went out. Naomi watched the flap fall shut behind him. Then she looked at me, for a long moment, and didn't say anything at all, and I knew that for the first time since she'd said six, she wasn't sure.
Later that afternoon I found Isak at Emil's end, past the toll house, where the barricade ran out and met the rocks above the lake.
He was standing at the very end of it with his arms folded, looking over. Below us his ice ran down to the foot of the rocks and stopped, gray and clean, and past it the rocks went on down to the water, black and wet and sheer, with the lake breathing against the bottom of them.
"Checking," he said, before I could ask.
"The rocks?"
"Nobody stands on the rocks." He didn't look round. "Ice on wet stone goes rotten by noon. I'd be spending a cast a day on a place where nobody stands." He looked a while longer. "Halvard agrees."
Along the last stretch of the barricade, Emil was sitting on an upturned crate with his four escorts round him, telling them something that made the youngest one laugh. He saw us and waved. Isak lifted one hand, and put it back under his arm.
Then he turned round and went back toward the gap, and I went with him, and neither of us looked back at the rocks.
That evening Emil found me at the brazier again. He'd found his hat; one of his escorts had kept it the whole time, apparently, in case. He'd jammed it back on and it came down to his eyebrows, and he looked exactly the way he had the first night, and he was smiling.
"She said goodnight again," he said. "Vera told me. Goodnight, then. Both nights."
"I know."
"Do you think it means anything?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what anything means out there."
He thought about that, and seemed to find it a satisfactory answer, which is one of the things I liked best about Emil. He sat down. Felix and Marika were already there, Felix on the crate with his wrapped hand to the coals, Marika on the barricade above him, keeping watch.
"When it's over," said Emil, "my mother wants to meet you."
"Why?"
"So she can tell you you're too small. She tells everybody that." He grinned. "And I want to see Sanctara. I've never been out of Septentria. Is it true the great shrine has all eight of them? In stone?"
"All eight," I said.
"Fulmara's better," said Felix. "Bigger. Louder. It has me in it."
"SANCTARA has the Academy," said Marika, from the barricade, without turning round.
"Fulmara has me."
"Fulmara can KEEP you."
Her ears had gone pink to the tips. Felix grinned up at the back of her head as if it were the best thing he'd seen all week. Emil looked from one of them to the other and laughed, properly, with his whole voice back.
"Both, then," he said. "I'll see both. And I'll say which is better."
"Diplomatic," said Felix.
"My mother's training," said Emil.
"Your mother sounds terrifying."
"She is," said Emil happily. "You'll love her."
"We'll take you," I said. "All of us. When it's over."
He looked at me. Under the ridiculous hat, his face went very still and young and glad, the way it had the first night when Naomi gave him the calls.
"Promise?"
"Promise."
He went off along the barricade a while later, to his end, with his four escorts trailing behind him, and his hair standing up out from under the hat in a wind nobody else could feel.
I watched him all the way to the far end.
I'm glad, now, that I did.